Mark Tipton’s Guide to Growing and Managing a Landscape Business Efficiently

00:00
Robert
Hi, everyone, and welcome to the I Am Landscape Growth podcast, where entrepreneurs help entrepreneurs grow faster, better, and stronger in the green industry. From leadership to sales to recruiting and operational excellence, we cover the topics holding entrepreneurs back and share how to get past those bottlenecks with the best in the industry. I’m your host, Rob Murray, co founder and CEO of Intrigue, a digital marketing company focused on helping landscape companies grow. So sit back and enjoy the show. All right, everybody, welcome back to another episode of the IAM Landscape podcast. Today is, I would say, a very special episode. I do say that sometimes about episodes, but this one especially. So I have the pleasure of having Mark Tipton, CEO of Aspire, on. On the podcast today, and Whitney Griffin, I want to say, like, head of product on. On the podcast today.

00:52
Robert
So the experience and perspective that we’re going to be able to get from two leaders within a leading organization in the industry, I’m pumped for it. So thank you for doing this, Mark and Whitney.

01:04
Mark
Yeah, thank you. Great to be here.

01:06
Speaker 3
Thanks, Robert.

01:08
Robert
Yeah, it’s a pleasure. When I. When I woke up this morning, I was like, oh, snap. I got this one on my docket. Like, this is like, all the interviews are great, but I, for some reason, had a little extra, you know, kind of jump in my step knowing that were going to have a chance to do this one today. So thank you.

01:24
Mark
Well, let’s have fun. We’re looking forward.

01:26
Robert
Okay, let’s do it quick. Obviously, context. We got to do it. You know, a lot of people probably have heard you tell your story a little bit, and Whitney maybe as well, so we don’t need to spend a bunch of time. But can you give us Cole’s notes, summary of, like, how you ended up in the industry and then taking over a leadership position within Aspire?

01:42
Mark
Yeah, it’s a. It’s a story that goes back over 20 years for me, Robert, where I was a software guy. I was, you know, had a company where I was one of the owners of, and were building software for anybody and everybody. And I had come from a product background where I had seen the value of a software product and what it can do. But at that time, I was building custom software, which was very different if you equate it to a landscape company. It’s a company focused on construction versus maintenance, and I was looking to be a little bit more maintenance than just purely construction and the ebbs and flows that construction brings to your business.

02:27
Mark
And so, through a friend of a friend, a business connection, I was introduced to a Landscape company, they were a larger regional landscape contractor, and they needed some software, and they couldn’t find any. Anything in the industry that fit for them. And so they contracted with us to build them something custom. And as were building the software for them, I was, first of all surprised at how complicated their business was. Right. Most people think of a contractor, a landscape contractor, and, like, they mow grass. I mean, come on, how. How hard can it be? Obviously, I think your audience knows how hard it is and how complicated those businesses are.

03:10
Mark
And I learned that and built a pretty sophisticated system to run their business and started looking at the industry as a whole and going, you know, why did this guy come and pay all this money to have us build something custom for him? Like, there’s got to be.

03:29
Robert
There’s got to be something.

03:31
Mark
Yeah. And so I went to my first GIE back, if you remember Gie from a few years. Yeah, yeah. I went to my first one in 2006. I was in Columbus, Ohio, my first experience outside of one company with the industry, and went there just to learn.

03:49
Robert
Just like, okay, who soak it up.

03:52
Mark
Yeah. Who are the other vendors here? How big is this industry? And so just doing some initial investigation, because I was like, okay, is there an opportunity to make a product here? And so walking away from that show, no question in my mind, there was a big opportunity here. Let’s go do that. And so started slowly, organically converting that software built for one company into a product platform, which is a lot harder than it sounds. Kind of like running a landscape company, Right? It’s a lot harder than it sounds, but made some progress there and got some great experience, great connections, fell in love with the industry. Just more the people than anything. But love the mission of the industry. You know, making our planet beautiful and sustainable is. Is an awesome mission.

