Lew Wolfe Pools has been servicing and maintaining pools in the Philadelphia area for approximately 20 years. Formerly a family-owned business, LWP was acquired by aACE partner All Solutions 360 in 2018. The company was doing well, but new owner Bryan Anderson immediately realized there was a problem: they used QuickBooks for accounting, and everything else was done the old-fashioned way – on paper. If he wanted his new venture to grow, Bryan knew he had to modernize his business operations.
As an aACE partner, Bryan already knew what the solution could do. But that doesn’t mean that he took the decision to implement it lightly. He and his team did their due diligence, examining both general business management solutions and industry-specific software. What they found was that only one solution could power their growing business while remaining adaptable enough to add support for workflows unique to their industry.
That solution was aACE.
When Bryan first took over the business, describing the monthly billing as a time-consuming task would have been a major understatement. During their off-season, the process of collecting and approving the previous month’s invoices could take up to seven days. In the busy summer season, that time more than doubled to 17 days – over half a month spent just catching up with the previous month’s billing. “We’d have hand-written tickets, and we’d have to go through each one, organize them alphabetically, and bill them manually,” Bryan explains. “It was really, really bad.”
The longer it took to bill customers, the longer it took to receive payment for services that Lew Wolfe Pools’ staff had performed. “It could be weeks before we got the previous month’s billing done,” he recalls. Bryan wanted to spend his time moving the business forward, but instead had to spend hours each month just keeping up with the paperwork.
aACE’s smart automation cut that time drastically. “Now when we do billing, it’s a push of a button,” Bryan says. “When we go to bill a client after work has been performed, the service record passes into aACE as a sales order, where it consolidates all of that information. And all of the pricing is set inside of aACE, including pricing for specific customers.” aACE references each line item, the quantities, and the customer’s pricing, then automatically generates an invoice that’s ready to be reviewed and delivered.
“We’re able to review the bills and get them out on a daily or weekly basis, depending on the specific policies in place for each account,” Bryan says. “In some cases, we’re getting payments the same day that a service was performed.” This enables them to stay on top of their cash flow and invest more time into growing the business.
When the business was run largely on paper, Bryan had little visibility into what – or how – his company was doing. There was no centralized repository for data; each ticket, work order, and invoice was an island unto itself. This made it difficult to grow the company or even to plan for the next year. After all, how can you improve your operations when you don’t know where you’re starting from?
aACE changed all of that. “By implementing aACE, we were able to eliminate all that paper-based information we were using in the past and put it into a live database,” explains Bryan. Digitizing that data gave him insight into the business that he didn’t have before. This enabled Lew Wolfe Pools to streamline their operations, allowing the company to grow even as the overall number of employees has shrunk.
“We originally had 12 employees when we acquired the company,” Bryan says, “And we were doing five times less revenue than we are today.” Since implementing aACE, they’ve had one employee leave – but their new processes are so efficient that they didn’t need to backfill the role. “It was a huge savings,” says Bryan, and it had a major impact. “Every year we’ve been able to basically double the business.”
When Bryan first took over the business, there wasn’t much in the way of inventory. “Traditionally, the pool maintenance industry hasn’t had to hold much stock,” Bryan says. “When I first bought the business, we were holding $2,000 worth of inventory going into the season.” Paper record-keeping, while still not ideal, may have been fine for that small amount. Then the pandemic came.
“With the demands that COVID-19 has brought, now we’re actually holding $200,000 worth of inventory,” he explains. “That’s a dramatic increase. And if you don’t have inventory right now, you don’t have sales for the following year. So managing inventory and the supply chain is becoming more and more important.”
aACE’s inventory engine makes it easy for Bryan’s employees to see exactly what they have in stock. As sales orders come in, the staff can see at a glance what they have on-hand to fulfill them – without digging through a stock room or calling around to distributors. “Now we can see how many of an item we have to sell versus how many are on a purchase order, and things of that nature,” Bryan says. He adds that his competitors don’t have the visibility into those details that aACE provides, giving Lew Wolfe Pools a strong competitive advantage.
Lew Wolfe Pools offers four services for their customers: installations of new pools, renovations of existing pools, weekly maintenance services, and repairs. These tasks used to be two-person jobs, but aACE enabled them to cut the workload in half. “We can do the same number of pools in one day with one technician that we used to do with two technicians,” Bryan says. This represents a 100% increase in the number of jobs they can do each day.
