Earlier this week on Tuesday, September 26, ServiceTrade turned five years old. If you don’t know our origin story, the roots of ServiceTrade go back to a national service company called DunnWell. A couple of smart, entrepreneurial fellas saw that the technology that DunnWell created was strong enough to evolve into a product that could help other commercial service contractors. That technology became a company on September 26, 2012, founded by Billy Marshall and Brian Smithwick.

What Billy said in the first blog post that introduced ServiceTrade nearly 5 years ago remains true today:

• We were created to help service companies deliver better service, grow faster, and be more profitable.
• Services still remain an underserved market for integrated SaaS applications – though it is improving.
• Our application will always be better next week than it is this week.
  (Read 5 years of release notes here.)

Some members of ServiceTrade at one of Billy’s famous Low Country Boils.

• Today ServiceTrade employs 21 full-time employees in 3 states.
• We have more than 300 customers in 45 states and 4 Canadian provinces.
• More than 14 million photos and documents are stored in ServiceTrade.
• About 23,000 photos and PDF docs are added each day.
• Around 2,600 invoices are created each day.
• Over the life of our app, our customers have sent 240,000 quotes representing $483,000,000.

One of the earliest subscription contracts has a $3 per tech per month rate. Being first had its advantages. (Everyone in sales wants me to tell you that this rate is no longer available.)

Our first beta testers are now our oldest customers — these folks shared our vision and saw the opportunity for their businesses early on. They have become good friends and some of our most trusted advisors.

ServiceTrade’s first customer appreciation event and fishing tournament at the Outer Banks in 2014 was attended by 11 people. This year we’ll have 150 at the Digital Wrap Conference.  

2016 Digital Wrap Conference

Storytelling has been part of the fabric of ServiceTrade since the earliest days. Our blog has been active since early 2013. The five most popular blog posts for our first five years are:

• Why Google’s Relationship with Home Advisor Matters to Service Contractors
• If you ain’t first, yer last!
• 5 Shocking Things You Don’t Know about Next-Gen Facility Managers
• Beware of “All-in-One Software” – The All will be Small
• 6 Key Metrics That Boost Repair Revenue

Now is the most exciting time in our five years. Everyone on our team believes strongly in our mission and that they have a part to play in making our customers’ businesses more successful. Our customer roster has always held the most innovative service companies across the U.S. and Canada who push themselves – and us – to do new and better things. Let’s meet back here in 2022 to see how things have changed for our 10th birthday.