Due to rising consumer debt and economic instability, homeowners are choosing to delay essential replacements and repairs. That can lead to lower demand, an empty dispatch board, and wasted marketing dollars for your home services business in 2026.
But the question is: Are you ready to face these challenges head-on?
Winning the year isn’t about making a New Year’s resolution to do better—it’s about implementing the right strategies and AI-powered technologies to win across both residential and commercial landscapes.
To help you succeed, ServiceTitan industry veterans Ellen Rohr and Tim Sjobeck unpack six critical areas where you can win in 2026:
Nail down your balance sheet.
Sell more memberships and recurring services.
Maximize profitability on service agreement contracts.
Automate to do more with less.
Differentiate yourself from your competitors.
Train your team to win with ServiceTitan.
Pursuing a winning strategy can help you overcome current consumer trends that show a repair-over-replace mentality in the past couple of years to now deferring maintenance altogether. According to survey data collected for the ServiceTitan Fall 2025 Benchmark Report:
71% of homeowners postponed renovations or repairs in 2025
62% deferred critical maintenance
14% delayed HVAC replacement despite heatwaves
$317 billion in potential exposure stemmed from deferred repairs
“What we're finding is that the year 2026 could be the year of the repair backlog,” says Rohr, ServiceTitan Brand and Industry Marketing Lead. “While the industry is going to experience some downturns and there's going to be some challenges, individual contractors do not have to fall prey to economic conditions.”
Knowledge is power, Rohr adds, and contractors who use that information to craft a winning strategy can beat out their competitor’s uncertainty.
Sjobeck, ServiceTitan Senior Program Facilitator, agrees.
“I think you’ve got to flip the script,” Sjobeck says. “We’ve got to look at this in a positive light and extract the data that's going to show us that.”
Let’s dig in and break down the six strategies that can guarantee your business some wins in the new year.
1. Nail down your balance sheet
When looking at the end of the year and deciding how to grow in 2026, Rohr says the most critical thing you can do is get your financial house in order.
The balance sheet lists your current assets, your liabilities, and the difference between the two, which is your equity.
“Now’s the time to sit elbow to elbow with your bean-counting team. That's going to be in-house bookkeeping folks, your accountant, your CPA. Have a meeting, sit down, and go through the balance sheet line by line. Audit the data,” Rohr explains.
Start at the top, and trust—but verify—the cash amount listed there, then confirm that the flow of data is working properly between your ServiceTitan account and your bank account. You might ask your bookkeeper or accountant the following questions:
Is that number right?
How do we know it's right?
Are we reconciling that number?
How does the info get from one software to the other?
Could we run one transaction and see where it lands?
With cash, you must reconcile with your bank statements. Check Accounts Receivable for any work you’ve performed but not received payment for yet. Make sure you’ve accounted for any fixed assets you’ve purchased in the past year. The key is to verify all of your assets and liabilities, so you know your true equity.
“The difference is equity. So, equity is really that balancing section. You need your CPA to help you make sure that equity section is properly reflected,” Rohr says.
And if you don’t know, just ask questions.
“There are no stupid questions,” Rohr says. “No one knows how to read and use financial reports from birth. This is not an innate skill. We all learned it.”
For instance, Rohr learned there are three ways to grow assets:
Borrow money
Secure investors
Charge more for your services to cover costs and grow profits
“As we move into the new year, I want you to raise your reporting standards. Do better. You can get a pretty good balance sheet once a week or you can nail it down once a month so that you know as you go forward,” Rohr says.
Sjobeck says your balance sheet is like building a foundation for your house.
“The balance sheet is where all this starts. You’ve got to have good data coming in or those reports aren't going to make sense to you and be able to drive your business in the direction that we want,” Sjobeck says. “Make sure all these things are accurate—the charter accounts, assets, liabilities, the P&L statements—that we're getting accurate information so we can use it, process it, and drive forward.”
2. Sell more memberships and recurring services
The benchmark data also shows consumer spending shifting into a bifurcation market, defined as one that’s divided into two distinct segments, where different parts of the market behave in opposite ways. Simply put, this means top earners are still spending and investing heavily in home maintenance and improvements, while middle and lower earners are putting things off.
