Q&A: How James Szojka Grew Yard Dawgs With RealGreen
RealGreen recently had a chance to talk with James Szojka, owner of Yard Dawgs, a Canada-based lawn care company he founded 10 years ago as a college student. We talked about how he got into the lawn care business, how he envisions the future of his business, how RealGreen is helping Yard Dawgs thrive and so much more.
RG: Can you tell us a little bit about your company? How did you get started in lawn care?
YD: I had just finished my first year of university in Calgary. I looked at my tuition bill and thought: I should probably do something about this. I took a job selling lawn aerators door-to-door. I realized I could make more money if I bought an aerator myself and sold aeration services instead. So I enlisted a buddy to help, and that’s what we did all summer.
Now, I was bad at sales, but I was also willing to learn. My biggest advice for anyone wanting to start a company is to start now. It only gets harder later on as you have more going on in life. The younger you are, the more willing you are to take that chance.
Today, 10 years later, Yard Dawgs Lawn Care is servicing more than 5,000 lawns annually. We want to grow five times that size in the next five years. Next year (2025), we plan to expand to four different cities; we’re just in one city right now.
RG: What made you decide to go with RealGreen over other software choices?
YD: Five years into our company, we were doing anything a customer would ask us to do. But the problem was that we were becoming jacks of all trades and masters of none. So we had to determine where the least competition was, where our highest margins were, and what we truly believed we could be the best at. We determined that it was making lawns green, healthy, and weed-free.
So when we started doing that, we were using a CRM that didn’t cater to that type of business; we were doing what a lot of people in that situation do, which was using a CRM and trying to adjust it to us. However, it got very complex, and the result was that we had to do a lot of manual tasks and work until 10 or 11PM every night, just trying to make everything work, schedule-wise.
We were having a really hard time growing at that point. We were graduating from university, I was getting married — we told ourselves we needed to either drop this Yard Dawgs thing or devote ourselves to it full-time and see what happens.
We knew from talking to several mentors in the lawn care space that one of the most important parts of succeeding in this industry is having a strong foundation, and part of that is having a solid CRM you are not going to outgrow and can support you in all the different things you are doing — and RealGreen was the answer.
Our mentors at large companies told us: You can look at these other softwares, but RealGreen will be elemental to your growth. It was a non-negotiable. It was the foundation. So we just decided to go for it.
It was more than we thought we could afford at the time, and it was a huge thing to adopt, but we wanted to do it right. So, we took the time to do things properly and saw it as an investment in our business. With RealGreen, you already have everything you need built-in, so you do not have to do workarounds, twists and knots along the way. It’s already made for you.
During our first five years in business, we used four different CRMs. RealGreen was the fifth and final CRM we chose. Before RealGreen, we had 200 customers a year doing fertilizer and weed control services. By our second year of using RealGreen we were up to 3,000 customers. As I mentioned earlier, in our fifth year, we’re at 5,000 customers — and growing.
RG: Can you give an example of how RealGreen has helped Yard Dawgs become more efficient?
YD: One very important way is through building route density. We can only do lawn care from May 1 to September 30 — so every minute truly matters. And windshield time is one of the biggest profit killers. Any time you’re not doing lawns, you’re just commuting — and you’re not getting paid to commute. You’re paying your employees, but you’re not making any money. Something as seemingly minute as which side of the truck each house is on — you want to make sure the house is on the right side because that’s where your hoses and spreaders come out. If it’s on the left, no big deal, but you have to turn around. You start doing that again and again. With other CRMs, that kind of thing won’t even show up. Little things like that add up, especially when you’re in a high-volume, low-ticket business like a lot of residential lawn care companies are.
There are a few things from RealGreen that have made routing a game-changer — that’s one of the most powerful things it can do. The way it routes the jobs, the way it makes everything very visual for you and the way it can organize on such a granular level. The fact that you’re going to be able to route a couple more jobs per day, or maybe even a couple dozen more jobs per day, it’s built for growth.
RG: Are there other ways you would say RealGreen has helped you grow?
YD: RealGreen is definitely a huge part of our growth.
People buy lawn care not because they can’t do it themselves but because they don’t want to. When you hire a company, the last thing you want is to deal with a billing mishap, missed service, or other customer service snafus. Otherwise, they could just do it themselves. It’s very important to create a headache-free, frictionless customer service experience. RealGreen enables us to do that. We can answer any question they have; we have the history and the data to answer their questions, and we can service them with the professionalism and speed they are looking for.
When you can do that, you can charge premium prices. We are the most expensive lawn care company in our city. Everybody else has to lowball prices because they don’t have their data together and can’t provide the same level of service we can.
RG: What would you say to someone in your position who might feel like they’re outgrowing their software, or their software isn’t meeting their needs, but they’re hesitant to switch because it feels so disruptive?
YD: I know this is cliche advice, but you have got to rip off the bandaid. I believe the cost of staying the same is greater than the cost of change. People usually say, I want to stick with my CRM because it’s the devil I know, and it’s affordable. OK, sure.
But I look at it this way: The constraints you face using an inferior product will cost you more than the monthly cost of the proper tool. For example, a screwdriver is definitely cheaper than a power drill. But the second you have to drill a thousand screws a day, it is worth paying that difference in cost for how much more you are going to be able to do. RealGreen is the exact same thing.
You’re going to be able to route more jobs. You can have credit cards charged automatically and renewed automatically. Automated pre- and post-service notifications. All of these things and more are automated, and you can customize them in any way you see fit. In our experience, just using condition codes correctly pays for our RealGreen subscription — and that’s not an option that was available with our previous CRM.
A condition code is simply a recommendation that the technician can check off on their device to show what services they saw a customer had and what their lawn actually needs. An example: I see that a customer’s soil is very acidic around their pine trees, and we have a product that will help balance the pH in the soil. When I select that condition code, it triggers an automatic email to that customer recommending this soil treatment, which they can then accept on the spot. People buy that way.
I’ll reiterate: That one tool alone paid for our entire CRM.
RG: Earlier, you mentioned wanting to expand. You’ve already grown so much, so fast — how do you envision your software making it easier for you to expand?
YD: I’m very excited about this expansion because it won’t cause many headaches when it comes to our CRM. Why? Say a customer calls in from another city; all it takes is a salesperson selecting the different branch of our company, and everything else is the same. The programs are the same, the way we sell is the same and the way we charge credit cards is the same, it’s just going to a different branch.
Operation-wise, nothing needs to change. It’s all on RealGreen. There might be some stress, but I’m not stressing how our CRM will sync between locations because that’s done at the click of a button.
Thanks to James for taking the time to talk with us about how RealGreen has helped Yard Dawgs accelerate their growth! We’re excited to see what they accomplish in the years to come. James will also be speaking at our 2025 Beyond Service User Conference, which will take place February 2-5 in Dallas, TX. Find out more about Beyond Service and secure your spot here.
