The Grass Isn’t Greener: Why Weedex Left FieldRoutes and Returned to RealGreen
The Company:
Established in 2001, family-owned Weedex Lawn Care offers a comprehensive portfolio of lawn care solutions to residential customers in the Dallas-Fort Worth Metroplex region in Texas. Their mission is to deliver the highest-quality results while maintaining exceptional customer care and communication. They were originally a RealGreen customer before switching to FieldRoutes in 2022. After just one year on FieldRoutes, they moved back to RealGreen in 2023 and have remained with RealGreen since.
The Problem:
After switching their business to FieldRoutes software, Weedex immediately started experiencing significant operational challenges. The platform proved inadequate for managing pre-paid customers and credits, lacked a functional customer portal, and presented persistent difficulties with routing, scheduling, and financial reporting. The Weedex team discovered that FieldRoutes simply didn’t offer the specialized features and functionality required for lawn care operations. Integration with other essential business tools also proved problematic. The issues were so severe that Weedex staff engaged in daily troubleshooting calls with FieldRoutes developers for six consecutive months, attempting to resolve the mounting problems.
Before switching to FieldRoutes, Weedex had roughly 12,000 customers. According to Chief Operating Officer Brennen Weir, that single year with FieldRoutes cost the company 16% of their clients, bringing their total customer base to just 10,000. “Our average customer tenure dropped from 4.5-5 years to around 3.3 years because of the financials. When you start messing with people’s money — telling them they owe you money when they don’t — they only have so much patience.”
These issues created a cascading effect on Weedex’s team, impacting employee morale and productivity. Route managers suffered financially, losing $500-$700 in monthly performance bonuses due to declining customer retention rates. Meanwhile, technicians endured daily confrontations over persistent scheduling, billing and service discrepancies caused by the software.
“It’s one thing to have a frustrated customer because they’re upset about how their yard looks. Our team knows how to handle that; we can fix that,” says Weedex Chief Executive Officer Felisha Weir. “The difference is that the whole year we were on FieldRoutes, we were dealing with frustrated customers who weren’t mad about their yards, they were mad because they didn’t know we were coming out. They hadn’t been scheduled in four months. Their billing was wrong. They got charged for something they shouldn’t.”
Both agree that the aftermath was costly. “The year that we were on [FieldRoutes], we were doing everything we could just to keep our heads above water and make sure that the business was still running,” notes Brennen Weir, explaining that the entire year after returning to RealGreen was spent recovering from the transition, focusing on reconciling accounts and retaining staff amid the frustration and workflow disruptions. The company had to take a $170,000 loss on top of everything else.
“I don’t know what [FieldRoutes] has done since we’ve left in the last year and a half, but there was nothing in that software that benefitted a lawn care company.”
The Solution:
After their difficult experience, Weedex recognized the critical importance of returning to RealGreen’s purpose-built software for the lawn care industry. At necessity, RealGreen offered a way to correct the setbacks experienced after using a generic field solution. Even more, though, RealGreen’s specialized platform delivered key capabilities fine-tuned to Weedex’s needs, including:
- Pre-payment functionality, which is used to properly manage and track service credits for annual programs and package deals
- Associated service routing, which optimizes technician routes to complete related treatments efficiently within geographic clusters, maximizing daily productivity
- Post-service communication, which automates post-service notifications to build customer trust through service transparency
- Comprehensive customer portal, which provides service history and payment options while presenting strategic upsell opportunities based on property characteristics
- Seasonal scheduling, which offers even more specialized capabilities to manage cyclical staffing and service needs
- Lawn-specific measurement tools, which deliver accurate property measurement and estimation capabilities
The transition challenges Weedex encountered highlighted how even promising software can create significant operational disruptions when it lacks industry-specific functionality. Additionally, Weedex identified the necessity for closed-loop integration between all their business systems, ensuring seamless data flow across customer management, scheduling, routing and financial reporting. This comprehensive approach would prevent the communication breakdowns and data silos that had previously hampered their technicians’ performance and customer satisfaction.
“When we left FieldRoutes, we just pulled the plug and went immediately back to RealGreen,” says Brennen Weir. “RealGreen has made their lawn care software very user-friendly, from the scheduling to the reporting to the financial side. I don’t think you are ever going to get better reporting than what RealGreen provides.”
“I think when they transitioned to Service Titan, they completely forgot about FieldRoutes. It’s obvious that WorkWave has taken a much better approach to RealGreen. I noticed this at the latest Users Conference — the company is clearly putting a lot into that platform.”
The Results:
After a year of strategic rebuilding alongside the reimplementation of RealGreen, Weedex is back on a growth trajectory. They’re focusing on building their customer list back to pre-FieldRoutes levels and have re-started their employee development initiatives. “Now we are working towards rebuilding the value back in our P&L and rebuilding value in our retention, customer relationships and customer base size — all of those things took a hit through that software switch. There wasn’t one aspect of our business that didn’t suffer.”
Felisha Weir adds, “With FieldRoutes, we had to put some things on the back burner, including employee development. From day one, we hire our team members with a succession plan where they can work their way up from the lowest level through to the highest, and we have great staff retention because of that. You can see that through our reviews and our online presence. We’re glad to be able to get back to that.”
With operations stabilized, Weedex is eyeing expansion, with plans to open a third branch in the next year or so. “We want to have a good sales year and a good growth year. That’s my biggest excitement — getting back INTO the business, instead of working so hard ON it. This year and beyond, we’re working on honing everything we already have, knowing we have good processes in place. We know what the process is with retention. We know what our metrics should be on the numbers — we’re not doing anything new, we’re just doing things we already know how to do, and we’re going to do them well and really shore this up back to where we were.”
