Powering the modern business

Tapping into past years’ data in a completely paperless business environment allows Mike Bella to zero in on labor hour missteps and job costing oversights that steal profit. A few years ago, Bella’s Lawn & Landscape in Toledo, Ohio, switched to a more scalable business software platform for the growing multi-service maintenance operation. What a difference.

“Now, our historical data is right there, and we can see which crews have mowed an account and the hours,” says Bella, president. “If we are under-performing on the job three years in a row, we look to see if we need to adjust the hours, so our target gross margin is achieved.” That was definitely the case. Bella says once implementing the software, account managers reviewed labor hours for all accounts, meeting with the production team to come up with a plan. Does the crew need more training to meet the goal? Does the account manager need to add more hours to the contract at renewal?

Bella recognized the business was bleeding potential income.

“We used to go over by 20% on hours,” he says, upon reviewing reports. “Now, after the third year of using the software, we are 20% under on our hours and our profit margins have gone up from less than 50% to over 60%.”

It’s no surprise that Bella says business software is “a game-changer if you want to take your business to the next level.”

From paper to tech platform

Is a move to a new business software platform an all-or-nothing feat? Not if you ask Jack Harder, general manager of Harder Services in Hempstead, N.Y.

“I’ve spoken with peers where they swept the desk off and said, ‘We are going to revolutionize how we price work, how we handle leads, how we schedule crews.’ I wasn’t in a position to say, ‘Take everything we’ve done and forget it.’ And looking back, I wouldn’t want to.”

A happy medium for the 101-year-old, fourth-generation business included meshing time-tested old processes with new, automated back-office solutions.

What was the old way? Imagine reams of dot-matrix printer paper with perforated edges requiring manual removal. Think about printing monthly invoices — and the labels — stuffing envelopes and applying stamps. More perforated edges on work orders, sorted by day and route, requiring a full workday every week to prepare.

In 2019, Harder Services adopted a software solution that employees with decades of tenure might have called newfangled, but it was in fact necessary. “We gained back a full day of time in the office weekly, getting rid of a lot of hand work,” Harder says.

Now, preparing the next week’s maintenance work orders takes about five minutes.

The company’s main goal was to streamline workflow and customer communications. Some of the paper would stay in place, such as work orders. The company had no plans to equip veteran crewmembers with iPads and break a system that had been working for a century.

“One software sales rep told us if we were not willing to move to smart phones, mobile printers and tablets for every crew foreman and sales rep, it wasn’t the software solution for us,” Harder says.

He agreed.

“Some crew foremen are open to it, some are not,” he says. “I’ve worked with a couple of crews to change from paper to iPads or iPhones, but we weren’t willing to take crew foremen who had been working with us for years and turn their worlds upside down.”

So, Harder’s approach when introducing and integrating business software was to focus on back-office processes and workflow. Customers who still want a paper invoice can receive one. Most don’t.

From a crew standpoint, conversion to screen versus paper is gradual. But now, all information for job-costing, customer contacts and project information are available in real-time. “We have GPS trackers in our vehicles so I can schedule crews and direct them to locations,” Harder says.

For Harder Services, the goal was mainly to update the “old way” of billing — and from there, the company has adopted other automated processes. That includes setting up jobs for four distinct operations: tree care, landscape installation, landscape maintenance and IPM/plant health care. “We needed a software solution that could handle small-scale, large-scale and recurring jobs with different billing setups for our office,” he explains.

The company implemented the software during winter, running through test scenarios during quieter months. “We were able to work out some kinks so when it came time to start the season, we had the data plugged in for scheduling jobs, getting work orders ready and preparing monthly invoices for maintenance accounts,” Harder says.

Now, the workflow is seamless.

Plus, the company has added a fleet of phones and tablets for supervisors and foremen, improving communication. “They can snap a picture and say, ‘I noticed this at the Smith residence,’ and it’s a limb that fell down and is hanging on a fence,” Harder says. “Our ability to address issues on customers’ properties has improved dramatically from seeing a hand-written note on a work order to texted pictures that allow us to address problems instantly.”

