Wesley Smith: [0:00] Hey guys, Wesley Smith here, Tree Service Digital, with another episode of “Tree Service Marketing Profits.” Hope everybody’s doing well.
[0:06] I just wanted to do a quick overview demo of Arbostar, which is a tree service/tree care industry‑related software that helps you organize your business. It helps everybody in the business be on the same page, helps organize your business, your accounting, your crew, your invoicing, your estimates. It plugs right into QuickBooks as well.
[0:26] I was impressed by everything that it did. I wanted to put together a quick demo of it. You may be wondering, “What should I do next to my tree service business? We’re kind of disorganized. We have two or three crews. We’re starting to try to organize our business and grow it.”
[0:41] The quickest way that I’ve seen our successful clients grow their business, typically, is by being well‑organized, having everything in one place. A system like ArboStar, there’s several other competitors out there too, there’s one called Jobber, and then there’s other ones like Harbor Gold, SingleOps, and different ones like that.
[0:57] A lot of them are starter, then you outgrow them at some point, they don’t do as much as you need them to do once you get larger. With ArboStar, you can’t outgrow this software. It’s got GPS for your trucks. It’s got an app for the smartphone.
[1:12] You can download it and everybody in the field that’s on your team, the crew leaders, your general manager, people out in the field, your office manager, the owner, you, the sales guys, everybody has got access to this application with ArboStar on their phone. Everybody can be synched up with the schedule for the day, the route and the coordinates measurement to job‑to‑job.
[1:34] Say you get six jobs with two different crews in one day, everybody knows where to go first, second, third. It’s got mapping software for the trees in residential customers yards, for commercial applications, etc. It’s huge what it can do. It’s easy and intuitive to get to learn.
[1:51] I want to do a quick demo on it. I did a demo with ArboStar myself, because I always like to put out things, tools and different things like that on the podcast here.
[2:01] Tree service marketing profits is not only about marketing, but how you can actually grow your business profitably and predictably by having the right things in place to where it makes it easier to manage your business, because after a certain amount of time you got certain personnel. You’ve got people at your business.
[2:16] If everybody’s not on the same page, it’s tough. You’re using sticky notes and regular yellow pads of paper works if you’re in the office, but then the guys outside in the field don’t see what you’re seeing and what you’re doing. This helps you update your client database, all of that stuff. Let’s go through what this looks like.
[2:34] This is ArboStar. It’s all business processes under one roof. You don’t need anything else for your tree service business. Again, if you’re already using QuickBooks or some accounting software, this will integrate with that seamlessly.
[2:51] You can integrate your accounting system with ArboStar in general. If you want to find them online, you can go to ArboStar. There’s no r in Arbo, it’s just arbostar.com. Just do a quick search for ArboStar on Google. You’ll see their website. You can click on it. On this home page here, it goes through all the different elements that it does for your business.
[3:11] It’s got your Customer Relationship Manager with the database, field and equipment management, business analytics, accounting and finance, payment processing, payroll, IP, and text message integration. You can text your clients, “We’re on the way. We’ll be there in 20 minutes.”
[3:28] It’s got automatic follow ups on estimates that you put out in the field, different things like that. You’re always going to be able to keep up with your crew and your sales guys, and everything else. Quality assurance. Human Capital Management, which is your crew, and personnel management, and enterprise planning, as well.
[3:46] It helps you grow your business. It’s awesome with your map view, you got scheduling and dispatching. You can schedule all of your jobs for the day, like I was talking about before. Let’s say you got six or eight for the day already, and you’re going to be all over the city. This helps you map out your day with each one of the crews on the three, four jobs their doing each.
[4:06] You got pricing and quoting in there. It has automatic follow‑up with estimates that your sales guys give out. If your sales guys go on appointment, and they write an estimate, it’s going to be $2,700 for this project. If he has to remove this tree, trim and prune these other trees and haul everything off. It’s $2,700.
[4:21] They leave that with the client. They email it to the client from the app that they’re doing on the site. The client gets the email and text message. It also will follow‑up with them on the parameters that you set.
[4:33] Typically, three to five days later it will send them a follow‑up, “Just wanted to make sure you got the estimates. If you have any questions, we’re ready to book it for you. Let me know.” Then it will follow‑up again a week or so. It’s also got the Integrated Database Manager, you can put all of your clients in there as you’re doing these appointments and estimates.
[4:50] If you’re doing marketing, this is always what we always run into with our clients, if you’re doing marketing and you’re producing 50, 75, 100, 150 leads every single month coming into your business, you need a way to organize that. All that data. Everybody’s name, email, phone number, address, and what type of estimate you gave them needs to be in one central spot.
