Client Follow-ups Led to a Record-breaking Year for this Astroturf Business

Things were taking off, but John quickly realized that his growth wasn’t sustainable unless he had the right processes in place.

“Eventually we got big enough where we realized that we had to automate our services,” John says. His team needed a simple way to communicate with their clients, efficiently dispatch crews, and aggregate information that was coming into the business. Everything had to be in one place.

John only realized how inefficient his existing system of dispatching manually using a spreadsheet was when he had to do it.

“My dispatcher was doing it manually…basically just spreadsheets. When I had to put his hat on, and I sat in his chair for two days, I realized, ‘What are we doing? This doesn’t make any sense!’”

“That’s when I did research and I found Jobber. I tried the free trial and it actually took me two days to just go, ‘Okay. This is going to work’. With so many different competitors it gets very confusing. Jobber has a very easy interface. It’s hard to make a mistake. Everything worked out and we’re using it. It’s been very successful.”

The artificial grass industry has a low barrier of entry, but this posed challenges for John: “everybody was starting to do it, and the margins had gone down,” he explains. His solution was to take a different angle in this booming market. Rather than focusing on installations, he would focus on maintenance and product sales.

“The product has been sold as a maintenance-free product for years. But I realized it’s not care-free. And there was a market there that nobody else saw.”

John started TurFresh from the ground up. “We started with grass roots: driving down neighborhoods looking for addresses, looking for who has turf… we started direct mail campaigns, too. We built it from there.”

It’s a no-brainer that John’s unique value proposition and being part of a booming market has led to TurFresh’s growth and success. But John explains that this was not enough to get TurFresh to where it is today.

John firmly believes that the golden key to succeeding with a home service business is “showing up and following through.”

“The follow-up. Everything is about follow up! I’ve had a successful career in home improvement, and I’ve always said to all my friends and colleagues, ‘It’s not hard to have a successful home improvement business as long as you know a couple things. Show up and follow through.’”

Doing this differentiates TurFresh from their competitors on a whole other level. It also helps them close more deals.

John takes following-up so seriously that he uses Jobber to help his team follow-up with their clients. He knows how integral this is to the business, so it’s worth the investment.

“The emails…the texts… it all demonstrates your capability. So if you follow-up immediately with a customer, say, ‘Hey, how did you we do? Are you happy? If you’re not, we’re willing to make you happy.’ But don’t wait. Not even two days,” John explains.

He underlines the two main reasons for why it’s important to follow-up for two important reasons:

1. It helps build your prospect’s confidence in you.
2. It shows your leads that you really care and that you’re taking care of you, and not just moving on to your next job.

John and his team are busy people, so they can’t do these follow-ups by hand anymore. Today, John relies on Jobber to track, manage, follow-up, and execute their day-to-day.

For John, following up is right in his daily workflow: “When I finish a job, Jobber automatically follows up [asking for] a rating [on a scale of one to ten].”

This gives John insightful feedback on his team’s service. As a bonus, when John gets good feedback, he knows who to ask for online reviews which has helped his business stand out online. “We’ve had a 99% five star rating … Jobber gives the client an opportunity to rate us one out of ten.”

John doesn’t see his company’s growth as a temporary thing. “We’re going to continue growing. We’ve grown every year since we’ve been using Jobber. We had a record year last year.”

In order to keep up that growth and meet his targets, John knows how crucial business efficiency is in this equation. “We’re just efficient, and it’s much easier for me to create redundancy in my work.”

With a more efficient workflow, John can do things he has never been able to de before like easily put someone else in a position, or empower his employees to work remotely if they choose (John’s dispatcher was recently working from Bora Bora while on vacation!).

When you have an efficient workflow that combines everything to run your business, big problems that used to plague the business are no more.

“When I complete the job, it automatically tells me to invoice. So I can’t miss billing a job. It shows who hasn’t paid even though we collect credit cards. It just tracks everything. Plus, the credit card processing has been just … It’s just hassle free. It’s just a phenomenal feature.”

With such an easy, succinct workflow, it’s no wonder that John and the TurFresh team had a record year last year and foresee continued growth moving forward.