Efficient, By Design

“I needed to understand my processes inside and out, and really know what I was looking for,” she says, adding that a business with large projects versus recurring maintenance has completely different software requirements. “I have such a different mode of operation,” she says of a business model centered on her design expertise and project management skills. She coordinates with installation partners who perform the labor.

Grundeen started her business in 2010 after working over a decade at another landscaping firm. At first, her “tech” was paper and pencil. Then, she moved to Excel for tracking customer information and communications. By 2014, she started shopping for customer relationship management options, tried a number of them, and was disappointed. “None seemed to fit the right niche,” she says, explaining that they were for operations much larger, they were too complex or centered on recurring revenue.

That just isn’t how Grundeen works.

She landed on a product in 2016 that was a fit and enlisted a virtual assistant to set it up for her, easing the headache of transitioning from spreadsheets to a real-time tool. It was a disaster. The assistant didn’t understand Trio Landscaping’s operations, so the pipelines and customer communication flows were off.

Grundeen doesn’t blame her. It would have worked if she operated a virtual assistant business, too. But she’s a designer. So, back to the digital drawing board per se.

She tried again with an assistant who took an industry approach and helped reframe certain functions to make it applicable to Trio Landscaping. “I have three sales buckets I track,” Grundeen says of the CRM specifically. She uses different tools for business accounting and landscape design.

The first is consultation. “Did we make it to the consultation level or did we lose the prospect because they weren’t the right fit or there was a lack of follow-up on our end or the client’s end?” Grundeen says. Next is design work, also a sale. Third is project management, which includes the cost of labor and materials.

Grundeen didn’t want a software product that forced her to nail down every single line item to “bake the cake” she sells as a final product. “I’m not selling the ingredients,” she says. “I tell them what goes into the cake and the frosting — those are the two costs in case you don’t want the frosting.”

In other words, the software is retrofitted to include what jobs entail without detailing exact dollar amounts for every little thing. Grundeen does that on her own.

The key with CRM software for Grundeen is tracking the sales journey and customer experience. “We can make sure we sent an email, find out if the customer responded — have they opened it?” she says. “I might see that they opened it up five times but did not send a reply, so are they click-happy or do they have other questions? I can then give them a couple of days and poke to follow up. Seeing whether they received communications and opened it is a very important point of our CRM.”

As for the design software, Grundeen delegates the input of her paper designs. She recognizes the need to give clients that HGTV-style 3-D rendering that seems to come to life in a few seconds. But the reality is, manipulating the tools takes time and she prefers sketches.

“Now, I have a design assistant who learned the technology, so I don’t even use the program,” Grundeen says. “She does all the base maps, I apply my design concepts to the map of the property and turn it back in, and she makes it look awesome on the computer. This leverages my time so much better, and she is wonderfully efficient at using the design program.”

Automating the Workflow

When Michael Crnkovic started his business in 2015, he Googled “free accounting software” and came upon a basic platform — think super stripped-down QuickBooks. (Remember, free.)

By 2019, Crnkovic realized he needed a more robust CRM solution that would grow with Fresh Cut Pros in Minooka, Ill. At the time was bringing in about $100,000 in revenue. Since then, the numbers have grown to over $1 million.

Crnkovic was in his early twenties, “and I grew up in the tech era,” he says. “It took an afternoon to learn it, and I had a couple hundred clients at the time, so it was fairly simple to get it up and running to use minimally until we learned all of its functions.”

Admittedly, there was trial and error involved. “I had to figure out the wrong and right ways to do things, and I’m also in a Facebook group with members who have used the software longer and deeper than I have, and they all offer tips and tricks, workarounds for known issues,” Crnkovic says.

Within a season, all systems were running smoothly.

“What a really good CRM software does is the things that humans don’t have to, so we can focus on the things that only humans can do, like building client relationships,” Crnkovic says.

