Ron Donoho
August 13th, 2020
2 Min Read
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“COVID gave us a chance to get back to the fundamentals of our business.”
—Ian Goldberg
Thinking about starting a commercial service department or want to know how to land and work with larger commercial customers?
Presenters Justin Armendariz, founder & CEO of Better Future Facilities, Ian Goldberg, president of Frank Gay Services, Dallin Tippetts, process director at Rainforest Plumbing & Air and Connor Theilmann, vice president of new markets at ServiceTitan, share experiences about starting, growing, and optimizing multi-trade businesses.
They chatted with attendees in a virtual session during Pantheon 2020, ServiceTitan’s annual conference for the trades. Here are some key takeaways:
1. Some sectors of commercial business are pandemic-proof.
There was definitely concern about losing commercial business during Covid-19, but certain essential services kept going strong.
“With grocery stores, it was crazy—probably more business than before the pandemic,” Goldberg said. “We also do a lot of government work, which is mostly outside, so that stayed steady.”
2. The pandemic gave companies a chance to focus on communication, messaging.
With many employees working from home and not being physically connected to the office, the focus on messaging with the team became all the more important.
“We really focused on messaging from leadership,” Goldberg said. “We started doing two messages a week—about safety and about teamwork—and we’re going to continue doing that into the future.”
3. ServiceTitan is very efficient at managing time in the commercial sector.
With techs working on commercial jobs, they tend to work more on an hourly basis than in residential. ServiceTitan allows a company to manage that, as well as the invoicing process.
“Having ServiceTitan saves us so much time,” Tippetts said. “People who were spending 100 percent of their time doing invoicing are now spending just half of their time on invoicing.”
4. There can be a difference in billing between commercial and residential.
Billing for residential and light commercial tends to be relatively the same.
“But you’ll see a lot of different billing portals for all of the different buckets of commercial clients,” Goldberg says. “They all have their own systems that need to be integrated.”
