The Company

Tony Sellers was a union laborer in 1998, but his entrepreneurial spirit led him to night school to study landscaping. Before he was even done with school, he acquired some accounts from an existing landscaping company and his new business was born. The next 13 years were a flurry of activity and growth that saw revenue increases of 25% in some years. Sellers Services hit the $1 million mark in 2008, after just 10 years in business.

The company employs 18 people during the peak summer season. Its revenue is derived equally from maintenance and installation work.

The Need

Rapid growth can create a lot of problems, but the increased revenues from that growth can also mask the effects of those problems. This is why it is so important for an owner to really know what is going on in his business. Sellers was using a combination of QuickBooks and QXpress to run the business, but several problems had developed because of double-entry of data and limited reporting capabilities.

Although he had purchased Clip, he didn’t like having to add several modules to make it work to suit his needs. He also looked carefully at Real Green Systems and Hindsite, but felt they were geared toward specific segments of landscaping, not the entire landscaping industry. Neither fit his data-reporting requirements. “Most of Asset’s competitors were pretty good at one area, but we wanted something that would do everything. Frankly, a truly-integrated, full-scale solution like Asset was not even in the initial budget, but after we learned all that it could do, it was clearly exactly what we had been looking for”, said Sellers.

Implementation Advice

What advice would Sellers offer to new Asset clients?

• “The owner needs to be involved. If you simply hand it off to an office manager to implement, you won’t fully appreciate many of Asset’s best functions. Actively participate so you understand the power of the software and it will yield great dividends.”
• “Dive in completely. We started by just dipping our toes in the water and really using only a portion of the capabilities of the software. But then we made a decision to fully immerse the company, and the results were immeasurable.”

The Results

“This is exactly what we were looking for”, said Sellers. “We can really zoom into great detail and know what’s profitable and what’s not. For example, we were looking at growing the fertilizing business, but the reporting has helped show us that expanding this segment is not an ideal fit for us. That is invaluable information.”

“Moreover, we are no longer missing important details. We’re no longer charging for only one hour for a special snow-removal trip when the total payroll is four hours, for example. We’re now recovering so many expenses that we weren’t before.”

“The job-costing capabilities of Asset are insane! I’m really looking forward to the coming year.”