Case Study: Kevens Landscape
How Kevens Landscape Uses MainSpring’s Evolve To Stay Lean, Move Faster, And Keep Improving
Executive Summary
Kevens Landscape, a Phoenix-based landscape company led by Justin Pauling, needed a better way to manage the “black hole” between a customer’s first call and a sold project. The company had working processes, but too much information lived in paper files, spreadsheets, and people’s heads. Justin considered Salesforce, but chose a Claris FileMaker-based system with MainSpring because it could be built around how Kevens already worked instead of forcing the company to change its process to fit off-the-shelf software.
Through MainSpring’s Evolve service, Kevens has continued to expand and refine its system month by month. What began as lead management has grown into a broader operating hub: leads, pricing, estimates, contracts, plans, customer portals, dashboards, service orders, and field-accessible customer information.
For Justin, the biggest impact is scalability without extra overhead. MainSpring has helped Kevens “stay lean while scaling,” giving him live information from his phone instead of forcing him to dig through spreadsheets or rely on more management staff. He estimates some projects can pay for themselves in one to two months, and sees his ongoing development spend as an investment that produces “tenfold” value.
What Is Evolve?
Key Results For Kevens Landscape
- More than $5 returned for every $1 invested. Across the three years Kevens has used Evolve, they’ve achieved a 419% ROI.
- Continuous improvement model saves on development costs. Kevens’ CEO estimates it would require three people to do the work completed through MainSpring’s Evolve model, with projects often paying for themselves in 1-2 months.
- Avoided an estimated $100,000/year sales management hire. With sales dashboards and customer information available in one place, sales management stays in the CEO’s hands instead of adding a dedicated sales manager.
The Challenge: A Growing Business With A “Black Hole” Of Information
Kevens Landscape is not a simple, single-service contractor. The company handles backyard transformations that can include landscaping, water fountains, barbecues, pergolas, travertine pavers, pools, and more.
Basically anything in the backyard,” Justin says about Kevens, “anything you can imagine, we take care of.”
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That breadth makes the business compelling to other contractors and service companies because Kevens has to coordinate complex information across sales, design, construction, customer communication, and service. Kevens had a process, but had no way to track progress. “What we do was already working for us,” he said. “We just needed a better way to track everything.”
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The biggest gap was the front end of the customer journey. Kevens had a usable process once a project moved into construction. The sticking point was everything that led up to construction. From the moment a customer called until the point a job was sold and handed off, Justin described it as a “black hole.” He had no clear view into where leads stood, which designer owned them, whether customers had been called back, whether emails had gone out, or how many prospects each person was managing. “I had absolutely no information until they said, ‘Hey, Justin, I sold the job, here it is, now you guys go build it,’” he said.
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The company also relied on Excel spreadsheets, physical files, and manual lookups. That meant Justin often had to go to the office, sit behind his desk, open spreadsheets, and compare month-to-date or year-to-date sales manually. As Kevens grew, that approach created pressure to add managers, operations people, or other overhead just to keep information moving.
The Solution: A FileMaker- Based Operating Hub, Improved Through Evolve
Justin first came across MainSpring after reaching out to Claris for recommended development partners. Kevens had used FileMaker years earlier, and Justin was evaluating options, including Salesforce and Claris FileMaker. The deciding factor was customization.
With Salesforce, Justin felt Kevens would have to change what was already working in order to fit the software. Justin saw a different path with MainSpring: “I was able to take the software and develop it the way we do things already.”
That became the foundation for how Kevens works with MainSpring. Through the Evolve model, MainSpring created a customized FileMaker tool for a simple lead management system. Since then, it’s expanded into what Justin now calls “an entire system.”
Today, the FileMaker-based solution includes lead tracking, customer records, pricing structures, estimates, contracts, plans, maps, emails, and dashboards. Kevens moved its pricing structure out of Excel and into the system. Justin can search a customer’s name and pull up contracts, estimates, maps, and project information from his phone.
