ServiceTitan Dashboards: Get Your Data in Order | Podcast Ep. 07 | Mastering ServiceTitan

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 Matt Kolasky, and Matt is the vice president at Friends Plumbing. And we'll be diving into the power of Servicetitan Dashboards. Matt, welcome to the show.

Thanks, Josh. I appreciate it.

Yeah. And before we get into dashboards, I wanted to ask how you got into the trades, because I love your story.

Yeah, so I got into the trades in 2019, fresh out of high school. I'm 23 years old now, but a lot happened since then. I was in a truck for three years or so, and I realized that the office needed a little bit more help. At that time, we were probably like 15 trucks, plumbing, only doing still plumbing, but doing $3 million annually revenue. And after I stepped in, it's been about four years now, really utilizing serviceite and all their features. I think we're on pace to do 10 million this year.

Dang, that is insane growth. And it's your dad who started the business originally, right?

Oh, yeah. My dad started the company 45 years ago and he was originally new construction and then moved over to service in about 2005 or so. So he's been doing it for quite some time. So I got a great mentor to look up to and he definitely knows what he's doing.

Yeah. And I know you were really involved in the service time implementation and all of that. And just before we started recording, you were showing me your crazy camera set up and lighting like you are a tech wizard. What's the father and son dynamic like there with you being really tech savvy and then helping to make change across the business?

I'll tell you what, it's like a reality TV show. It is like there is always something going on between us. It's a family business, you know, if you know, you know, you know.

That'S awesome. So, yeah, when we were. When we chatted last week and I asked you what is. What are some of your favorite service Titan features? One of the things you mentioned was I love dashboards as. As long as they're set up properly. And so we wanted. I wanted to go into that a little bit today and give some people some insight. But first, what do you. Why do you love dashboards so much?

I love dashboards because I know what it can look like and I know what it should look like. And the biggest thing for me was I sat down and I took a look at the dashboards and I said, okay, what is this thing what is this gauge? Right. And I was like, okay, well, that's revenue. All right. But what's sales? What's opportunity, job average? What is all this stuff? And then when you start to take a deep dive in it, you're like, oh, so we're not putting that in. Right. So my favorite thing about dashboards is being able to look and see every single piece of the puzzle. Because once you have that, it's a. It's a math equation, and you can kind of go from there.

I feel like data and making sure you have the right data is such. Can be such a big problem if you don't. Yeah. So can you talk a little bit about the sales and revenue dashboards and how technician performance, like, how did you guys set up your workflows when it really. As it relates to the technician?

At first, we weren't really doing any. Any workflows at all. We were just kind of going at it, selling jobs, doing what we had to do, until I realized that if we're selling something, even if it's a small job, it should be down as a sale because it goes into their sales revenue. Not every company is set up the same, but I thought, hey, we should probably get a. Get a good read on this and figure out why somebody has $100,000 per year in sales, but they're pulling in 500,000 in their truck. So something's wrong with this. And getting that dialed in was the first thing I did when I came back from Pantheon in 2023.

Yeah, I know. You talk about how Pantheon was life changing, and you got to learn a lot of things there. So how was it set up before, and how did you guys clean that up?

Okay, so the way we had it set up before was we had just a plumbing service business unit, just one. And you can do it so many different ways. There's so many workflows. But we realized that there's a better way. We started really implementing different business units, whatever those may be. And it's pretty simple stuff, but once you get the business units down, and then you can say, okay, well, these guys were on an install job. These guys just did service calls. These guys sold the work. And really making sure that gets put in correctly is key, absolute key.

Are there still issues that come up if they're inputted incorrectly?

Absolutely. Every day, even today.

And so, yeah, like, for example, what happened today, and how do you guys manage, like, keeping that data clean?

