Safely Test and Prep for Future Updates | Podcast Ep. 08 | Mastering ServiceTitan

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Welcome to Mastering Service Titan, where we get expert advice from power users. I'm your host, Josh Liu, and today I'm here with Juan Lopez. Juan is the business analyst, level two of digital customer experience at Franklin Electric. And, Juan, welcome to the show.

Thanks for having me, Josh. Appreciate it.

I'm super excited to talk today about your progression in your career, how you just get after it when it comes to learning Service Titan. And first, I wanted to ask you to tell us the story of how you learned to ride a bike.

Well, this is a good one. I don't remember the specific age that I was. I want to say I was like, somewhere between 4 and 6. All those years kind of blend together. I was outside of my house. I had training wheels at the time. Grab the tools, and I'm out front taking my training wheels off. My protector, my older sister, she was inside looking out the window, watching what I was doing. Knew that I was taking the training wheels off, but thought it would be really funny to watch me crash a bunch, so didn't tell my mom or my dad. Just kind of let me go, which I was fine with. I've always been kind of fine doing things on my own. Get. Get the bike over to the sidewalk. And my first goal, we had this set of bushes that separated our yard from the next from the neighborhood. And my goal was, if I can get past that bush, I'll be good. So hop on my bike right into the bush, just like my sister imagined. I saw her laughing, but I was determined, got back on the bike, gave myself a little push, right into the bush again. I think I probably ran into the bush 15 to 20 times. Bunch of scratches on my arms, you know, But I just kept getting on there. And finally, on my last attempt, I get on my bike, I'm riding. I finally make it past this bush, which was fantastic. Attained my goal, unfortunately, past the bushes, which I never really went that far because I played in our front yard. It was a hill, and it went straight down. And as soon as I made it past the bushes, I don't know how fast I went. I didn't know how to use the brakes. I got all the way down, and before I could hit the. Hit the street, I just jumped right off of my bike. My sister comes running, and she's like, what are you doing? And I'm like, well, I want to ride my bike without training wheels. That kind of like, drive and just get after it mentality is kind of how I live my life, you know, I like to say I Live one bush at a time.

Pretty epic story. And I love that story because it just shows innately like your personality. And that'll come into play here as we tell the story of your career progression. So can you talk a little bit about when you were first introduced to Service Titan? Where were you at in your career? What was the situation?

So actually prior to ServiceTitan actually get implemented with the previous company, which we were bought out a couple times. So my first company, which is Helen Brand, we actually explored Service Titan and it was a little bit too big for us at the time. We loved everything about it. We were just a little mom and pop organization. We didn't really have the resources. And when Franklin Electric purchased us and they said, hey, we're looking at introducing Service Titan, I was instantly excited because I knew I had watched some YouTube videos earlier and I knew that it was a good program, very user friendly. So I was very much looking forward to getting to use this software. And so we launched in May of 2022. At that time I was a regional manager on the water treatment side. So I was basically there to help build processes and just answer questions about our business so we could launch seamlessly into this software.

And then in our previous conversation you said one of the things you're really passionate about when it comes to Service Titan is the next environment. Can you tell me how'd you feel when you first discovered Next? And then it seemed like it just took off from there.

Yeah, actually. So we've been, we had Syspro prior to that and anytime we would try something or test something, we were impacting everybody. And so we weren't really able to get creative or figure out different ways to do things. So when we're going through this launch process and they're like, yeah, you have the next environment, you have the practice environment and we have our own IT department. So we get, we got tangled into the integrations environment as well. But they let me, they let me loose into the next environment and it was awesome. Like I got to like push buttons and try this and try that and add this. And it was almost like playing video games. Which I have a passion for as a hobby is I play a lot of video games. So I was just in there playing, learning and didn't take me long. Well, actually I could probably say it took me about 100 hours. But all of a sudden I kind of became the guy that knew what was going on in Service Titan. You know, when they were talking about how they're going to write out a Process. I'm like, hey, we have two or three different options. You can go this way, that way or the other. And it really got me into the circle of, of the service site and group and introduced me to a lot, a lot of other aspects of the business, being kind of isolated where I was at. So it was a good experience. And the next environment was fantastic.

Yeah. And I know you quickly became the expert at, at Franklin Electric when it comes to service time. It's so cool how you leverage next for people who don't know the difference between next and practice. Can you share a little bit about that?