“So, what's that tell me? That tells me my memberships attract them. That means our current members are going to become the most critical asset going into 2026,” Sjobeck explains.
How many memberships did you sell in 2025? What goal do you want to hit in 2026?
ServiceTitan offers a variety of automated features to help you grow memberships. Here are three automations to get you started:
Customer Portal
Membership Dashboard
TitanAdvisor
Customer Portal
The customer portal is a powerful self-service tool that provides 24/7 on-demand access for your customers to book their own appointments, pay invoices, approve proposals, track tasks, manage equipment, and more.
“This is a pretty amazing feature that allows customers not to have to call the office. They can do some of this stuff directly from the portal,” Sjobeck says.
Not only can they see what’s included in their memberships, customers can also track equipment service dates and book recurring services right from the portal. This automates the process and boosts membership revenue.
Membership Dashboard
With ServiceTitan’s custom dashboards, you can set up a specific Membership Dashboard to better track memberships and recurring services.
“There is so much information and filter capabilities,” Sjobeck says. “I can get that data with the charter accounts, the right P&L information… I can do this from a tracking standpoint in memberships and my recurring services.
“As a pro tip, this is one of the few areas that I can see my technician sales and my internal office membership sales,” he adds.
TitanAdvisor
You can use TitanAdvisor to get an accurate system check of how well you’re selling memberships and scheduling recurring services.
Described as “a tailored system that filters out the noise and points you directly to which features will have the most impact on your business,” TitanAdvisor can help you capture more opportunities, increase your average ticket, follow up on unsold work, and generate more revenue.
For instance, if you have “book membership sales” set up and operating correctly, you’ll see a green check mark next to it.
It’s also important to define the value of your membership services to customers. Maybe it’s special offers, discounts, or front-of-the-line service.
“Whatever it is, suss it out from your customers and from your team members. ‘What's really in our customer's best interest before we just put something together that nobody wants?’” Rohr says.
To grow appointments for recurring services, give your customers the ability to book online.
With Scheduling Pro, customers can book online and schedule their own recurring services. The system identifies your existing members and automatically offers and schedules their specific recurring service. If the customer is a non-member, the online scheduler promotes your membership program directly, allowing your team to know to follow up right away.
“Whether we're using this via Scheduling Pro or just the free web scheduler, you 100% need to be offering your customers online booking in ’26,” Sjobeck says. “And if you match this with Marketing Pro, you can automate your booking reminders and follow-up message via text to drive more bookings on top of this.”
You can also apply automation to answering customer phone calls with ServiceTitan’s AI Voice Agents, now available as native AI CSRs for all customers. These automated virtual agents are designed specifically for the trades to handle incoming calls at all hours, book jobs, reschedule jobs, or manage customer requests.
“Our AI identifies your members instantly, recognizes their recurring service needs, and books them, keeping your records clean,” Sjobeck adds.
3. Maximize profitability on service agreement contracts
ServiceTitan data for commercial businesses shows 63% of their total revenue comes from service agreements with their clients, and 53% expressed optimism about their revenue growth in 2025 and beyond, Sjobeck says.
“Business owners aren’t really facing the same headwinds as our homeowners,” he explains. “So, I think if we’re going to focus on expanding our commercial services, that might be a nice hedge bet just to protect us on that residential side.”
ServiceTitan features to grow your commercial services include:
Customer portal
Service agreement template
Management dashboard to track service agreements
New ServiceTitan CRM
Customer portal
Just like residential customers, your commercial customers can use the customer portal to view their own service agreements, schedule recurring services, track equipment, pay invoices, and more.
Service agreement template
ServiceTitan templates allow you to customize and build your own service agreement with set terms and pricing, then you can save the template and reuse it.
ServiceTitan also offers visit templates, where you can create templates for each recurring service visit without having to build them each time a technician performs a service visit.
>>Learn more about creating your own service agreement templates.