Well, it's all about. It's all about making sure that your team is all on the same page. And getting that data in, right? Whether it's. If a job was sold by someone else and they're not there and it's getting installed by somebody else, that's an install job. So really, just knowing the business kind of how the operations work, it's not that complicated. But once you get into it, it's. It's very important to make sure that the data is incorrectly. Because if you're on performance pay, you have to. You have to have that stuff in, or next thing you know, guys are gonna be like, hey, I didn't get the right amount on my check when you go look. And it was supposed to be a service job, but it was on install, which is less of a percentage. So. So.

And why do you think those issues happen? Is it just like a. A quick mistake out in the field when things are moving too quickly? Or it's.

It's either out in the field or it's in the office, and it's definitely moving too quickly. It's. They just. They gotta get it. They gotta be on top of it, and it's part of the workflow. It's just part of getting to know Service Titan and doing things the right way.

It seems like human error is always gonna be part of the problem. And so you have to set up these, like, workflows or some kind of checks and balances to make sure everything's going in right. How did you catch those mistakes today?

We're currently working on implementing payroll through Service Titan. But one of the ways that we. We just started performance pay a few months ago is we're going through dashboards and making sure that all the jobs are correct. So that's. That's why I love dashboards, because we don't tell anybody. We. We pay on this. Okay? It's not a secret, but we pay off of it for now. But it has to be perfect because now you're touching pay. And we have boards up all over our office. There's TVs everywhere. It's a competition half the time, and it allows us to show people what their average ticket is or how much they got from a turnover call and things like that. And when we pull that stuff up, if they come to us and they're like, hey, I turned a call over, but I didn't get a bonus or whatever. Because we're saying we will give that to them. Goes back to data entry and making sure it's in. Right. But it's a great way to grade your team. Like I was Saying earlier, the biggest thing is I could take their average ticket and the amount of calls that they're running, and I could tell you a whole story about that person right from there. If they're running a bunch of calls and they have a low average ticket, I know they're not giving options. It also tells me if they're giving options. If you're going in through the invoice tab on the mobile side and you're just throwing stuff into the job and you're just going with that, you're not, you're not even making an estimate, how are you giving options? So that's what I meant when I said sales weren't matching revenue. So that's how you get them to match is that everything just has to be an estimate. Even if it's a small thing, even if it's an additional item, make a new estimate, add it to the invoice.

That's such a good tip that you made right there. And that especially applies for like some of the jobs that take multiple days. Right. And things can get a little wonky if you're accidentally just making an invoice immediately instead of an estimate, even if the customer has already agreed to it. For those customers who are brand new to service time, you know, some of the language that we use in the product needs a little bit of translation. Can you talk just at the basic level revenue, sales opportunities, like, how are these things created in Service Titan and can you help with some of the translation there for new customers?

When I say sales, sales can be whatever you make it in your head. But when we're talking about it, we're talking about everything that goes through the estimate tab on the iPad is a sale. It'll go down in their sales category and it'll say sold by said technician.

Right.

And then everything on the invoice side just gets added to an invoice. So it's not, it's not showing up on their sales numbers as far as dashboards go. So that was a huge thing right there. And like, I don't know if you want me to, like, get into it. I don't know how new some people are that are watching. But, you know, when we say things like KPIs, it's key performance indicators. Those are just basically any statistic on the dashboard that you really need to know. And one of the biggest things was opportunity. Job average. That was our average ticket was being able to sit down and say, okay, we ran this many jobs, how many jobs do we need to run at that average ticket to get to 10 million, then you can go back and 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? You know, things like that.

That makes a lot of sense. I want to go back to what you said about business units. It sounds like you guys had only plumbing service set up. And one of my favorite things about this podcast is giving new customers, like the warnings, you know, like, hey, we did it this way, but you don't have to. And make sure you keep these things in mind. So how come you guys started with plumbing service only, and then how did you guys add a bunch right after Pantheon? Or how did you evolve way your business units were set up?

