Leveraging technology to boost productivity both in the office and in the field has been essential to growth at Velocity Plumbing & Heating, based in Quincy, Massachusetts.
For example, owner Tom Pecoraro Jr. had the company’s 2022 Ford F-150 pickup truck equipped with a liftgate manufactured by Tommy Gate, a brand owned by Woodbine Manufacturing Co., used to lift boilers and water heaters on and off the vehicle.
In addition, the company also owns two MS-60 StairCat stair-climbing hand trucks from Escalera. They’re used to move boilers and water heaters up and down stairs.
The underlying philosophy behind the investments? Help employees work smarter, not harder — and more safely, too.
“We’ve never had a workers' compensation claim before, but I don’t ever want to,” says Pecoraro, who established the company in 2016. “Working safely is important to me. I didn’t want to be known as a company that wasn’t willing to pay, say, $5,000 to minimize injuries.
“Sure, it’s important for us to make money,” he continues. “But it’s also important that everyone goes home healthy at the end of each day.”
The Tommy Gate liftgate cost around $5,000. Pecoraro vowed to get one after one last struggle to get a large commercial water heater for a restaurant off a truck.
“We were working after hours and after that installation, I said I’m done — we work hard enough as it is, so there’s no need to kill ourselves,” he says.
The StairCats cost about $2,500 each. While they make hard jobs easier and safer, they also allow Pecoraro to allocate workers more effectively because a water heater, furnace or radiators can be delivered with two employees instead of four.
“The guys love them,” he says of the liftgate and StairCats.
On the other end of the business, Pecoraro invests in another kind of technology: Housecall Pro, a cloud-based, business management software platform. For a fee of about $2,000 a year for five users, the platform does everything from scheduling, dispatching and invoicing to managing customer relations, financial reporting and more.
“We just signed up for a payroll add-on service, too, which will save us about $1,500 a year compared to using a third-party payroll company.”
Efficiency and productivity increases followed — and so did positive Google reviews, increasing to 94 reviews, up from 30 before using Housecall Pro.
“I don’t pay to get higher Google rankings, but you don’t have to look too far down (in the Google rankings) to find us because of all the positive ratings,” Pecoraro explains.
Housecall Pro also enhances internal efficiency and customer service. When the company receives a call, the software automatically logs an appointment date and time and texts it to the customer. And when a technician finishes a job and heads for the next call, he sends a text that lets the next customer know he’s on his way — and it even provides an estimated arrival time, Pecoraro says.
If a customer forgot about the appointment and isn’t at home when a technician is on the way, the customer can quickly respond with a text — no need for anyone to make time-consuming and inconvenient phone calls, he says.
The Housecall Pro platform also includes a cloud-based calendar that tracks appointments. That’s an improvement on the Google calendar the company used before, which wasn’t integrated with the business-management software the company used before switching to Housecall Pro, Pecoraro explains.
“So our operations now are much more streamlined [compared to switching back and forth between the software and the Google calendar],” he says. “It makes it much easier to move job times around.”
Pecoraro also notes that on an initial sales visit, he can take photos and upload them to the Housecall Pro platform. This gives technicians a better idea of what to expect on a service call and how to prepare for it.
Read more about Velocity Plumbing & Heating in the January 2025 issue of Plumber magazine.
