CityLeaf grows its unique interior landscaping business through job-costing insight and efficiency with Aspire

CityLeaf specializes in building and maintaining interior plant walls for commercial businesses and big-tech companies such as Facebook and LinkedIn in the San Francisco Bay Area. The interior landscaping company also installs unique flower arrangements to grace these business’s lobbies on a regular, rotating basis.

While CityLeaf aptly caters to these big-business needs, the company’s built-in software lacked the capability to handle invoicing and timekeeping properly, leading to labor-intensive processes and wasted time. And the purchase of additional software as a point solution only exacerbated the problem.

“We wanted to get some robust software like Aspire that unifies core business functions, like the database management, invoicing, payroll, scheduling, and purchasing,” says Can Akbay, CityLeaf’s Strategy and Operations Lead. “This was a game-changer moment for us when we discovered Aspire.”

With features for estimating, scheduling, job costing, invoicing, and more, Aspire’s end-to-end business management software empowers interior and exterior landscape companies with the tools they need to operate efficiently and profitably.

After 18 months of utilizing the Aspire platform to streamline operations, Akbay says CityLeaf:

• Decreased servicing-related costs by nearly 50%

• Improved estimating speed by 50%

• Improved the accuracy of contract changes

• Reduced plant replacement rates by 4%

“Rather than going weekly, we came up with a new (plant maintenance) model that requires us to go every other week, decreasing costs by almost 50%,” Akbay says. “Also, we didn't raise our prices, so we stayed on the competitive edge—even though we’re visiting less, and we’re replacing fewer plants. We must have done something amazing to achieve that.”

CityLeaf implements new business model with Aspire

After completing his MBA in Turkey, Akbay was hired by CityLeave to implement Aspire to improve business operations. Once he completed that project, Akbay was promoted to Integrity, the parent corporation of CityLeaf, where he oversees Aspire strategy and overall operational efficiency.

“For us, the game-changer moment was the job costing functionality,” Akbay says. “Having this function gave us visibility into our financial performance at the job level. This, over time, positions us in a very strong place where we can make corrective decisions and become a more profitable and efficient company.”

But implementing Aspire for CityLeaf wasn’t as simple as flipping a switch. 

“Aspire is a little bit different than what we require, so we had to come up with our own solutions and think outside of the box to figure out the different ways to use Aspire to accommodate our business model,” Akbay explains. “So far, things have worked out quite well, and we improved so much more from where we started.”

Akbay used Aspire to address CityLeaf’s main pain point—having to migrate data back and forth between different software platforms, which created a labor-intensive workflow and introduced the potential for errors, especially when invoicing customers. CityLeaf’s invoicing process is now streamlined under one platform.

And rather than adopting Aspire’s recommendations to build kits for about 400 items in its inventory, which seemed overly cumbersome for CityLeaf’s customers, the company created three distinctive categories for its entire plant inventory: desktop plans, short-floor plans, and tall-floor plans.

“This approach totally streamlined the entire process for us and made it possible for us to work with Aspire,” Akbay says.

Adopting a strategy to win with Aspire 

CityLeaf services more than 800 commercial customers, including Facebook, LinkedIn, and Tinder, at 10 to 15 different campuses in the Bay Area and Los Angeles, Akbay says. The company started in 2002 and has now expanded to servicing customers in all nine counties of the Bay Area, as well as some in L.A.

Integrity, CityLeaf’s parent company, also owns and operates Medallion Landscaping, which operates two branches of its exterior landscape business on the north and south ends of the Bay Area. Medallion also uses Aspire to run operations but with a different workflow.

Akbay says a strategy that uses Aspire to streamline operations at all three Integrity branches helps the entire business increase its chances of winning.

“That's how we look at Aspire and how we can utilize Aspire functions to grow our business because we wanted to scale, be agile, and be more productive, as well as efficient,” Akbay explains. “Having job-costing capabilities at the job level, purchasing the direct materials on the job-costing level gave us great capabilities.”

Rather than track quality through exterior site audits, the interior-focused CityLeaf builds and maintains plant walls or provides plant and flower arrangements that meet specific standards. Interior landscaping comes with guaranteed plant maintenance, Akbay says, so CityLeaf replaces any failing plants.

“We make sure our plant service is at the highest level, and we provide the quality of service that we guarantee our clients,” he says.

With Aspire’s powerful scheduling and routing features, CityLeaf not only cut costs with reduced replacement rates but also provided better customer service and seamless communication related to clients’ weekly, biweekly, or monthly servicing cycles.

“Aspire helped us tremendously on this path to achieving efficiency in scheduling and service quality,” Akbay says. “I can definitely say that we reduced our replacement rates by 4% by using effective scheduling strategies with Aspire.”

Reduced plant-replacement rates mean cost savings for the business. And Akbay took that champion moment even further by producing fixed replacement costs for each category with Aspire. Previously, replacements were calculated through a wholesale plan cost, requiring a labor-intensive workflow.

“It was a pain. Everybody was complaining,” Akbay says. “Now, we’re totally streamlining the entire process, improving the estimating speed by 50% as well as the contract changes accuracy by at least 40%, making all stakeholders happy, keeping the same results, and recovering the costs that are necessary to run our business.”

Overcoming challenges with good data

With change comes challenges, and Akbay says one of his biggest challenges is continuously improving user engagement on the work tickets. 

“We want to make sure we have at least 95% user engagement on those work tickets because when good data goes into Aspire, good data comes out,” he says. “If you want to achieve the job-costing functionality, look at things on the job-cost level, and have visibility into the financial performance of our operations, we have to enter good data.”

Akbay also points out that it’s not one person’s job at CityLeaf or Medallion to enter good data, but the whole team must do their part.

“Once we bring the mindset that Aspire really works, we have to make sure that we equally divide the responsibilities. We cannot rely on one person,” he says. “Everybody has to play a significant role in the workflow.”

Aspire efficiency inspires future growth

Using Aspire to address CityLeaf’s efficiency-related challenges, Akbay says the company is profitable and on track to bring in $27 million this year. To increase its strategic position in the market, CityLeaf plans to acquire new companies by the end of this year.

“We want to grow. We want to grow to $100 million in the next few years, so we have set our business models to achieve that,” Akbay says. “Aspire has played a significant role in that."

“We are always improving and learning with Aspire,” he adds. “That's where we’re going for the future.”