Your schedule keeps you moving.
And when you move, you make money.
To keep track of your lawn care schedule, you probably use one of these:
Maybe you wonder, "Should I get a better scheduling software tool for my business?" ...because lost sticky notes and forgotten appointments are costing you money.
It can be hard to decide on the best option for you company. So, consider this...
Lawn care scheduling lives or dies on two things:
Route Density is how close together your jobs are.
If you have a lot of jobs very close together, you have a very dense route. That's good.
Even when you are desperate to get work, you shouldn't expand wildly; you want to add jobs in the neighborhoods where you already work.
Why?
It’s easier to sell where you work, because potential clients can:
On top of this, route density helps when a truck breaks down or an employee fails to show for that day.
Having your jobs in same neighborhoods makes it easy (and more cost effective) for nearby crews to pick up slack.
Dense routes will also increase your success with the second tenet of lawn care scheduling...
Trace out your crew's movements on a map.
Does it look messy? Do they zig-zag and backtrack?
An inefficient route eats up your:
With longer, inefficient routes, you can't complete as many jobs. This kills your profits.
Check out these photos:
This route was organized randomly (alphabetized by client name). All together it was 12.8 miles, for a total of 28 minutes of drive time.
A more efficient route might look like this:
The above photo uses the exact same five properties. However, this route was created with the Group Stops feature in Service Autopilot, which creates an optimal route based on the shortest distance between stops.
All together, this optimized route was only 8 miles, for a total of 18 minutes.
That is a 36.5% DROP in mileage. With this one tool, you could cut down your fuel costs by a THIRD.
The benefits of a simple "route efficiency tool" like the one in Service Autopilot are simply massive.
If you...
...then your memory might serve you well enough. But after you hire a couple of helpers, or bring on more clients, your chances of error go WAY up.
Rainy days will cause you lots of pain, but at least you have it written down somewhere.
However, a misplaced Post-It note or a toppled mug of coffee and your scheduled jobs are gone. On top of that, there is no way you will be able to route efficiently by hand. It's all guess work or pinning things on Google Maps.
Maybe you have a complicated Excel document or you're a Google Calendar “power user." This can get the job done, but as you grow you'll have to add more office workers to manage it.
Again, you will still have to manually map out your routes. This becomes more expensive and time-consuming as your company scales.
Scheduling software significantly reduces the likelihood of human error.
No more misplaced notes. No more forgotten jobs.
Whatever the size of your lawn company,
Great lawn care scheduling software makes it possible for a smaller company to enjoy the benefits of full-time scheduling staff without spending a full-time employee’s wages.
For a larger company, it eases the office workload so your team can focus on more valuable projects and problems like how to market your lawn business.
With the right scheduling software, efficiency and scheduling should be "done for you." You should be able to easily see what your daily jobs are, without having to pull up a spreadsheet.
Your time is incredibly valuable. Every minute spent scheduling is a minute you could use to do more productive tasks. That’s why scheduling in SA only requires a handful of clicks. This scheduling software will never slow you down.
Service Autopilot allows you to turn a phone call from a client into a scheduled job in moments. You select the client, the job, the schedule, and click “Save.”
There’s no complicated formula, no checking the calendar and calling back, no collecting a pile of notes from another desk. Set it and forget it.
Do you have enough room to schedule another weekly client on Wednesdays?
What about a bi-weekly Thursday?
Take the guess work out of your schedule using Service Autopilot’s Dispatch Board.
Using our Dispatch Board, you can quickly view a future day (or date range) to gauge the workload for that period.
Tighter routes = more money in your pocket.
The Dispatch Board gives you the ability to reorder your jobs for the most efficient route possible.
These small time-savers add up. You get an extra hour a day… but that means 25 hours per month. You get 3 extra work days per month, just because you schedule your lawn services with Service
Autopilot's software.
The coordination of schedules, the Dispatch Board, and our mobile app means that you’ll never miss a job again due to disorganization or a misplaced Post-It note.
Once the jobs are sent out from the Dispatch Board, you’ll be able to see all your jobs on your phone or mobile device.
Need more control over your schedules? That's why we created Master Schedules. If you need an "out of the ordinary" schedule - with special rules for a particular client - you can make it.
Service Autopilot is designed to meet all the needs of your lawn care or landscaping business. We strive to make scheduling software that is easy to use, yet allows you to wield it in almost any way you see fit.
The system will take some time to master, but in the long run it will serve you far better than any alternative. Put down your pen and paper, log off of Google Calendar and take a tour of Service Autopilot.
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