Mike Prong has spent his career in the green industry, and he’s brought LMN with him everywhere he’s gone. As Director of Design and Business Development at Nicola’s Garden Art, a boutique landscaping firm just outside London, Ontario, he’s now on his third company running on LMN. At this point, it’s just part of how he operates.

“If I ever went to a company that didn’t have LMN, that would be my first recommendation,” Mike says. “You need to do this.”

That’s more than familiarity. It comes from watching a business run better season after season, company after company.

Nicola’s Garden Art has been creating elevated outdoor spaces since 2003. Founded by designer Nicola, the company built its reputation on emotion-driven boutique landscaping, spaces crafted for specific people, not cookie-cutter installs. Two years ago, Nicola’s son Jeremy took over operations and Mike joined as Director of Design to help steer the business into its next chapter.

The team of 11 targets between $1 million and $1.5 million annually, split between landscape construction and garden maintenance. At that scale, with multiple active crews, a steady pipeline of custom projects, and clients who expect a premium experience, the operational stakes are high. Missed line items, slow quotes, disorganized job files: any one of those can chip away at margins and reputation.

That’s exactly why Mike believes that the right software isn’t a nice-to-have. It’s foundational.

According to Mike, one of the most underappreciated functions of a platform like LMN is how it holds institutional knowledge, the kind that used to live only in someone’s head.

In LMN, estimating templates are pre-built job frameworks: a patio install, a garden bed, a maintenance package, with all the typical materials, labor, and line items already loaded in. When a new estimate starts, the structure is already there. You add what’s needed, remove what isn’t, and adjust quantities. The guesswork is gone.

“Once you have the templates set up, it just makes everything so much more efficient,” he says. “It acts as a memory. Things that you’re like, oh yeah, I need this — it’s already there on that list.”

For a business like Nicola’s Garden Art — where the work is highly customized and the details really matter — that reliability is everything. A template does more than just save time, it protects margin. It’s the difference between building a complete, accurate estimate and realizing halfway through a job that something got missed.

In landscaping, the window between a client inquiry and a signed contract can be surprisingly short. Clients who are genuinely ready to book tend to move quickly, and the companies that respond fastest often win. Mike has seen this play out directly with LMN’s mobile estimating feature: the ability to build and send a quote right from the job site.

“I can get them that quote before I even pull away,” he says. “It’s on my list. I do it. It’s done. It’s gone. They’re happy because the turnaround is fast.”

The downstream effect is real. Nicola’s Garden Art is typically booked through mid-to-late August by May of each year because a faster quoting process means a fuller, more predictable calendar.

For a business built on design and emotion, how you show up to clients matters as much as the work itself. Mike points to LMN’s customer portal as something that quietly elevates the entire customer experience. It allows them to move away from tangled email chains full of PDF attachments and into a clean, centralized space where clients can see their estimates, approvals, and job files all in one place.

“It gives a larger company feel,” he says. “And the fact that they can access everything right there — and I can see everything they’re looking at — makes it so much cleaner.”

He can also control exactly what each client sees, which matters when you’re dealing with clients who might fixate on individual line items. That kind of customization is a way to manage relationships more professionally and with less friction.

What keeps Mike coming back to LMN, through multiple companies and nearly a decade of use, is that it doesn’t require you to start over. Budgets update and carry forward. Templates built over years stay intact. The platform evolves, with mobile estimating, improved crew connectivity, and a development roadmap shaped by the people actually using it, without asking users to rebuild from scratch.

“You can basically update your budgets and everything kind of carries through,” Mike says. “And I like that the roadmap and requests are open — they’re asking the people who actually use it what can be developed. Going right to the source.”

That kind of long-term partnership is what separates software that gets abandoned after one season from software that becomes part of how a business operates. For Mike Prong and Nicola’s Garden Art, the answer has been clear for a long time.

“I can’t really see quoting without it now, to be honest with you.”