In this business, the calendar is the customer.
Your revenue doesn't arrive when a lead comes in. It arrives on dates you already know — the November prepay letter, the February renewal, the September aeration round, the snow contract that has to be signed before October 1.
Most software helps you chase leads. We build the year: the campaigns that fire on those dates, the agreements that capture a card at signing, and the payment rails that mean the money lands the same day the customer says yes.
We didn't guess at your business.
This kit was designed against how lawn care and landscaping companies really operate — two businesses under one roof, a route that decides your margin, and a season that compresses a year of cash flow into about thirty weeks.
Recurring sells like a subscription. Projects sell like jobs.
Maintenance runs on season contracts, autopay and annual renewal. Design-build runs on consultations, renderings and deposits. Run them on one board and both get managed badly — so you get two.
The address decides everything, and it's the first question.
In-zone or out-of-zone changes whether a lead is worth winning at all. Route density is the margin in this trade, so qualification happens before the quote — not after a truck has already driven there.
“Agreement signed and card on file” is a stage, not a nice-to-have.
The best operators won't put a property on the schedule until season terms are signed and an autopay token is captured. That's a pipeline gate, and your board should enforce it.
Quotes don't die. They drift.
“Call me in the spring” is not a loss — it's a date. Most follow-up systems throw that away. Yours captures the deferral and brings the customer back on the day they asked for.
Two pipelines, with the stages this trade actually uses.
Not a blank CRM you have to design. These are the boards your account opens with — the green marker is the gate the industry's best operators refuse to skip.
Recurring maintenance
- New Inquiry
- Route-Qualified
- Quoted
- Agreement Signed / Card on File
- Scheduled on Route
- Active — In Season
- Renewal / Prepay
Projects & design-build
- Consultation Scheduled
- Design In Progress
- Design Presented
- Agreement + Deposit
- Scheduled / Materials
- In Progress
- Completed / Walkthrough
- Convert to Maintenance
Your revenue calendar, turned into campaigns.
The single biggest difference between a good year and a great one in this trade isn't lead volume — it's whether the seasonal money events actually happen on time, every time.
The prepay ladder runs as three scheduled campaigns on the documented dates — ~10% expiring Dec 1, then ~7%, then ~5% — each carrying a pay link. Anyone who pays drops out of the next rung automatically.
Renewal notice goes out with the escalator stated plainly, announced in the off-season and never mid-contract. Prepaid customers are exempted from the increase — the perk that feeds next year's ladder.
Early-bird and priority-scheduling offers to your existing and past customers first, then the spring push. When capacity fills, leads join a waitlist instead of being dropped.
Aeration and overseeding — the year's biggest upsell — goes to every mow-only customer automatically. The snow-contract conversion runs to your maintenance base before the October 1 deadline.
Speed-to-lead, with the route gate
Every lead source — web form, chat, Facebook, Google, missed call — gets an instant text and lands on the board. The intake asks for the address first, and out-of-zone requests route to a decline or a price-up rule.
Missed-call text-back
A missed call sends the caller a text immediately and notifies the office, with a separate after-hours version. In a trade where nobody answers on the mower, this is the cheapest lead recovery there is.
Quote follow-up that captures deferrals
Automatic check-ins at day 2, 5 and 10, then a call task — each carrying one-click “remind me in 10 days / 30 days / next spring.” The deferral is captured as a date, not lost as a no.
Agreement to onboarding
Season terms e-signed with the card captured in the same motion, then first-visit expectations, route and service-day assignment, and gate, dog and access notes confirmed before the first mow.
Card-expiry outreach
Chasing starts 30 days before a stored card lapses, with a link to re-capture it by text. Every expired card nobody caught is a customer who quietly never renews.
Reviews, referrals and the neighbor play
The review ask fires the day the work is done, while the property looks its best, gated so happy customers go to Google. After every project, a task to hit the five nearest neighbors — route density is the margin.
In-season touchpoints
Service-window reminders, weather-delay and skipped-visit notices, care instructions auto-sent after fertilization or seeding, and a storm-day broadcast for the snow lane.
Win-back, personalized to the reason
Spring and fall campaigns to lapsed customers, written to the reason they left. “We miss you” underperforms; “your lawn is due for its pre-emergent” doesn't.
Compliance rails, on from day one
STOP/HELP handling, consent capture, unsubscribe and broadcast caps — plus a pesticide-notification list and pre-application notice template for the states that require one.
Nobody in your market answers fast. That's the opening.
Speed to the first response is the one advantage in this trade that costs nothing to hold and that almost no competitor actually holds.
More likely to qualify a lead when the first contact happens inside the first hour, across ~1.25 million leads studied by Harvard Business Review.
