How Kanga Gardening saves up to 120 hours of driving a year with SortScape

Tim Le Grand was a chef before he changed careers and became a gardener. He learned the trade working under another gardener out near Clyde North, including at a retirement village. He set up Kanga Gardening in 2020, and in October 2023 he struck out on his own, running it full time.

He knew the gardening, and he had the tools for it. The business side was another matter: what he had for running it was an ordinary calendar and his memory.

The calendar only worked for a short time. It wasn't built for work that repeats on its own cycle, and Tim's work is body corporate and strata complexes, commercial sites, self storage facilities and retirement villages, each on its own recurring program.

As Tim puts it, “The knowledge of each site lived in my head. That works until the morning it does not, and forgetting one detail is what turns a twenty minute visit into a forty minute one.” He knew he needed a better system if he wanted to scale his business and avoid future headaches.

He trialled a few options and chose SortScape. “It really helped me take that next step, and it made me feel confident to go out on my own.”

What used to live in Tim's head

SortScape keeps a record for each site, which Tim calls the card.

“Every site has a card, and the card knows more than I do.”

His busiest site keeps its keys in a lockbox: four keys, each on a coloured label so he knows which door it opens.

“I once spent fifteen minutes at that lockbox trying combinations like I was cracking a safe, because I had backed myself to remember the code. It went on the card that afternoon, and everything goes on the card now.”

At a warehouse in Cranbourne West, with a fish pond outside and close to 200 indoor plants inside, the card has the gate codes, the day the green waste bins are collected, what time the office opens for the indoor plant work and when people start arriving, so he knows when he needs to be finished and gone.

After a wet stretch, a body corporate owner asked Tim to leave his soft lawn alone until it recovered. The exclusion went on the card that day, with a soft ground rule for that corner.

If a car parked on a lawn stops him working, he photographs it with a camera app that prints the time, date and address on the image, and uploads it to that site's card. When someone asks weeks later why a strip was missed, the answer is there instead of somewhere in his camera roll.

A round across Melbourne

Tim's week is built on days that repeat. Mondays are the same sites every week. Friday is the big mowing day, with two retirement villages taking turns each fortnight. He sets a day up once and SortScape repeats it, so clients know exactly when he will turn up.

The round runs from Edithvale out to Pakenham and down the Peninsula to Safety Beach, so the order of the stops matters. Tim sets each day up roughly from the suburbs in his head. Then, the night before or on the day, he clicks route optimisation and SortScape reorders the jobs by what will actually be quickest.

“It will often save 15 to 30 minutes of driving and 5 to 20 kilometres a day. Over a working year that adds up to somewhere between 50 and 120 hours less behind the wheel. My HiAce uses about 12 litres of fuel per 100 kilometres, so it is also hundreds of dollars in fuel, getting close to a thousand, plus the wear and tear on the van.”

The office side mostly happens in the evenings. Melbourne weather being what it is, a washed-out day moves back or forward, and the couple of clients who like a heads up get an SMS instead of a round of apology texts. Invoices go straight into Xero, which he says has made invoicing “basically a non-issue”.

His own card

Machine maintenance was the thing that slipped when he started, and Tim has unloaded mowers with blades about as sharp as a butter knife. So his own address in Edithvale has a card too, listing what's due on the Hustler zero-turn, the Honda push mower, the hedger and the trailer. These days, the tool that keeps the others sharp is SortScape.

It has spread beyond gardening.

“I run one calendar, and I will admit the dentist and the vet have both ended up in there. A calendar you actually check beats three you forget about.”

He puts it simply.

“It is a lot more than a seven day calendar. Used properly, SortScape becomes the memory of the business.”