Heartland · Operating analysis
A register of opportunities across 28 operating companies in three regions, each sized from data already held in Aspire and rated for how well it is evidenced, with the full supporting studies alongside. Items are ordered by size rather than by ease, and several are open questions rather than findings.
Contents
The full time study. How much of the driving was avoidable, judged only on what the scheduler knew before each week began; evidence that Aspire's route optimizer works but is applied inconsistently; three real weeks mapped before and after; and what the saving is worth in crew hours rather than fuel.
The client-service deliverable in full, with per-operating-company drill-through. Conversation volume and categories, coverage against the property book, stale close-outs, and the renewal record behind every retention figure quoted elsewhere.
A full accounting of the paid day against the shift clock — where the unbooked time actually sits — and the quality signals Aspire records: warranty labor, review discipline and cancellations. Includes two measures that were tested and rejected.
Delivered gross margin per job — which nothing in the platform computes — plus how consistently the price book is applied and what overtime Aspire actually records. Includes a corrected pricing-dispersion table and a correction to an earlier overtime conclusion.
The estate read three ways — Central, West and East — with opportunity size and delivery performance side by side, the operating companies beneath each region, and what the regional cut deliberately does not claim. Every figure is the figure the other documents report; this document groups, it does not recompute.
Whether Aspire actually holds property maps, surveyed live across all 32 production opcos. The expected maturity curve turns out to be a hard binary: five opcos have a map attachment type configured and twenty-seven do not have the type at all. Changes what any map-dependent feature can be scoped to.
Orientation
Contract value under management
19,579 properties, 95 branches, 28 operating companies.
Value on renewals not retained
From 52,721 renewal decisions in the window.
Labor not reaching a job ticket
15.5% of clocked time, so job costing sees most but not all of what is paid.
Avoidable driving
Crew-hours over the window — the most precisely measured item here.
The register
Every item is drawn from data already in Aspire. Size is the best current estimate, confidence states whether it is measured or still open, and effort distinguishes a process change from something that needs building. Only one item is both measured and process-only: the route optimizer.
Retention ranges from 65% to 100% across the 80 branches with decided renewals, on $393.7M of contract value. The gap between the weakest branches and the group median is the largest single number in this analysis, and it is now visible by region: Central holds 87.0% against East's 92.0%.
Next: Take the six branches below 82% retention and read the decline reasons already recorded against their lost renewals.
19.8M dollars of work was delivered below its own recorded cost, on $391.3M of priced revenue. It is overwhelmingly an East problem: East carries $14.4M of it and blends 38.5% against West's 52.3% and Central's 49.6% — and East is simultaneously the best-run region on routing and retention.
Next: Read the largest negative-margin jobs at Heartland NE and Heritage. The drag figures say a few dozen tickets account for most of it, and they are identifiable today.
Aspire holds 18,943 property map attachments, but only five opcos have a Map or Snow Map attachment type configured at all. The other twenty-seven return zero because the type does not exist in their Aspire configuration, so there is nothing to upload into. This is a configuration gap, not an adoption gap, and it caps what any map-dependent capability can serve.
Next: Ask ServiceTitan what configuring the Map attachment type involves per tenant — a setting, a template change or a migration. That answer decides whether this is days or quarters, and nothing else can be sequenced until it is known.
Between 57% and 89% of services carry an overridden price, and minimum-price application is effectively unused. At the top of that range nearly nine services in ten depart from the book.
Next: Ask what an override means at Heartland NE, where 89% of services carry one. If overriding is the norm, the book is not the control it is assumed to be.
585,829 overtime hours are recorded across the estate, while Signature records almost none despite running the longest shifts in the group. Signature's job costs therefore exclude premium pay its peers include — and Signature sits in Central, so Central's margin is flattered relative to East's.
Next: Pull OTLaborCost and OTLaborBurdenCost so overtime is money rather than hours, then re-cost margin with premium pay included.
Aspire's Optimize Route feature works — a fifth of crew-days are exactly optimally sequenced, which cannot happen by chance. It is simply not applied consistently, and never on the largest days.
Next: Ask one branch manager why days above about fifteen stops are skipped: the 25-stop cap, the time it takes, or distrust of the result.
Crews clock 6.14M hours but only 5.19M reach a job ticket. Job costing therefore sees about 84% of what is paid, and the missing share is not evenly distributed.
Next: Establish what the off-ticket time is — travel, load, shop, breaks — for one branch for one week, then decide what should be captured.
Crews are clocked on for 3.4 to 7.9 per cent of the shift before any work is booked — the largest unbooked block of the day in almost every operating company, and a morning-start question rather than an end-of-day one.
Next: Ask one branch what happens between clock-on and the first ticket — loading, briefing, or dispatch delay. The data cannot distinguish them.
Completed tickets are reviewed between 4% and 61% of the time depending on operating company, while approval sits at 99.8% almost everywhere. Approval is a formality; review is the only step that checks work before it is billed.
Next: Compare warranty rate and estimate variance between reviewed and unreviewed tickets. If they do not differ, closing the gap is not worth doing.
Actual hours run at 120% of estimate at Heritage and 93% at JML. For Heritage this is roughly five times larger than its entire scheduling opportunity.
Next: Compare Heritage's estimating assumptions against Keesen's, which lands within 0.2% of estimate.
Nothing in the current toolset decides which properties a crew visits together. Regrouping visits within the week they were already planned, without changing crew, removes measurable distance.
Next: Validate with a production manager: how many proposed regroupings survive contact with unrecorded constraints.
Between 3% and 37% of planned visits have no time booked against them. Some are cancellations; the rest is work done without capture. Completion reporting cannot be trusted where the figure is high.
Next: Sample fifty Heartland NE visits with no labor and establish which were canceled versus uncaptured.
Some weeks could be completed in fewer days. At current day lengths the effect is small; allowing longer days makes it larger but pushes most person-days into overtime, which likely cancels the gain.
Next: Confirm the overtime threshold and premium actually applied, then re-test only against days that carry a premium today.
Retention is 1.5 points lower among properties that had a conversation. Selection is the likely cause — conversations appear to follow risk — but the benefit is currently unproven either way.
Next: Compare conversation date against renewal date, or match on account size and tenure, before scaling the program.
Only 7 of 91 branches have a yard recorded in Aspire, and 21 of 24 Aspire instances have none on any branch. Yard locations for the rest are derived from where crews are observed to finish the day. 9–20% of labor is also keyed manually with no usable clock time. Both limit every distance and time measure available.
Next: Enter a yard property per branch using the coordinates derived in this analysis, validated to within 395 feet.
Work tickets carry an invoice reference. Whether completed tickets exist without one has not yet been tested, and unlike the other items here it would be cash rather than efficiency.
Next: Query completed tickets with no invoice reference across all 24 instances. Roughly an hour of work.