Product Profile: Sept. 1997, Design Done Right

One day a decade ago, while Walter was waiting for his friend at a computer store, he sat down at a Macintosh computer and started investigating the sample office-layout software that was running on it. Being a creative sort, he recognized that this model could work for his business as well; instead of adding furniture to an existing room layout, he could add landscaping materials to an existing house lot.

So he bought a computer (with a black and white monitor, mind you!) and got to work. He took photographs of houses, scanned them in and began to draw on top of them. When color displays became widely available, Walter really got inspired. He began to photograph homes under construction, scan the photos and add them to his landscaping vision using software graphics tools, and then, because color printers were still not widely accessible, he would "print" his images onto videotape. He’d create a custom video for each prospective client using a photo of the family’s particular house, and drop it off to them. "I’d do this for every house in a subdivision," Walter said, "and it really helped me to get my foot in the door."

Thanks to this innovative approach, Walter’s name started getting around. In fact, the Minneapolis Association of Nurserymen invited him to demonstrate his method at a computer fair. He took them up on the offer, and it was there that he met Gayle Kallevig, who was demonstrating a software program he had developed just for landscaping professionals. "His system kicked the heck out of what I had," said Walter. Kallevig’s software (which has since grown to become Softdesk’s Pro Landscape) combined landscape-visualization functions with CAD plans.

Walter became a convert and started using this new advanced package. Meanwhile, computers were becoming faster and affordable color inkjet printers were becoming available. Walter bought two new IBM compatible computers and built his business around this new technology. He continued to draw up plans for new homes based on snapshots of the houses, but instead of distributing videotapes, he would simply generate color printouts and deliver them to prospective clients. The effect was phenomenal. "I hardly ever got turned down," Walter said. "And it got to the point where I had to turn away business or else subcontract work. Pretty soon, I couldn’t make cold calls anymore; I just had too much business."

Not only did lead generation become significantly easier, but the software helped Walter accomplish more work in less time. "There are four parts to the planning of a landscaping job," Walter said. "There’s the first call, the computing image, the estimate and the CAD design." Where the first call used to take anywhere from 30 minutes to an hour, thanks to Walter’s use of computerized visualization, "it now takes about five minutes." But that’s not the only time savings Walter has realized. "Pro Landscape counts everything in the image you use for visualization and transfers it to the estimate. By generating the estimate automatically, it cuts out 25 percent of your planning time right there." Walter estimates that his planning time is "50 to 75 percent less overall."

Of course the less time he spends planning, the more time he can spend doing other things. And that’s the way Chris Walter likes it.