Deliver Service That Matches Expectations With Tight Site Audits

Hi,

It’s been a while since I last sent out a newsletter. I was busy working on something amazing that is starting to take shape. Not to spill too much, but trust me, once it’s out, it’ll be a game-changer for the industry .

On a different note, have you been following the news? Trillions of cicadas are emerging after 13 years. It’s an incredibly rare and amazing phenomenon that won’t happen again until 2037. As fascinating as it is, it could cause some concern among your clients about potential damages and clean ups. Hope you’ve got a plan.

Okay, enough with the cicadas, let’s get to the point of why I decided to send you this email.

Hope you’re ready for a history lesson.

A History of Quality Audit ??

?The Brickman Group, one of the largest landscaping companies in the world (before it merged with ValleyCrest in 2014 to form BrightView) had a process for driving quality that they used to call LQA (Landscaping Quality Audit).

The Account Manager would go to the site and audit the work done by the production team. There would be 3 main objectives behind this:

1. To audit the quality of work and get ahead of any issues on site. The idea is to bring up issues yourself and give the customer a reassurance that you’re aware and you’re addressing them. Much better than having the customer come to you with an issue.
2. To identify opportunities for enhancement sales.
3. To maintain a strong line of communication with the customer and make them feel like they’re being kept in the loop about things.

Here’s what it would typically look like:

This was so successful that even after The Brickman Group merged with ValleyCrest and the guys who made the company went on to create their own companies (many in the top LM150 list today), they are still following some variation of the good old LQA process.

The problem is - it takes a LOT of time and effort to conduct an LQA.

• First you have to drive to the site
• Then take photos from your phone camera
• Then take notes separately on a notebook
• Then go back to the office and build a document by combining those photos and notes. This can be a pain when you have to scroll through hundreds - at times, even thousands - of job photos in your camera roll.
• Then you have to make sure that it looks professional enough to share with the customer.

That is a lot of time taken out of the day which otherwise could have been used for something more productive.

How much time is spent creating those reports?nbsp;

• First, if you’ve taken your notes on paper, you need to type them into a document (let’s assume you’ve got good typing speed and you can do that in 20 minutes).
• Then you have to look for the photos you took on site in your camera roll. Not easy to find those photos if you aren’t creating the report the same day (On average, it would take at another 15 to 20 minutes).
• Then you have to compile stuff into a presentable report (This would probably take another 20 to 30 minutes).

Ballpark, it would probably take you anywhere between 1 to 2 hours to create a report.

Now, if you have to perform this process on 30 properties in a month, that could amount to 60 hours of work! That’s like a whole week spent on creating reports.

Crazy, right?

Okay, deep breath.?

Ready for the good news now?

We fixed it. We took the LQA process and built an entire infrastructure around it making it fast and easy to follow.

Process built by Brickman; software built by SiteRecon.

All you need is SiteRecon’s mobile app on your phone or tablet. Whenever you go to the field to audit quality of work, you can fire up the SiteRecon app and take notes on ready-made LQA templates.

Once you’re done, you can export the notes in the form of pdf reports. Much better than having to create the whole report all by yourself.

You can then share these reports with your customers and production teams.

Takes only a couple of minutes.

See full report: CLICK HERE

Here’s what happens when you run your quality audits with SiteRecon

• The photos you take are automatically being organized with the help of the tags, so no need to sift through your camera roll.
• The photos are being stored on the cloud, so your phone’s memory isn’t being hoarded by job photos.
• You get to fill a ready-made template, which means there is no need to create “professional reports” anymore after your site visit. It will be created automatically whenever you need it.
• All of this data is being stored and crunched on a dashboard so you can actually gain valuable insights and stay on top of the quality of service across your portfolio.

The dashboard looks like this by the way:

How much time are you saving now??

• Time spent typing your notes into the document (0 minutes)
• Time spent creating professional reports (0 minutes)
• Time spent looking for photos in your camera roll (0 minutes)
• The only time you actually spend doing audits is the time spent visiting the site and documenting what you see.

At the very least, you’re creating your audit reports 75% faster (figure corrobodated by SiteRecon users). The report creation process is completely automated, the note taking process is faster, the photos are not only being stored on the cloud but they’re being geo-tagged as well, adding another layer of context to your reports.

Another interesting thing to note here is that LQA as a process was developed by The Brickman Group (a commercial landscaping company) to solve quality issues but right now, Mariani Landscape (a high-end residential landscaping company) from Chicago is using SiteRecon’s LQA infrastructure to drive and maintain their insane quality standards.

Tells you that LQA is a?universally-applicable concept within the landscaping industry. The vertical you service doesn’t matter.

If you’re curious how this works, you should set aside 30 minutes sometime this week to talk to Tyler from my team. He has hands on experience with implementing the LQA infrastructure and he’d more than happy to show you around.

Here’s a link to Tyler's calendar: CLICK HERE

I’ll see you here next week. Have a great day.