Northwest Landscaping (NWL) is a small business specializing in residential landscaping projects like yard cleanup and maintenance, sprinkler system installation and maintenance, and drainage projects. They have a great reputation with their customers that often leads to referrals but administrative bottlenecks are holding them back from being able to grow their business.

Note: NWL is a fictional client based on an amalgam of residential services clients, used here as a demonstration.

The problem

NWL’s Work Estimator follows a time-consuming and repetitive process for generating work estimates. After visiting a customer’s home to discuss the job the Estimator will spend an hour or more crafting an estimate. The workflow involves taking notes either into a tablet or on paper, then copy-pasting information and doing repetitive manual calculations, leading to several pain points:

• Administrative overload: Estimates are often prepared after hours, extending the estimator’s workday and interfering with their personal time.
• Backlogs: It’s common for the Estimator to fall several days behind, impacting customer satisfaction and business growth.
• Lost business: When customers have to wait days for their estimates they may choose to work with a faster competitor.

Results

I built a tool that automates much of the estimation process, replicating the logic and calculations NWL uses to estimate projects. Information can be entered through a form or with a photo of the estimator’s notes, and the tool generates a document describing the job and with itemized costs for the estimator to review and send.

What I built

I built an online tool to manage the estimation process. The tool is custom-built to handle the specifics of their business and apply their cost calculations consistently. Project details can be entered in either of two ways:

• Form-based entry: Estimators can quickly enter project information using an online form.
• Photo upload: Alternatively, they can upload a photo of their handwritten notes from the site visit.

The tool automatically identifies and extracts relevant information, applies NWL’s standard cost formulas, and generates a professional written estimate that can be reviewed and sent to the custom

The right design is critical

The first step was a deep dive with the business owner and Estimators to understand the business, its goals, and the challenges it faces in achieving those goals. The time it takes to generate estimates was their largest challenge, so that’s where to start.

To do this effectively would require the following:

• Identify the types of work NWL does and establish pricing formulas for each type of work. This includes labor costs, number of workers for each type of job, materials costs and typical materials needed for jobs, overhead and other costs that need to be factored in.
• Understand the Estimator’s workflow to understand how to capture the relevant information from the site visit. Since Estimators often carry a clipboard and take notes by hand, that’s a logical place to start. But for small jobs like winterizing a sprinkler system, the handwritten notes method would be slower than a quick web form, leading to the hybrid system that allows for either.
• For this example I supposed that NWL doesn’t currently have a structured customer database like a CRM, so the Estimator gets the customer’s information ahead of the site visit through the calendar. To simplify the build, the design uses the bid documents as the customer record. If having more structured customer data becomes necessary in the future, we could do a project to pull customer info from those documents and put them into a new CRM system.
• Reviewing the design is an important step, so that what gets built matches what the client expects and will meet their needs. After determining the workflow I built a full design that could be reviewed before building.
• Once the tool is built it needs to be tested. I mocked up handwritten notes, with neater and messier handwriting, for different jobs to test that the tool got the right information to build the estimate and handled when information was missing. With a real client this would then include having Estimators try it in parallel with their current method to check that the tool produces good results.

Once validated, it would be time to roll out the tool and do full-scale training. During this phase, I would provide a full warranty for 3 months to make sure things are working correctly before handing off. Following this period, I offer an ongoing support plan in which I monitor and support the tool and the client for as long as they wish.

What’s Next

The other high-impact challenge NWL faces is a high volume of incoming messages from customers seeking information, appointments for quotes, and following up on ongoing work. The proposed solution is an automated chatbot system that can take standard queries through their website and via text and respond back based on NWL documentation covering their services, rates, and existing workload. For example a customer seeking to understand if NWL handles broken gutters along with their underground drainage work could get an answer with no human intervention. Further optimizations could include routing a customer to a calendar tool to schedule an estimate visit or giving them quick unofficial estimates for simple jobs like sprinkler winterization.

Results

With the new tool in use, NWL sees clear improvements:

• Faster turnaround: Estimates are now ready to send in as little as 30 minutes, even when adjustments are needed for special cases.
• Reduced workload: Automation eliminates much of the repetitive administrative work, allowing the Estimator to focus on core business activities with a better work-life balance.
• Improved customer experience: Quicker estimates mean happier customers and a competitive edge in the market.
• Business growth: With less time spent on paperwork, NWL can respond to more leads and win more projects.

For an Estimator who generates 10 estimates per week, this saves 20-35 hours per month.

Demo screenshots: