Change ‘plus’ progress

COVID-19 caused chaos for everyone, including Grace DiBenedetto, who, after being laid of from a tech company, thought she’d just be answering the phone at her father’s lawn care company for a few months before moving on.

Now, nearly three years later, Grace, officer administrator, and her dad, Nick DiBenedetto, president, are embracing technology together at Grassmaster Plus to make the Massachusetts company run more efficiently and more profitable.

“2020 was the first full year Grace was in there at Grass Master Plus and we were doing $1.2 million. That whole year she integrated technology, and in 2021, we did $1.475 million ,” Nick says.

Grace says this drive to advance the company through technology started almost immediately after coming onboard.

“Early on I started noticing things that were really frustrating to me — a lot of wasted time and wasted resources,” she says. “I’d come home at night and drive my dad crazy asking, ‘Why are we doing this?’”

Grace recalls being overwhelmed by the number of whiteboards, clipboards and paperwork just cluttering the Grassmaster office. But, the company did have software already established that could make life easier for its employees and customers.

“We had the software in place; it just wasn’t being utilized,” Grace says. “It was like opening up the shed, seeing all these dusty tools, taking them out and sharpening them, learning about hem and practicing and then implementing.

“I was shocked when I was digging more into the software and found all the resources,” she continues. “I thought I was missing something. Before I brought the information to the team, I was calling the software company three or four times to make sure we had access to all this and didn’t have to pay extra or anything.”

Once Grace started bringing these additional features to the company’s day-to-day operations, the payoff was seen almost instantly.

“It’s unbelievable — I don’t even know how they were functioning before,” Grace adds. “It just seems like everything was taking 10 times longer than it needed to, to get any kind of information or data.”

First things first

Before Grassmaster Plus could reap the benefits of its software, employees had to be taught an entirely new way of recording, inputting and tracking key data.

Instead of handwriting reports and notes at each jobsite, and then manually making call-ahead phone calls at the end of each shift, everything was being digitalized. Now, all they had to do was log into the app and they could find the data at their fingertips.

“It wasn’t easy — obviously,” Grace says of the shift over to digital. “But one of the ways we did it was taking it really slow. Nothing happened overnight. It was days, weeks and month of slowly changing it over.”

Before taking the new software features to the team, Grace says she and Nick had several long, hard conversations trying to anticipate all the personal roadblocks some employees would face.

“In our heads we already knew who was going to struggle, so we catered and tailored the training toward them specifically,” she says. “That’s a big benefit of being a small company is that we were able to customize the training for each individual employee.”

Grace adds she made sure to be 100% familiar with the software herself before training began.

“It took a lot of time and training to get started. Every day I was doing little demos with myself to ensure I knew how things worked,” she says. “That way we could teach it and get it implemented.”

Once the new features were introduced, Grace notes there was a bit of a generation gap between who picked up on the changes quickly and who took a little more time to get a handle on things.

“It was cool to see during this how different people learn,” she says. “With some of our younger technicians, we told them what app to download on their iPhone, gave them their username and password, showed them how to clock themselves in and let them go.

“The younger employees picked up on it right away and they were excited about it,” Grace adds. “But with some of the older employees, it was almost like you had to do more coaching than anything. There was a lot more training involved and honestly a lot more trial and error. We’d go to them with what we thought was the proper training that’d be sufficient enough and they still weren’t grasping it.”

When this happened, Grace says she and the team would regroup together, brainstorm and find alternative teaching methods.

“We wound up sending them very specific videos of me performing the tasks we were asking them to implement,” she says.

Throughout all this training, Grace says they kept emphasizing how important this software would be in saving employees’ time and making their jobs easier on them.

“We really honed in and focused on showing them how it will really improve things for not only the company and its customers, but it’ll also improve their work as well,” she says. “I think that was super key and really pushed everything over the edge to get it to work. It was about telling them, ‘This is how it’s going to benefit you. This is how it’s going to make your life easier, and this is how it’ll make your day-to-day tasks more efficient.’”

Coming around to compliance

But even with constant reassurance of that message, some employees struggled to buy in to the changes. Grace says there was one frustrating phrase that kept cropping up — “This is the way we’ve always done it.”

