04 / Home services
Nine days to an estimate, in a business decided in forty-eight hours.
A five-crew landscaping company losing warm leads to whoever answered first. A four-question quote flow that returns a real range in minutes, books the site visit on the spot, and stops the owner from writing estimates at 10pm.
0 views
01 — Context
The situation
Tallgrass runs five crews doing design-build, maintenance, and seasonal work. Leads came in through a contact form that collected a name and a message, then waited for the owner to call back, drive out, measure, and write an estimate by hand.
The median time from form fill to delivered estimate was nine days. Homeowners requesting landscaping work typically contact three companies and hire within a week — so the process was structurally losing to anyone faster, regardless of quality.
02 — Problem
What was actually broken
- A form that collected nothing useful — Name, email, message. Every lead required a phone call just to learn what the job was.
- Estimates written after hours — The owner wrote quotes at night, which capped throughput at his own stamina.
- No triage — A $400 cleanup and a $40,000 patio entered the same undifferentiated queue.
- Invisible locally — No service-area pages, no structured data, and a Google Business Profile that had not been touched in two years.
03 — Approach
How the work was shaped
I sat with the owner and reverse-engineered how he prices. Within twenty minutes it was clear that four inputs get him to a defensible range for eighty percent of jobs, and the remaining twenty percent are the ones that genuinely need a site visit.
- Four questions, real numbers — Service type, property size, access, and timing produce a range on screen immediately, with an honest note about what could move it.
- Book the visit inside the flow — The moment after a range appears is the moment of highest intent. Available slots appear on the same screen instead of in a follow-up email.
- Automatic triage — Jobs above a value threshold or with unusual answers route straight to the owner. Routine work routes to a crew lead, with a templated reply.
- Service-area pages that are actually about the area — One page per town with real project references and local structured data — not the same paragraph with the town name swapped in.
04 — Decisions
Three calls worth defending
- Showed a range, not a price — A single number is either a lie or a liability. A range with named variables builds more trust than precision the business cannot honor.
- Made 'not sure' a valid answer — Every question accepts uncertainty and adjusts the range's width. Forcing false precision is how quote flows get abandoned.
- Wrote the follow-up sequence as design work — Three messages over ten days, written in the owner's voice. The automation is only as good as the sentences in it.
05 — System
Color and type
Archivo in heavy weights for outdoor-sign legibility, mono for job numbers and dates — the site borrows its hierarchy from a truck door.
Field Green
#2b3529
Tallgrass
#8fa96b
Lime Gold
#E7E247
Mist
#E9EDDE
White
#ffffff
06 — Outcome
What the engagement delivers
9 days → minutes
Time from inquiry to a usable price range
4
Questions between a visitor and a booked site visit
7
Service-area pages with local structured data
AA
WCAG 2.1 AA, including outdoor-glare contrast testing
The site is a lead engine rather than a brochure: it qualifies, prices, books, and follows up without the owner touching it, and it hands the routine eighty percent to the crew leads who can handle it.
Reflection
Speed was the whole strategy. A slower company with a nicer website still loses this market. Once the estimate arrived in minutes instead of days, every other design decision on the site got easier to argue.