How did aACE help them accomplish such a huge increase in efficiency? With smart automation and increased visibility.
Previously, each step in a workflow was divided into multiple tickets, with two technicians dividing up the tasks for each job and manually writing down notes after each task was complete, documenting what was done by whom and when. With a custom-built field service app that integrates into aACE, however, Bryan eliminated all that manual work – and accelerated past his competitors.
“Most businesses in this space never get above 100-150 clients ever, because it’s too hard [to manage],” Bryan explains. “They don’t have the software.” He adds that typically these companies were handed down from parent to child, with processes that remain static despite technology evolving around them. “We use iPads and iPhones in the field all day long,” Bryan says in contrast. “Every one of our guys has a computer. Even our water-testing equipment is computer-based. And so aACE has been a huge supporting factor. I can’t imagine doing this without it, honestly.”
While his mom-and-pop competitors seem to be happy staying small, Bryan has a bigger vision for Lew Wolfe Pools: “One of my goals is to be the #1 service and installation company in the Philadelphia region. We’ve already grown our business by over 500% in 42 months, and our goal is to get to 2,000 customers.” To do that, Bryan has already acquired an additional pool company, Suburban Turn-Key Pool Services, with plans to add more. For now, he’s keeping both companies separate as he figures out what each does best and where improvements may be needed. Fortunately, aACE makes it easy to manage multiple companies separately within a single solution.
“Being able to look at, for example, Suburban’s clients vs. Lew Wolfe’s clients and things like that is huge,” says Bryan, adding that the feature will only get more important as they continue acquiring more businesses. “We’re going to want to be able to see all that data, and being able to go into one database to see it is by far the best option. I can’t tell you what a huge thing it is to have the ability to do that.”
Bryan and his team chose aACE because it was the only solution that offered the power they needed for their core transactions and the flexibility to integrate with tools designed for the particular needs of a pool service company. But when it came to finding those tools, Bryan had a problem: nothing he found on the market was capable of integrating with an ERP solution.
For any other business this could have spelled disaster, with duplicate data entry making costly errors more likely and wasted staff time a guarantee. But Bryan and the team at AS360 saw it as a golden opportunity. They developed a software package that addressed the pool industry’s unique workflows and integrated seamlessly with aACE.
“aACE is a great mid-market product,” Bryan says. “I believe it fits the needs of most companies out there. But aACE doesn’t have tools for managing, for example, bodies of water, which is fine because that’s not something aACE really needs. So we built that outside of aACE, and now we can sync data between aACE and our custom solution with the push of a button, which is awesome. It’s so much easier than trying to re-key data.”
So much easier, in fact, that AS360 plans to make their solution available to pool service companies across the country – paired with aACE for a complete, all-in-one business management system with additional features tailored to the needs of their target market. In addition to Lew Wolfe Pools, AS360 has already begun deploying their custom add-on to select clients, with extremely encouraging results. “We’ve had as many as 50 trucks a day running our software,” Bryan says. “I think that speaks dividends.”
Here’s what Bryan had to say about the results of his aACE implementation:
“There are so many companies out there that could benefit from aACE. It’s not just industry-specific, and that’s the beauty of it. Anybody that needs job costing – there’s a great job costing module in there. Anybody looking at Microsoft, anybody running multiple companies, any distribution companies… aACE could give these companies a chance to add value. Anybody who’s looking for more long-term support, it’s a great opportunity.
“aACE has got a great support team, one of the best out there. We’ve gone from less of a partner to more of a customer after reinventing ourselves, and any time we’ve needed something the team has always been there.
“And for us, aACE has more than paid for itself, over and over. Most people in my company hadn’t used it until we introduced it to them, but getting everyone up to speed was so much easier than with other products I’ve used in the past. I have so much control when it comes to who can access which areas of the system –some user groups have access to inventory, others can see sales orders only, and things of that nature. That’s going to be of huge value to us as we grow. And I’d really like to thank the aACE Software team for all the work they’ve put in, because aACE is a great product.”
Interested in learning more about what aACE can do for your SMB? Read our feature highlights to see how aACE can help you take your operations to the next level.
