“You can’t make everyone happy. You’re not a taco.”

As an Irrigation or Landscape Professional, you probably understand the deep truth of that statement. You are balancing a portfolio of clients with vastly different needs, expectations, and properties. You probably wish you were a taco.

What’s the one thing that makes every client happy, across the board? Saving money, right? With water being a property’s #2 budget expense – or even #1 in certain areas – maximizing smart irrigation technology to simplify water management is going to make a major difference for your business. Read on for our three suggestions for ways to save your customers money, blow their expectations out of the water, and make their jobs a little (or a lot) less stressful.

1. Put an end to the road trips. If you’re still driving to each property in your portfolio to adjust controllers, it’s time to park that truck. If you can Uber, tweet, or Yelp, you can manage all of your properties just about as easily. Save the gas and take advantage of reliable remote access, easy-to-use tools, and mobile features of SmartLink that help you increase revenues and save on labor costs without driving all over town. Just keep a bag of Funyuns in your desk in case you miss going to the gas station every day.
2. Get in a groove. Standardization is the foundation of the most successful businesses. Starbucks, Southwest Airlines, McDonald’s have all built their empires on doing things the same way every time, everywhere, because reinventing the wheel every day makes a whole bunch of weird wheels. Rather than trying to operate a different brand of controller on every property you manage, standardizing sets you apart as an expert while simplifying your inventory, improving your response time, and allowing you to manage every controller from a remote location. Be the expert your customers depend on.
3. Don’t let run-off wash away all your money. Run off is the single most miscalculated factor in an irrigation system, causing as much water waste as a broken sprinkler or a non-weather-adjusted run time. Cracking asphalt, incurring fines, and creating angry residents are just a few of the headaches run-off can cause on your customer’s property. Calculating run times to avoid run off may feel impossible, but you can take away the complex calculations or the guessing games by using a controller that will automatically set the correct run time based on soil and slope. Keep the people happy. Stop the run-off.

In a formula where saving budget dollars + happy customers = more business, everybody wins. Technology standardization can get you there. Interested in how we can help your business connect the control systems you manage? Learn more at http://get.smartlinknetwork.com.