Getting Unstuck: How to Break Through $1 Million

Owning a home or commercial service business can be a great way to build a lucrative career, but too often companies hit a plateau. Instead of scaling, they end up spinning their wheels, working harder without seeing the revenue gains they expect.

Growing a home service business past $1 million requires more than just hard work—it takes focus, consistency, and the right systems. In a recent episode of the Mastering ServiceTitan podcast, Michael Katz, Co-owner of Trio Heating & Air, shares how he and his brother scaled from $300K to nearly $10 million in under two years. 

Katz breaks down the biggest mistakes that keep businesses stuck, why customer service and reviews are your lifeline early on, and how to avoid the trap of reinventing the wheel. Plus, he reveals the key ServiceTitan features that every growing business should master first.

In this podcast recap, you’ll learn: 

• Why focus and picking one lane is crucial early on

• The power of reviews and how to get them consistently

• ServiceTitan foundations 

Organized Chaos: The Early Days of Trio Heating & Air

Katz lived a true rags-to-riches story. He spent years in sales but couldn’t close a deal to save his life. After getting fired from multiple jobs, he started to worry he’d be next at the insulation company where he worked alongside his brother, who, unlike him, crushed it in sales.

“I told my brother, ‘What am I gonna do?’” Katz says. “And he said, ‘Just give them good customer service. Don't try to sell. Just really help them out and do the best you can.’ 

“So, I did that, and I broke the company record that same month. And from that moment, it opened up my eyes because I never thought I could make the lawyer’s salary, the doctor's salary. If you're 20 years old in the trades industry and you're making above $30,000 a month, it really changes your perception about life,” he adds.

Out of the blue, Katz says his brother came to him during COVID and proposed they start an HVAC company.

“We decided to go into the heating and air conditioning industry because it was just soaring,” Katz says. “I saw all these companies growing really fast and selling and heard all these stories that were just really interesting to me. So, in July, 2021, we did our first heating and air conditioning job.”

Katz says the first few months were “organized chaos” as he, his brother, and one other employee worked 14-hour days with no real experience running a business. 

“It was a very long and painful process, but we managed to adapt quickly,” Katz says. “We managed to learn from other people that are doing it successfully and we went from three people to 25 people to 40 people to 60 people in a year.”

Two years later, the company made just shy of $10 million in revenue. They were also recognized at Pantheon as one of the fastest-growing ServiceTitan companies. In 2025, Katz ambitiously hopes to break $15 million.

Getting to the First $1 Million

Katz says service businesses face several challenges along the road to $1 million, but there are steps you can take to excel in an already crowded field.

First and foremost, Katz says you need to understand your industry and focus on the services you really want to provide. 

“A lot of people get into HVAC and then the customer asks them, ‘Can you do my gutters?’ And then it’s like, ‘Oh, we do gutters, now let's add that to the van.’” Katz says. “And then it’s, ‘Oh let's do roofing too.’ And at some point, their van just becomes a graffiti wall of all the different services they offer. Stick to one lane, get really good at one thing, because that's your only way to grow.”

Katz says you also need to create a website and logo, make sure your business is fully licensed, and determine your core mission and values. 

“For example, in our office, we want to make sure that we're not complainers, we're solution people,” Katz says. “We want to make sure that people aren’t pointing fingers, but taking ownership of things and actually moving things forward. We want to make sure people are creative and flexible. We want to make sure people can teach down.”

Determine Where Your Work is Coming From

To get to $1 million in revenue, Katz says businesses need to understand how they generate work, specifically the channels and tactics that lead to a service call. 

“The biggest problem with these smaller shops is that they don't stay consistent,” Katz says. “They're very short on budget. There's no money coming in yet, so they do a magazine ad for a month and then they do Google PPC for a month.”

When he was starting the business, Katz says he would frequently go on Google and Yelp to conduct surveillance on his competition. 

“What do their Yelp pages look like? What do their Google pages look like? What pictures do they have?” he says.

Katz points out that highly successful businesses often showcase slick videos and other flashy features on their websites, but he tells smaller businesses not to let that intimidate them. Instead, he encourages them to focus on having a clean, consistent, and branded website that stacks up well against the competition. That alone can make a big difference.

Most importantly, Katz encourages services businesses to open accounts with Google Business Profile, Yelp, Thumbtack, TaskRabbit, and Angi to generate testimonials.

Reviews

Katz urges service businesses to ask for a customer review after every job, and not just on one platform, but across multiple ones. He says reviews make all the difference when a customer makes a hiring decision.