04:49
Mark
And so, you know, spent about, you know, a decade plus doing that, and just, you know, got to a point where it was. I wanted to go big, and so went out with Kevin Kehoe, who had been a friend of mine, who had one of the great people in the industry that I had met over that time. And together we got together and started Aspire. And this is almost 12 years ago now. And we just had a big vision for what we could do, and we wanted to change the industry. We saw the opportunity that was in the industry. Kevin had amazing insights, having worked with, you know, probably upwards of 300 contractors in a consulting type of engagement that he would have.

05:39
Robert
Right.

05:40
Mark
Helping them with their businesses, their budgeting and everything. And so that’s what really aligned us. I understood the software side and I understood landscape as well and he understood best practice and we had great connections in the industry and so we took off. I mean it took us over a year to get version one point oh done. But once we did, we took off. We had some great initial customers sign up that are still with us today and just had a great run. And so the last 12 years have been an incredible learning experience for me both in the industry as well as running my own growing company. You know, as we grew from you know, just a small ragtag group of people to the company we are today.

06:36
Robert
Amazing. And I’m going to have some questions about that in a quick second. But Whitney, would you be so kind to do the Kohl’s notes of your 20 years plus in the industry?

06:46
Speaker 3
Totally. So I wanted to be a landscape designer for high end residential since I was in high school. I only applied to Auburn University, that was the land grant university in my state. And I didn’t really have a backup plan so like luckily I got in, everything worked out. I finished my undergraduate degree in 2008 and as we all know, no one was building homes anymore, let alone landscaping them and all of my friends were going into the industry to do maintenance and quite the opposite of Mark. I am not maintenance minded. I don’t typically enjoy doing kind of the same things. I, I want to do something different every single day. And so maintenance wasn’t really for me and I decided to stay in school and be a professor.

07:37
Speaker 3
I thought if I can’t do what I want to do, I’ll just teach the thing. So I earned a master’s and a doctorate and I joined the faculty at Texas A and M and taught all of the landscaping courses there. And then after a few years I, I was recruited back out of the industry, back out of academia and back into the industry and ran the design and project management team for a builder in Austin, Texas doing custom high end design, build landscaping and it was phenomenal experience and I loved it. And then after a few years, skin cancer ran me out of the sun and my doctor basically said like you can’t do this for 10 more years or I can’t help you anymore.

08:21
Speaker 3
My significant other is a software engineer and he said look, you have the personality for product management and I think that it’s that like that day to day is very different and it’s very kind of project focused and I think you would really enjoy this if you just gave It a shot and I thought why not? And our director of product, Brian Brinkworth was willing to give me a chance when my resume came across his desk. And so he hired me on as a product owner and I worked with a engineering team kind of translating what landscape minded users are asking for in their landscape or language and translating that into, you know, what a developer can actually put into practice from a business logic and code based perspective.

09:11
Speaker 3
And grew up and I’m now with Aspire as a product manager and kind of continually. Yeah, I just translate between landscaper speak and developer speak in a very simplified perspective of what I. Yeah, I.

09:27
Robert
Mean like, and that’s a unique skill set in the world, I would imagine. So anyway, pumped to have you on this interview. So quick one back to you, Mark. Quick for those of like many people know of Aspire, maybe not everybody knows what your core focus is as a business. So can you just take a quick second to help people understand like what is the core focus of Aspire?

09:50
Mark
Yeah, so we provide a business management software platform. So it’s basically software that helps landscape contractors their business. You know, at the heart of our system. I would say we’re a job costing system, but we do a lot more than that. But that’s kind of the core of it. But it goes from, you know, the sales process and you know, putting bids together all the way to invoicing customers and all the reporting that goes with that.

10:22
Robert
Amazing. And right now number of companies on the platform. Ish.