For instance, Crnkovic set up drip automated communications. “We target customers who have one service to sell another, send happy holidays emails and do everything from lead intake to estimate to follow-up — asking how the job went and requesting a review,” he says. “It’s all done automatically.”

Explaining the updated workflow, a lead filters in through the company website. Prospects fill out a form that creates an account in the CRM system. “Then, we can contact them or measure their property, create an estimate and send it,” he says. “Next, it is converted to a job that converts to an invoice once complete, and payment is taken on the portal.”

Overall, Crnkovic says the software “makes it that much easier to build relationships” because of diligent check-ins and seamless service.

The software ties to a fleet management platform that provides driver safety reports like notifications for hard stops, quick acceleration and idling. Crnkovic built a bonus program around these reports, sporadically handing out cash incentives to drivers with the highest safety scores. He says, “People think, ‘If I keep it up, maybe I’ll get a bonus as well.’”

Boosting Transparency and Response

Mike Bella reflects back on implementing his company’s first business software, when the data was still in his head and he had to input it into the system. It took well over a year. When he changed platforms a few years ago, the process took about 90 days. “Initially, I had to build out an item catalogue, service catalogue, production rates — there was a lot,” he says.

Though, he adds, “Everyone struggles the first year.”

He learned some lessons the hard way. For instance, he accidentally setup salt to be allocated by the pound. “It was a typo,” Bella says. “I wanted to allocate it by the ton, so all of those 50 to 80 snow contracts were locked into that and it caused some billing issues.”

Bella corrected the problem on the back end. “Now, new contracts have the ‘new allocation’ but with those that were locked in, I had to wait until I renewed them and remember to change the allocations. Software can have quirky challenges.”

But overall, the customization capabilities have finetuned tracking and shed light on the company’s productivity and revenue opportunities, he says.

Crews must use the software, and Bella provides a $50 allowance per month toward their cell phone bills. “We tried company phones, but it was too much of a hassle,” he says.

With the mobile app, “there is no hiding anything,” Bella says. “Drive time is allocated to service tickets so they can’t fudge the numbers. The data is real time, so if we have 15 crews out and one is behind, it takes five seconds to see how we can reallocate a nearby crew to help and you don’t even need to make a phone call.”

Before, Bella would have to personally contact all 15 crews to find out their location, their work order status and whether they needed help.

The office can quickly respond to customer requests by accessing a real-time trail of service notes, crew locations and labor hours. Account managers can gather the information they need about an account without calling the production manager for notes.

Crnkovic says, “As you get larger, you need to run a business by numbers, by data, and this software literally offers that in real time, so you get it instantly and it’s accurate.”

Scheduling a High Volume

Aside from maintaining government-owned properties and some residential accounts, Faithworks Total Ground Maintenance in Mt. Dora, Fla., also offers janitorial services and pressure washing — a lot of it, to the tune of 1,400 stops.

“Software is important,” says owner Felecia Freeman, an understatement given she is the office staff and crew members are constantly deployed in the field. Still, since she runs a tight shop. “Some of the bigger software companies wouldn’t even talk to us, and they had another division for smaller companies but that software was not as robust,” she says.

Freeman wanted to be sure she could fully demo a business software platform before putting it into play. Organization was key. “We take pictures after every stop, which allows us to protect ourselves and makes it easier for invoicing,” she says.

She is in the process of migrating data now after moving from a different platform. Her advice: “Just use the software and don’t be afraid.” In the beginning, some of her crewmembers were resistant, but they got used to the convenience of checking off jobs through the app. Freeman keeps a small fleet of tablets and cell phones in case their personal phones are not updated enough to run the app or if there is not enough storage to upload it.

“I have a friend in the industry who said, ‘If you go to software, your people will threaten to quit,’” Freeman says. “But this is the way life is going. You need to be able to move forward.”

Easing team members into the system with support and technology, if needed, has resulted in Faithworks winning acceptance, even from the “old school.” And, they’re teaching each other easier ways to use the note-taking tool, such as talk-to-text. Freeman says, “We didn’t have any really formal training — they just caught on.”