A Flexible Schedule: Route Management

Scott Brown is willing to travel for commercial maintenance jobs, such as Coca-Cola Corp. and CAMCO Property Management, that are 60 miles from his home base in Atlanta, Ga. His route management program is dictated by his sales process and vice versa.

"These high-profile commercial jobs are worth the extra time and expense," enthused Brown, president of Atlanta Lawn. "We schedule jobs that are farther out in a particular way. If we are traveling to an area where we don’t have any other work at the time, we immediately go on a sales blitz. We start working that area heavily to accommodate our route. We bid and gain as much work as we can to keep a full day in that area. So far, this approach has worked very well and prevents us from having scattered routes."

Brown’s key to routing is approaching the clients he wants and providing them with the right information and references so that he can close those accounts. "Then I am in an area that I would like to be in working on accounts I would like to put my company name on."

Being selective about potential clients can solve a lot of selling and routing hassles. No route can be serviced or bid in the same exact way and be acceptable for clients who have different needs. "Our system works well for jobs far and near because we are able to be so flexible," he said.

Whether a routing program’s focus is selling in specific areas to establish routes, splitting up the service area, factoring in additional rush hour and congested traffic costs, or automating the process, productivity, organization and focus will become easier as long as contractors remain flexible managing their routes.

THE RIGHT APPROACH. Atlanta Lawn’s sales/routing program targets specific jobs the company wants to maintain. "We don’t just go out and bid on the world," Brown said. "We approach prospects in an area that we want to work in, let them know we truly selected them and would be honored to work for them, and then let them consider hiring us. We have had a great closing ratio using this approach. Plus, then we have accounts we have found, instead of them finding us."

The company takes on new customers by having crews in areas like aeration or pruning that can be pulled off their schedules and moved in a split second to a maintenance crew, Brown said. "We operate two full-time, year-round aeration crews, and we schedule them so they can be moved around by usually only scheduling their work no more than two days ahead," he said. "All other customers are on standby or know a general time frame for when they will be aerated. So, when we obtain clients and can’t work them into a current route, we pull an aeration crew off for a day or two or until the job can be worked into a maintenance crew or a new route is created."

In addition to the aeration crews, Brown said the company is going to implement a pruning crew that will prune full time. "The pruning crew will also be able to pull a small trailer behind its stake body truck with machinery for touch ups or kicking off new maintenance accounts while they are in a specific area," Brown said. "The point of an effective route maintenance program is to save time by going from point A to point B and not doubling back over yourself or missing an area altogether, and I think having these specific crews in place helps us do that efficiently."

To be successful in this approach, Brown said all employees at Atlanta Lawn are cross-trained in maintenance and lawn care.

Also helpful is properly allocating travel time. Drive time is always estimated into Atlanta Lawn’s jobs because the customer needs to share in that cost, Brown pointed out. "We include the estimated annual drive time in all bids, breaking it out over 12 months, so each month we are billing toward the drive time needed," Brown said. "For example, crew No. 1 has to drive with three men 30 minutes to the job. That’s 90 total minutes of man-hours just riding. We apply that to the job time in the proposal and include it one way. We cover the costs back to the shop but charge the customer for a one-way travel. We pay half, they pay half."

RUSH HOUR. Sometimes regular travel time becomes excessive in high-traffic areas. Due to an increase in growth and traffic congestion in Carol King Landscape Maintenance’s service area, "windshield time" continues to increase, cutting productivity and profits for the Orlando, Fla., company, even though it only services a 35-mile radius area from its home office, said Vice President Bruce Bachand.

"We combat this problem in several ways: targeting and selling more work in areas closest to our base of operations, selling larger jobs that cut travel time and pursuing good opportunities close to profitable existing customers to create complete work days for a route or routes in certain areas," Bachand said. "This cuts down on account manager travel and crew travel. We also have created more site/groundskeeper jobs. This allows employees to report directly to a job, eliminating company travel for all but the account manager visits."

Sometimes because of problems with rush hour or congested traffic, adding extra travel cost to a bid can recover lost time and productivity. "All our jobs are bid with a certain amount of ‘windshield time’ included," Bachand explained. "Currently, we are creating routes with 20 to 25 percent of the work day allocated to travel. If a prospective job is in an outlying area and we are interested in the job, we bid in enough man-hours to cover travel expenses from our office to the site. If this client, however, is associated with or referred from a long-term existing customer, we estimate the travel time from that existing customer."