10:27
Mark
You know, we’re a public company now, Robert, and there’s certain things I’m allowed to say and certain things I can’t, so.

10:34
Robert
Oh, fair enough.

10:34
Mark
Just say. I’ll just say well over a thousand.

10:37
Robert
Okay, great.

10:38
Mark
Companies are running on Aspire today.

10:41
Robert
Yeah, it’s amazing. And so like we have a chance to do association shows, state shows, national shows, Canada, U.S. Private, you know, run events. Every time we bump into people that are using Aspire, they all speak very highly of the use case. They do say that obviously it is a lot and when they say when they get through it’s worth every effort, dime, whatever. So anyway, just appreciate you leveling up the professionalism of the industry. It was interesting in 2018, I think it was 2018, I did my first talk to a group of landscape entrepreneurs and I asked the room, who here heard of Simon Sinek, Seth Godin, Jim Collins? And it was really not like zero. Like we’re talking room of like 150, 200 people.

11:26
Robert
And last year, in our, you know, circle around the continent, 75% of people are exposed to this type of content or better. And it’s just really interesting to see how the whole industry’s professionalism is elevating. The last 10 years. It’s been pretty amazing.

11:46
Mark
Oh, it is. It’s absolutely amazing. And, you know, you’re seeing a whole new level of professionalism in the way companies are being managed. You’re seeing a lot of, you know, professional money come in, if you will, in the form. Yeah, well, there’s private equity investors who, you know, those are smart people who have, who are sitting on, you know, piles of cash that are looking to invest in good companies and they’ve looked at the landscape industry and they see huge opportunities there.

12:20
Robert
Yeah, there’s.

12:21
Mark
And it’s just a start credit to the industry. Right. It’s, it’s an attractive business to invest in.

12:27
Robert
Yeah, it’s big time. And like you, the, when we got involved, the work hard, play hard nature of the people that run these companies, the openness I found is unbelievable. Like how incredible.

12:40
Mark
Yeah.

12:40
Robert
Cooperative everybody is, even in local environments. Anyway, super cool. The whole part of this show is this one question we ask every single person, because that’s what we’re trying to figure out the answer to is what’s the primary growth constraint holding entrepreneurs back in the green industry? And with somebody with such a wide perspective and deep in terms of being able to see companies growing under the hood, what do you see as the primary growth constraint holding entrepreneurs back in the green industry today?

13:07
Mark
Well, it’s hard to say primary because I see a bunch that, you know, we have the opportunity to work with so many companies and get to see so many things. But, you know, a really unique thing happened this year. We do surveys every year of our customers just to hear from them, you know, what’s working, what’s not working, what are they concerned about? I think for the first, I don’t know, 15 years that we did this or 10 years that we did this, the primary concern was labor. Right. And, and that was my constraint to growth. And for the first time, we didn’t hear that this year. Not that the labor issue is fixed, it is far from fixed. It’s still very much a challenge.

13:52
Mark
But their primary concern this year, and that was the way we phrased the question, what is your, your primary concern is growth. They want to grow and they want to grow now more than ever before. And so I think it’s appropriate. Your question here, Robert, in taking a look at this and you know, we asked some other questions in that survey as well around marketing and how much they spend on marketing and then how much they’re growing. And there was an absolute direct correlation there. Most landscape contractors are way under investing in way under investing compared to other industries. And, and I’ve got the unique perspective as being part of service titan, where I can just not see landscape, but I can see a lot of the other trades as well. I can see past. I can see plumbing, H vac, electrical, roofing.

14:50
Mark
You know, we as service titans serve a broad range of the trades. And you know, comparatively landscape contractors underestimating in underspend in marketing and are getting not just proportionally less opportunities, but it’s a significant curve there it is where the more you spend, the more you invest. And it’s not just dollars, it’s time and effort too, in marketing really puts you on a platform to grow. And we have a unique perspective in that we have an immense amount of data. You take the customers that we have that represent billions and billions of revenue, and you can see those that are growing and those that aren’t and where the ones that are growing, what are they doing that the ones that aren’t are not as much Marketing certainly a part of that. Another huge part of that is just managing your business, managing your jobs.

