Updates on the Operational Journey

Guesswork Unveiled, Issue #18

Updates on the Operational Journey

Guesswork Unveiled, Issue #18

Mea culpa, I really fell off the bandwagon with my writing over the past month. Life got in the way, in the form of moving homes and taking on more “in-the-business” work while one staff member was on a leave.

That said, I’m excited to share a bit of operational update on the state of Blooma Tree Experts with subscribers of Guesswork Unveiled — thanks again for your ongoing support.

Let’s dive in.

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Systems Update

CRM

We transitioned the business from SingleOps to ArboStar — both are tree care-specific software that allow us to build quotes and schedule jobs for clients. ArboStar has a more robust crew scheduling feature. When we acquired a local competitor last year, we learned that going from two crews to three crews was not 50% more complex…it was 3x as complex.

Having that many more people and vehicles translated to significantly more crew and equipment permutations. I used to send the crew daily staffing as a text message each afternoon for the next day — that used to take me 5-10 minutes to set up. With a third crew, it took me 45+ mins, with lots of mistakes made.

The ArboStar crew & equipment scheduling functionality allowed us to visualize staffing much more intuitively.

We also took the migration moment as an opportunity to onboard the whole team onto the platform; historically, only our crew leaders & sales arborists used SingleOps. Now our entire field crew uses ArboStar, which also allowed us to move to digital clock in/clock outs.

To be clear, any major software change like this is a massive headache. It took about six months and we’re still working out some kinks. QuickBooks Online is the classic culprit here, with syncs breaking, double-syncing, not syncing, and more.

Software changes like this require a significant withdrawal from your team’s trust bank…so be prepared for that. Even if the benefits of the new software feel obvious, the choppiness of change will still be exhausting and demoralizing.

Slack

We rolled out Slack as a company-wide communication tool. This moved us away from large text message groups — recall that most of our team doesn’t use email for work purposes.

We had long used Slack to work with our overseas CSR team, but bringing the full team onto one platform was surprisingly fun & easy. Having a dedicated “Blooma Banter” channel allows a space for folks to post photos and make jokes without crowding out all the actual work-related posts in the “Tree Production” channel.

Thankfully, this change was relatively easy to implement given most of our team is mobile-first by design anyway.

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People Update

Our leadership team & crew team are as strong as they’ve ever been — it’s deeply gratifying to feel surrounded by folks that are rowing in the same direction and working independently to build the business.