“If I have 1,000 reviews and you have 2 reviews, I'm getting the job,” he says.

Katz says it’s OK to ask for reviews from friends and family, but warns it can look disingenuous if you have too many reviews compared to how long you’ve been in business, or too many over a short period of time.

You can also increase reviews by offering a discount on the job if the customer agrees to complete a review. Katz also says it’s OK to ask customers to leave reviews on more than one platform.

“Anytime a customer would give me a Yelp review or Google review, I’d wait for the review to come in, and then I would actually call the customer and say, ‘Thank you so much for the review. You actually put it on our Google page, and I wanted to see if you can put a review on our Yelp page,’” Katz says.

Getting Over the Hump

Many service businesses struggle to get over the hump and earn their first million. Katz says several factors can keep businesses stuck in a rut.

For instance, Katz says businesses run into problems when they lack knowledge of the products and services they sell. 

“They're installing things and thinking they're making money, but then they have to go back out so many times to clean up the work and fix it. So, all the money goes to that,” he says.

Service businesses often struggle from a lack of focus. Katz says one month they’ll focus on marketing, and then pivot to collections the next month. The lack of consistent focus leads to stagnation.

Katz warns that some businesses run into trouble by overspending on PPC and driving more clicks than they can afford. Instead, he recommends building partnerships with complementary service businesses to generate new leads without blowing your marketing budget.

“If I'm a heating and air conditioning shop, most likely there's plumbing shops that are being asked about HVAC, and vice versa,” he says.

Katz says service businesses fall short when they overcomplicate processes or try to “reinvent the wheel.” 

“You're not really gonna grow from that because you have to have something that's scalable,” he says. “You gotta nail it and scale it. Other people already nailed it, so just use that.”

Katz says once you figure out your business process and understand how to generate leads, the focus should switch to recruiting top performers. 

“Money talks. If there’s a top performer in a company making 7% commission and you have zero overhead, you can offer the person 25% commission,” Katz says. “Even if it's just for the first year. That individual could help you take your business to the next level. That individual alone could generate $2 million, $3 million, or $4 million. Get two of them and you’re on the way to $10 million.”

ServiceTitan Features

Katz loves the customization in ServiceTitan, especially the ability to tailor buttons and create scripts for his call center staff and CSRs, which he says is one of his favorite features.

“I created dropdown menus with pre-answered questions because I don’t like free typing,” Katz says. “If CSRs have the ability to write anything down, one CSR is going to give you two sentences, another CSR is gonna give you a full story. 

“I like buttons because they answer the core questions. ‘How old is your system? Where is it located? Are you trying to work through a home warranty? Are you the homeowner? Are you gonna be present?’ You know, these types of questions.”

Katz also loves the follow-up screen in ServiceTitan, a feature he says doesn’t get enough love.

“The follow-up screen has all the sold estimates,” he says. “You can see how much you sold, how much revenue you collected. You can see all these sold estimates and see exactly where they're at, and you can filter based on date ranges and departments.”

Katz also recommends using ServiceTitan’s dashboards and reporting functionality to keep track of tags, monitor profitability, and measure KPIs.

“You can customize everything,” he says. “Any wild idea you've ever had about something you want to find out about your business, you can have it in reports, and it can be sent automatically to you.”

Finally, Katz says services businesses need to leverage Pricebook to ensure profitability as manufacturers raise their prices. 

“A lot of price increases are happening because of tariffs, because of general price increases, refrigerant changes in my industry, things like that,” Katz says. “Pricebook gives you the ability to not miss things that you were supposed to. If you missed on price increases in a year and your prices have been the same for about a year, now you're coming to your sales team and saying, ‘Hey, I'm increasing pricing by 25%, 30%.’ You can't do that.”

Katz understands that many businesses are tightening their budgets and may hesitate to invest in a tool like ServiceTitan. However, he urges business owners to be bold and adopt technology like ServiceTitan if they want to grow their business 10x or even 20x.

“You need to open up the features in ServiceTitan because you can't have 50 different apps. You're gonna miss something,” Katz says. “You're not a robot, you're not gonna be able to catch everything. 

“ ServiceTitan is everything. It's all in one,” he adds. And if you learn the platform, your business grows. Every time you learn a new tab, you have more revenue coming in. It's always like that with ServiceTitan.”

You can find this interview and many more by subscribing to Mastering ServiceTitan on Apple Podcasts, on Spotify, or here. 

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