“The main reasoning was simply just the leaders we had in place were of the older generation and were kind of stuck in their ways saying this is how they’d been doing it for 20 years and they just weren’t digging into the software and using what they needed to in order to get by,” she says.

And while most everyone came around eventually, there were a few who had to be let go as they were unwilling to embrace the technical advancements.

“Unfortunately, there were some people who had to be moved on from the company,” Grace says. “Growth is pain. We knew that going into this.”

However, seeing this did serve as motivation for others who were struggling to take the training more seriously and commit to the software.

“One person had to be moved on and I think that was a little bit of a wake-up call for another employee that was putting up a wall with us,” she says. “But now we’ve seen over the last few months and seasons that wall has definitely come down a lot more.”

For Grace, an additional hurdle she had to face was being the boss’s daughter and the one implementing these changes.

“I was told ‘This is not how it’s done,’ and ‘This is how we’ve always done it,’ all of that stuff was said to me,” Grace says. “Obviously, there’s good and bad about being the owner’s daughter… I had people who wouldn’t even talk to me and go straight to my dad even though it was me implementing it, training and trying to talk it through. They would just bypass me and go straight to him. Dealing with that was kind of tricky.”

But Nick’s commitment to his daughter and the improvements she was making never wavered, saying he always encouraged employees who came to him to seek solutions with Grace directly.

Boundless benefits

All the hard work to get employees on board with the changes paid off. Nick says they are already seeing plenty of profit — including a 7% savings in labor.

This is primarily because of a switch over to automated phone calls for mandated call-ahead notices.

“I was observing that our technicians were making all of those calls at the end of the day,” Grace says. “They manually dialed every single customer…I immediately took over that and wanted to remove that from the technician’s list of tasks for the day. It was taking a lot of time and I kept thinking there has to be another way.

“I dug into our software and was able to send out an automated recording that we could send out to all of the customers in just three clicks,” she adds. “You could see the relief in the technicians’ faces.”

Grace calculates that this automation has saved Grassmaster Plus about 4.5 hours of overtime daily, which equates to thousands of dollars over the year.

The savings don’t stop there, thanks to good data.

“With the data we have now, we can immediately pull reports,” Grace says. “We can pull tracking reports, production numbers and inventory. All of that wasn’t being utilized before, and that’s really the base of any company.”

Going paperless has been huge, and the business has been able to track and stay on top of inventory like never before.

“Because we were having technicians handwrite things, things weren’t being tracked and those papers were being lost, thrown out or not followed up on,” Grace explains. “It was a lot of time, effort and money being wasted. Having someone collect all of those handwritten reports and enter them into excel sheets would’ve been a whole employee’s day.

“Now that we’ve transitioned everything into the software, after every single stop at every customer’s house a technician goes to in a day, they’re typing in that inventory. They’re also being tracked and timed. We know they spent 25 minutes here and that’s right in the software in real-time.”

The geofencing and tracking reports have also been great in disputing customer complaints and show exactly where technicians were and when, Grace says, adding 2022 was one of their best years with inventory.

“We stayed on budget and the remaining inventory we (had) left at the end of the year will be the smallest we’ve ever had, all because we’re able to keep on it, watch it and monitor things.”

3 pillars of prosperity

Nick says any business success should be a “Triple Win” — meaning it benefits the business, the employees and the customers.

And that’s exactly what this push toward technology has been for Grassmaster Plus.

“It was all about how this would benefit the customer, the company and the employees,” Grace says. “Those three pillars were always the main point behind everything I was looking into.”

It’s not just the company and employees benefiting, but now customers are getting better, more concise and more professional information from them, Grace says. And more communication is being done via email and online rather than leaving paper on someone’s doorstep.

“We’re retaining more customers this way,” Grace says. “Our cancel rate has decreased over the last two years. Our customers are also getting better information and it’s faster and more in their hands. There’s now a customer portal where they can login and make their own payments, see past data and history of when we’re on their properties. Their questions are being answered for them right there online while they’re sitting on their couch on their iPad.”

While the change may have been tough at times, Grace says she feels employees are more energized now after going through it.

“Our employees are feeling more productive at the end of the day,” she says. “Everyone likes to track their own progress and have goals. We’re putting the power in their hands.”

The author is an assistant editor with Lawn & Landscape.