[5:12] If you have an office manager or personnel that answers the phone for your tree service business, they can enter that information into ArboStar each call that comes in. The next time somebody calls, maybe six months later, they’ve got another project, you guys can look them up. “Hey Sally. Yeah, looks like we took care of two of your trees last time, what is it that you need this time?”
[5:32] It’s more of a personal approach. You guys know your clients better. It’s really cool. It’s got communication between everybody in your office and with your clients, GPS tracking, fleet management, HR management, it’s got an HR plug‑in for you, accounting, finances, detailed reporting.
[5:49] Every month, you can see where your expenses went, how much revenue you produced based on the invoices and the signed contracts that you got from those estimates. Activity log, you can track how many estimates you gave versus how many you closed, all those really cool stuff.
[6:04] If you see right here, it’s a dashboard of a calendar, what went down per salesperson, per crew, different things like that. Did you collect, did you not collect? It has everything in here that you need. It is so robust with everything it has.
[6:19] They’ve got a lot of huge clients that use this already. I think, you guys would love. That would be so great for your business to organize it. I wanted to go through this with you quick.
[6:29] Here’s a presentation, a PowerPoint. It’s completely unique in the most advanced business management platform for the tree care and landscaping industry. You can modify it, customize it per your needs. Start off with a lower plan to get used to it.
[6:43] Keep your client database in one spot, all the communications. They help arborists organize their businesses through facilitated scheduling and accounting by making their workflow easier from quoting to invoicing, and by analyzing all business data to track profit and loss.
[6:58] It does so many things for you and a lot of it is automatic. You put the numbers in. How much was this job? Enter. Did you collect? How many you did that day? It’ll count to your weekly revenue, your monthly revenue, minus your expenses if you wanted to use it for that.
[7:13] Also, integrates with QuickBooks. If you’re already using QuickBooks, it’ll basically pull the data from QuickBooks into ArboStar for a quick view there as well. The ArboStar solution is designed with a modern business in our minds and our client’s interest in our hearts. You can see right here. Here’s the application view.
[7:33] You go to Google Play Store if you’re on Android, or if you’re on a Apple device, you literally go download the application, put it on your phone, and then now you’re talking to the people in the office doing the scheduling, answering the phones, and you can shoot off text messages through the app to the clients. “Hey, we’re 15 minutes away. We’re on the way.”
[7:54] Different things like that make your business so streamlined and so organized, it gives you that appearance of professionalism to the client. That’s what helps you grow ultimately, because people love a good experience, clients do.
[8:07] The best solution on the market for the tree care and landscape industry, ArboStar is robust, secure, and dependable cloud‑based business management platform that maximizes the growth, saves the time and increases the revenue of an arborist’s company of all sizes.
[8:21] Any tree service company size, whether you’ve got one crew and you’re looking to go to two crews, three crews, five crews, several million dollars, you won’t outgrow ArboStar. It has the expanding capabilities to grow with your company and grow as you go. It’s got work flow automation, better team coordination, so everybody out in the field is on the same page.
[8:44] There’s no “Where’s so and so?” “What tree are we supposed to take down?” or any of that stuff. You can mark them with the GPS system on ArboStar while you’re out in the field giving the estimate, and then they know exactly what to do. It reduces your scheduling time, increase in workforce for your sub‑contractors. Helps you manage those guys.
[9:03] Increased customer satisfaction because the communication is second to none. You’re sending people notices that you’re on the way. You’re letting them know the invoice. They can click on the invoice and pay digitally. They don’t have to print out something, write a check. A lot of people like to do these things online these days. This gives you that convenience factor to your clients.
“[9:23] Hey, just click on the invoice, you could just pay right there with a credit card. You don’t have to worry about sending us a check or meeting up with us to pay.” Real‑time visibility into the field operations, resource optimization, increased operational efficiency for sure, because everybody knows what everybody’s doing.
[9:40] Improvement in work order completion rate, so if you do go give estimates, you’re going to sign and close more of them because this system follows up automatically.
[9:49] When your sales guys or arborists are out there in the field, giving these estimates of $2,000, $4,000, $8,000 dollars on these jobs, it’s hard to keep up with all the estimates you’re giving if you don’t have some system. This thing will automatically follow up with text message and with email to each one of the clients after you give that estimate.
[10:06] If they sign the order, pay you a deposit and it will stop with the follow‑ups. From there, you’re scheduling the work to go finish it out. Reduces all your costs too, with a lot of other different things. There’s an integrated CRM where you can create your sales targets and tasks for your team.
[10:23] You automate the communication of when you’re on the way, when you’re leaving, when you’re going to collect the invoice. It’s got service reminders, sales notifications, and follow‑ups, and easy to access client service file.
