Until two years ago, L.J. Kruse Company, a fourth-generation plumbing and HVAC shop in Berkeley, CA, was still using paper for invoicing. With ServiceTitan, the company’s service side boosted revenue by $1 million. “I don’t know how many companies are left on paperwork orders, but if there are any, you have to make the switch, and you’ve got to make it yesterday,” said Will Kruse, vice president and service manager at L.J. Kruse Co. Switching to ServiceTitan “was night and day.”
Piles of Paper
L.J. Kruse Co.’s frustration with its paper processes usually peaked every October. That’s when Kruse and his team would rush to invoice all of their commercial and residential customers before Halloween—which marked the end of the fiscal year.
That task was never fun. “We’d have literal piles of invoices, which would represent tens of thousands of revenue dollars that would sit there,” said Kruse. “We weren’t emailing invoices. We were putting them in the mail. And we were literally losing invoices. It’s a physical piece of paper that can get lost.”
Invoices could sometimes be found in the kitchen. Or the warehouse. Or shuffled into a pile on a desk and completely forgotten. “[October] would be a fire drill of, ‘What are we missing?’” Kruse said.
And when customers finally received their invoices, they could not pay electronically. That meant they were sending checks via mail or calling in their credit card numbers. “Sometimes, it would be a month or two before we’d see payment,” Kruse said. Looking back, Kruse knows all of this “sounds crazy,” he laughed. Especially now, with everything they can do with ServiceTitan.
Time for a Change
L.J. Kruse Co. has operated continuously since Kruse’s great-grandfather started the company in 1916. Five years ago, the torch was passed to the fourth generation—Kruse and his brothers. That’s when, after surveying the unscalable processes of their business, it was obvious that something needed to change. “But the hamstrings of being a four-generation company is, change is hard,” Kruse said. “We ran into a wall of how to make that change… the path to get there was unclear.”
That path became much clearer when ServiceTitan announced an integration with Viewpoint Vista, which L.J. Kruse Co. had been using for its accounting software. Soon after, the company went live with ServiceTitan in May 2023 and ditched their paper ways.
Kruse described some of his favorite features of the new system:
- Dispatching: When Kruse first started working at L.J. Kruse Co. 10 years ago, the company’s dispatch board was “literally a bulletin board with stickies,” he said. Kruse added a color-coded spreadsheet to keep things organized—but it was still chaotic. “It used to be that if two calls came in at the same time, the dispatchers would have to fight over who could get it on the board first.” That’s not happening anymore with ServiceTitan’s dispatching capabilities.
- Pricebook Pro: Before they started using ServiceTitan, 99 percent of L.J. Kruse Co.’s service work was billed using time-and-material rates. Since they started using ServiceTitan’s Pricebook Pro, they switched to flat-rate service pricing. “That’s allowed us to increase revenue, increase margins, and turn around quotes to customers a lot (faster).”
- Reporting: ServiceTitan’s robust reporting features have helped L.J. Kruse Co. better align with MCAA best practices. “So much of what we do, day-to-day, is data-driven,” Kruse said. “[Now,] I can clue into an individual job, even if it’s a one-hour job. I can know exactly how we’re doing on that job. That’s been huge, [and it allows us] to adjust our prices accordingly. Having the data that ServiceTitan provides has been huge in growing the [service] department and being able to follow some of those best practices.”
Read ServiceTitan’s blog post, Flat-Rate vs. Hourly Rate: Pros and Cons of Each Pricing Model: https://www.servicetitan.com/blog/flat-rate-vs-hourly
Streamlined Invoicing
Winter is usually the busiest time of year at L.J. Kruse Co., because they do a lot of heating and boiler work. Even so, thanks to ServiceTitan, the service team is getting invoices out within 24 hours.
“There’s a report in ServiceTitan that we use a lot—the old jobs report—which basically tells you what jobs are open that haven’t been completed,” Kruse said. “We’re running that on a monthly basis. We still find things that are floating out there that aren’t closed out, but we’re catching them as we go, instead of having a stack of $10,000 that we never billed.
“That headache basically went away with ServiceTitan,” Kruse noted.
Both Kruse and customers also love the customer portal and the ease of payments. “I’ll send out a batch of unpaid invoices… and we will get half or more of those paid that night.” As a result of using ServiceTitan, L.J. Kruse Co. increased revenue by $1 million on the service side, and they have grown the number of technicians from eight to as many as 12.
Looking ahead, Kruse wants to continue to grow the service side and the commercial HVAC department. He is also excited to see where ServiceTitan goes. “[ServiceTitan] started as a residential-focused company. But it’s clear to me that they put a lot of money, effort, and time into growing the commercial side of things.
“You can tell that ServiceTitan cares about the future and their adaptation of AI [artificial intelligence],” Kruse observed. “It’s an exciting software to be a part of.”
For more information, visit www.servicetitan.com.