So the practice is basically a stagnant site, so it stays the same. It looks exactly like your. Your live site looks. So you can go in there and mess with processes the way it looks. The next environment is basically how it's going to look in the future, whether that be this upcoming quarter. You know, they drop in new, new releases, new features, new user interface, toggles and buttons and views. So you basically can go practice what you do on a daily basis with the new features and see if everything works. So us being a global company, we're kind of judged on our ability to make sure everybody can do their job on a regular basis. So the next environment is great. It never goes away. Once a quarter, I'm in there for sure, looking at any new features, making sure people can do it. And if something is drastically changed, I then issue that person some training on their processes and say, hey, you got to get in there, you got to use it, get used to it. Because in April or whenever the release is going to drop, things are going to change a little bit for you. So people get to practice how it's going to be in the future, which I think is really nice.

That's really cool. I'd love to dig in a little bit into that process of yours and kind of show people how the best do it. So let's say you're prepping for the next release. What's the first thing that you do?

So for me, I really like the all the things that Service Titan provides. They provide notes, they usually come out with a YouTube video. There's community conversations about it. So if you're not joined in any Facebook groups, you should, because there's a lot of conversations there. I personally do a newsletter to start, so in order to create my own personal newsletter, I go in and I read all the features, watch the YouTube video, and then I go try them out for myself in the next environment. And if there's something that's really cool and fun. I'll highlight that. I use Tom Cruise as kind of like my speaker in my newsletters. So Tom Cruise has, you know, fantastic points he wants to highlight for the team. And I'll put that together, I'll send that out. And then if there's areas like, I know lately we've been focusing on accounting, you know, I'll make sure I meet with the accounting group and I spend 30 minutes and I just say, hey, here are some different things that are dropping. Take a look at them. You might not use them now, but it might be something that you want to implement into your processes in the future. But I try to have fun with it as much as possible. Fun's like the key, the key thing. The next environment for me is fun, but for everybody else, it's kind of like, oh, I got a little extra work. So I try to do a fun twist on it just to get, get people in there and quiz them a little bit, throw some wrenches at them just to make sure that they're in there testing it out.

Very cool. And so if they agree that, hey, these things look really cool, we do want to implement it for our accounting department, then they go back to you. And you said you assigned training. Is that through the, the knowledge base or.

Yeah, so it depends. We have our own kind of written processes. Everybody knows within Service Titan, which I think is a cool aspect, is that there's not one way or the highway. It's like we have a couple different ways you can do this. And so we try to outline what works best for our company and then fill in the blanks through integrations or third party connecting apps, things like that. But essentially what we do is I highlight the process that's affected and I have them, you know, go in there and run through and, you know, create an invoice, use these parts, create a customer and change these terms or notification pieces, whatever the, the feature is that's changing. I kind of highlight a couple different aspects for them. And then as new programs get released in the academy, I'll assign those. We try to assign training once every six months to existing users. New user, new users get the full rollout every time.

That makes sense. And do you have any advice for people on if they want to take more advantage of next? Maybe they don't use it very much for some reason, or maybe they're just getting started with service time. Like, how do you take, how do you get the most out of the next environment?

That's a good question. I think what, what you want to do is take your previous processes from wherever you came from, whatever software you moved from, just take one at a time and just try to do that process. I always say every software, no matter how good they are, you're going to get about 80% of what you used to do and then there's going to be about 20% new. So I challenge people to take, hey, take your main processes and try to replicate them in the next environment and get it to about that 80% and then let's work on the 20% together. Because no matter how good a software is, there's, you're never going to fit everything into that new software. Lingo is going to change some of the wordage, some of the paths that you take. There's a lot of different interpretations on sales, accounting, scheduling, inventory. So that's where I kind of come in, is I fill in that blank for the 20%. That way I'm not always focusing on the 100%. I let people kind of figure out about 75 to 80% of what they need to do and then we have fun with the other 20 to 25%.

That makes sense. And then how about the practice environment? When do you guys use practice?

We use the practice environment for when we launch a lot of times, either launching or new hire training. So if it's somebody that's existing, they hop into the next. That way they're working on the next best thing. If it's a new one, we want them to hit the ground rolling. We want them to be training in what they actually see as soon as they go into the computer. That way they're not confused. It's great for launches because we can, it's a static site, so we can, we can load all of our information and it doesn't reset on Fridays. So we'll do that for, for launches. Build kind of our dev environments in there and do the pre service Titan training in there. It just seems to be like for beginners, practice is really where you want to go. For people that are starting to get more comfortable with service Titan, the next environment is where you want to be at.