Of contractors respond to an inbound inquiry within five minutes. The other ~88% are the reason a text sent in ninety seconds wins the job.
The average first-response time HBR measured. Your missed-call text-back answers before the prospect has put the phone down.
Typical customer retention in this industry — which is exactly why the renewal engine and the card-expiry chase are worth more than another lead source.
Figures are published industry research, shown to illustrate where the opportunity sits — they are not a projection of your results. The response-time studies are cross-industry and directionally relevant to home services rather than native to it. Retention is an industry median; yours will differ.
Your first thirty days.
Configuration is ours, not yours. Here's the sequence — and the two points where we need something only you can give us.
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Days 1–3
Your account is built, not handed to you blank
Both pipelines, your service menu, lot-size and turf-measurement fields, service types, lost-reason list, route zones and service days — all created and named for lawn care before you log in the first time.
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Days 3–7
Lead capture goes live
Web form, chat widget and your Google Business Profile wired to the intake that asks for the address first. Missed-call text-back switched on. Every source tagged so you can see which ones actually produce.
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Week 2
Two things we need from you
Text-message registration and your sending domain both require a real human with your business details — regulation, not paperwork we invented. We prepare the submissions; you approve and sign. This is the one step that sets your go-live date.
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Week 3
Payments connected
Your Square account and dual-priced invoicing go live: e-signed season agreements that capture a card, deposit invoicing for projects, and text-to-pay links ready for the prepay campaigns.
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Week 4
The calendar is armed
Prepay ladder, renewal engine, aeration upsell, snow conversion and win-back all scheduled against your season dates and your discount ladder — then they run whether or not anyone remembers them.
Every automation ends at a payment. So we own that part too.
Follow-up that ends in “I'll send an invoice” is half a system. Your account runs on Square for processing, with dual-priced invoicing on top — the cash price is the price, and a customer paying by card sees the card price beside it and chooses.
Dual pricing on the volume you already run
Autopay contracts, prepay season and project deposits add up to steady card volume at ~3% in processing. Dual pricing hands that cost back. Your November check-payers notice nothing — they already pay the cash price.
E-signed estimates that become deposit invoices
Your own rule is no install without a signed agreement and a down payment. Sign the proposal, the deposit invoice fires, it's paid by link, the install gets scheduled — same day, not two weeks later.
Card on file that makes renewal automatic
Stored-card charging is what lets the season renew without a phone call, makes a per-push snow job billable the morning after the storm, and turns card expiry into a link instead of a voicemail.
Text-to-pay, because that's where your customers are
Visit reminders, weather delays and review asks already live in SMS. Each prepay campaign and every deposit invoice carries a pay link in the same thread.
Two plans. Month to month.
Everything above is included in both — the pipelines, the seasonal campaigns, the payment rails. The difference is how much marketing and reporting surface you want on top.
- CRM and both pipelines
- Unified inbox — text, email, chat
- Calendar and online booking
- Website and funnels
- Forms and surveys
- AI lead follow-up
- Payments and invoicing
- Everything in Starter
- Full marketing suite
- Reputation management
- Social planner
- Memberships
- Documents and contracts — the e-signed season agreement
- Advanced reporting
- Priority support
Fair questions.
My customers mail checks. Dual pricing will scare them off.
This is the easy case. The cash price is their price — nothing changes for a check-payer, including during prepay season when checks are the tradition. The card price is shown alongside and the customer chooses every time. Nobody is surcharged in the dark.
All my autopay customers are on another processor. Switching sounds like a nightmare.
Straight answer: saved cards don't transfer between providers, so every autopay customer re-authorizes once. Two things make it manageable — re-capture is a text with a link, under a minute; and renewal season gives you a natural window to fold it into a message you were already sending.
I already run Jobber. I don't want to rip that out.
Don't. Your field-service software stays the source of truth for dispatch, routing and job costing — that's the documented best-practice split in this industry. What moves is the marketing, the follow-up and the money.
Is this just a generic CRM with a lawn care sticker on it?
No. The stage names above are the stages your board actually opens with. The prepay ladder dates, the route gate, the September aeration round and the October 1 snow deadline are in the build because this trade runs on them — they are not settings you have to discover and configure yourself.
Your prepay letters go out in early November.
Board now and this year's ladder runs on the new rails.
Automate With Us provides software and configuration services. Figures shown are published industry research or illustrative examples — they are not projections, guarantees, or representations of the results you should expect. Individual results depend on your market, pricing, capacity and execution. Processing costs vary by card mix and volume; the ~3% figure is illustrative and your effective rate will differ. Payment processing is provided through Square and is subject to Square's approval and terms. Text-message and email sending are subject to carrier and regulatory registration. Terms · Privacy