When Kevin Couper bought Kyle Plumbing in Deerfield Beach, Florida, in 2023, he knew the company had what house flippers might call “good bones.”
But the 37-year-old entrepreneur, who has a strong financial-services background, also knew the business would need significant modernization to maximize its potential. So he systematically began to integrate digital technologies into the business, starting with ServiceTitan, a business-management software that handles everything from dispatching, financial reporting and job scheduling to customer payments, payroll and job estimates.
“It was a game-changer financially,” he says. “We had tons of customers that owed us money and had to make a lot of phone calls to collect payments. Now all our technicians have iPads and use ServiceTitan to create invoices, build estimates and collect credit card payments right there on the job.”
But the transition wasn’t easy, Couper says.
“The hardest part was getting everyone on board — there was a lot of pushback and the transition involved a lot of training,” he says. “But I was lucky because the existing system was outdated enough that there was no technical support or software upgrades available anymore. So everyone knew we’d have to make a change sooner or later.”
The transition was somewhat eased by the fact that Couper had all office staff attend presentations from vendors and gathered feedback. This approach eventually led to unanimous support for ServiceTitan, he says.
Couper also adopted Profit Rhino, a digital platform that allows contractors to build customized flat-rate price books.
“It was a tremendous help for basically building a price book from scratch,” Couper says. “Before, the company relied on time-and-materials pricing. But flat-rate pricing allows us to quote an accurate price and avoid dealing with customers that otherwise would be annoyed or upset about how long technicians were on a job (compared to the estimate).”
The company also embraced an inventory-management software platform from Ply Financial. It relies on a barcode system to track inventory both in the company’s warehouse and on technicians’ trucks, he says.
“You can even set specific minimums for part inventory on trucks that trigger automatic purchase-order requests to our warehouse manager when inventories get too low,” Couper explains. “It really helps keep our trucks fully replenished with parts.”
The system can also review parts prices from different vendors and automatically selects the lowest price — and then tracks the savings that results, he says.
Read more about Kyle Plumbing in the July 2024 issue of Plumber magazine.
