How CMG Landscaping cut missed calls by 84% with Quo

Chase Gallagher was 12 years old when he started mowing lawns around his neighborhood. His mom printed his flyers at her office and brought them home at night. Chase went door to door, passing them out. His business at the time, within a year, he had 13 clients. By age 17, he had as many as 85.

After high school, he pivoted to bigger-ticket jobs. His company CMG Landscaping designs and builds drainage systems, hardscaping, and outdoor lighting for homeowners on Philadelphia's wealthy Main Line. Chase’s team generates more than $2 million annually.

Answering the phone was a feeling, not a fact

For years, Chase ran CMG from two iPhones, one personal and one for the business. “It was kind of cool” having two phones, he says of the early days. Except when it became a problem:

• Phones left behind in hotel rooms while traveling
• Calls he couldn't take forwarded to his office manager's cell phone instead; catching up on those conversations was time-consuming

“It was a mess,” he says. “Things just weren't as organized and tracked.” There was no report, no dashboard, but Chase knew his team was missing a significant amount of calls. Each missed call means losing out on thousands per project. Chase once estimated missed calls had cost CMG roughly $300,000 over the years. 

One number, backed by the whole team 

Chase moved CMG's business phone number onto Quo and built a small team around it. Office manager Corey answers calls when she can, and trains everyone else. Receptionist Diana covers the phones from 9:00 a.m. to 2:00 p.m. each day, then works through Quo’s Jobber integration to follow up with anyone she missed. A rotating set of sales reps and Chase himself pick up the rest. Between them, someone nearly always answers.

When nobody can pick up, the system doesn't let a lead go quiet. Quo's AI agent Sona gathers the caller's details. That way, their team doesn’t miss calls and has the information they need from leads to follow up — instead of those callers just moving on to a competitor. 

Using a shared number, they also don’t have to worry about losing any conversations if a team member leaves the company. All calls and texts live in their shared inbox. 

A report nobody could argue with

“Quo is also an accountability tool. Forget about what you say. Where's the Quo recap email at the end of the month? I want to see that. That's going to tell me if you're really answering the phone.”

Chase Gallagher

Founder, CMG Landscaping

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Data from Quo’s monthly recap email changed how Chase manages the team. Instead of taking anyone's word for it, he pulls up the numbers each month and walks the team through them: where they improved, where they slipped, what to fix next. He also connected Quo to ChatGPT, so he can ask who handled calls best that week, or how many follow-ups a rep made. “I can go through the information I need to see a lot quicker than if I'm just sitting here reading,” he says.

Every call is recorded, and that turned into its own kind of training. When Diana joined the team, she learned the job largely by listening back through a year of Corey's calls. Corey, Chase says, is a master at building rapport over the phone, so much so that homeowners sometimes assume the two of them are related. Sales reps now also review the office's original intake call so they arrive at a homeowner's property with the information they need to close them.

Faster closed deals & thousands saved

With answering the phone no longer left to chance, every number at CMG Landscaping has moved in the right direction since switching to Quo:

The sales themselves have also gotten easier to close. Where CMG once had to fight for a $4,500 job, Chase says, a $10,000 drainage project can now turn into what he calls a lay-down sale, decided on the spot, check in hand.

CMG's revenue has scaled from a teenage lawn-mowing side hustle to more than $2 million a year. Chase credits that growth as much to marketing spend as to answering the phone, though he's clear the two work together. Spending more to bring in leads only pays off if someone's there to pick up when they call.