Customer: Willow River Company    
Location: Hudson, WI
Service Focus: Landscape design/build, tree installation, irrigation, mowing, turf care, snow removal, tree care
Annual Revenue: ~$16 million    
Team Size: 130 employees

Jim Shimon, co-owner of Willow River Company, has 350 customers he calls his “golden children.” They’re the subscribers to the Willow River Experience, a bundled service model that lets homeowners combine up to seven services into a single monthly subscription: mowing, turf care, irrigation startup and blowout, snow removal, plant bed maintenance, planter subscriptions, and more. And for a long time, managing that subscriber base put real pressure on his office staff.

Multiply that across 350 subscribers and a team of five office staff, and it adds up fast. When LMN rolled out its integrated payment product, LMN Pay powered by Stripe, Jim decided to give it a try. He was expecting something complicated. Five minutes later, he was done.

“Probably wouldn’t have happened if it wasn’t so easy to set up, to be honest,” Jim says. “Because it’s such a pain with these things. You think, let’s just stay with what we’ve got. But in literally five minutes it was all set up. I’m like, whoa. Nothing is that easy.”

The contrast to the banking world stuck with him.

The biggest impact wasn’t the setup time. It was what LMN Pay unlocked through the customer portal. Willow River’s subscription customers can now log in, view their full service schedule, pay invoices, and update payment methods on their own, without calling the office.

For the Willow River Experience specifically, where customers are on recurring, multi-service contracts, portal access means those golden children get a level of transparency that matches the premium service they’re paying for. Customers can check their schedule, pay an invoice, or update a payment method on their own time.

“Anytime we can eliminate a phone call to the office and the customer can do it all through the portal, that’s a win.”

Meanwhile, Jim’s office staff can redirect that time. “They’re phenomenal humans,” Jim says. “They’re all about lead generation and getting to the next thing. Anytime we can automate something, by all means, that’s what we want to do.”

Willow River was previously building invoices in LMN, sending them to QuickBooks, and processing everything there. LMN Pay removes that step. Invoices, payments, and customer records now live in one system, with accounting still flowing through QuickBooks but without the double-handling in between.

“We’re just removing that step,” Jim says. The integration is still rolling out, but he’s encouraged by where it’s heading. “The customer experience that LMN has been building, the portal, the payments, it’s leaps and bounds from where it came from.”

For 350 customers who chose Willow River because they expect a premium experience, that matters. And for the team running the business behind the scenes, it matters even more.