At a glance
| Industry | Landscaping / Field Services |
|---|---|
| Location | Midwest |
| Employees | 400+ |
| Products | Salesforce Sales Cloud Accounting Seed |
| Result | ~85% billing time savings 2 weeks → 2 days |
Executive summary
Epic Landscaping, a family-owned company with over 400 employees, had committed to Salesforce. The problem wasn’t commitment — it was capacity. A two-week, nine-person billing process was consuming the time and bandwidth the implementation required to move forward. Without solving that first, the transformation would stall indefinitely.
SMBHD identified the billing bottleneck as the single constraint blocking everything else and solved it first. Billing dropped from two weeks to two days, and from nine people to one — an ~85% time savings. The early ROI converted executive skepticism into investment, and the partnership deepened into what Epic describes as an extension of their own team.
Key outcomes
The business problem
Epic Landscaping operates across three areas — operations, production, and sales — with a deep culture built around its people. As CFO Ty Constant put it: “Epic is about the people. Technology has to empower our people and support the roles we’re doing.” That philosophy made any technology implementation a people problem first and a technical problem second.
The billing bottleneck was consuming two weeks and five to nine team members per cycle — exactly the time and people needed to drive the Salesforce implementation forward. Without resolving that first, the transformation would never get off the ground. The strategic constraint wasn’t technology. It was a single operational bottleneck blocking everything else.
The challenge
- Billing as the critical bottleneck: a two-week process requiring 5–9 team members consuming the exact bandwidth needed for the Salesforce rollout
- Limited implementation capacity: the team couldn’t run a technology transformation while simultaneously managing the overhead that transformation was meant to eliminate
- Executive skepticism: leadership needed to see tangible, visible ROI before committing fully to the investment
- People-first culture: a company that defined itself by its people needed technology that visibly empowered the team, not one that felt imposed from above
- Multiple competing technology investments: careful prioritization was required to sequence initiatives in a way that built momentum rather than spreading resources too thin
The solution
Rather than attempting a full Salesforce deployment immediately, SMBHD helped Epic prioritize one high-impact win first: eliminate the billing bottleneck and create the capacity to do everything else.
- Billing transformation via Salesforce + Accounting Seed: redesigned billing workflows reducing a two-week, nine-person process to a two-day, one-person operation
- Capacity creation as implementation strategy: the billing win freed the bandwidth required to continue the Salesforce rollout without stalling
- Internal champion development: co-built with Epic’s internal leader to ensure the team could own, extend, and adapt the system independently
- Scalable Salesforce foundation: structured for continued expansion into automation, AI, and operational optimization as the business grows
The results
Billing was reduced from two weeks to two days, and from nine team members to one — an approximately 85% time savings. That single win freed the capacity for the Salesforce implementation to continue and gave leadership the visible proof of value they needed to commit fully.
The trust built through high-touch, embedded delivery created a partnership dynamic that Epic describes not as a vendor relationship but as an extension of their own team. That relationship quality is what makes the next phase — AI-driven scheduling and crew optimization — not just possible, but ready.
“That created the trust of, OK — I see how Salesforce can drive value and I can lean into this.”
AI readiness
- Billing automation as the foundation: clean, structured financial workflows are the prerequisite for any AI-driven operations optimization
- AI-driven scheduling optimization: with billing automated and operational data structured, AI can now optimize crew scheduling, routing, and allocation across 400+ employees
- Predictive capacity planning: AI can forecast crew availability and project load based on historical patterns, enabling better resource decisions before crunch periods
- Automated job completion workflows: Agentforce can trigger billing, follow-up communications, and crew reallocation automatically on job completion
How we worked
- Constraint identification before scope-setting: SMBHD’s first move wasn’t to define the full Salesforce scope. It was to identify the single operational bottleneck that, if solved, would unlock everything else.
- Embedded, high-touch delivery: SMBHD was present at every critical moment — every key meeting, every rollout, every crisis. The relationship wasn’t managed from a distance.
- Side-by-side co-development: solutions were built in collaboration with Epic’s internal champion, not delivered as finished artifacts. That approach ensured every configuration reflected real workflows.
- Presence during failure, not just success: when billing failed during a critical period, SMBHD was on the call at 8pm on a Friday. That kind of presence builds a different quality of trust than delivery alone.