That's perfect. And by launches you mean because you guys are acquiring new locations and is that what you mean by launches?

Yeah, we're in water treatment, for example. We'll acquire a new retail location and we have to go in there and take everything that they were doing before and put that into servicetitan. We do that probably three to four times a year.

Yeah, so you've Seen a lot of locations with their processes have to move on to Service Titan. And you've been the point guy for a lot of that.

I have recently, yep.

Yeah. Can you talk a little bit about how you transitioned into that IT role and became that point person?

Sure. This goes back to our conversation about the next. But using that next environment. Nobody assigned that to me. Nobody said, hey, everybody has to spend a lot of time in the next environment. To be completely honest, if you're not on the IT team pushing the launch, the people that you're training, the people that you're working with, they're really hesitant. They don't know what to do. They're kind of waiting for you to give them orders or steps or processes to follow. I decided to be a leader and just understand it, learn it myself, use that hundred plus hours I spent early on. I'm far beyond a hundred plus hours at this point, for the record. But I used that early on to kind of position myself to say, hey, I can learn other things, you know, Yeah, I may be a regional manager that manages people, but I also understand systems and softwares and processes. And what that did was get me noticed by the IT department. And once everything kind of slowed down, they offered me a position to move from the regional manager position to a business analyst. Still working with the same people, but from a different point of view. And now that's what I do on a regular basis. And I love it.

That's awesome. And you took full advantage of a lot of the programs that Service Titan offers. I feel like we need to get the word out about these programs even more. We have these programs called Ignite, Ember, Spark and Torch. Can you talk a little bit about that, your experience going through those and what benefits you got?

Sure. So when I hopped into it, now I'm like a small fish in a big lake. I really didn't know what to do, but I knew I never wanted to fall behind at the time. They basically said, hey, you're going to be one of the point guys for Service Titan. You know, you'll transition as you go to more responsibility. So I had time to kind of like figure things out and I thought, why not just go all in on Service Titan? And I hopped in the ignite just to. Just to get an understanding, just to meet people. Conversations were great, but I was basically listening. I was the one listening in the beginning, just soaking it all in. I was new to really being entrenched in the software. Finished, that popped into embers. And then I was kind of talking. Still a lot of listening, great facilitators. So, you know, they were there. They were there to show you all the things you could do. And so I was just soaking it all in, writing down the notes, getting into my next environment, talking with the business. You know, I felt there was a lot of energy that came back and forth through those meetings and, and kind of kept me moving and feeling good about Service Titan. And then next thing you know, I was like, hey, I started having more answers. I'm in these meetings with, you know, the business talking about their processes, and I have even more answers. And I just wanted to keep going. So then I. I moved into Sparks, which Sparks is actually more of you talking than the facilitator. The facilitator is just there to guide the conversation. And I found that I was answering a lot of people's questions and other that are in the same scenarios that I'm in. And then Ashley, who was my facilitator, she suggested that I joined Torch and then I moved into Torch as well. Along this process, I also became a certified administrator. So I took that course, which now I was learning how to talk with people through the ignite embers and sparks. Like that was just great, just talking to people. What the certified administrator program did is it showed me how to use all the features and the power of the features in all aspects. You know, you had to learn marketing, inventory, accounting. I don't have an accounting background, but going through the course and understanding what the power of that module had, I was able to show that to the accounting department and guide them in their path. I might not be able to answer accounting questions, but I for sure was able to explain how the features work and kept them moving throughout the process. And then during that stint, for a small period of time, I was on the product advisory group as well. The. The whole purpose of that was to kind of like guide new product development and give some feedback, take surveys, things like that. So I've kind of been entrenched in Service Titan since I've become part of this team for the last 20 months. And I can say I've definitely learned a lot more by taking those courses and interacting with other people using Service Titan than I ever would have just tried to do it on my own.

Yeah, Juan, I feel like you are the dream it person for someone to have is like that mentality that you have that of like when you first just when you were a kid.

Right.

I want to learn to ride a bike without the training wheels, crash into the Bushes who knows how many times. And then eventually you break through, which is awesome. And to take a step back, if people have never heard of Ember or Ignite, Ember, Spark, and Torch, what are those? And I. I'll put a link in the description for how they can join it. But just to take a step back, what exactly do you guys do?

