Lance Bachmann has never sold a roof. He’s never even been on a roof.
“I’ve never banged a shingle,” he said.
Yet Bachmann, the owner of LB Capital Group, a private equity firm in Bucks County, Pennsylvania, that partners with and expands home services businesses, has taken roofing companies and multiplied their revenues.
Take Cherry Roofing and Siding as an example. In the 1.5 years since LB Capital purchased the New Jersey residential roofing company, it’s grown from around $2.5 million in revenue to pacing at more than $20 million this year.
How did that happen?
“When I bought (Cherry Roofing and Siding), the first thing I did was put them on ServiceTitan,” Bachmann said. “And (ServiceTitan) wasn't even in roofing (yet)!”
Today, that’s a different story. The all-in-one software for the trades is servicing the roofing industry. So why was Bachmann so convinced that ServiceTitan would be a perfect fit for roofing—before ServiceTitan even ventured into the industry?
“It’s simple,” Bachmann said. And the answer has to do with the tenets of running a business.
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Bachmann first learned about ServiceTitan after he noticed that many of the HVAC companies he acquired were already using the software. Bachmann loved the all-in-one nature of the software so much that, if he acquired a company that wasn’t on it, that would be one of his first changes.
“All I do is put ServiceTitan and advertising in place, and some systems and processes,” Bachmann said.
This formula had worked for many of his HVAC companies. For example, the first company Bachmann did this with went from making $2.5 million in revenue to pacing at $25 million three years later. “We sold (that company) to a private equity firm about a year ago,” Bachmann said.
So Bachmann wondered: Why wouldn’t this formula translate to roofing?
“ServiceTitan worked for HVAC, it worked for my other companies,” he said. “What are the biggest things that matter? Call comes in, I book the call. Was it a lead or not? My salesperson goes out and closes it. Then it gets real simple. Did my crew go out and do the work? Were there any call-backs?
“Well, (you can manage all of this) in one platform: ServiceTitan.”
Make roofing a ‘demand business’
Bachmann knew that any home service industry, especially roofing, could benefit from a CRM system that could handle dispatch, scheduling, text communication, financing and more. But to really dig into roofing, Bachmann needed support from ServiceTitan.
Last year, he reached out to Tom Howard, ServiceTitan’s VP of Customer Experience, and Ara Mahdessian, ServiceTitan’s Co-Founder and CEO, and pitched his case as to why he felt roofing and ServiceTitan would be a perfect fit. He explained that he’d already put one of his clients, Cherry Roofing and Siding, onto the software, which required duplicating a different roofing software and transferring all of that information to ServiceTitan.
“We had no pricebook in there,” Bachmann said. “And we went from around $2 million to $12 million (in the first year).”
Months later, Bachmann received word from Howard and Mahdessian: ServiceTitan would service the roofing industry.
“Ara and Tom were willing to do it and move fast, and they were willing to deploy the revenue into making it grow and work to what we need to scale,” Bachmann said.
Bachmann is thrilled about what is to come as ServiceTitan continues to dig into the roofing sector. He already has three roofing companies in his portfolio, and is on the verge of adding a few more.
“I'm going to change the roofing industry,” Bachmann said. “I'm going to change how roofing is done, make it a demand business, make it a retail business, make it a five-star business, make it professional, and really show these roofing companies how they can become successful businessmen.”
And he’ll use ServiceTitan to help.
