What Type of Software to Use for Lawn Care Business?

Hey everyone, it's Mike over@landscapebusinesscourse.com I wanted to make a quick video just for YouTube and Facebook. I wanted to tell you guys about something I get asked about almost every single day from course members and podcast listeners, people from the channel wanting to know what type of software I would recommend for their business. So what I could do, and maybe one day I will do, is really talk about all the different types of software that are out there. There are literally dozens of options, everything from QuickBooks, FreshBooks.

Like Yard Book. There's a million different types of software out there that you can use. I'm gonna give my very detailed point of view and really give you two different options that I would suggest. So instead of trying to compare all 50 of them and give the pros the cons and kind of give a very generic, which I feel like there's a lot of that kind of content out there and you can easily go out and research a bunch of different types of software very easily. So I'm going to give you a very pointed, direct way answer for your question. And this is how I've answered it for a long time now. So really how I answer this question is really the first question I ask people when they ask me that question is I say, what's your annual revenue? And the reason I ask that is because obviously we want the best software we can possibly get. But on the other hand, that software is going to come in at a price. It's not easy to maintain that software and keep it up to date and add new features. And so you can't necessarily have the best software right from the get go. The reason for that is if you're only doing three, $4,000 in monthly revenue, maybe 50, $60,000 a year in revenue, it's just not worth to pay 3 to $400 a month on software. You'd rather spend that money on marketing, advertising, getting your name out there and growing the business instead of spending 5%. I've literally seen 5 and 10% of people's gross revenues.

Being spent on software, which is ridiculous. It's just not worth it. You're not using a fraction of the software's capabilities. And really the efficiency that you're getting from that software is not enough to account for all the money you're spending. So this is kind of how I break it down. There's two different types of software that I recommend and some of you are going to agree with me, some of you will disagree. I completely expect that this is just one Man's point of view. And so there's two different types of software that I recommend. Number one is Lawn Pro.

LawnPro. And then the second one is what my company currently uses today, which is service.

Autopilot.

So I'm not affiliated with any of these companies as far as like any sort of stock in their company or anything. I know both of the owners that have created these softwares and things like that, but I don't have any sort of stake financially with them. And so anyways, so these are the two different types of software that I recommend. What makes, what makes me recommend this to one person versus another is their revenue. So. So if you're just starting out, if you're just starting your business, Lawn Pro is the way you want to go. And in my opinion, if you're doing under $400,000 in revenue a year, LawnPro is still the way to go. So let's kind of do the pros and the cons of both of these and I'll kind of give you my general synopsis on software in general. So LawnPro, the pros of LawnPro, really the biggest pro of LawnPro is the cost. It's very, very cheap. You get the free Software, which includes 90% of the features for completely free. It doesn't limit you on like literally the free software is amazing. And for 250 bucks you can get the full version. And it unlocks things like customer portal, client portal and some other features. And then ongoing, it's like nine bucks a month. If you start getting multiple.

Crews that they do for routing, like route optimization, it's like nine bucks a month, but you're looking like nine to ten, twelve dollars a month. They still have all the other features as far as like their features, I guess the pros I would say is their features really, I would say is a pro because for the cost that you're paying, there is quite a few features. There's the client portal. I really like their design of their estimates and invoices.

