How Senske Services Uses RealGreen by WorkWave to Power Growth
“It’s a night and day difference.”
The Company:
Founded in Spokane, Washington, in 1947, Senske has been providing excellent service to its customers for more than 75 years. From its humble beginnings with just three employees, including founder Bill Senske, the company has expanded its footprint to include locations in Washington, Utah, Idaho, Colorado, and more recently, Maryland and Virginia. Senske provides pest control, lawn care, and arbor care services. They have been a RealGreen customer since 2016.
The Challenge: Growing Pains
Recently Senske has undergone rapid growth, acquiring nine different businesses over the past year alone. While this is an obvious positive for the company, creating additional revenue and opportunities while expanding its geographical footprint, it also created some real challenges.
While Senske itself has used RealGreen for 7 years, some of its acquisitions did not. Meanwhile, the acquisitions that were already RealGreen customers didn’t necessarily utilize the program in the ways Senske needed them to. The company was looking for ways to bring everyone on board with the least amount of disruption while also creating across-the-board efficiencies and performance improvements.
The Solution: Tailor-Made Customer Service
“One of the things we leaned heavily into in 2022 was RealGreen’s Professional Services,” says Richard DeWolf, Director of Business Solutions for Senske. “As a company, we were able to dedicate specific resources to how we do our reporting, how we do acquisitions, and how all of that data migration is handled.” RealGreen’s Professional Services team worked directly with the team at Senske to help create a workable strategy, while also working directly with new acquisitions to smooth the transition and get them up and running on the system, to everyone’s benefit.
According to DeWolf, “Leaning into the Professional Services team helped us with brainstorming solutions – how do we accomplish this? How do we get this to the finish line as fast and efficiently as possible? That changed our strategy on how we handle acquisitions and how we bring on those customers. Being able to partner directly with the team face-to-face, and not just saying to someone – here’s your instruction manual, figure it out and do with it what you will. We were able to work with a team to accomplish those things in a great way.”
The Value: One Platform, Amazing Results
Deploying RealGreen across the entire company has been a win-win-win – for Senske, its acquisitions and its customers. According to CEO Casey Taylor, Senske has doubled its revenue since starting with RealGreen in 2016. “It really separates us from the competition,” says DeWolf. “It’s designed to support different markets, it’s designed to support different locations, and there’s an ease to it that allows you to think outside the box. If there are markets you want to go into where you currently do not have a footprint, you can set those up and grow organically that way. [RealGreen] helps us get a 10,000 foot view, but it also allows us the ability to get a granular look at our individual markets and individual customers.”
For recent acquisitions who either weren’t RealGreen customers or weren’t utilizing all of RealGreen’s capabilities, there are additional benefits as well. DeWolf cites the example of a company that did not have the ability to take credit card payments. “Now, we have that ability. So is that a value-add for that customer base we’ve acquired? Yeah, absolutely.”
“The way we can communicate with our customers gives us versatility that competitors don’t have: If customers prefer to receive an email or text message, two days prior to service or the day of, we have all of those abilities built-in within the system,” continues DeWolf. “RealGreen offers us the ability to get a good level set of where we are as a company – whether it’s how many customers have canceled or how many customers have been sold or what was our average application price, and all of those things are at our fingertips in the system. I’ve seen the flip side where a company doesn’t have that ability, and for them to tell us how much service and how much revenue it is for us to purchase from them meant going through a shoebox with 3X5 notecards and creating a spreadsheet from that. It’s a night and day difference.”