[10:33] That way you can always see what you did last, six months ago, two years ago, five years ago for each client. It’s got a map, a real‑time view of your leads, your crew, and your equipment location. It’s awesome.
[10:44] You know where everybody’s at, what’s going on. You don’t have any of these questions in your head, like where’s everybody doing? Where are they at? Scheduling and dispatching system will build an efficient service schedule. GPS tracking, you can track all of your vehicles. [laughs] There’s no guessing of where everything is anymore.
[11:02] It’s got a built‑in phone system and texting communication platform. SMS communication so you can actually, again, you can send text messages to your crew members, clients when you’re on the way, anybody. It’s everybody synched up to this system.
[11:16] Fleet management, you can manage your entire fleet of trucks, chippers, everything. Estimating system determines the right price using artificial intelligence based on location, crew size, and equipment required. You can also do your own estimates manually, easily as well.
[11:33] Invoicing, easily view outstanding invoices. If somebody has not paid, that becomes a job in itself. To track down everybody that hasn’t paid their invoice or completed the invoice. Maybe they paid a third or they paid two‑thirds and you’re still waiting to collect the last part.
[11:48] This system will automatically notify and follow‑up to get your pay, get your clients to pay the rest of it. It does your finances as well. You got HR management, activity log, or what’s been going on for the day, detailed reporting. You get to see real‑time, what’s going on in a report fashion, as well.
[12:08] It does credit card processing. You don’t even have to worry about paying for credit card processing aside from what, maybe, right now you’re using Square or one of the other credit card processing systems. It’s already costing you.
[12:20] ArboStar already got it built‑in, you don’t have to have a separate system for that, and it does your accounting. The mobile app is for super convenient access. You download it to your phone, and literally, it does probably 95 percent of what the online version does on the computer. While you’re out in the field, you can still communicate.
[12:39] You can still see outstanding invoices. You can see estimates, you can text the clients. Everybody knows what’s going on at all times, which makes your business more efficient. This way, this is the only way, in my opinion.
[12:53] If you want to grow a business and you want to have a business that has three crews, four crews, five crews, and get up to 3, 4, 5, 10 million dollar tree service business, you have to be super organized. Otherwise, you just have too many leaks of communication, too many leaks of revenue, too many invoices that fall through the cracks, estimates that don’t get followed on.
[13:13] There’s too much of that going on. When you have a very efficient system to plug into and everybody’s on the same sheet of music every day, it just makes everything so much easier. It actually allows you to scale your business. Otherwise, you’re shooting in the dark.
[13:29] People have grown a business the other way, but you still have to be organized, even if you’re going to do it with paper, but why do everything with paper? If you learn the tool, everybody in your team can learn the tool.
[13:40] That can be part of your training when you first get started is learn the ArboStar tool when you bring on new crew members. You prioritize safety with ArboStar. It’s got all different kinds of things. You can schedule, and modules, and stuff like that.
[13:56] All these other cool little add‑on things like, near‑miss accident forms, with the missing accident reporting forms, module, your employees can also promptly report on major situations, allowing you to always be aware of what’s happening.
[14:08] Estimator statistics. If you got sales guys and they’re out there given estimates in the field, you can see which sales guys are the most efficient, which ones are closing the most revenue, closing the highest percentage of estimates given, and what their sales closing ratio is.
[14:23] That’s good to see as well, if you’re trying to keep sales guys on board and things like that, who’s producing, who’s not, sometimes it can be tough to keep up with that. You’ve got a cool plug‑in tree inventory. This is awesome too.
[14:35] If you do commercial work, even residential, somebody’s got a big property with lots of trees. You can create, manage and use your own inventory with ease. It’s a pre‑installed tree base that has an aerial view of the GPS satellite. It sees the trees from the Google Earth satellite view.
[14:57] It may not be Google Earth. It’s an earth satellite that comes down, and you can see in this particular picture on this presentation, look at that how clear it is.
[15:06] It’s coming from a satellite and this image will show you the trees that are onsite. You know which tree to trim, remove, prune, spray, whatever it is that you’re doing out in the field to these trees. You can mark these and then your crew has zero questions about which tree it is.
[15:23] It’s coordinated to that specific tree from the inventory of the tree inventory system. Your crew’s going to know what to do. There’s not going to be any missing steps or their questions when they get out there. Their customer service is amazing. You can call our ArboStar or you can email our ArboStar, committed to deeply understanding your business and the challenges. They want to make your life easier with this system.
[15:46] Any system, no system is perfect, but they do have a great support that I found too because I’ve tested it a few times and they always answer the phone and get back to you right away. Your office staff can always be on top of that thing too, but they go through an onboarding phase with you.
[16:01] If you sign up with them and help you get everything up to par and plugin the most important things from the beginning. You can start using it, getting more familiar with it. Eventually, you keep expanding all the things you’re using it for.