There's a lot of features that even the mailing, so you can just from the invoice click a button and for $1.50, they print it off, they mail it to the customer. Looks really professional. I like it a lot. And it has a return envelope in there for them to send you the check. I really like Lawn Pro for the cost. That's really the biggest thing because obviously there's better software out there. But this is the reason I recommend to people that are doing just starting out their business or two $300,000 in revenue is the cost. It's a one time fee. It's very, very minimal monthly subscription. If you do some of the other, I think they charge for QuickBooks. They charge per month in addition, QuickBooks integration. But things like that you might not even be using. Literally the free version of LawnPro is pretty fantastic. The cost is the biggest driver of lawnprof. So what are some of the cons of Lampro? The big thing is it's a small team. So literally it's a couple designers and web people. They don't have a big team, they don't have a lot of different designers and programmers. They take a long time to develop features. They aren't very great at customer service as far as timing. These are just the realities of it. What's great about their customer service is you can text them and they get pretty instant features. You get pretty instant feedback with that. As far as figuring little issues out, however, there's a small team and fixing issues takes a while as well as there can be periods of time. Because the reason I know all these things is that we used to use LawnPro. We used Lawn Pro the first two and a half. Almost three years of our business. Almost three, yeah. Almost three years of our business, we used Lawn Pro. So the reason I say slow, it's not always slow, but it is. You'll hit like a day, like 24 hours or, or even just a couple hours actually where it would just get really, really slow and it would take a long time to load webpages. And yeah, it didn't happen a lot, but it was definitely slow. Like I said, We LongPro for almost three years. By that time we were doing around $80,000 a month in revenue. And we were probably overdue a little bit to change out of Long Pro into a bigger software package. So I really recommend if you're hitting like that 40, $50,000 a month in revenue, then it's time to consider Service Autopilot. So the pros of Service Autopilot is the efficiency that the features bring. So efficiency from features. So what that means is now that you have multiple crews, by the time you're going to get Service autopilot, you have larger revenue. So you're going to have multiple crews, lots of employees. Now you're going to have efficiency which will then account for the additional cost. So Service auto has a lot of different features, things that are really good for when you get multiple crews and you have multiple people running around and people can see it much better on their mobile device. So for instance, Long Pro, it does have mobile, but I have to say one of their cons is they don't have a native app.

So they don't have a native app.

For your employees. It's all online. You can still do unlimited users. So you can still have unlimited users on LongPro, however, it's not a native app. And so if they're not connected online, they're in a slow Internet place. They won't even be able to refresh and see their schedule. So when we use LawnPro, we actually have to print out all their schedules because if the app wasn't online, they couldn't see their next job, their next address. So the pros of LongPro, yes, you get unlimited users at no additional cost. However, with Service Autopilot, the pros is it has a native app. So that might, like I said, these are features that when you're small, isn't a big deal. When you start getting multiple crews, multiple services, you have separate, like we have separate offices now. It gets very, very important. And the little features, the little nuances of Service Autopilot, the little features that are better than LongPro really make up for the cost. So the biggest disadvantage of Service Autopilot is the.

So you're looking at, just to get started with them, you're looking at 50 bucks a month. But how they work is every single thing that you add onto that is additional cost. So we are coming, we pay over $500 a month for Service Autopilot. And that's only going up because as you add new employees, you're 15 bucks per month here, 15 bucks per month there. For your client Portal, you pay $20 per month there. For Maps, the mapping feature, you pay, I think it's $50 per month. And then you pay per time that you optimize route. So it gets very expensive. And so you can't be paying that when you're a small company. And as you get more and more employees, they are going to make you charge more per user for the mobile app is 15 bucks. That's like your employees, your field staff for office people, if you want them to have their own account or their own user account, they are going to be $25 per month. So lots and lots of, if you want an integration with QuickBooks, it's like, I think it's 50 or $80 per month as well. So there's just a lot of different things. For what they call automations and Service Autopilot.