“aACE was a really good mix for us of both out-of-the-box software and customizable workflows. It was very adaptable for something that is already a complete business management solution.” - Lance Caffrey, Executive Vice President of Operations, American Christmas
American Christmas is a B2B holiday decorating company specializing in commercial Thanksgiving, Christmas, Hanukkah, and New Year’s décor. For 50 years, they’ve been bringing holiday cheer to office lobbies, department stores, and hotels in Manhattan and the surrounding area. More recently, they’ve expanded to include clients around the country and across the globe.
But four years ago, their patchwork of databases made running their business a ho-ho-whole lot of trouble. They knew that in order to scale they would need a unique business management solution: one that's complete enough to handle all aspects of their operations, yet flexible enough to manage their particular workflows.
They found that solution in aACE.
For years, American Christmas had relied on a patchwork of solutions. Because none of these tools integrated with the others, information had to be entered and re-entered manually in each one. “We were using a few different software solutions, and they weren’t communicating well with each other,” says Lance Caffrey, American Christmas’s Executive Vice President of Operations. “We were doing our work in FileMaker Pro, we were doing a lot of reports in Excel separately, and then we were using QuickBooks for our finances. Reconciling all of those things together was not only really challenging, but oftentimes not possible because we were looking at information in so many different ways.” With aACE, Lance and his team are able to run the business from a single, comprehensive business management solution.
Due to the seasonal nature of their business, American Christmas operates on a year-long sales cycle. In their previous system, the start of a new year meant duplicating the previous year’s database and manually cleaning it up – a lengthy process that involved resetting the status for every order, deleting anything specific to the previous year, and making innumerable modifications to ensure that the new database was up-to-date. “The biggest challenge was going through the contracts and making sure that all of the information was correct,” says Svetlana Kochan, Senior Director of Operations. “That took about two weeks.” aACE completely eliminates the need for a new database each year, turning what was once a two-week process into the simple click of a button. Clients on a multi-year contract are automatically billed, and expired contracts are handed to the sales team for renewal, complete with all the information they need from previous years.
Because their previous systems didn’t talk to one another, pulling reports was more like pulling teeth. “It was very hard to cull data out of the software we had,” Lance says. “Reports were very difficult to run and to manage.” And because each year’s orders were stored in separate databases, compiling a year-over-year report took three people almost a week.
In contrast, aACE’s comprehensive reporting tools give the American Christmas team a big-picture view – including viewing multiple years at a glance – so what used to take days now takes mere minutes. And when it’s time to take a more granular look into that data, aACE makes it easy to see only the information they need, when they need it. “What I love is it allows us to quickly get a full overview of the system,” says Svetlana. “We can easily run reports now.”
In their previous system, American Christmas’s proposal process was a manual slog through Word documents and pricing binders. aACE tracks each sale from the lead to the balance sheet, starting with customized, branded proposals that allow them to offer their potential clients a range of options. “Because we rent things, sell things, and service things that other people own, that mix of business is difficult to manage,” Lance explains.
As a result, they need proposals to cover a wide range of situations while remaining consistent with the brand their customers know and trust. “The way we communicate information is very specific and we have found that it’s worked very well for us, and we were able to customize aACE to maintain the style of communications that we have with our clients,” adds Lance. With aACE’s flexibility, they’re able to do it all.
In their old system, anyone could change a record at any time – and those changes weren’t logged, so if someone later had questions, they had to hunt around for information about who made the alterations and why. And because their Orders database didn’t talk to their Invoices database, which didn’t talk to QuickBooks, there was no easy way to find related records.
aACE solves both of these problems, offering greater transparency throughout the system. Advanced logging features mean that once a record is opened, key changes are captured in the logs so there’s never a question of who did what and when. And with aACE’s drill-down, drill-around capabilities, it’s easy to track a transaction from start to finish. “The beauty of the software is that you have so many different links, you can track clients, you can see all invoices related to a client, you can see related leads, all the related records,” says Svetlana. “That’s great. We didn’t have that before.”
aACE Software President Michael Bethuy often jokes that the average employee spends three hours each day following up and three hours being followed up on, doing actual work with what’s left. As American Christmas learned when they implemented aACE, there is more than a kernel of truth in Michael’s humor: like many companies, they were spending too much time simply tracking down the information they needed to do their jobs. aACE changed that.
