Landscaping Reviews

My husband Dale can fix anything with a small engine and he cannot say no to a yard. Somebody cries about their grass before a wedding and Dale is out there at seven at night cutting it for the regular price, then grumbling about it at me like I sent him. April is our worst month for it. The phone rings while the crew is already out, nobody answers, and by the time Dale calls back the person found somebody else. This April the calls started getting answered by the Launchbarr voice thing. I heard about it from a customer. She left a review saying the young lady who booked her cleanup was so patient with her list of instructions, gate code and all. There is no young lady. It is just Dale, me, and three men in a truck. Dale gets more done now and he is a sight less grumpy about the phone. He told me last week he does not know if it is worth him answering at all anymore, the other one writes everything down better than he ever did. From Dale, that is practically a love letter.

Hank and I are partners. He runs crews, I run the books, and for years the books were a shoebox Hank kept. Cards, checks, names in his head. He carried late payers forever because he hates the money talk worse than mowing in August, and I knocked on doors in October asking polite for June money. Route customers pay online now through Launchbarr and cleanups take a deposit before we start. One old customer told Hank paying on a phone felt cold. He pays two days early now. Hank says the shoebox retired undefeated. Close enough.

I will admit something. When the spring calls picked up, I assumed it was luck and good weather. Then a new customer in the next town over told me she found us on the Google map Launchbarr cleaned up and called because we were fifteen minutes away and the reviews talked about us showing up on the day we said. My old route had me driving past three neighborhoods to cut one yard for a man who haggled every spring. This year the new accounts landed close together, streets I already work, and I dropped two stops that cost me money every single week. That does not sound like much on paper. In July, when it is 95 and the trailer is loaded, a tight route is the whole ballgame. My crew lead said it best at the gas station: boss, we are cutting grass now, not windshield time. He is not wrong.

My lead man, Scotty, is the best trimmer I have ever seen and every January some warehouse tries to hire him away for steady hours. I used to have nothing to tell him except hang on till March, spring is coming, and we both knew what that was worth in a month with no checks coming in. This past winter we stayed working. The ads Launchbarr ran for us pushed fall cleanups first and then holiday lights, which I thought was a gimmick, I will be honest. It was not. We kept Scotty and the younger guy busy into Christmas, and two of the light customers signed up for full season lawn care in February before my competitors were even calling people back. Scotty took the warehouse interview anyway this January. Old habit. He came home and told his wife the numbers over there were worse and the work was inside. Then he told me, do not make a thing of it. I am not making a thing of it. I am just writing it here.

Every October I used to mean to write the fall cleanup note and every October the leaves beat me to it. Id think about it while blowing out a bed and forget it by the next yard. This year the reminder went out on its own through Launchbarr, one short message to everybody we mowed all summer. Eleven cleanups booked before I finished my coffee, and three people asked to get on the spring list. My foreman asked who I hired to do the phones. Nobody. The calendar did it while I was holding a rake.

My husband Glenn has run our lawn company for fourteen years and he treats the phone like a second job he never applied for. He is on a mower eight hours a day, gloves on, earbuds in, and every call that comes in during a cut is a call he answers mad or does not answer at all. Customers deserved better and honestly so did he. Last spring a lady left us a review about the sweet young lady who answered, took her whole cleanup list down, gate code and the dog and everything, and booked her without putting her on hold once. There is no young lady. It is the voice Launchbarr set up for us, and it works the hours Glenn cannot. Three more reviews mentioned her by the end of May, all saying how patient she was. Glenn reads them out loud at supper now like they are ball scores. He told me on Sunday, that girl has never once told a customer to call back during lunch. From a man who has told half the county exactly that, it is the highest praise he owns. He still will not let me put her name on the truck. I am working on it.

I am short and I am blunt and I run my route the way I run my house, on a schedule. What broke me was not the mowing. It was chasing forty dollar and sixty dollar payments all over the county from people who loved their yard and hated their mailbox. I spent Fridays doing collections instead of quotes. Launchbarr put my regulars on cards that run when the cut is done. Nobody argues, nobody forgets, and I stopped being the bill collector on my own route. A customer told me it felt more professional. It feels like Friday to me.

My brother runs the design work, I run my mouth, that is the partnership. We would price an install, a patio with beds and lighting, the homeowner would say let me talk to my wife, and then nothing. I am not a paperwork man. Those quotes sat in my truck until the paper curled. The follow ups go out now without me, a polite note, then another, with the pictures from the first visit attached. A man answered one in February about a quote from October. He said, you are the only ones who ever called back. We start his backyard next month.

Dad started this company with a notebook in the visor and he still thinks that notebook is a system. I am the son, I do the schedule, and I got tired of being the only person alive who knew which yard got skipped when it rained. Everything sits on one board now through Launchbarr, routes, installs, who called, who owes. Dad looked at it once and called it a fancy notebook. Last week he checked it himself before asking me anything. I did not say a word. I just watched a thirty year habit change seats.

I never asked a soul for a review in twenty two years. Felt like begging. The ask goes out on its own now after each job, and my Google page filled with people saying things I would never say about myself. A customer told me she read eight of them before calling. I said, well, they are nicer than I am.

I run the phones and the schedule for a company with four crews, which in Florida means I run the weather complaint department too. When rain moves a whole day, I used to spend the evening calling sixty people one at a time. The reminders and the change of day texts go out together now, and the on the way message goes when the truck actually leaves. My call volume on rain days dropped to almost nothing, and the few who call are nice about it. One lady told me we are the only service that warns her before we warn the grass. I will take that review any day. People plan around a text. They never planned around my memory.

