How Hardy Fence Cut Their Field Time by 50% with ArcSite

April 7, 2026

Table of Contents

About Hardy Fence

Industry: Fencing

ArcSite Customer Since: September 2021

Their Story: Hardy Fence is a family-owned fencing contractor based in Chanute, Kansas, serving residential and agricultural customers across rural southeast Kansas. Founded in 2016 by Dan Hardy after a career in oil and gas sales, the company has built its reputation on delivering a level of professionalism and attention to detail. Today, Hardy Fence operates as a lean family business, focused on quality work, trusted customer relationships, and doing things the right way.

The Impact

Regularly wins bids as the high-price competitor based on proposal quality and professionalism alone
Eliminates costly site visits for 80–85% of estimates using satellite-based remote measuring
Delivers material lists accurately down to individual nuts and bolts, preventing costly over- or under-ordering
Generates multiple fence styles and pricing options per customer in minutes — work that previously required hours of time.
Scope disputes that once simmered into callbacks or "he said/she said" conflicts simply don't happen with clear SOWs inside ArcSite.

How the Business Started

Dan Hardy didn't plan on starting a fence company. In early 2016, two setbacks arrived at once: the oil and gas industry, where he'd spent a decade in sales, went into a downturn and laid him off, and a barn fire had just consumed part of the family's property. While the new barn was being built, Dan and his wife, Sara, were building a fence between the old and new barn locations. In a conversation that afternoon with the contractors building the barn, they started joking about starting a fence company.

That evening, he did some research. Two weeks later, he filed the LLC.

Hardy Fence launched in March 2016 out of the family home near Yates Center, Kansas, a small town in the rural southeast corner of the state. For three years, Dan ran the business with his wife, Sara, and the occasional friend or family member helping before hiring his first employee in May 2019. The company grew, moved into commercial space in town, brought on crews, a marketing director, and an office manager — and then, as Dan puts it honestly, things got tough. Eventually, they started fresh.

Today, Hardy Fence is back to its roots: a lean, family-run operation working out of their house near Chanute, Kansas, with Dan's kids — ages 16, 15, and 13 — occasionally helping in the field. It's intentional. The Hardys homeschool, and the flexibility of running a small family business is what Dan now describes as his favorite part of entrepreneurship.

The Challenge

Before ArcSite, Dan's estimating process was what he calls "stone tablet and chisel" — hand-drawn layouts on grid paper pads that fence suppliers hand out, with measurements eyeballed on site and pricing calculated by hand. He graduated to a custom spreadsheet he built himself, which was more systematic but still required manual input of every run length, corner count, and gate configuration. Generating multiple quotes for different fence styles meant running through the whole process again from scratch.

For a fence contractor operating across rural southeast Kansas — where job sites can be 40 to 60 miles from home — every site visit carried real cost. Driving an hour each way to measure a project that didn't close was half a day gone. And even after all that effort, handwritten or simple spreadsheet estimates left room for scope confusion: you might quote 150 feet of fence and show up to discover the customer had expected 175.

The Solution

Dan found ArcSite in September 2021, early enough that we were still developing our fence-specific capabilities. He became a collaborative partner in that process, spending time building out a detailed product library — pricing fence sections down to individual posts, panels, corners, gates, and hardware, with waste factors built in for materials like wood. That investment paid off in a highly configurable, granular system he could rely on completely.

His workflow today runs quickly: when a lead comes in through MySalesman — a customer-facing quoting tool integrated with his website that he's used since the company was two months old — Dan imports that data dire ctly into ArcSite.

Within a few minutes, he pulls the best available aerial or satellite image of the property, calibrates it inside the software, and draws the fence layout over it. The finished drawing shows fence lines highlighted in bright green directly on the customer's own property — measurements clearly labeled, scope precisely defined.

In 80 to 85 percent of cases, Dan can deliver a firm estimate without visiting the property at all.

The Results

The impact on Hardy Fence has been hard to quantify — but unmistakable. "If I had to put a dollar amount on the value that ArcSite has provided to me in the almost five years that I've been using it, it's pretty priceless," Dan said.

The clearest signal is what happens at the bid table. In rural southeast Kansas, few competitors show up with a professional digital proposal, a scaled drawing overlaid on the customer's own property, and a detailed materials breakdown. Hardy Fence does. And it's not uncommon for them to win the job even when they're the most expensive bid.

The proposal also creates a layer of legal and operational protection. A customer who receives a drawing showing exactly where fence lines will run, how many feet are included, and what gates are specified has no grounds to claim they expected something different. Scope disputes that once simmered into callbacks or "he said/she said" conflicts simply don't happen.

Dan isn't chasing growth for its own sake. He tried the multi-crew path once and found it wasn't what he'd envisioned. "I found the most joy in where we're at right now," he said.

His 15-year-old son has started helping in the field and is taking an interest in the trade. Dan's hope for the next decade is less about scale and more about building something the next generation might want to carry forward.

Dan's advice is simple: don't compare yourself to others. "My joy is not to be a multi-million dollar company. I tried for a little bit, and it backfired, and it wasn't fun. Just stay in your lane and find joy in what you're doing."