Sizing the demand for automation in professional turf care

The question

An outdoor equipment maker serves professionals who look after large areas of turf, where a working week is made up of many different jobs.

The company wanted to know which parts of that work its professional customers would welcome help with, and what that demand could be worth, job by job and market by market. Interest alone wouldn’t show where the money was, so every job had to be sized on the same terms.

Our approach

We sized each task from the number of sites in a market and what a typical site spends on equipment and labor, so every job was measured on one basis.

Interviews with consultants and turf professionals shaped what we asked, and a survey of turf professionals measured how interested they would be in automating different parts of their work. Stated interest tends to run ahead of buying, so we down-weighted it for overclaim before it touched any estimate.

What the team came away with

A market sizing model, built task by task with every assumption visible and adjustable, went to the team with a report setting out the evidence for its strategy planning.

Because labor and equipment were sized separately for each task, the team could see whether demand rested on money spent on machines or on people’s time. Markets the survey didn’t reach were sized from comparable markets, on stated assumptions, so the team knew which numbers rested on comparison.

As costs, plans or assumptions change, the opportunity can be sized again without new fieldwork, and any part of it can be tested against a different view of the market.