Like every small business owner, Shannon Marques knows time has value. When she was presented with a new business opportunity recently, she soon realized just how much value her time — and her employees’ time — could affect her company’s bottom line.
Marques’ business — Mean Green Solutions, Inc., in Orange County, Florida — serves as a vendor to the Federal National Mortgage Association (FNMA), commonly known as Fannie Mae, and the Federal Home Loan Mortgage Corporation (FHLMC), known as Freddie Mac.
With a staff of about 40 people, Marques wanted to expand her business by doing property safety hazard inspections for these government agencies — a process where volume matters. To make it cost effective, Marques had to make sure her employees could finish as many properties as possible in a regular work day.
Properties could be located anywhere in Orange County (the fifth largest county in Florida, encompassing 1,004 sq. miles with a population of 1,145,956). Therefore, it made the most sense to group properties together geographically to maximize her employees’ time and minimize the driving distance. Plus, each property was only visited once, so the routes would change completely every day.
“Normally I used MapQuest. But it would only let me do about 25 properties at one time, and the parameters were obsolete,” she said. “Plus the routes were inaccurate, and I’d have crews spending a lot of their time trying to find the address.” This was the case with Google Maps
Google Maps as well.
Frustrated, Marques happened upon the MyRouteOnline.com website. Within 15 minutes of testing out the software, she was signing up for an account. It paid off immediately.
“Before our crews were driving 42-84 miles a day. Our first week with MyRouteOnline, they were traveling 18-32 miles per day,” she said. It wasn’t just the crew’s time and mileage that was affected. Instead of spending 2-3 hours creating routes for her crews, Marques could simply upload an Excel spreadsheet with the addresses to MyRouteOnline, then create multiple routes in minutes with the click of a button.
“Now I can import 400-500 addresses at once and create different routes for a 4-5 day work week,” she said. “I love it. It rocks. I’ll never use MapQuest or Google Maps again. I am going to MyRouteOnline.com every single time.” If that wasn’t enough, Marques also touts MyRouteOnline’s customer service. “They were fantastic,” she said. “Whether I called or email them, they also got back to me really quickly.”
Her experience with online route planning has changed the way Marques plans to run her business in the future. “MyRouteOnline.com was an absolute savior for me,” she said. “I’m a dedicated customer.”
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