So basically what we do is we pick a topic, and in Embers and Ignite, the topic is really driven by the facilitator to say, hey, here are the things I know about this module. They talk about it and they'll poke and prod. They'll say, hey, is anybody experiencing any issues or have any questions in this that they want to talk about? And they provide a lot of answers. I know a lot of people get a customer success rep, which they're awesome as well, but this is just another outlet in which you're able to get answers when you're ready for them. It's almost like a stepping stone, right? Like you go from Embers, Ignite to Ember to Spark to Torch. In each level that you go through, the conversations get more complex, but you're ready for them. They're very simple at first, just to get the. Get you used to the concept of Service Titan. And then as you start to learn more, the conversations become way more complex. And then you get to a point, you know, where you're almost the facilitator, you're kind of helping and you're a power user. And I take pride in and being the best at whatever I'm doing, you know. So, sure, with Service Titan, I've gotten past that bush, but there's still that. That hill that I gotta figure out that's. That's going so fast, and I gotta figure out the brakes. And then I'm sure when I figure out how to stop at the bottom of the hill, there's going to be some. Some other challenge, whether it be cars coming, that I got to avoid. All the same things with Service Titan and the team at. With Service Titan is doing so much to improve the system that it really is. You need to do your due diligence and get in here because things are changing for the better. So much has changed in Servicetight in the last two years. And if you can stay on top of the feature releases and all that other stuff, it's only going to do your business that much more.

Very well said. Yeah, the Ignite, Ember, Spark, that's so cool that, you know, you meet an hour a week and you've got other contractors using Servicetein kind of around the same level as you, whether you're a beginner or intermediate. And then you can see how other people are approaching, let's say, price book. Like how do you guys set up your price book? What are best practices you're doing? You can share information with each other, which is so valuable. And you mentioned the Service Titan Certified Admin program. Now it's going to be called the Service Service Titan Certified User Program. They're going to have different paths for different roles. We kind of glossed over that for a second. But can you dive into what exactly that was again?

So the certified Administrator program was for admins. Right. So it was basically only the people that had certified certain permissions to change and edit all aspects of Service Titan. They're enhancing that now to where they're going to have that same level of instruction and interaction and training. But it's going to be role based, which I think is going to be huge. Because in order for me to succeed in Service Titan, I actually had to recruit a team of users. I had to recruit a sales point, an accounting point, a scheduling point, an inventory point because I'm only, you know, one person. So I went and recruited each of these, these people to help in all those aspects. And now they can go ahead and get certified in those roles and be even more powerful and it brings more, more to each of their role. Right. Like they want to be invested in what we're doing and if we provide them the system or the structure to do that, it's just going to make them more fulfilled in their career, more willing to engage and interact. Especially if they have control of being the expert in that area, they're going to want it. And those are the employees you're going to want to help make decisions and help build processes. So I think this Certified User Program is going to be fantastic. And as soon as it drops, I already got people in mind that I know want to do it and I'll probably do some of them as well just to make sure that they're not the experts above me, you know, and if they got to be that bush that I got to pass, I'm perfectly fine doing that as well.

I'm sure you all can tell Juan Juan is not competitive at all. That is awesome. But yeah. Well, you'll hear more about the Service Sign Certified User Program at Pantheon. They're going to be doing a talk there and I believe they'll have a booth as well and look out for future episode as well. We're going to deep dive into the new Service Titan Certified User program. But yeah, it's such a cool way to just become an expert, get certified in that area. And now you can be the guy given all the answers and helping everybody get on board.

Absolutely.

Awesome. So I think we've covered everything I've wanted to. Do you have any closing thoughts or advice for those who want to adopt more of this mentality? This get after it mentality?

Yeah, I think Service Titan has allowed people to be fearless. Get in there, explore, take advantage of these groups. There's some fantastic people out there that are on Service Titan, not just the people that work for Service Titan, but the people that are using it. And who knows, you could have the next answer. And that's what we're looking for. We're all looking for answers. And these are all channels for us to find answers and work together to make our businesses grow. Because that's. That's what Service Titan is about. It's helping your business grow by the ease and use of not only how it functions, but how it gets you ready to use those functions.

Yeah. And I hope people are inspired by just how your career was able to take off, too, by becoming an expert in service time and how service can make such an impact on the business. So, yeah, take advantage of the programs and I'll link them all in the description here so you can. You can find those easily. And Juan, thank you so much for coming on today and I'll see you at Pantheon.

Thanks for having me.