On tap

More than ever, customers want everything delivered right away, including their lawn care services. We spoke to Jeremy Yamaguchi, CEO of Lawn Love, which works with more than 23,000 lawn care companies, to find out how contractors are using service apps and how the whole process works.

LL: Do contractors use the app as a primary source of business or a supplement?

JY: We’ve seen contractors use it in both capacities. The idea here is that the lawn and garden industry is a very large but highly fragmented market. The average company is about two people and most of them don’t use all that much in the way of technology to run their businesses.

These folks are really skilled tradespeople with deep domain expertise around lawn and garden care, but maybe they’re not super sophisticated marketers or great at bringing technology to operate more efficiently.

That’s essentially what we’re trying to solve for these guys. We start by bringing them a ton of new demands for their service, so they spend less time hanging door hangers or navigating snake oil SEO salespeople.

They just pick up whatever jobs they want to start and that frees them up to spend more time on site, mowing lawns and earning more each week.

LL: How many jobs does the average contractor take from this kind of service?

JY: We see contractors initially dip a toe in and take five or six jobs a week to fill holes in their routes. The trend we see with the pros we work with is they just end up taking more and more work through Lawn Love, all the way up to the point that we have hundreds of pros running multiple crews on the platform doing 50-plus jobs a week with us. In those cases, we’re substantially most of their business at that point.

LL: What’s the average price of a job through the app?

JY: It varies heavily, as you might imagine. The average job across all jobs is about $57. You’ll have jobs as low as $29 and as high as $500, so it goes all over the map.

The vast majority of our customers sign up for recurring maintenance services and often the job repeats weekly.

LL: What does the application process look like?

JY: When a lawn care provider signs up, they go through an initial screening process. We make sure that we’re only working with talented, skilled lawn pros and we are rigorous.

You go through a questionnaire that is meant to demonstrate their expertise and illustrate that they can tell the difference between a zoysia and a fescue. Once we have those signals and it’s clear that they’d be a good fit for the platform, they download the app and can immediately see all of the jobs available in their area.

From there, they get access to the platform and can immediately start picking up jobs.

LL: How does the review process work?

JY: It’s kind of a ranking system. Much like Uber where riders rank the drivers after the service, the customers rate the lawn pro’s service after the work is done and then that kind of rolls up to a tier-based system. The companies that are highly ranked on the platform get the first look at jobs, they get first access to new jobs that show up on their route and they can alternately grow their businesses faster.

LL: Do you have a minimum number of jobs?

JY: Not at all. You can take one job or a hundred jobs. It’s completely flexible. We see folks all over the spectrum.