.svg)
.svg)
Josh Korte was still a college student in 1999 when he started a landscaping business. What began with one man and a lawnmower has evolved into Korte Tree Care, a thriving small business that serves a three-county area in mid-Missouri.
As the company expanded, Korte realized he needed help managing a growing team and fleet.
“In 2019, we started adding more crews, and that’s when I couldn’t keep track of everything on my own anymore,” he said. “Customers would want to know when we were coming and where the trucks were, and I couldn’t give them answers.”
Korte solved that problem with the help of EquipmentShare’s T3® technology. T3 is known best as the operating system for construction, but its combination of telematics hardware and user-friendly software is perfect for any business or organization that needs to manage a fleet of vehicles or equipment.
“T3 allowed us to keep up with the growth of the company and let us grow bigger than we otherwise would have. It’s really handy,” Korte said. “It probably saves me personally an hour a week on checking maintenance records and then probably eight hours of work on the logistics side.”
Here’s how T3 has helped Korte Tree Care scale its operations, maintain its equipment and protect its employees.
Scheduling logistics: Each day, the company’s three crews head out to prune and remove trees, clear land and grind stumps. Meanwhile, Korte spends much of his time on the go, evaluating prospective jobs and providing bids.
The company’s 18 trucks are outfitted with T3 trackers, allowing Korte to monitor their location in real time on the T3 app’s map so he can make quick routing decisions. This is extra important on the chaotic days after storms, when crews are dealing with multiple emergency jobs.
“I’m seldom in the office, so I need to be able to look at my phone and see where our trucks are and what time they got there, which tells me when they’ll be done and ready to go to the next place,” Korte said. “It really helps me organize things.”
Maintenance: T3’s service dashboard has allowed Korte to break free of a pen-and-paper system for keeping track of maintenance schedules.
“It automatically records the miles and hours on each truck, and then I can get in the portal and decide when to schedule oil changes, air filter changes, fuel filter changes, spark plugs and whatnot,” Korte said. “I don’t really have any trucks go over their recommended service time, because there’s nothing slipping past our radar. Without T3, I’d have to physically open 18 trucks and turn them on to see how many hours and miles they have on them, and then I’d have to go look in a book to 18 different pages. Now I can pull it up digitally, and it saves me a tremendous amount of time.”
Safety and legal protection: About once a month, Korte gets a call from someone claiming a member of his team was driving unsafely. He didn’t have a good way to evaluate those complaints, resolve disputes or coach his drivers until he had T3 Dash Cams installed on his trucks. T3’s cameras provide clear 1080p HD recordings and use motion detection and AI-based triggers to capture critical events.
“If there’s a name on the side of a vehicle, you’ll get calls all the time,” Korte said. “The big trucks are slow, and I guess that makes people angry, so they’ll cut the trucks off and then call and accuse my drivers of things. So we got cameras to know what happened and be able to prove what happened. My guys were all for it, because they were tired of being wrongly blamed.”
For all those reasons, T3 has helped Korte and his office manager to comfortably handle all the company’s logistics as Korte Tree Care has more than doubled in size in the last seven years. That has positioned the company for even more growth in the future.
“Without this technology, I would have had to employ someone else who would do some of these things, because the two of us doing logistics wouldn’t be able to keep up,” Korte said. “It’s been great for us.”
— Want to see how T3 can help your business thrive? Schedule a demo.
