Ambrogio Robot Winter 2020/2021 Activities

The light at the end of the tunnel is now visible, I received my first vaccine shot and and looking forward to being fully vaccinated in mid-May!  And, I will be traveling much more once that happens. It has been so frustrating, every time I am ready to get out on the road, the places I planned to visit always seem to become a Covid hotspot shortly before the date of my trip. I still go, but my meetings are far more limited than my original plan. It happened again, I have a trip planned for Michigan next week and the word is Michigan is "on fire" with Covid. Great. At least I have the first shot, which offers some protection against the disease.

Late Fall 2020 through early Winter 2021 was similar. So, what did I do with my time? Actually, it was a blessing in disguise. I had time to work on some key internet content, I developed an Ambrogio robot advertisement for the iLandscape365 Wisconsin/Illinois Virtual Tradeshow, and, I also developed a slick online "Fleet Designer" calculator to help landscapers analyze the cost/profit benefits of switching to robotic mowing. Check out the commercial here:

Here is the Ambrogio Robot Winter Service Video I made to help our dealers and long-time customers who service their out-of-warranty robots themselves:

Web sites for small businesses are a black hole for either money or time. We chose time. I often say having technical skills to develop our own web site is both a blessing and a curse. The blessing is it is not necessary to pay someone for web design or programming. The curse is the time it takes to do those tasks ourselves. After additional growth, we will either transition the work to an outside service or we will hire someone with programming skills to maintain our site. For sure I am not signing-up for web site maintenance long-term!

But Covid gave me a chance to brush-up on my programming skills so that I could develop the online calculator. It started as a spreadsheet. I would like to acknowledge our dealer, Joe Langton of Automated Outdoor Solutions, for his insights in the development of the spreadsheet. The spreadsheet enables landscapers to determine the annual net revenue factoring-in different loan rates and loan terms, robot installation cost and twice-monthly grass trimming/robot maintenance visits. 

With this business model, landscapers or other entities, own a fleet of Ambrogio robots that replace some of their lawn mowing equipment. The robots are leased for 4 years. Customers sign 4 year robot-mowing contracts, similar to a cell phone contract. Two 3-year renewals are a reasonable expectation for Ambrogio robots, before the robot might have to be replaced. In reality, if the robot is still in good condition, it could keep running with additional maintenance, too. 

During the 4 year contract, the spreadsheet shows a positive cash flow while the robots are being paid off. After the loan is paid down, maintenance of the robots during the renewal periods is still required, but the positive cash flow increases greatly. The spreadsheet computes the annual net revenue, including all expected costs, for Ambrogio robot models that are eligible for the fleet program discount.

Having completed the spreadsheet, an idea popped into my head that I could translate the spreadsheet into an online calculator. Minor detail, I had to learn Javascript. No problem, because I do have programming experience and once you learn one language the rest are a piece of cake! I was trained as an engineer before Google existed. It is so easy to debug code now vs in the old days.

It did not take very long to write the code. I did most of it over the holiday break and had the final debugging and features added well before iLandscape in early February. I received very good feedback from landscapers who found the calculator on our site and who also requested the spreadsheet. 

Here are some screen shots. The point of the calculator is help landscapers and other companies learn how to start a robot mowing business and to design the robot fleet that fits the property sizes of their clients. This is one advantage of Ambrogio over other brands, robots are available for very small properties up to 5 acres and more, because of the Ambrogio Infinity System, that allows robots within a single wire loop to coordinate mowing through cloud data storage and commands.

Notice how the Annual Net Revenue increases greatly when "Trimming Included" is set to "No", which means the robot is doing all of the grass trimming and the technician comes only once per month vs twice per month. To enable the robot to do the grass trimming, often there are mini-landscaping projects that have to be done, the assumption is the projects are done over time to gradually reduce the labor requirement. And, check out how the revenue looks for large-sized robot vs small.

I am expecting the calculator to gain traction year-over-year as a way to help grow the robot mowing as a service market.

This season's early Spring has made us busier than ever! I hope I can increase my post frequency but I am not counting on it just yet. Meanwhile, check out my Winter Service video and play around with my Fleet Designer calculator.