The case study we have to live with.
LawnJunkie is an Ontario landscaping company — one of us is a partner there, and its owners approved the build. It runs on an operating system we built, and when software is bad here, real crews stand in a yard waiting while a founder hears about it at breakfast. That is a quality bar no client portfolio can fake.
Challenge
A seasonal operation run from trucks, texts and one estimator's head: quotes took evenings, crews phoned the office all day, and job margin was a year-end surprise.
Solution
One operating system, built data-model-complete: estimating, crew scheduling, job costing and routing on a single record of customers, work and money.
Impact
The owners stopped being the router. Metrics being confirmed for publication are marked below; we publish real numbers or none.
The system
Four screens that run a season.
[TK — screen: Estimating]
Estimating
Price-book estimating: a site visit becomes a priced, sendable quote the same day.
[TK — screen: Crew app]
Crew app
Crews see tomorrow's jobs, materials and notes on their phones. Nobody phones the office for an address.
[TK — screen: Job costing]
Job costing
Hours and materials land against jobs as they happen, so margin is visible weekly, not discovered in April.
[TK — screen: Route optimisation]
Route optimisation
Weather reshuffles twenty jobs; the schedule and the routes reshuffle with it.
The honest part
Blocked for weeks on eleven numbers.
Here is the part a normal case study leaves out. Mid-build, the project stalled — not on code, but on eleven numbers only the business could supply. Production rates, real material costs, what a crew-hour actually costs loaded. The software was ready to price estimates; the business had to decide what the truth was first.
No developer can compress that. It is exactly the client-side work we tell every prospect cannot be automated away, and we hit it ourselves, inside a company one of us co-owns, with no vendor to blame. The build resumed when the numbers existed, and the estimating engine has been trustworthy since precisely because those weeks happened.
We tell this story on purpose. If a firm's case studies contain no friction, they are not case studies. They are ads.
Impact
Numbers we'll publish when confirmed.
[TK]
admin hours returned per week
[TK]
of estimates out same-day
[TK]
weekly margin visibility per job
We measure these in our own books, and we publish real figures or none at all. The unmeasurable impact is simpler to state: the owners run the company from the system, not from the phone.
The next step
Your operation could run like this.
Field services, trades, any operation run from trucks and texts: this system's bones — customers, work, money, complete from day one — fit more businesses than landscaping. The free day is where we find out what yours needs.