“All of the information we need is now contained and accessible and linked together, so a sales person can click on their order and see when purchase orders are due in or when shipments are due in and what has been ordered,” says Lance. He adds that company-wide, the need for internal follow-ups has been reduced by somewhere between 24 and 36 hours per week – a greater than 50% reduction! Thanks to aACE, American Christmas now has an extra three to four days’ worth of productive work time each week, allowing their staff to spend more time making the magic.
Here’s what American Christmas’s Executive Vice President of Operations, Lance Caffrey, has to say about their aACE implementation:
“I live by the system to a great extent. Yesterday I had to go into our old system to get some information, and it made me realize all over again how user-friendly and useful aACE is. I take a lot of aACE for granted now when I’m working in it, because it’s a big part of our day-to-day. It’s become second nature.
“Where aACE really helps us is by allowing us to work through the system in a cleaner way and not have to spend the same amount of time on every single order. For the orders that are contracted and not changing from year to year, we can just flip the switch and have them all ready. aACE enables us to send out the invoices immediately. Then we can focus on the handful of orders that really need our attention.
“Anyone in a niche market that requires a lot of customization should look into aACE. Certainly anyone that has a high amount of communication with clients that needs to present a specific look and face to their clients. I would recommend it to a growing midsize company because it’s very scalable.
“aACE has quickly become an important part of our fabric. I look forward to a future of growth together.”
Do you or someone you know need a change from one-size-fits-all ERP tools? Check out our videos to learn more about whether aACE business management software for Mac and PC can help accelerate your company.
“The results of implementing the calendar have been overwhelmingly positive. Everybody benefits from “real time” scheduling allowing us to see down to the nth degree what resources are available for any project at any time. The calendar solved the lack of visibility issues we were having.”
– Jimmie Wolfe, Director of Field Operations, Gable
Gable provides visual solutions that attract, engage and direct people to properties, buildings, places, and spaces through the integration of architectural and graphic elements that include signs, digital displays, audiovisual, media and lighting. Its custom signage that is manufactured in-house requires a complex production and installation schedule. However, when it came to scheduling projects, there wasn’t much visibility across the company and rapid decision-making was challenging. When spreadsheets weren’t cutting it, the aACE+ DayBack calendar integration saved the day by allowing users to see exactly what their day, their week, or their month looks like.
As the last link in the chain from order to delivery, the Installation team is responsible for delivering an order to the customer exactly how they want it – and when they want it. Director of Field Operations Jimmie Wolfe and his crews kept track of which orders were assigned to which resources using spreadsheets saved on a shared drive. These were cumbersome to access and time-consuming to keep updated. The aACE+ DayBack calendar now gives them up-to-the-minute visibility into what resources are scheduled where, allowing them to plan installations quickly and accurately.
Under the previous system, Jimmie sometimes wouldn’t know an order was coming until a physical copy arrived in his office. At that point, he would manually enter it into a spreadsheet, prioritize and filter the spreadsheet, and then go back and manually remove the order once it was done. With up to a dozen work orders coming in each day, this was a burdensome task. And if the spreadsheets weren't up to date, Jimmie or a member of his team would have to physically track down colleagues to find out what resources were and weren’t available. With aACE+ DayBack he can see an order coming as soon as it’s entered into the system and know precisely what resources are available to fulfill it, giving him more time to plan ahead.
When a customer places an order, they typically like to know when it’s going to arrive. That sounds like a simple question, but under Gable’s previous scheduling system they often had no simple answer. Sales representatives in the field would have to call the office to find out whether an installation crew was available on the customer’s preferred date. And as orders moved from team to team, project managers had no way to easily track which step of the process they were in. aACE+ DayBack allows sales reps to give customers an immediate answer about when their order will be installed. And if a customer has questions about their order while it’s underway, project managers can see where in the fulfillment process it is and connect them with the relevant team.
The aACE+ DayBack calendar updates when a change is made to an order, giving users an immediate and accurate view into their own schedule and those of other teams. “It's pretty important for our account managers and our project managers to be able to see in real time what we're doing today, what we're doing tomorrow, or what just got completed,” Jimmie tells us. “The calendar is a window for the company to see exactly what was going on at any given time.”