My Google listing had a photo of a yard I never cut and the wrong phone number for the better part of two years. I did not know. I am outside for a living, I am not sitting around admiring my own listing. Launchbarr fixed the whole thing, real photos of our work, every service we actually do, cleanup, sprinklers, snow in the winter. A new account called and said she picked us off the map because we were close and the pictures looked like her neighborhood. Close is money in this business. Every account near another account is profit, and every one across town is me paying for the view.

My husband Earl is a kind man with a mower and a terrible memory for who paid what. He carried folks all season, nice people, slow people, people who would pay him in tomatoes at the gate and call it square. I did the books at night and did the asking, and I hated being the heavy in my own marriage. The route pays by card now, set up through Launchbarr, and the cleanup work takes a deposit before the trailer rolls. Earl has not had to ask anybody for money since March. One of his oldest customers, a man who owed us since the previous summer, paid on the second automatic reminder and apologized to Earl in the driveway like Earl had sent it personal. Earl just tipped his hat. Peace in a house is worth more than any mower we own.

Desert yards are won and lost on how fast you answer. Somebody staring at dead grass and a busted drip line in June is calling three companies and hiring the first one who sounds ready. My estimates used to wait until I got home and typed them. Now the quote goes out by text while I am still standing in the yard, line by line, with the rock and the plants we just talked about. A woman signed on her phone before I reached the truck. She said the other company was still going to get back to her. It has been two weeks. I checked.

Leon is my partner and the better designer of the two of us, so I handle sales, which means I handle rejection at scale. The ads Launchbarr runs for us are narrow on purpose, install work, patios, beds, lighting, in the neighborhoods where our routes already run. I told them I did not want more twenty dollar mow calls and they actually listened. The leads that come in are people with a yard problem and a real budget. Leon walked a job last week two streets from a route we already cut. He said, this is the first advertising that knows where we live.

I am the daughter, the office, and the only person here who knows a password. My dad and my uncle took calls on two different phones, estimates lived in text threads, and a customer once got three different answers from three different members of my family in one afternoon. Everything lands in one place now, calls, texts, messages off the website, all of it in front of me. A customer wrote in a review that our little company answers like a big company. Dad read that and stood up straighter. He still takes his own phone fishing. It does not matter anymore, and we are all happier for it. Three answers became one, and the one is right.

Our old website was built by a cousin in 2014 and it had a stock photo of a lawn so perfect it looked fake, because it was. Meanwhile our real work, the retaining beds, the shoreline yards, the cleanup jobs that take a dead yard to a postcard, sat in my phone camera roll where nobody could see it. Launchbarr rebuilt the site with our actual jobs, our actual crews, grass we really cut. A homeowner called about a sloped yard and said, I saw the one on your site with the steps in the hill, that is my exact problem. Nobody ever said that about the stock photo. The work was always good. It just finally has its picture taken.

My wife Lorna owns the company and I am the hired hand with a ring on, her words. She runs a tight route and she does not stop a mower for a ringing phone, which cost us. A call would come in during a cut, go to voicemail, and by evening the job belonged to whoever picked up. Now a text goes back the second a call is missed, starts a conversation, takes the address and the gate notes. Lorna told a customer at the door that she has an office girl now. She has me and a text that types faster than both of us.

Storm took down half the trees in our area on a Saturday and by Sunday morning my phone had forty one calls stacked up. Two years ago I would have worked that list for a week and lost most of it. This time every call got answered or called back in order, the cleanups got booked while I was still cutting up the first yard, and nobody had to hear a full mailbox. A man told me we were the only outfit that treated his mess like it was urgent. It was urgent. That is the whole job some weeks.

I run a crew, I do not run an office, so hear this from the truck. Everything I need is on my phone now, the route, the notes about which lady wants the gate locked for the dog, who added a cleanup, who already paid. Before, the boss called me at six in the morning reading off a notebook and I wrote it on my hand half the time. A customer stopped me last week and said the crew seems more organized this year. Same crew. Same me. The notebook is what changed, and it changed into something I can read at a red light.

January used to scare me. The grass sleeps, the phone sleeps, and I would sit there doing math about February. This winter Launchbarr sent a simple note to our past customers about pine straw, bed cleanup, and getting first on the spring route before it filled. Fourteen people answered. Fourteen. Some of them I had not cut for in two years and assumed were gone. They were not gone, they were just waiting for somebody to ask. I have been in business six years and nobody ever told me my old customer list was a savings account. I ask more questions now.

My husband Marty is a wonderful landscaper and a hopeless promoter. He will talk to a yard for an hour and never once mention that we take new customers. The trailer got a square code on it this spring, the kind you point a phone at, going to our reviews and the booking page. I did not expect much. A woman two doors down from a route stop scanned it off the trailer while the crew was working, read the reviews in her kitchen, and booked a full cleanup before the truck left her street. Then her neighbor did it the following week. Marty now backs the trailer into jobs at an angle so the code faces the sidewalk. He told me it is called positioning. Thirty one years married to this man and the trailer is his first billboard. Whatever works, I say. The route is filling from the route, and I no longer have to be his advertising department at every cookout in the county.

When I bought this company, the old owner handed me a coffee can of customer cards and said the gold is in there. He meant it as a joke about the can. There were years of one time cleanups and install customers in that can that nobody had talked to since. We put the list into Launchbarr and sent them a plain note, no pressure, just checking in and offering spring spots. Nine came back in the first month. My bookkeeper asked if I bought another company. I told her no, I just finally read the coffee can.

I am third generation and the first one who has ever posted a picture of our work on the internet, which my grandpa considers a magic trick. Finished yards go out on our pages now on a schedule I do not touch. A lady messaged us that she drove past a yard, saw the post that night, and realized it was the same house. Booked a cleanup off it. Grandpa asked if the picture did that. I said the picture did that. He has started pointing out which yards photograph best. The man is eighty and art directing now.