I have to say one of the pros of Service Autopilot is their Automations. However, it comes at a very steep cost. So to get set up with Automations is $1,000 and then monthly it's an additional 180 bucks. So that's expensive. But like I said, we're the size now where that $180 a month. When I can use that feature of Automations, I can really save my office staff a whole lot of time in billing collections, sending up and following up with invoices and estimates. Service Autopilot, I'd say their strongest thing that they're going to dominate in the next two, three years is Automations. They're ahead of the game. It's not perfect yet. As I speak about this early 2018, this is not perfect in Service Autopilot. But as they perfect this, this is what's going to separate them from Lawn Pro and everyone else. But like I said, it's very expensive right now. Very, very expensive. It's similar to software packages like infusionsoft and things like that. So cons of Service Autopilot is really, you're looking at the cost that is the driving factor. There's other little things, but I would say like as far as customer service, they're really good. They do have online chat, there's a big team. So I guess that they're constantly evolving and changing the product. Evolving would be Service Autopilot. They're cutting edge. They're really very, very much, much larger customer base. Long Pro, you're looking at thousands of users, low thousands of users. Service Autopilot, there's tens of thousands of users. And so I was able to go to their big conference a few months ago and see what they're planning to do. And that's really what makes me excited about Service Autopilot. It's okay right now, really, but I really do believe that they're focusing on aut focusing on changing their entire web design. And I think they'll become the leader in this industry. That's why I recommend Service Autopilot. We use them now in our business for a little over a year. We use Lawn Pro for the first three years of our company. So to wrap this all up, I wanted to make this video to give you a hard set answer on all the people that ask me this question every single day almost, I'd say at least four or five times a week I get this question. And. And so I didn't want to just kind of beat around the bush or even just do pros and cons. I Wanted to give you a solid answer. So this is my solid answer that I would give to you. If you are doing.

If you're starting your business, so it's $0 or you are making up to $30,000 in monthly revenue. So per month.

If that's you, I would recommend Lawn Pro. If you're doing like 40 plus 40k per month or more.

I would take Service Autopilot. That would be my hard set kind of guidelines for you. The reason for that is because if you're doing 0 to 30,000, you can't afford to pay hundreds of dollars per month for software and you're not going to be using all the features of service Autopilot Automations is great because we're doing multiple, you know, estimates every single day. But when you're doing zero to $30,000 a month in revenue, you might be doing a few a week, you might be doing a lot of lawn mowing estimates. But like not big jobs, you don't have to worry about job costing as much big landscaping projects, materials vendors, all of that sort of thing. So you don't need to take it, you don't need all these other automation, you don't need a native app necessary, you don't need cutting edge technology and you're going to get away from this. So that's why I recommend Lawn Pro. Because for instance, if you're doing 30,000amonth in Reven, you're probably going to end up doing $250,000 a month. I mean, sorry, per year, $250,000. If you're in that kind of range here, $250,000 per year, alright? You cannot afford to spend $6,000 a year on software for just one package. Service autopilot. 500 bucks a month, you can't afford to pay that times 12, that's $6,000 per year. So if you divide that out like literally that's 4% of your revenues going towards software. I don't believe that's a very wise decision. And so for that reason I recommend Long Pro. That's the hard numbers that I would give you. Between 0 and $30,000 per month in revenue. I'd be using Long Pro. We used it right up until we were almost $80,000 per month in revenue. And like I said, we probably should have switched over earlier to Service autopilot. So 0 to 30,000, I'd highly recommend long pro 40,000 service autopilot. There are smaller.

Packages that you can use here. Like I said, you can get in with service all put as low as $50. But to really start using their software, if you have any sort of a size of a business, you're going to have multiple users and you're going to need other integrations. You're going to want to use their maps and you're going to have the client portal. Like for instance, their client portal alone. I think it's either 20 or $50 per month. Lawn Pro, it's already included and, and I really think Lawn Pro's their client portal is one of their strongest features for the cost that you're giving is just fantastic. So that's my breakdown. I hope that helps a little bit. I hope it kind of makes helps you get a clear and concise decision on what type of software you should be using. If you're not using a software system, you're not using a CRM, you're not tracking your customers. It just, you have to. What is nice about Service Autopilot, it is all integrated. So even the emailing, when you keep track of all your customers and your CRM, your clients, your leads, people that don't convert to clients and all of that stuff, you can keep track of that and email them right from Service Autopilot, it keeps track of all that. Whereas with Long Pro you're going to need like use a mailchimp or some other mailing provider. But then both of them can do things like automated billing, collecting credit cards and storing those on file and you know, automatically creating invoices at the end of each month. So both very powerful software packages. I recommend this one if you're just starting out or smaller this one if you're bigger and can afford to the extra cost for the efficiencies that it brings. Again. Mike Andes landscapebusinesscourse.com Check it out. We'll see you next time.