Munie Greencare

Aspirations

Munie Greencare Professionals is an Illinois-based company that specializes in grounds maintenance and lawn care services. Over the past 40 years, Munie has expanded operations to provide landscape maintenance for large multifaceted sites, athletic complexes, military housing communities, and more. The company currently has clients in ten states.

A plan for implementation

Prior to implementing the Aspire platform, company owner Joe Munie was looking for a solution that could help him address multiple opportunities at the company, including:

• An effective CRM software to manage leads
• A more precise and reliable estimation process
• A way to better integrate production teams into the business

Brandi Smith, customer care manager at Munie, was an integral part of the Aspire implementation process. Her role was created after Munie Greencare first partnered with Aspire Software, so she could provide internal support and help the team maximize the benefits of the platform.

Smith quickly became a “super user.” She learned the system’s functions inside and out, allowing her to field questions and help employees across different departments troubleshoot quickly.

Results

With the Aspire platform fully integrated into Munie Greencare, the company is especially pleased to see increased employee involvement when it comes to creating and managing work plans. Aspire has also helped Munie simplify the estimation process and provide a more consistent method for compiling quotes.

Smith finds the platform's interface to be self-explanatory, straightforward, and friendly for production-minded employees.

“We come from an industry where technology isn’t our thing,” Smith says. “The guys on top of mowers, they’d rather be on a mower than in front of their laptop. The simplicity of it is really helpful because it’s easy for my production people to catch onto and use.”

She’s confident that Aspire is intuitive enough for new users, regardless of their role in the company. “If somebody wanted to go through and explore it, and they’d never been into the software, they can easily understand how to navigate the features.”

Looking ahead

Looking to the future, Smith sees several ways Munie can further integrate the Aspire platform into business operations. For example, she imagines Munie will use data from Aspire to further streamline the estimation process.

“We want our account managers and production-focused employees to have everything set up with a simple, templated process that makes it easy to produce estimates as needed.”

Smith also foresees a time when Munie would consider Aspire fluency as part of its employee evaluations. “I see us using our scorecards for managers to base some of their performance reviews on what they can do in Aspire,” says Smith.

Words of advice

One piece of advice that Smith wishes she had before going live is: keep it simple.

“You don’t need to overcomplicate your services, your items, or even your kits,” she says.

Smith also recommends learning more about why certain information is tracked in Aspire and how the software uses those stats to yield results that inform business decisions. Take the time to really get to know and understand the functionality.

“Ask questions about how the system functions, so when you’re filling out spreadsheets and doing data dumps, you understand why you’re adding these numbers,” she recommends. “That will help the data make sense in Aspire because you know its purpose.”