[16:16] It becomes this asset for your business. If you ever want to sell your business, let’s say your goal is to build it up to three million dollars and then sell it, a tool like this makes it exponentially easier to sell your company down the road. If you were looking to do something like that, simply because all your clients are in the database, all of your revenue numbers are in the database.
[16:34] All of your personnel people are in the database. You’ve got a system to track everything, organize everything. You’re going to get a huge return on investment with something like this, because you can see a path and a clear road to grow in your business, otherwise, there’s no way to do it, if you don’t have that.
[16:51] Here’s a couple of those statistics that they’ve got at the bottom of this presentation. By using this system, they see a reduction in drive time by about 35 percent, because everybody knows exactly where to go to and from point A to point B.
[17:06] Each job increase of equipment uptime by 20 percent, because you’ve got systems and processes to keep your tools and your trucks and everything maintained. Improvement in technical productivity by 33 percent. MHR calculations increased the productivity of the crew by 15 percent. You got marketing analytics help to decrease customer acquisition costs by 30 percent.
[17:29] Again, the follow‑up tools are going to help tremendously with getting more of those estimates that you give in the field to turn into paying customers, because follow‑up is the key to any business. Automatic follow‑up sales confirmation increased by 20 percent when people plug this in simply because there is a process for follow up.
[17:48] It text messages the client, and it emails the client. I don’t know what else you could possibly do to get a better response than that, because we see this all the time with our marketing. If you’re texting and emailing with the follow up, you’re going to significantly increase the people that move forward with your services.
[18:04] A lot of people want to do it, they were busy for a few days or put it on the back burner. Those follow ups come in, and they’re like, “You know what? Let’s go and get it done now.” It really helps. It helps reduce company expenses by average of 12 percent, right out of the gate.
[18:18] If you think about it, if you’re doing a million dollars a year and your expenses for various tools and processes and procedures, let’s say, they’re 10 percent or a $100,000 for some of your expenses, this’ll reduce that by 12 percent right out of the gate, easily paying for the service.
[18:34] They got a lot of reviews and ratings. You can see them online if you want to. Again, you can go to this website, and they’ve got their partners on here, they’ve got testimonials on here. Testimonials of tree doctors, frequently asked questions, blogs, different things like that.
[18:48] It’s really cool and I thought it was something that I wanted to bring to you guys attention because it helps organize your business and it helps you predictably grow your business, along with the marketing.
[18:58] If you’re doing a lot of marketing, getting a lot of leads, putting a lot of customer information into a database, google drive sheet or excel spreadsheet, you need to get a system like this because its going to put all that on steroids. Its going to get you on the fast track to growing your business.
[19:13] Whereas, if you’re doing the same thing you’re doing now for a year or two, you’re not going to get that much further ahead. If you use a system like this for the next year or two, you’re going to exponentially grow your database, your client database. Your communications are going to improve tremendously. You’re going to sign more estimates that are given in the field.
[19:29] You’re going to reduce windshield time, because you’re going to have a system that coordinates your stops everyday. I mean, it’s awesome. It does all this stuff for you. Everybody is going to be appreciative of that in your business because they’re all going to like it too. If you want to get a demo with these guys, go ahead and get on their website here, which is arbostar.com.
[19:49] I’ll have it in the show notes of the podcast episode that you’re listening to, or on the YouTube channel. I’ll have everything in the description of the YouTube video, where you can click on the link, book a demo with them. I’ve also got a nice discount code. If you enter this discount code if you do end up ordering the service, it’ll give you a percentage off of your monthly billing with ArboStar.
[20:10] We’ve come into an arrangement together. I was impressed with the system when I did a demo a good couple of weeks ago. I’m excited to bring it to my audience because it’s a really good system. ArboStar, it’s very robust, it does everything you need to grow your company.
[20:23] I’ve got a discount code. It’s TSDO2021, and I’ll put this in the description as well, where you can copy and paste it. If you’re checking out, buying ArboStar, getting set up with a trial, or anything like that, you can enter in this code and you can copy and paste it. It’ll be in the show notes of the podcast episode or in the YouTube video.
[20:56] If you have any questions, you can give me a shout, or I can put you in touch with a demo person at ArboStar. Again, you can go to their website, arbostar.com. At the very top right, if you’re watching this video you can see the tab there, it says Request a Demo. Schedule one there. Then use our discount code for a better price monthly on it.
[21:15] Hope you got some value out of this, excited to share ArboStar, what all it does for tree service companies and trying to bring some good value to our listeners here at “Tree Service Marketing Profits.”
[21:25] Hope everybody has a good day. Until next time, we’ll talk to you then. Thanks a lot.
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