From Hours to Minutes: How Dynamic Routing
Revolutionized Barefoot Grass’s Operations
The Company:
Florida-based Barefoot Grass provides professional lawn care and pest control services for residential and commercial customers. They understand the unique challenges of Florida lawns and offer customized solutions to keep yards healthy, green and pest-free.
The Problem:
In just three years in business, Barefoot Grass has grown from an initial small base of around 100 accounts up to 3,000 — a massive increase in a short time. While the company was initially using RealGreen, they briefly switched to Briostack, only to quickly return to RealGreen because of its superior reporting, routing and other lawn-specific capabilities. Owner Kaleb Karnes says he made the move back because he was taking the long view, considering where he wanted his company to be over the next 10 to 20 years.
“We knew we wanted rapid growth, and we knew that RealGreen can handle bigger companies. It was clear that with RealGreen, we’d have a good partnership going forward,” he explains.
After returning to RealGreen, Karnes realized that team members were spending a long time on routing. “Our team members wear a lot of different hats, so efficiency really matters. We saw that people were spending up to two hours a day on routing — they’d get lost in it trying to perfect every route. That’s when we decided to switch to Dynamic Routing.”
The Solution:
Upgrading to RealGreen’s new Dynamic Routing platform has proven to be a major time-saver for the entire staff. “Routing Assistant required a lot of steps that Dynamic Routing doesn’t,” says Karnes. “I’d have to print invoices, check everything thoroughly, apply various filters and import data into routing. Then I had to map routes, assign them to individuals, print invoices again, organize loose work in a specific order and spend significant time rearranging them since the optimization wasn’t always ideal. Finally, I’d reprint invoices in the correct sequence. It’s a much more complex process than Dynamic Routing.”
In contrast, says Karnes, with Dynamic Routing, “I let it do the work. It is super efficient and I can just let it do its thing.”
The Results:
The team saw significant time savings right off the bat — from several hours spent on routing down to around 20 minutes. “I might take a little bit longer because I’m super picky, but generating the route itself takes no time at all.”
Another benefit of Dynamic Routing, says Karnes, is the ease with which he can pass routing duties on to others. “I don’t want to be doing the routing forever,” he notes. With Dynamic Routing, when someone has a question, it’s super easy for me to just point to something and say, ‘Assign this to this person,’ and they can pick it up from there. With Routing Assistant, as I mentioned earlier, there are multiple steps: filtering out certain items, specifying how many days each service needs, assigning people to tasks – it gets messy, and it’s easy to miss things. So it’s definitely easier to have somebody use Dynamic Routing.”
“It frees me up to check on other people and ensure everything’s getting done instead of sitting at my computer until the end of the day. Sometimes I even get to leave early because I don’t need to stay until 6 o’clock doing routing tasks,” adds Karnes. “I can spend time managing other staff, making sure things are running smoothly in the warehouse or with the salespeople. I can even get out in the field with our door-to-door sales associates to check that everything’s going okay. Not having to return to the office at 1PM when I’m out with our sales team is significant — I can come back at 2:45, finish by 3:15 and still have a couple of hours left in my day. This makes a real difference.”
Beyond the clear improvements in overall efficiencies, Barefoot sees significant value in the new system. Karnes says he appreciates the technician-specific filtering capability, which enables them to pinpoint which services each tech can perform, preventing errors like assigning mosquito treatments to unqualified staff. Another benefit is route consistency — keeping technicians operating in familiar geographic areas — which has been an important goal for the team. Dynamic Routing also excels at multi-service management, making it simple to coordinate various offerings like lawn care, pest control, shrub treatments and mosquito services. The team can easily select each service type and set specific timelines, with the system handling it all automatically.
Karnes also notes that the initial time investment to get the system set up properly is more than worth it. “In the long run, do you really want to be taking two hours every day to set up routes for the entire time you’re in this business? We knew we didn’t. With Dynamic Routing, the more information you give it, the more efficient and accurate it will be.”
