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My BOSS Software ROI

John Richter, President of Richter Landscape Company

Most contractors invest heavily in equipment and tools for a specific task. However, once you have made those investments, you do not leave the piece of equipment in the yard at the office or keep the correct tool in the toolbox. You utilize them and make the most from your investment. BOSS LM software is no different. BOSS allows the contractor to use the right piece of equipment or tool for the situation. It is simply a matter of taking the time to pull the trigger in BOSS. I am referring to BOSS’s Work Order Automation Module. The module is simple to use and can help bring in significant income that you had not anticipated.

Do you usually add optional services at the bottom of your estimates? Most landscapers, me included, usually add at least one optional service to every quote. It might be a service to simply refresh or replace a customer’s mulch, plant seasonal color, or offer aeration service.

The problem we often encounter when quoting optional services is lack of follow-up on those services after

customers sign their proposals. What if you had a business management system or tool that allowed you to query and quickly see how many signed agreements still have an open optional “mulching” service? And when you do, you simply point/click your mouse a few times in that software to send an email en masse to those clients who have not yet opted for that service. You would be surprised how many customers, when they can simply point/click to accept the optional service, will book that service. When I did it for the first time, I was stunned. The bottom line is last year we booked over $300K in optional services using this incredible tool. I would say it was like picking low hanging fruit, but it would be more accurate to say that it was like picking up ripe fruit off the ground. It was that easy!

BOSS’s work order automation is but one contributor to my BOSS ROI. Other factors that have also enhanced my BOSS ROI. By deploying BOSS, we eliminated some of the office assistance previously required and certain software applications we had been using prior to BOSS which are:

  • Zoho CRM software
  • Time clock software
  • RLC work order system
  • Constant Contact software
  • ProjectManager.com

These eliminations contributed over $15K in savings (after paying the BOSS subscription fee). Our team also experienced additional reductions in admin time as discussed below (old way vs. BOSS):

  • Time data entry per week: 8 hours vs. 3 hours.
  • Hourly billing for work orders: 2 hours/day vs. 2 hours/week.
  • Managing purchase orders: 1 hour/day vs. 5 minutes/day.
  • Verifying reports: 2 hours/job vs. 10 minutes/job using BOSS reports.
  • Maintaining my custom spreadsheet estimating tool.

BOSS streamlined and improved other areas of our operation. Although I cannot quantify how these improved efficiencies contributed to my BOSS ROI, I intuitively know they did.

For example, we had a very organized whiteboard for scheduling. The problem, however, was updating it in a timely fashion. With BOSS a few clicks of the mouse and the production dashboard is current.

Thanks to the BOSS service catalog and other estimating tools, I no longer have to spend time maintaining the spreadsheet we used to create estimates for many years. BOSS frees me up. I now have a little independence in how I spend my time. Also, BOSS’s estimating tools have helped us generate more estimates in less time resulting in more opportunities for us to expand our customer base.

I am sure you get the gist of it. BOSS helped us become leaner and meaner in an industry that is very competitive. I don’t think there is a more effective tool than BOSS. It has helped us shape who we are as an organization, which has helped our company’s culture and identity. I feel BOSS has become the backbone of our organization and has created a central focus across our company, which has helped us build consistency and accountability from top to bottom. My only regret is not deploying BOSS back in 2004 when we were getting RLC off the ground.