How DM Greenkeeping runs without a data team

DM Greenkeeping looks after lawns and gardens across Denmark - grass service, robot mowers and fertilizer sold through their online shop, and roughly 100,000 garden visits a year. At that volume, small things compound: a minute longer in each garden, or a kilo more fertilizer per hundred square meters, runs into real money across a year. The data sits primarily in their custom CRM, the Shopify store and the e-conomic accounting system.

Rasmus Keiding, DMG’s CTO, runs their full technology stack. He’s not a data scientist or a developer by training. He’s the person most data questions end up with - finance, customer service, leadership.

Before Less, those questions were hard to answer and harder to trust. Reports came out of DMG’s own CRM, but anything beyond the basics meant an outside agency building it - people who didn’t know the business, working on their own terms. The same system could hand back two different numbers for the same thing, and no one could say which was right.

“The challenge was opacity - how are we performing, how many leads here, how many customers there. It was all a mix of guesswork and Excel sheets.” - Rasmus Keiding, Chief Technology Officer

The day-to-day was manual. Every week - sometimes every day - numbers were copied out of the CRM into a spreadsheet by hand. New questions went to the agency and waited.

DMG didn’t need enterprise data infrastructure; that’s built for companies ten times its size, with a team to run it. It had outgrown spreadsheets too. It needed one capable person to get answers out of the business - answers they could trust - without a data team.

Answers for every team

Now Rasmus builds the answers in Less himself. A sample of what runs across the company:

Customer service. DMG’s crews work routes - a service car starts a stretch with a set list of gardens to visit. Customers want to know one thing: when are you coming? The old answer was a month - “sometime in June.” Rasmus built a model in Less that estimates the visit window from the route data, so customer service can be specific. Rasmus says: “they can look it up and say: it actually looks like we’ll be at your place in five days.

Leadership. A sales dashboard pulls revenue from e-conomic and Shopify and adds KPIs from the custom CRM - visits among them - so leadership tracks the whole business in one place.

Payroll. Payroll. The garden crew work on commission, so every month someone has to work out what each of them is owed. A dedicated dashboard now does it - the kind of reconciliation Rasmus says has "given [Britt] possibilities she'd otherwise have needed a whole finance BI team for," referring to DMG's CFO. What used to take days is now automatic.

Operations. A resources tracker shows seed, fertilizer and weedkiller use - daily, per vehicle. At a thousand tonnes of fertilizer a year, that isn’t a detail; it’s where the margins are made.

Marketing. A significant set of models reshapes the CRM data into audiences for ActiveCampaign and pushes them every day, so the email campaigns always reflect each customer’s latest state.

Because it all runs in one place, the questions that cross systems get answered without a project. "How many customers are on grass service, bought a robot mower in Shopify, and also bought fertilizer?" Rasmus can find that out relatively quickly - something that would have taking wrangling data from three systems before.

It also changes what Rasmus's own job feels like. He describes himself as "a one-stop shop" - no longer sending emails back and forth to developers and data scientists, or sitting and copy-pasting in Excel, but answering the questions himself.

The speedboat

Rasmus calls Less a speedboat - light and quick next to the supertanker of DMG’s own long-term development.

“We have a supertanker - our long-term infrastructure - but in the meantime we need a lot of things right now. Speedboats just sail off and solve them.” - Rasmus Keiding, Chief Technology Officer

That speedboat now runs what the company can’t do without: payroll, the leadership dashboards, the daily marketing pushes. In May alone, 6,000 tasks ran through Less. As Rasmus says: “some of it has been running in production for two years”.

One person, a data team’s output

Rasmus does all of this alongside the rest of his job, with no data team behind him. He compares DMG to a company he knows that runs a twenty-to-thirty-person data team.

“As one person, alongside all my other tasks, I’ve delivered maybe eighty percent of what their twenty-to-thirty-person team does. Smaller scale, sure - but the same tasks, the same logic, the same data, the same systems. I couldn’t have done it without Less.” - Rasmus Keiding, Chief Technology Officer

He calls it a superpower. DMG runs on numbers it trusts and controls, produced in-house, by one person - without a data team.