So we, we had plumbing service. We were originally set up. We had some outside help come and send us up. And at the time, I don't think we knew what we wanted. Our entire business, 80% of the business was just service. And it wasn't until we realized that people need to be on certain seats on the bus that we were like, okay, we need business units. And I, I kind of wanted to implement this model for a long time. And the model is a technician goes out and they kind of assess the issue, and then they figure out, is this a turnover? Do we need to turn this over to a project manager? That's for things like in the plumbing industry, re pipes, sewer, re pipes, you know, everything else in between. Right. Even sometimes on filtration, if a guy isn't skilled enough, we'll send a filtration expert out there, and that's when the business units will go in, and it starts as a service, and then it turns into a sale, and then if that closes out, it turns into an install. So that's the way that the workflow is done. In most companies that are operating a full, you know, on all cylinders, that are using Service Titan, they have three departments. They have a service department, an install department, and a sales department.

And so is that how you laid out your business units, or are there additional business units in there?

Yeah, we have an additional one for after hours because the pay is different.

But that makes sense. And you do that just so the dashboard will report accurately and then you can pay off of it.

That was the biggest thing, is we had guys who were bringing in $550,000 a year, but. And they were like, look at me, I'm so good. And then as soon as I removed that on Call the after hours business unit. They were in the middle of the pack and I was like, so they're putting in way more time and way more hours. But now I can go in and see after hours. Our average ticket is lower or higher right now. I know, you know, what can we do there? You know, if there is anything to do there.

But actually speaking about anything to do, earlier, you mentioned you love seeing the numbers because you can, you can see the story. And then from there, you talked about in our previous conversation how to coach technicians. And so when you're looking at the dashboard, what stories are you looking for? And then what kind of coaching conversations are you having with your technicians?

Okay, good question. So when I'm looking at a dashboard, I really want to see their average ticket. It's the first thing I want to see. I look at their opportunity job average ticket, and I compare that with how many jobs they ran versus how many jobs they converted. So then I look at their conversion rate, right? And I say, okay, so you have a 50% conversion rate, but your average ticket is 850. I want to do all, I want to make all of those better. Of course, right? It's because I'm just here to coach people and help people, right? So now I'm sitting here and I'm like, okay, if I have a 850 average ticket, if I can just get that up by a hundred dollars, and then we can actually get that conversion rate to come up closer to 70, now we're able to go in and see, you know, you'll have this much more revenue per month if you did those things. And then it turns into a coaching session because it's like, okay, well, what do I do? I'm doing all those things that you're telling me in the meetings, you know, what can I do? Is there any books I should read or anything like that? So that's what, that's what's been going on right now here today at Friends Plumbing is we've really been dialing in and showing everybody their numbers and just falling in love with them and really trying to figure out what we can do in the office to help them, how they're, as far as, you know, hey, you got a 50 conversion rate. You know, I know some people, some companies, they won't even let that fly. So. But the biggest thing, the number one thing about that is that if you, if you don't have your job type set up with the job type threshold, you're not going to have your conversion rate in it. At all. It's, it's going to be all over the place. We had no idea what our conversion rate or booking rate. The entire business gets funneled into this dashboard and every single piece of the operation has to be set up properly within service site.

Can you talk a little bit about the job types?

Yeah, huge things. So as soon as I learned about that, I was like, oh shoot, I got to go in and make every job type have a sold threshold of $100. Because if it's not, then when we're collecting our service fee is 99, 50. If we're collecting that, I don't want that to hurt their conversion rate. So any time, anytime it's under that, it does hurt their conversion rate. But to me it should be a little higher than that. But that's a different story for a different day. But as far as getting those job type thresholds in, it's super easy. Just go on service Dayton, change them all.

Yeah. And how does the threshold impact the dashboard? Is it how it gets categorized?

So if you go out and you close out a job for $0, that's not going to count as a converted call. So anything from 0 to 100, well under 100, I think it's either 100 or it's 100. Either way, anything from 0 to 100 is going to be a non converted job. So even if they go out and they charge a service fee, it doesn't, it goes against their conversion rate. And you want that because, you know, I heard somebody say if they're willing to pay you 9950 to get off of their property, that's probably not a good look. So, I mean, it's, it's true. So we don't, we don't even like when guys get that. So nobody should be, you shouldn't be getting anything on the positive side for your conversion rate for that.

