Landscape and Irrigation is read by decision makers throughout the landscape and irrigation markets — including contractors, landscape architects, professional grounds managers, and irrigation and water mgmt companies and reaches the entire spetrum.
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Streamlining Business Operations T Business Management By Matthew Noon Noon Turf Care maximizes business efficiency with new technology, equipment and business processes he past four years our lawn care company, Noon Turf Care, Hudson, Mass., has grown a considerable amount. We have added more than 20 trucks to our fleet and have built our team to manage a $5 million business. We have been very fortunate to have experienced this growth during a major recession. I suppose this is one of the good parts to being a small player in a large industry — there's no place to go but up. Marketing and sales drive to find new business, and then maintaining our clients, have been the overall goals these past several years. Growing during a recession has been a chal- lenge, and it has meant investing more into these avenues to ensure that we can continue to grow market share. Many years this has meant sacrificing our bottom line to grow the top line. One of the major challenges has been managing cash flow as we invest into infrastructure from sales and marketing to brick and mortar investments. Maintaining our company vision as a team has also been a challenge as we have en- countered many speed bumps along the way. However, having faith and belief in setting out to fulfill what we have put down on paper for goals has gotten us through these difficult periods. As we have grown Noon Turf Care, it has also been essential to invest in technology, peo- ple and processes that have allowed us to avoid many of the growing pains many companies experience during these periods. New technology One major investment we made was installing mobile laptop com- puters in all 25 of our service vehicles. This was something we were contemplating doing for a few years before we made the decision to invest in it. As a leader, technology has always been something that I have valued, because it streamlines our company processes to ensure better quality in service and delivery. It is also something that we have been cautious of, because investing in the wrong technology can set a company back years in making the wrong investment. We purchased our mobile computers at the beginning of 2012 and it has proven to be a wise investment. Having the laptops in the trucks has drastically reduced the amount of time our technicians take entering notes about the condition of the lawns when they visit each property. All of the notes are set predicatively so that when they enter "grubs found," for example, a standard message is automatically created to educate the client on the issue and how it can be fixed. Additionally, all notes are computer generated and printed in the truck so that the clients can easily read them. This helps with many of the technicians that don't have the best handwriting. Technicians also have the option of typing custom notes for that personal touch that clients also enjoy and value. We also hired a full-time IT professional to assist in this transition, as well as with all of our office technology such as computers and soft- ware. We found that it has saved us a lot of money by avoiding down- time in the office and on the road. Rather than one of our managers dealing with technology downtime and equipment failure, an IT pro- fessional can fix the issue more quickly, allowing our managers to focus on managing our technicians and the quality of our service. The laptops have enabled us to better streamline all facets of routing and invoice printing as all work is posted automatically into the computer as it is performed. At the end of each day, as trucks enter our company parking lot, the crews' work is transmitted via wireless technology into our company software. This has cut down 100 percent on entering the Left: Noon Turf Care Co-Founders and Owners Christopher and Matthew Noon. Right: A lawn specialist spraying a lawn with pre-mixed products from the Noon Turf Care mixing tank. 24 Landscape and Irrigation July/August 2012 www.landscapeirrigation.com