The portal gives Kevens a cleaner way to share and manage customer-facing materials without pushing everything through email. Customers can access agreements, plans, renderings, and estimates in one place, while Kevens can manage access over time—including removing expired estimates instead of leaving them available indefinitely. The portal also supports internal workflows, giving employees in the field easy access to customer records, service details, and other information they need on-site.
MainSpring’s Evolve model is central to the story because the system is not a one-time build. Justin described Evolve as “like a membership,” where he has a set number of development hours each month and can roll unused hours forward or pull from the next month when needed. That gives him a predictable way to keep improving the platform without turning every idea into a separate, high-friction project.
The ongoing model also lets Kevens solve small issues quickly while continuing to build toward larger improvements. Justin said MainSpring helps with minor fixes, often completed the same day, that do not need to wait for the next strategic meeting.
The Results: Leaner Operations, Faster Decisions, And ROI
The tangible results Justin describes are primarily about time saved, management overhead avoided, and faster access to business information.
Overall, MainSpring’s projections demonstrate an ROI of more than $5 for every $1 spent on Evolve. Over the course of the three years since enrolling in Evolve, MainSpring has spared Kevens nearly 14,000 staff hours or more than 6 staff years.
Since partnering with MainSpring, Justin says Kevens has been able to “stay lean while scaling, without having to add a bunch of overhead and salaries.” The dashboards push information to him instead of forcing him to search for it. He can now see sales by month, year, designer, and lead source. He can compare current numbers to prior-year numbers from his phone.
That changes how quickly he can make decisions. “I now can do that from my phone sitting on my couch,” Justin said. “That’s not only made me more agile, [but it’s] made me be able to make decisions quicker.”
It also helps Kevens avoid additional management costs. Justin said that, before working with MainSpring—when he was tracking everything in spreadsheets in what he calls the “Excel era”— scaling would have required extra operations or sales management support. Now, because the information is at his fingertips, he can still manage sales himself at the company’s current scale. In fact, the Evolve model has helped him avoid opening up “a $100,000-a-year salary just to manage these sales.”
The service order workflow is one of the clearest examples of ROI. Justin described the cost of a recent service order package. Before Evolve, the service process involved phone calls, walking around the office, asking who had a paper, searching through desks, and tracking down information manually. Justin estimated that when he calculates the man-hours saved at roughly $30-40 per hour, a project like that can “pay for itself in two months” with Evolve.
Those savings are directly tied to the workflows MainSpring is building in FileMaker: reducing manual searches, centralizing information, automating updates, and allowing the same team to do more.
Justin’s broader value calculation is even stronger. He is happy with Evolve because replacing what the recurring, predictable, continuous improvement model helps him do could require him to add headcount at up to four times what his Evolve investment is. “I almost look at my monthly investment as another employee,” he said.
The Impact: Confidence, Control, And A System That Keeps Getting Better
The most important impact is that Kevens now has a central place to reference business and customer information. Plans, estimates, contracts, pricing, maps, emails, dashboards, and service details live in one system rather than scattered across paper, Excel, and people.
That single-source access is especially valuable in high-stakes, fast-moving project situations. Justin described a customer changing plans days before work was scheduled to begin. Instead of waiting for someone to return to the office, print new plans, or update the crew manually, revised documents can be uploaded and referenced live, reducing or entirely eliminating a last-minute delay due to those changes.
The system also improves customer experience. With service orders, customers can receive updates when work is requested, scheduled, and completed, including a completion photo. For customers who live out of state or out of the country, that proof gives them confidence that the work was done.
With Evolve, Kevens uses custom software that integrates with other tools the business uses without losing the way the business already works. But, MainSpring is not just delivering tasks; Justin describes the relationship as a strategic “think tank.” He brings problems, MainSpring brings options, and together they decide whether a quick fix or a larger build makes sense.
His recommendation to others is straightforward: “Definitely call them” and set up a preliminary consultation. As Justin put it, MainSpring can show companies similar problems and what they have already developed, because “most of them are the same problems that everybody’s having.”
For Kevens Landscape, Evolve has become more than software support. It’s a continuous improvement engine: predictable monthly investment, practical automation, fast fixes, strategic development, and a system that keeps adapting as the business grows.
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