So that makes sense. And it's a good definition for the, the threshold so that everybody, maybe people are new, getting used to the language. They know those are, those will be counted against the conversion rate as it should be. Do you have any advice for people who have really messy dashboards like, and they want to clean it up, where should they start?

Oh man, that's a tough question. Because honestly, I would say start with making sure that your technicians are taking everything through an invoice and giving options because you'll be able to see on dashboards as soon as they start giving those options, you'll see an average opportunity per job so you can start Seeing who's really following that system, and that system is proven and it works. But start there. Really try to keep things off the invoices on the mobile side, on the office side. You really want to make sure that you have. I mean, you can start anywhere you want. We started with booking rate. That's what started us. We went in and booking rate is a monster. But we went in and we started making sure because somebody said, you have a 70 booking rate. That's terrible. And I was like, no way. It can't be. So I went in and we found out that we were really at like a 90. So that's good news for us. But booking rate, and then I would say, which is, you know, you got to research all this stuff. I mean, there's. There's so much that you could go into. We can't fit it into this podcast, but getting your booking rate logged correctly and really just falling in love with entry. Data entry is the biggest thing. So messy dashboards start wherever you want. But you could start with making sure sales are coming over properly. You could start by separating them right now. If, you know, you're like, oh, we have project managers and they're going on a service, you know, business unit that probably should be changed. I don't. I don't think that's right, personally, but it really just depends on where you want to start. But we started with booking rate, and then it turned into making sure splits were correct on invoices. And then it turned into, hey, how do we fix our conversion rate? It's at 50%. And we know this guy isn't doing that. He was doing salt deliveries and wasn't getting any money, so we had to fix that. It's really everything as a whole. And if you're not using it properly, you know it'll hurt.

I bet it'll hurt. Because then, you know, there's that famous quote of, you can't manage what you don't measure. And it goes back to your coaching conversations of, like, seeing the stories and then helping to have the right conversation to help them move the needle. Like, for example, when I first started out in sales, I remember I had, like, a really high average, really high close rate, like 80% plus. But my average ticket was really low. And it's because I was way too nice. I would discount the crap out of every single job. And, oh, yeah, but that was just me.

My personal stories that I could tell you about a person. When I see the low average ticket, I'm like, okay, yeah, I know what he's getting at, you know, people, we work with these people every day. So you can sit there and say, okay, I know for a fact that he's the discount, you know, master. You know what I mean? So, yeah, that was me.

And so if you see a technician like me out there, the discount masters, just, man, giving out way too much. What kind of coaching conversation do you have with him to help?

Well, I always tell people, you know, do you really respect the quality of your work if you are quick to discount it, everybody's quick to ask for a cheaper price, right? That's what people do. One of our. One of our top guys, you know, he told me one time, he was like, I, I don't understand why people don't value their, their workmanship. They're great plumbers. We have some amazing technicians here. And these guys were literally walking away through calls with like $150 and stuff like that. And it's like, do you really think you did the customer a good deed or a good service by not fixing something the right way? Really finding the why. And then it goes back to coaching, right? Like you said, finding somebody's why is huge, Huge. Because then you can take that and really kind of dive deeper into what makes them kind of tick. And that's where we. That's where we try to approach our coaching here, is we try to basically get with guys and say, okay, was the discount the first thing you did? Or did you try to lead in with maybe some more rapport about the company? Or did you build up about your relationships, you know, with them or, you know what I'm saying, Like that really just getting into building a better relationship with the customer and starting there and starting with really giving a crap about them and letting them know that. Because if you're there to help them, you're never going to come off like a sales guy. And that's not what we're here to do. So you really got to come off like you're there to help them. So that's how we try to coach everybody to get a higher average ticket. Performance pay helps with that because, you know, people won't see that image or that vision when they're on an hourly pay. But that's. That's a podcast for a different day.

