Growing past the owner’s head
North Georgia Landscape Management is in a growth phase. Jeremy Talboy, the owner, is moving the business from owner-operated to branch-managed. That shift brings a familiar problem: the knowledge of how each property should be run lives in a few people’s heads, and it does not scale with them.
Hamilton Preserve, an established maintenance account, was the first property where NGLM ran CrewPlanner job plans and CrewIntel Smart Vests together. The crew had the plans and the tools, and they had a clear picture of what a finished property looked like.
A rollout without the answers
Bobby, NGLM’s production manager, led the rollout. When the crew had questions, he did not answer them. He pointed them back to the job plan maps and let them work it out.
“I didn’t even answer any questions for them. I just guided them in the right direction.”
Bobby, Production Manager
The crew member who stood out
When Yates Hamilton, TOP Green’s Customer Success Manager, reviewed the Smart Vest data, one crew member stood out straight away. His spraying and edging followed the job plan to about 92%: the right areas, the right sequence, and the exact stop points. His idle time for the whole day was 12 to 15 minutes.
His production rate was not just close to the four-year veteran’s on the crew. It was better.
Yates asked Bobby if this was his foreman, his most experienced man. Bobby laughed. The crew member had been hired the week before, and he had no landscaping background.
“He is tech-savvy and incredibly willing to learn. You teach him the equipment, and he picks it up fast. You show him the technology, and he already figures it out.”
Bobby, Production Manager
Yates’ read on it: “This guy doesn’t know how to do it any other way, so this gave him the blueprint.”
What the full crew data showed
The vests captured about 25 to 26 man-hours on site. The crew of four arrived around 8:15 a.m., took an hour for lunch and wrapped around 3:15 p.m., inside the sub-7-hour production goal.
Coverage reached about 65 to 75% of the property. Two things held it back:
- The 60-inch mower broke down mid-run, so some backyards were not mowed.
- The sprayer made several refill trips, which added 43 minutes of walking. Staging material at midpoint locations fixes that.
“This is as good as it gets in real life with people watching.”
Yates Hamilton, Customer Success Manager, TOP Green
Jeremy was on site and Bobby was there all day. The gaps the data surfaced were not effort problems. They were planning gaps, and planning gaps are what the next version of the plan fixes.
A March benchmark, on purpose
This was an early-season run. The grass was not fully grown and some areas did not need service yet. In July, when backyards need mowing and driveways need blowing, the hours will go up.
That is the point of the first run. NGLM now has a measured starting point for Hamilton Preserve, and the plan is already being refined for the full season.
What NGLM is building
Jeremy is replacing tribal knowledge with a production system. Job plans are standardized across properties, and crews know what finished looks like before they arrive. As NGLM grows toward $10M and adds satellite operations, how a property gets run no longer depends on one person’s experience.
The new hire at Hamilton Preserve showed what that looks like. When the job plan is clear about the equipment, the time and the area for each person, someone with no landscaping experience can run at 92% of it on his first day with it, and the business does not need a single veteran foreman to carry every property.
