Episode Overview
ServiceTitan Dashboards: Get Your Data in Order
After discovering the power behind ServiceTitan Dashboards, Matt Kosloski helped grow Friend's Plumbing, his father’s 45-year-old plumbing shop in Oldsmar, Florida, from a $3-million operation to a $10-million shop in four short years.
The 23-year-old VP of Friend’s Plumbing joined the company fresh out of high school in 2019, worked as a plumbing tech for a few years, then decided to dig into learning ServiceTitan field management software to help the business operate more efficiently and profitably. While his dad knows all about plumbing, Kosloski brought some tech savviness to the family-owned business.
“My favorite thing about ServiceTitan Dashboards is being able to look and see every single piece of the puzzle,” Kosloski says. “Because once you have that, it's a math equation and you can kind of go from there.”
Once he learned the meaning behind each gauge and lever on the Dashboard, Kosloski discovered missing workflows and inaccurate job categorizations were messing up sales and revenue data and the company really had no idea of its conversion or booking rates.
“The entire business gets funneled into this Dashboard and every single piece of the operation has to be set up properly within ServiceTitan,” Kosloski says. “Getting that dialed in was the first thing I did when I came back from Pantheon in 2023.”
In our next Mastering ServiceTitan podcast—where we get expert advice from power users—Kosloski explains how ServiceTitan Dashboards helped his family’s business accelerate its growth and get its data in order with intuitive modules to track the biggest KPIs (key performance indicators), such as sales, booking rates, and conversions.
>>Listen to the full podcast on leveraging memberships with ServiceTitan now on Spotify, Apple, or YouTube.
Refine your workflows
Getting your data in order starts with establishing the proper workflows, implementing separate business units, and making sure all data is entered correctly. At Friend’s, Kosloski says there were no official workflows and the company had one plumbing service business unit.
He improved the process by setting up different business units for service calls, installation jobs, and sales, then making sure every sold job—large or small—was correctly entered as a sale and linked to sales revenue for the person who sold it.
“Really making sure that gets put in correctly is key, absolutely key,” Kosloski says. “It's not that complicated, but once you get into it, it's very important to make sure the data is entered correctly.”
For instance, if you incorrectly label a job as an install, but it’s really a service job, the technician’s performance pay will not reflect the right amount and your techs will notice immediately.
“You’ve got to be on top of it and make it part of the workflow. It's just part of getting to know ServiceTitan and doing things the right way,” Kosloski says.
Friend’s Plumbing started offering performance pay a few months ago and is currently implementing ServiceTitan Payroll, both of which required Kosloski to go through the dashboards and make sure all jobs were entered correctly.
“It allows us to show people what their average ticket is or how much they got from a turnover call, and things like that,” he says. “It's a great way to grade your team.”
To know how many jobs your techs performed in a particular time period, you look at the average ticket or “opportunity job average.” Then, you can figure out what it’s going to take to reach the next level.
“How many jobs do we need to run at that average ticket to get to $10 million? Then you can go back, reverse engineer it, and figure out how many technicians do I need? How many CSRs will I need? Can we handle this volume? How much do we need to market? Do we need to raise our prices?” Kosloski explains.
Another change Friend’s Plumbing made was adding a project manager to the business units. Now, the company sends a tech to assess the issue and determine whether it’s a job that needs to be turned over to a project manager.
“That's for things in the plumbing industry like sewer re-pipes, and even sometimes on filtration,” Kosloski says. “The business units kick in and it starts as a service, then it turns into a sale. Then if that closes out, it turns into an install,” Kosloski says. “That's the way the workflow is done at most companies who are operating on all cylinders using ServiceTitan. They have a service department, an install department, and a sales department.”
Use dashboard stories to coach technicians
The dashboards also tell a story about your technicians’ performance, Kosloski says.
“I could take their average ticket and the amount of calls they're running and I could tell you a whole story about that person right from there,” he says. “If they're running a bunch of calls and they have a low average ticket, I know they're not giving options.
“If they're going in through the invoice tab on the mobile side and just throwing stuff into the job, and not even making an estimate, how are they giving options?” Kosloski adds.
To ensure sales match revenue for each tech, you need to make sure every tech creates an estimate for anything they sell—even if it’s something small or additional to the original job.
At Friend’s, everything that’s entered through the estimate tab on the tech’s iPad is considered a sale and the tech automatically receives credit for the sale. Whereas, everything entered through the invoice tab only gets added to the invoice.
“So, it's not showing up on their sales numbers as far as the dashboards go,” Kosloski says.
When coaching techs to improve performance, the first thing Kosloski looks at is their opportunity job average ticket. He compares how many jobs they ran with how many jobs they converted, and then looks for a conversion rate of at least 70%. For instance, if he finds a tech with an $850 average ticket and a 50% conversion rate, he coaches them to understand their numbers and shows them how much more revenue they could make if they increase their average ticket to $950 and bump their conversion rate to 70%.
“But the No. 1 thing about that is, if you don't have your job type set up with a job type threshold, you're not going to know your conversion rate at all. It's going to be all over the place,” Kosloski says.
For Friend’s, Kosloski sets every job type to have a “sold threshold” of at least $100, which accounts for their service fee and everything sold above that.
“If you go and close out a job for zero dollars, that's not going to count as a converted call. Anything from $0 to $100 is going to be a non-converted job,” he says.
Clean up messy dashboards
To clean up a messy ServiceTitan Dashboard, Kosloski suggests starting at the beginning to make sure your technicians are providing options to customers and creating estimates.
“As soon as they start giving those options, you'll see an average opportunity per job [on your Dashboard],” he explains. “You can start seeing who's really following that system, which is proven and it works. Start there, and really try to keep things off the invoices on the mobile side.”
For the office side of the business, Friend’s Plumbing focused on understanding its real-time booking rates and worked to improve them.
“Getting your booking rate logged correctly, and really just falling in love with data entry is the biggest thing,” Kosloski says. “Messy dashboards—start wherever you want, but you could start with making sure sales are coming over properly.”
Once everything is set to run correctly, you may discover some of your technicians are masters at providing customers a discount, rather than building a relationship and providing real value.
“I always tell people, ‘Do you really respect the quality of your work if you’re quick to discount it? Do you really think you did the customer a good service by not fixing something the right way?” Kosloski says. “Was the discount the first thing you did? Or did you try to lead in with some more rapport about the company? Or did you try to build up your relationship?
“You’ve really got to [let customers know] you’re there to help them. That's how we try to coach everybody to get a higher average ticket,” he adds.
And grading techs on their performance with ServiceTitan Dashboards gives you the right formula to grow profits.
“100% tech-generated leads is the key. It’s the answer to making more revenue inside of your operation,” Kosloski says. “Because if you can get another set of eyes out there, have a project manager who knows what he's talking about come out there and inform the customer on what their options are and what needs to be done, it’s 110% the biggest thing you can do.”
You can find this interview and many more by subscribing to Mastering ServiceTitan on Apple Podcasts, on Spotify, or here.
Know a business that could use a bit of muscle from ServiceTitan? Refer them here!
Listening on a desktop & can’t see the links? Just search for Mastering ServiceTitan in your favorite podcast player.
About ServiceTitan
ServiceTitan is a comprehensive software solution built specifically to help home service companies streamline their operations, boost revenue, and substantially elevate the trajectory of their business.
Our comprehensive, cloud-based platform is used by thousands of electrical, HVAC, plumbing, garage door, and chimney sweep shops across the country—and has increased their revenue by an average of 25% in just their first year with us.
Ready to learn more about what ServiceTitan can do for your business?