About Custom Lawn and Landscape
Custom Lawn and Landscape is a full-service lawn and landscape provider based outside of Kansas City, offering everything from fertilization and weed control to mowing, irrigation, landscape installation, pruning, snow removal, and more — 145 services in total. As VP of Customer Experience and one of the company's owners, Dave Magruder has been at the center of the company's growth for more than 15 years, including its long-standing partnership with RealGreen.
The Challenge
Custom Lawn and Landscape faced a challenge that many growing field service businesses know well: how do you efficiently expand services across an existing customer base without adding operational complexity? With over a hundred service offerings and an aggressive growth strategy, the company needed a platform that could do more than manage a single line of business. They needed something that could scale with them and continue to handle the full scope of their operations.
The Solution
Custom Lawn and Landscape turned to RealGreen, then used the platform to its absolute fullest potential.
While many operators in their peer groups viewed RealGreen as lawn care-only software, Dave and his team saw something different: a flexible, centralized platform that could run their entire operation. They use RealGreen for estimating, sending contracts, managing customer communications and tracking service delivery across all 145 service lines. They've even adapted it for internal operations like vehicle maintenance scheduling — treating company trucks as "customers" within the system and logging oil changes and periodic maintenance as service jobs.
"If you think of it as a CRM, anything can be a customer," Magruder explains. "A vehicle can be a customer. A tree can be a customer. If you just switch that a little bit in your head, you can use it for anything."
The result is an operation that runs entirely on RealGreen. No toggling between systems, no syncing disconnected tools, no data living in multiple places.
"I don't have 15 different softwares that I'm working with, connecting this one to this one constantly. I log in, do everything I need to do as an owner, as a customer service guru, as a people manager. Everything is done right in RealGreen."
The Results
The impact has been significant and measurable.
Annual customer value has tripled. When Custom Lawn and Landscape started with RealGreen 15 years ago, average annual customer value sat around $400. Today, it's approaching $2,000 per customer, a direct result of the company's ability to efficiently expand services across their existing customer base using RealGreen's estimating and sales tools.
Streamlined multi-service sales. RealGreen makes it simple to identify cross-sell opportunities, generate estimates, close sales and service customers across all service lines — turning single-service customers into full-service relationships.
Simplified operations at scale. By consolidating everything into RealGreen, the team has eliminated the complexity that typically comes with growth. One platform handles it all, giving every role in the company — ownership, customer service, operations — a single source of truth.
Future Plans
For Custom Lawn and Landscape, RealGreen is more than a mere software tool. It's become a foundational part of the company's growth strategy. As they pursue an aggressive expansion throughout the Kansas City metro and beyond, RealGreen is playing a direct role in their M&A process.
"We're to the point with RealGreen that as part of acquiring another company, we'll mandate that they have their data in RealGreen," Magruder says. "We'll help them with the process, help them onboard with the RealGreen team. That data is going to be in a usable format by the time we get to it, and we're going to use that data to evaluate whether it's a good company to purchase or not."
The company is also excited about RealGreen's investment in AI — particularly the software’s ability to capture and store every customer interaction then provide recommendations on what to do next, eliminating disputes and giving the team a complete, actionable and permanent record of every touchpoint.
"As far as software companies in the landscaping space, RealGreen is at the forefront of implementing AI in everything they do. The implementation of AI in something as simple as landscape software is going to be huge for us."
"If anybody wants to improve their business, improve the way they communicate with their customers, improve the service offerings they're giving their customers — RealGreen has done that for us and more,” concludes Magruder. “It just simplifies your business. It's a time saver."
