Three months of answering every enquiry inside a minute.
BCW Garden Care is our own family's business, working Melbourne's eastern suburbs. It takes about 15 enquiries a month and it has been running Cushy for three months.
This is what changed, and the bits we are not going to claim.
A phone in the ute and a good memory
You cannot answer a phone while you are behind a mower or on your knees in a garden bed with gloves on. So calls rang out, and the ones that came in as messages sat until the end of the day.
The evening ones were worse. Somebody sits down at seven o'clock, decides the backyard has got away from them, and starts looking. That enquiry would land at 7pm and get answered at nine the next morning, by which time they had messaged two other people.
How long an evening enquiry used to wait. Fourteen hours, every time, and every one of them spent with the customer free to ring somebody else.
Three things, and only three
That is the whole change, and it sounds smaller than it is. Before, a call meant killing the mower, pulling gloves off and finding the phone, or more often not hearing it at all. Now the reply goes out whether anyone heard the phone or not.
Garden care enquiries arrive after work, from people who have finally sat down and decided to do something about the backyard. Those used to sit until the next morning. They do not any more.
Fifteen enquiries a month is not a lot, which is exactly why losing two or three of them to a slow reply mattered. At that volume there is no such thing as a lead you can afford to let sit.
The maths behind it is on the garden care page, where a client is counted at what they are worth over a year rather than per visit.
What we can't tell you yet
Most case studies you read in this industry lead with a number that nobody measured. Here is where ours stops.
We have not published a jobs-won figure. Three months is not long enough to separate the system from a normal seasonal swing, and pretending otherwise would be the exact thing this page is meant to avoid.
We have not put a revenue number on it. Nobody has measured one properly, so there isn't one to give you.
We can't tell you what it does at 60 enquiries a month, because BCW doesn't get 60. If you are running that kind of volume, the honest answer is that we have not tested it in our own business at your size.
“The bit I didn't expect was how much of it was just not having to think about the phone.”
You get used to keeping half an ear out for it all day. Once the replies were going out without us, that stopped, and the work got easier in a way that has nothing to do with leads.
Fair questions about this page
It is our own family's business, which we say plainly rather than dressing it up as an independent case study. It is the business the system was built for first, and it still runs there.
Because nobody has measured one properly over three months, and a made up number would be worth less than no number. When there is a real one, it will go on this page.
At 15 enquiries a month you are well inside the $990 tier, and the maths depends entirely on what a maintenance client is worth to you over a year rather than per visit. The calculator on the garden care page runs it properly.
A mobile phone in a ute and a good memory. Which is what most garden care businesses use, and it works right up until the week it does not.
Ask on the call. It is a family business, not a reference account, so we will not hand out their number without asking them first.
Want the same thing in your business?
Twenty minutes on a call. We'll time how long your enquiries actually sit, and you'll know by the end whether it's worth doing.