Carol Kings’ jobs are generally scheduled from the closest to the farthest away within the geographic area that a crew works in on a particular day, unless individual circumstances prevent this. "Generally, customers must fit into our schedules," Bachand said. "We honor requests for no machines running before a certain hour in the morning by performing only detail functions until the agreed upon hour arrives or holding the job until later in the day."

Because the company services all of its contracts 52 weeks per year in Central Florida, routes run every week of the year with fixed labor and equipment budgets. "Job costing is made easier because the daily routes are created and designed with a specific amount of income in mind," Bachand added. "If the daily route is completed as expected, it will earn the planned income."

Also, because of traffic congestion in the area, Carol King has gone "past the period when we took on customers regardless of their location," Bachand commented. "We regularly turn down maintenance work outside our service area. And we occasionally turn down or mark up work inside our service area if it doesn’t fit our existing routes."

THE SERVICE AREA SPLITS. W.L.M. Work-A-Holics Landscape Management, Naples, Fla., doesn’t turn down customers unless it has to. "As long as our clients’ desires are feasible, we’ll try to accommodate them," President Cullen Walker said, who described his company as 74 percent residential and 26 percent commercial. "We interview our customers just like we do our employees to find out what they are looking for. Homeowners want their service on Thursday or Friday. These clients are usually our high-end residential customers who want their properties to look nice for the weekend. We do try to schedule accounts in one area on a specific day. If they are a new account in a new area, then we can try to build up that area to a half-day or whole day. If the whole street is on Monday and a client wants Wednesday, we explain our schedule to them and see if we can schedule the job on Monday. But, ultimately, we do what we can to accommodate the customer."

To do this successfully, Walker split up his service area in three parts and dispatched dedicated crews to each section. The company’s service area extends 25 miles from the center in all directions, and each of the three areas covers approximately 50 miles of space, Walker explained.

To provide management in these three areas, Walker promoted his three top employees to supervisors in charge of scheduling one section each. The south section has the most high-end accounts, and by having a supervisor dedicated to that section, clients in that area get as much interaction as possible, Walker enthused. "These high-end accounts that need extra care sometimes aren’t the cheapest way to go, but they are our niche market," he said.

Walker said his route management system works because there is no "stand-around" time, and each crew knows its area and can get around faster covering a smaller space. "We see each of our 190 customers weekly, so there’s no time to waste," Walker said. "Our crew members come in at 6:45 a.m. and are out the door by 7 a.m. to get to their jobs on schedule."

AUTOMATION ASSISTANCE. Sometimes, simplifying a route management program means installing computer software to do to job. In Dan Standley’s case, managing routes with computer software was well worth the 60 to 70 percent time saved from doing the paperwork by hand for his company, which focuses on commercial accounts.

Standley, president, Dan’s Landscaping & Lawn Care, Terrytown, La., explained how his automated system works: "I meet with the crew supervisors weekly to see who can handle the new jobs," he said. "Every night we have staff meetings with the crews so they know where they need to go in the morning. Each crew has a set schedule that we map out, and I meet with the foreman monthly to review that. Our crews keep track of arrival and departure times to and from properties and everything that was performed. Daily, or sometimes weekly, our office manager types all this necessary information into our routing system, including specifics about the job, the crew working on it, directions to the job, what needs to be done there next and any special instructions, such as locking the gate in the backyard to keep the dog from getting out. If we don’t finish the job one day, it pops up on our schedule the next day so that we don’t forget it. If I want specific information on an account, I can pull it up on the computer anytime. If a visit was missed, this is recorded in the system, and I know about it."

Standley said adjusting to an automated routing system took about six months, and he said the company still does some manual scheduling. "Our software program has a map built in, but the program doesn’t know the proper breakout of our area and isn’t always totally accurate, so we do our own mapping," Standley pointed out.

The key to pricing Dan’s Landscaping & Lawn Care’s service is evaluating the man-hours that will be involved based on the square footage of the property to be maintained and the amount of work or materials, such as bags of fertilizer or mulch, that need to be used. "All these factors blend together to come up with a final figure," he said. "The trick is making sure you don’t forget anything."

Automation isn’t the only thing that smoothes out Standley’s system. "We use the 80-20 principle, which states that 80 percent of our business comes from 20 percent of our clients," he said. We resell to customers who know us. Sometimes you can get all caught up in the Yellow Pages syndrome and waste drive and sales time with clients who don’t even pre-qualify to fit your niche. The clients I currently have are ready to say ‘Yes’ – I just need to write them a proposal."