With aACE+ DayBack, users no longer have to schedule sections of time just to manage their schedule. Now users can rearrange their calendars in seconds simply by dragging and dropping events from one date or resource to another. The calendar automatically updates the associated order record, making rescheduling as easy as clicking a button. This user-friendly system has been a big crowd-pleaser, especially among employees who were familiar with the previous system. Says Jimmie, “Everybody who's used this tool is ecstatic over it.”
Gable has currently rolled the calendar out to three teams, each with their own unique needs. Typically, a calendar has one static list of resources for the company, with users able to drag and drop events onto that shared list. Because Gable has different resources in each team, they worked with the aACE team on a custom solution allowing them to set a different resource list for each team that's using the calendar. “It's a nice feature to open up specific calendars on-the-fly for a specific team, see the resources, and set the schedule. That was a great addition,” Jimmie says.
Here's what Gable's Director of Field Operations, Jimmie Wolfe, has to say about the calendar:
“It's much easier for people to get the information they need when they need it. There is less time spent on admin tasks, and less walking around the building trying to get updates. Now you can just log into the module and see exactly what's happening. It’s a huge time-saver, really.
“Any business that uses a scheduling system should look into the aACE+ DayBack calendar. This aACE module can be tweaked to conform to different situations. For anybody that currently uses a calendar in their day-to-day operations, this module would obviously be helpful.
“So far there's been an overwhelmingly positive response from everybody at Gable that has seen and used the calendar. They want to see more of it right now, so we're in the process of spreading this through the rest of the company. Eventually we want to roll out our customized calendar to each of the half-dozen teams that can use it. In the teams that keep workflow schedules, it's a must-have. And it improves each time we roll it out, so the next team is getting a better, more user-friendly product each time we set it up!”
We would highly recommend working with aACE. They are approachable and easy to work with. Their knowledge is very expansive in regards to how their software can work within your business environment.” -Lili Hall, President of KNOCK and Erin McCloskey, Director of Creative Services
Branded design is the core of KNOCK’s expertise. Their strategic design solutions have garnered acclaim from their peers and results for their clients, resulting in explosive growth. In 2007 they found that they found that they had outgrown their business management software and began looking for a solution that could keep up with the pace of their business. They almost immediately identified aACE as the right fit. It offered the comprehensive integration necessary to streamline operations and, importantly, had attractive and simple interfaces pleasing to the creative staff who would be required to use the software in order for the implementation to be a success.
As a growing company with world-class clients, KNOCK needed software that would work for them now and in the future. Having outgrown their previous solution, they were looking for something that would grow with them as they continued to expand. aACE is designed to support up to several hundred concurrent users, ensuring that it will grow along with your business.
KNOCK needed a solution that could be customized to their unique workflow. Because aACE is a “platform within a platform,” it can be easily adapted to meet the needs of almost any business.
The team at KNOCK needed a comprehensive solution that would streamline their operations and encompass their entire work process, from time and expense management to purchasing, invoicing, accounting, sales processes, and beyond. aACE provides an all-in-one solution for CRM, ERP, order fulfillment, jobs, accounting, and much more.
With staff at all levels of technological skill, KNOCK needed software that was as streamlined and clear as their designs. aACE is designed to be clean, concise, and highly user-friendly.
aACE covers every step in KNOCK’s work process with custom solutions built to fit their business. It has a comprehensive Customer Relationship Management section that leads into prospective customers becoming real customers. From that point you can take an order from start to finish by capturing deadlines, resources and material costs spent on a project, as well as extensive accounting functions.
Because aACE is so user-friendly, KNOCK’s whole staff was able to embrace it regardless of their technical skill level. As a design agency, they appreciate aACE’s smooth and concise interface, and that it doesn’t take much training to understand how aACE fits into KNOCK’s work environment.
aACE allows KNOCK to conduct all of their processes in one simple software solution, allowing them to have a 360° view of their business at all times.
Here's what KNOCK’S President, Lili Hall, and Director of Creative Services, Erin McCloskey, have to say about the results of the aACE software implementation:
"aACE has helped us streamline many of our processes. We have a snapshot of each project with many of the important details being on one screen. We instantly see our profitability within our projects and have specific numbers or data regarding many aspects of our business. We would highly recommend working with aACE to anyone."
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