The client:
Northwest Landscaping
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 challenge:
Generating estimates
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.
The Solution:
Automated estimate creation
We 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 customer.
The Impact:
Up to 35 hours saved per month
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.
To achieve this result, we worked with the business owner and other stakeholders to deeply 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 we started there.
To build the solution we did 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, which led us to determine that photos of handwritten notes and a web form would be the best input methods. We initially started with just the handwritten notes but found that for quick jobs like winterizing a sprinkler system, the handwritten notes method would be slower than a quick web form. That led us to the hybrid system in which either input can kick off the estimate.
- Built out a document template for delivering estimates and established key information that would need to be extracted, for example customer name, address, and phone number. NWL doesn’t currently have a structured customer database like a CRM, the Estimator gets the customer’s information ahead of the site visit through is calendar. For now we opted for the proposal documents to serve as the record of all customers served by NWL. (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.
- Build and test the estimation tool. To do this we interviewed the Estimator and office staff about the type of information gathered from each customer when the appointment is made and what information the Estimator typically uses to generate the estimates. We mocked up handwritten notes in the Estimator’s handwriting and form entries for different jobs to validate that the tool got the right information to begin the estimate and generated the right information in the resulting document.
We enrolled all team members in accounts to access the tool and the estimate documents and trained them in using the new tool. There were minor workflow changes required, which we identified during the planning phase. For example, the Estimator needed to write down the customer’s name and address on his notepad before inputting it into the tool because NWL wanted to use the customer’s name in a document naming convention as a way to organize the estimates. This habit was easy to build by creating a template the Estimator could print on stacks of notepaper with prompts for key information. There was a slight slowdown during the learning phase that quickly resolved, leading to the sustained time savings NWL now enjoys.
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.
Demo screenshots:
Start an estimate by uploading a photo 
Photo of handwritten notes from a site visit 
The tool generates a document based on the provided notes, including cost calculations. Tweak as needed and send. 
Generate a quick estimate directly from a form 
Enter relevant information and submit 
The tool generates a document based on the provided notes, including cost calculations. Tweak as needed and send.
About this Case Study
This portfolio project was developed to showcase how consulting services can help small businesses streamline their operations. While Northwest Landscaping is a fictional client, the challenges and impact of the tool described here are based on real-world clients. This tool was actually built and deployed, and is available for a live demo.
With real clients, What Works will create a proposal to address their specific pain points and work together to design a solution that will work for them.
If your business struggles with time-consuming document preparation, for example creating estimates, invoices, reports, product catalogs, inventory logs, or booking confirmations discover how our approach could deliver measurable results for you. Book a free, zero pressure consultation.