Customer: Del Vacchio Landscapes and Christmas Decor 

Location: Westchester, Pennsylvania 

Service Focus: Design, Build, Maintenance, Christmas Decor 

Annual Revenue: ~$5 million 

Team Size: 6 crews (summer), 9 crews (holiday season)

Del Vacchio serves the high-end residential market in West Chester, Pennsylvania: full design-build, and maintenance, plus Christmas decor. For a while, all of that ran on spreadsheets, Google Maps, and handwritten 3×5 index cards. Crews filled out their hours by hand every day. Someone in the office spent an hour or two every single day trying to compile it all.

Jarod Eaton had used LMN before. So when he joined Del Vacchio Landscapes and Christmas Decor as operations manager and the company hit a wall, he knew what to do.

“You’ve got things you can’t read, numbers you can’t read,” Jarod recalls. “And then we have to try and figure out what this actually said.”

Back when it was a one-crew operation, everything was manual and ran on paper and spreadsheet. That worked for a while, but it didn’t scale, and it wasn’t built to. The tipping point came when that first mowing crew’s schedule filled up completely. A second crew made sense, but routing and managing it the same way they had been just wasn’t workable. “It just got too chaotic for us,” Jarod says. Estimating had its own version of the same problem: no standards meant different salespeople pricing the same work in different ways, with inconsistent proposals going out the door and unpredictable margins coming back.

When Del Vacchio was ready to make a change, Jarod knew they needed business operations software. They looked at a few options. But for a company doing design-build, maintenance, and Christmas decor, LMN had the most complete fit: robust estimating alongside scheduling and routing, all in one place. They onboarded five years ago and have been benefitting from improved systems every since. That was five years ago.

The most immediate change was time back. Timesheet approvals that used to take an hour or two every day now take five to seven minutes. The LMN Crew App replaced the index cards. Crews clock in on their phones, attach notes, and take photos before leaving every job site. The photos turned out to be more valuable than Jarod expected. “It allows us to get photo documentation that we were there and the state of the property when we left,” he says. When a client claims damage happened during a visit, the photo record is right there. “We appear more professional as a result.”

On the estimating side, the change was just as concrete. A small estimate that used to take two to three hours now comes together in ten to fifteen minutes. Complex jobs that used to take five to seven hours now take about an hour and a half. That speed matters because, as Jarod puts it: “in our market, the first to the table with a solid number gets the work about 80 to 85 percent of the time.” Standardized templates with built-in labor rates and production rate calculators are what make it possible. Every proposal goes out looking the same, priced the same, and built on numbers the team already knows they can deliver against. 

Route optimization changed what each crew can accomplish in a day. By sequencing jobs geographically through LMN, Del Vacchio added an average of one job per day across their maintenance schedule. For Christmas decor, where the window to install, service, and take down is short and crews grow from six to nine, the impact is bigger. “It definitely has added probably two to three jobs a day for the guys for Christmas,” Jarod says. The approach is the same whether it is a mowing route or a holiday install run: route it geographically, send the crew out with everything they need in the app, and document what happened before they leave.

This year, for the first time, Del Vacchio broke their annual budget out by division. Each profit center now has its own target, and the picture that it creates has changed how they think about clients. “It’s showing us clients who we thought were okay, that may not be as profitable as we thought,” Jarod says. On the install side, expected gross and net margin are visible before a job even goes out the door. “It helps us get it out the door knowing we’re going to be profitable.”

SMS notifications have become just as important for their clientele. A reminder text the day before a visit means gates are open and the property is ready for the crew. When weather delays a service, one message goes out to everyone affected instead of calling clients one by one. They have built templates for Christmas decor communications as well, keeping the same speed and consistency across the seasonal business.

When Jarod talks to peers who are still on the fence, he comes back to one thing: how connected everything is. The CRM brings clients in. Estimates go out from the same system. When a job is won, it becomes a work order in two clicks. Scheduling, routing, and crew instructions all flow from there.