Management dashboard to track service agreements
Once you’ve created a service agreement template or visit template, you can easily track your sold service agreements and visits from one ServiceTitan dashboard.
Before you start tracking progress, Rohr says it’s important to clarify the meaning of memberships versus service agreements.
“The membership is going to be a recurring fee and it may provide some light maintenance services. Service agreements can be full-bore priced jobs that just need to happen on a recurring basis,” she explains.
Another key difference, Sjobeck says, is that memberships are typically for residential recurring services whereas service agreements are sold to bigger, commercial properties with multiple pieces of equipment that require recurring services and, possibly, client-specific pricing.
New ServiceTitan CRM
The new ServiceTitan CRM, currently available in private preview, helps commercial businesses drive consistency, predictability, and measurable growth with AI-backed CRM insights. Commercial companies can use this CRM in the new year to follow up on unsold estimates and grow revenue.
“This isn't just a database here. It's a revenue-recovery engine for our commercial side,” Sjobeck says.
Before, teams used multiple disconnected tools, apps, and third parties, which resulted in lost revenue and missed opportunities. The new ServiceTitan CRM is a single unified place for both the office and field teams to track your entire sales pipeline.
“No leads left behind. You get quotes on the spot, seamless leads, and it's all in one centralized management,” Sjobeck says. “The mission here is to nurture every account, surface and track every deal, and close every deal.”
4. Automate to do more with less
In addition to the 15 core automations you can implement in ServiceTitan today, the AI Voice Agents are designed to ensure there are no more missed calls, book more jobs, run more jobs, and score more revenue.
“Those missed calls in the past could've been customers, and they could be going to competitors,” Sjobeck cautions. “What we're seeing in our industry standards for AI Voice Agents is that it’s currently achieving a 70% booking rate.
“So, if your current booking rate is below 70%, you're missing calls,” he adds. “If you're using an expensive temp service or answering service, this could be the difference maker going into '26.”
In addition, Atlas, ServiceTitan’s new AI digital assistant, helps your techs get instant answers in the field with the new Field Mobile App. Or Atlas can be combined with Pro Product automations, such as Field Pro, to create a fully automated AI workflow.
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5. Differentiate yourself from your competitors
By implementing ServiceTitan’s Integrated Financing in 2026, you can boost sales and maximize revenue by making it easier for customers to pay for your services, Sjobeck says.
“Providing financing to your customers has to be a primary focus in 2026,” he emphasizes.
Working with multiple financing partners, such as GoodLeap, Wells Fargo, Synchrony, GreenSky, and others, ServiceTitan’s Integrated Financing allows techs to automatically seek a second look at financing when the primary provider rejects a customer’s application.
“It's a game changer, because now we're all integrated into ServiceTitan. I don't have to go anywhere. That speeds up the process, that improves our customer experience, and it closes more deals,” Sjobeck says.
In fact, ServiceTitan data shows customers who use Integrated Financing see 12% higher close rates, 13% higher average tickets, and a 39% increase in sales, Rohr says. “I mean, how can you say no to that?”
ServiceTitan is also partnering with Conduit Tech to help companies improve HVAC sales in the field. The tool uses LiDAR (light detection and ranging) to automate HVAC load calculations and proposal creation. This helps techs quote faster, eliminate manual errors, and close jobs with confidence—all in one seamless experience.
Train your team to win with ServiceTitan
Lastly, check out the Customer Resource Hub for Ember Sessions and Spark Sessions to learn more about ServiceTitan, and train your team to win with a variety of resources. Sjobeck leads many of these sessions.
Ember Sessions explore TitanAdvisor for the intermediate user. Training sessions happen in a group-learning environment where participants learn from the facilitators and each other.
Spark Sessions are geared toward a more advanced user, with participants meeting once a month for 11 months. Sjobeck says contractors do most of the talking in these sessions, learning from each other about how to run their businesses successfully with ServiceTitan.
ServiceTitan Certified User program trains you to learn how to use the full functionality of the platform with free courses on a variety of focus areas. The program now offers role-based certifications for every member of your team.
>>Get more pro tips on winning strategies by watching the full webinar on demand.
