Signature Landscape KC

At a glance

With Aspire, Signature Landscape has:

• Drastically reduced labor costs
• Shifted from 100% paper dependent to 90% paperless
• Broken down departmental silos, leading to consistent operations and a more productive team environment
• Improved data entry and reporting to ensure quality and measurable data

Aspirations

Signature Landscape is a grounds and snow maintenance company specializing in commercial maintenance and high-end multifamily sites. It was founded in 1989 by Bill Gordon, who dreamt that one day the company he started in his garage would provide the best grounds maintenance service in Kansas City.

Now, Signature Landscape is headquartered in a purpose-built facility in Olathe, Kansas. With branches all over Kansas City and a team of 300 landscape professionals, Signature is a $30 million dollar company.

Since its inception, Signature’s team has focused on delivering quality customer communication and services through landscape best practices.

Time for a change

As Signature Landscape continued to grow, and in 2016 merged with HeartLand, the organization realized it needed to create more efficient business processes which included managing and measuring its data through one scalable software platform.

“We had three systems that managed everything across our company, and we had information that didn’t communicate with each other,” say Samantha Wilson, operations training and support analyst.

But in January 2018, that changed when Signature completed a full implementation of the Aspire platform. “Aspire presented one single platform for us to manage all of our information."

"One of the most amazing things is that it's so easy to access information that everybody in the company can use it, which is allowing us to hit a lot of targets that we didn't have great information on before.”

The process

During implementation, Wilson worked closely with an Aspire customer success manager to ensure proper training and set-up of the software. This partnership made for a smooth transition and accelerated learning curve.

“Our customer success manager was very involved. He met us on site, took our phone calls, and emailed constant communication for anything we needed,” she explains. “I believe if we didn’t have him, we would’ve had a totally different outcome. Having someone that was driven toward our account and getting us off the ground—he gave us his full attention and we’re grateful for the work he did.”

Results

Signature Landscape has now used Aspire's platform for three full seasons, all with positive results. “It used to take us a crazy amount of time and labor to complete a job—from data entry, production, field work, etc. With Aspire, we cut our labor time in half, which ultimately saves the company a lot of money,” Wilson says.

In addition to reducing labor, Aspire has changed the way work gets managed at Signature Landscape. Every department uses the platform, from the sales team tracking pipeline and upsell opportunities to production teams managing tickets, timetables, and data. Using Crew Mobile and the platform's subcontractor portal, Signature can now get on-site, real-time information from the field which Signature’s administrative team manages and measures on the back end, crunching work reports, data, and invoices. Aspire allows for a smooth and simple flow between all these processes.

“Everybody that has anything to do with the operational process or the sales process are touching Aspire,” says Wilson. “Before Aspire, everybody was in their own little hole and didn’t help in other areas. Aspire removed those silos. We’re a multi-branch company now, with branch-oriented teams. We always try to work together toward meeting the bottom line and Aspire is empowering us to get the results we need.”

Additionally, the company has benefited from the platform's reporting and dashboards features, which helps the team collect, maintain, and measure data. “The information that Aspire provides is accurate—it’s reliable, it’s substantial, it’s easy to access. I really do think that from the management perspective, Aspire has been incredible for what we’ve achieved.”

What's next

Moving forward, Signature Landscape plans to take full advantage of everything Aspire has to offer. This year, the company deployed the equipment module and has started to track not only its assets inventory but also its new equipment purchases, inventory management, and service and maintenance of its fleet.

Wilson says that as a large and growing business, Signature Landscape is always looking for the ability to provide excellent service and drive success by using powerful tools like the Aspire platform. “Aspire has been the tool that we’re using to get to success. If we can do it, I think other companies—big or small—can, too. Aspire provides something for everybody.”