How Lawn Plus went from $500K to $5 Million in a decade – with RealGreen
The Company:
Based in Ohio, family-owned Lawn Plus has been improving lawn health for their residential and commercial customers since 2005. They are committed to providing excellent service at an affordable price, using only the best products. They have been a RealGreen customer since 2009.
The Problem: Too Much to Do, Too Little Time
When General Manager Bob Brower joined Lawn Plus in 2011, the company was growing. They started marketing their services more aggressively, but the influx of new clients was difficult to manage with the staff and infrastructure they had in place at the time.
With nearly 600 customers (and rising) and just four employees, Lawn Plus had to be efficient. “When I started, I was the general manager, I was the office manager, I was the operations manager. And then after I got all of my morning stuff done, I was going out with the crew and helping them seed lawns. Then I’d come back and have to schedule for the next day.”
That challenging workload — with a skeleton crew — left little room for scaling the business. Brower started looking for solutions. He found one right in his own office.
The Solution: RealGreen to the Rescue
“You can be efficient but not effective. With RealGreen we can be both.”
Lawn Plus was already a RealGreen customer when Brower joined the team. “When they first started using RealGreen, they basically used it just to print invoices and input payments into the system. We only used it in a very minimal way and didn’t understand the full power of what it could do.” He realized there was untapped potential there: “Can you keep using it that way? Yeah. But you’re not going to see the growth. The software is just so much more than just an Excel spreadsheet of invoices and payments.”
Brower started investigating the functionality of the software, exploring the many different reports available and seeing how they could shine a light on where Lawn Plus could improve and streamline its business practices. What he discovered is that “RealGreen makes it easy for anybody who is a general manager or an owner running an office to be able to look and see, for example – how much are the technicians getting done each day? How much have you grown this week in sales? Are you meeting your sales goals? Just all of that combined.”
The following season, the company really hit the ground running with RealGreen. “That’s when we really started blowing up as a company,” says Brower. “That’s when we really started taking off — by using RealGreen.”
The Results: Significant, Manageable Growth
At the end of 2011, Lawn Plus had 829 customers. Eleven years later, they had 13,726 customers. Brower says over the past decade, Lawn Plus has grown anywhere from 18-30% each year, adding around 1,200 new customers yearly. “In 2011, we had four employees. We were a half-million dollar company,” says Brower. “By 2022, we had 50 employees and were a $5 million company. I think that tells you how much we have grown. It’s with RealGreen’s help that it was able to happen. Using that tool to its full potential allowed us to be able to create this business that we imagined, you know, 18 years ago.”
The Value
“RealGreen is absolutely worth its weight in gold. I can’t imagine life or running a business, without it. It makes my job a whole lot easier.”
“Being able to run the reports and actually dig into the numbers – you know, numbers don’t lie, those reports don’t lie,” says Brower. “You can see the production of your technicians, your route efficiency, your sales daily, weekly, monthly, and yearly – we actually run those reports, see what’s working at the end of the year. And then we can invest back in the business because we know we’re getting a return on our investment.”
Today, Lawn Plus uses a wide range of RealGreen solutions, including SA5, Customer Assistant Websites, Automated Marketing Assistants, Measurement Assistants, Routing Assistants, Payments, and ServiceBot. “With the capabilities of the RealGreen system, it doesn’t matter where they are — we have a form of communication with our customers at all times. You just have to be able to find those avenues and be able to actually use those to their full capability and implement them into your business.”
The Challenge:
– Growing company and small staff
– Little room for scaling
– Only using software for invoicing and payments
The Solution:
– Utilizing Service Assistant® to fullest potential
– Running reports and digging into the numbers
– Using integrated add-ons such as CAW, AMA and ServiceBot
The Results:
– $500K to $5 Million in a decade
– Managed 18-30% growth each year
– Grew from 4 to 50 employees