It relates, though, and, you know, you have to incentivize people the right way and then build the workflows around that that they can follow. So every. Everyone's aligned back to dashboards. So when you see your technicians performing, are you Having coaching conversations with all of them or are you just talking with the lower performing ones? And how often do you have these conversations?

My dad always said we have to bring the bottom up. And I would be like, okay. But Tom Brady literally practices more than everybody else on the team, so shouldn't we focus on him? And it's a, you know, kind of go at that. But everybody needs equal opportunity. So we do try to bring the bottom up. And how we do that is. And like I said, you can almost read a book on people is right now we're building a training center out back and we're going to be training everybody, you know, as as many new people that are new to the trades. And I mean, five years in. Right. Like these people know a lot about plumbing, but we're going to make them elite in the home when it comes to knowing, you know, what a customer needs in that situation or how to do a specific job that they may or may not have been taught by whoever taught them.

So it sounds like you, you prioritize the low performers, but you still make sure everyone's having a coaching conversation.

Oh, yeah, everybody. Everybody. Subject to get coach from me. Everybody.

Well, you guys are definitely doing something right if you're growing that much that quickly. So it's awesome to hear.

Yeah. One of the biggest things for us was really implementing, and I know this is a dashboard conversation, but when you implement your dashboards properly, this is how it should look, in my opinion. And I'm just talking because I learned from 100 million dollar shops and things like that. But the way it should look is you should have a project manager that goes out to a lead and if that lead is marketed, which means it came in from a phone call or if that lead came in from a tech generated lead, which is also. TGLs are a huge thing inside of Service titan that if you're not incentivizing and you're not doing those with your team, it's, it's really what changed us. We had a project manager come in and he was like, hey, I'm here. Or like you're hired. And we kind of went from there. And he came from a shop that knows what they're doing. So we're glad to have him and a couple other people he's brought. So we basically use all of that stuff inside of dashboards now to grade all of these people that have come and we're starting and immediately, right away we, we brought over, I think 15 technicians in the last two months and half of Them are gone because we have a standard here and we use the dashboards to see where people lie.

And tech generated leads is part of the grading process.

100%. Tech generated leads is the key. It is the answer to making more revenue inside of your operation. 100%. Because if you can, if you can get another set of eyes out there and you have a project manager who knows what he's talking about, come out there and inform the customer on what they, on their options and what they need to have done it is 110% the biggest thing inside of the operation right now.

And then does the performance pay reflect that sale for both the project manager and the technician?

Yes. Yes. Yep.

That's.

Yeah. The performance pay is set up that way so that they actually will. The. Our project managers are very nice people. They'll actually give us their. A percentage of their sales revenue to. To the technician. So they get a little piece of the pie.

Yeah. So that way they're. They're on a team together trying to maximize.

Everybody's a team. It's all a team effort.

That makes sense. Cool. It's. It seems like we wanted to cover the topic of dashboards, but really underneath dashboards is like how you guys set up the incentives first for the technicians, the project managers, once they're aligned, then the dashboards reflect the exact grade that or like how well the technician is doing. And then from there it goes into your coaching conversations. So this, this all makes a lot of sense.

Exactly. It all started with dashboards. It all started there. And there's little things inside of the dashboards. You're not going to fix the whole thing at once. We went booking. Right. And then we fixed that. And then we said, okay, we need to fix this and fix that. And then it came full circle to now that we know it's spitting out the right information, when we do it right, it's going to make it so that we can read it like a.

Book, you know, so that's perfect. So yeah, for those out there listening, if it feels intimidating when you look at your messy dashboards and it's just like a lot of data, listen to what Matt said. Start with just one metric and maybe you can do what he did. Start with booking rate and then clean that up and then move on to the next and the next and eventually it'll all be clean. You can read it like a book and have those coaching conversations to make an impact on the business. We'll see you at Pantheon.

Yes, I'll be there.