Blue Collar Builders Episode 8: Professional Landscaper Builds an AI Voice Quoting Agent for His Business

Landscaping Professional Automates Price Quotes with AI

Quinten O’Dea’s Q&A Landscaping is a growing business located in Pittsburg, Pennsylvania, with a 20-man crew and a very busy seasonal schedule. This is typically a good problem to have, but Quiten quickly realized that his administrative work, which is his personal responsibility, was eating too much of his time, including during the weekend.

The problem only worsened once his baby was born, at which point Quinten decided it was time for a change. That’s when AI came into the picture.

The most obvious use case was in the administrative department, where the AI would help Quinten create personalized price quotes based on voice inputs. Simply put, Quinten would voice-record his quotes on the fly, during lawn-mowing or other backyard activities, and then upload the audio transcript into the AI tool.

The AI would then produce a multi-layered customer-facing quote, organized by labor, equipment, and materials.

Why the Standard CRM Software Failed Quinten

Quinten is already using a CRM software to organize his business, but, in his own words, the tool is moving too slow for his needs:

Todd: “Was your software not working well enough? What made you take that leap into using AI?”

Quinten: “My software was getting it done, but I knew that there was more that could be done. It wasn’t introducing AI tools into its workflow at a pace I thought was reasonable.”

As Quinten saw it, his CRM software, despite still being useful, held his operations back. So, he decided to integrate AI into his business on his own.

This, naturally, took a bit of tinkering on his part to make it work the way he wanted to. The biggest challenge was feeding the AI the pricing for different materials, jobs, equipment, and minor and major fixes, to create a robust database that the AI can use in its quotes.

With that out of the way, Quinten can now automate price quotes and instruct the AI on how to change and adapt them based on the client’s input – tasks that previously took a lot of manual work on his part.

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How Quinten’s Story Exposes a Blind Spot Within the CRM Software Market

CRM software tools are still must-haves for pretty much all blue-collar businesses today, helping with operational organization and logistics. But, as Quinten’s case shows, they have a major blind spot: the lack of customization.

Quinten needed something very specific, which the CRM software he was using couldn’t deliver. So, he was forced to look for solutions elsewhere and AI was the most obvious answer.

Even so, Quinten admits that there’s still a lot of room for improvement because, right now, the process has one too many steps still: 

He takes voice notes into an AI note-taker -> He uploads the notes into the primary AI tool -> He performs some oversight to fix any number errors.

Ideally, as he puts it, the notes would go directly into the main AI tool. But even without that, Quinten admits that the process he’s using now is still a major time-saver.

“I’m not quite to the point where I’m talking and it goes right into it (the main AI tool), just because of the software flow that I’m utilizing, but, right now, I’m able to take all of my notes and put that right into the AI.”

How Dalton Mills Makes AI Integration More Accessible

Standard CRM software models either don’t allow for AI integration yet, as is the case with Quinten’s software of choice, or do it poorly, not really allowing for customizability and forcing users to find alternate solutions.

Dalton Mills takes a different approach. Rather than forcing businesses to adapt their operations to the software, our platform allows them to create their own, fully customized CRM software tools instead – completely tailored to the business’s operations and internal pain points.

This allows contractors like Quinten to adapt their AI tools to their unique use cases, giving them more creative freedom in the process.

More importantly, there’s no coding involved. Anyone can use the Dalton Mills platform to create custom CRM tools, because the AI handles all the coding. You just tell the AI what you need or simply describe your problem(s) and the AI will build the software you need, according to your instructions.

If you want to test out Dalton Mills’s services, apply for early access today and we’ll contact you shortly.