About 1 powerful concept…..
Several years ago, while I already had a full time job working as a Data Architect and Modeler in the Information Technology field, I started a Lawn and Landscape business for my son about the time he was finishing up his freshman year of high school.
I had always enjoyed yard work and landscaping and the beauty it would bring – which I mostly learned from my grandfather (this man could pick up any leaf off the ground and tell you what tree it was from) – and thought this would be a good field for my son (and me) to go into. I knew that this type of business would give my son, who was already a hard worker anyway, a chance to see the reward of what hard work can do – in this case a financial opportunity – if you do a good job for your customers.
June 2016 – The business began small with a very slow Husqvarna lawn tractor, a trailer, a jeep with a hitch, a small gas blower, a few work tools (like shovels, pick axes, rakes, hatchets and so on) and some very cheap home store weed eaters. Little did we know that in no time at all we would be handling more customers than we could shake a stick at. The regular cumbersome writing down and scheduling of customers, keeping up with jobs, generating invoices and a host of other management tasks became way too much to address with a manual method – especially when you added suppliers and supplier products to the mix.
I had looked for other lawn and landscape management applications on the internet to cover the wide area of items that we needed to track, however, they only presented certain features that we needed and didn’t give you a complete set of all the components available to fully manage a lawn and landscape business; not only that but they were expensive, quirky and cumbersome to learn.
Siting at my desk and thinking through the process of what all I really needed to manage, track and report on, it hit me – since there wasn’t any one system or application that met my needs, I decided with my background in programming and understanding of data structures and modeling that I should just build my own. I made a conscious effort to encompass every aspect about managing and maintaining customers, jobs, employees, schedules, suppliers, products, employees, reports and more.
I wanted the system that I built to not only be powerful but also user friendly and visually appealing (what is it about the complexity of applications these days – you shouldn’t have to have a degree in computer science to be able to manage your business) and to be able to use a program that is available on most computers with a Microsoft Office suite of tools – Microsoft Access. Thus a powerful concept that turned into reality – Lawn Bytes was born!!
The application – always with the end customer in mind – will always undergo continuous review, based on your feedback, to make sure key features are placed in scope. For those in Lawn and Landscape management this should ensuring efficiency, ease of operation and visual appeal so it doesn’t hurt your eyes when you use it.
As you gain experience with the Lawn Bytes application make a mental note of what might be a good feature or features that could be beneficial to your every day management needs – we would appreciate any feedback to make the application as user friendly and robust as possible. If interested in purchasing, you can click This Link or simply click Purchase Lawn Bytes at the top of the page. Thanks for your consideration!
(p.s. – for those wondering we did eventually upgrade to more professional equipment).