16:03
Mark
We have seen so many companies that, you know, labor is a precious commodity, right? It is, it is the biggest limitation to how much they can grow. And, and the labor’s not being managed effectively. They’re not, you know, they’re taking labor and using it in an inefficient way. That’s not just costing them money, but it’s costing them growth opportunities. Like if I. And not just the labor in the field, by the way. We’re not just talking the guy pushing a mower or planting a tree. I mean, we’re talking account managers, production managers, people who are managing the breadth of business that they should be able to manage with the right tools in place. And so I look at those two things as the two biggest things that we’ve seen recently that are limiting companies opportunity to grow.

17:07
Robert
Well, first of all, Mark and Whitney are not plants, right? Because you do realize that we are a digital marketing company completely focused on landscape and the green industry. And it’s just music to my ears because sometimes it’s like trying to take blood out of a rock when we’re trying to Increase a marketing budget with a landscape entrepreneur.

17:30
Mark
And I would say it’s an industry challenge, Robert. Like, it’s.

17:33
Robert
No, I’m with you. I see it every day. Like, we are so close to what you just said. And I’m trying not to jump out of my, my shirt right now because I’m so excited to just get a little bit of insight here from someone who can see so much from a database point of view. Because a lot of times, and we talk about this is that especially in one of the biggest issues we see around marketing with landscapers is that there’s a lot of people selling stake oil in like two landscapers promising great results and not delivering on their promises. Because really, what is it takes a laptop and Internet connection to say that they, you know, run a marketing agency.

18:09
Robert
So that aside, you know that one of the reasons we’re doing this podcast from a marketing point of view for us is how can we just bring more value to the industry so that people can understand how to grow their businesses and then, hey, if they choose us as a partner, great. But one of the insights I think you might be able to bring then is like, and we get this a question a lot and we have a framework for it. But when you look at budget as a percentage of revenue investment in marketing, and that can be anything from truck wraps to, you know, going to fundraising dinners to, you know, online advertising with Google Ads and website development, it could be whatever you want to call it is. Is there a range where you’re seeing the growing companies within.

18:52
Mark
Yeah, I don’t have the numbers in front of me. But, but there was a clear, like I said, it wasn’t like a straight line for every dollar you spend, you’re going to get. Yeah, it’s the more you spend, the higher your return. So you don’t just get more, you get a significant percentage more. And obviously there’s a diminishing return at some point. But the point is that, that there is undervaluing of what, you know, a good marketing plan and approach can do. And, and it’s certainly a limitation to growth.

19:30
Robert
Yeah. Anyway, it’s so hard for me not to promote ourselves right now, so I’m just not going to and move on. But I do appreciate that there’s actually a really cool report that you guys did that we actually summarized and then linked back to you guys on the what’s coming up forecasted for 20, 25. And I think some of the questions that you Were just referring to were in that report.

19:52
Mark
Yeah, I think we’re talking about the same thing.

19:54
Robert
Yeah, yeah, 100. And there was some really cool. It was John. I can’t remember his last name, but he’s a VP client experience with you guys.

20:01
Mark
John Goal.

20:02
Robert
Yeah, that’s right. Anyway, I got a chance to meet him in Costa Rica when were down at the leaders forum. I mean, what a cool cat, like in every sense of the word. And we had him on the show too, and give him a huge shout out because he delivered that report to the audience and it could have been pretty dry. And he did a really good job of breezing through it, but kicking on the key points. So it is something that we should check out. If you’re listening to this right now, you can go to intramedia.com blog. You can just Google Aspire. Obviously you can go to the Aspire website and find it too. But I think it does break down some of the investment criteria around marketing.

20:37
Robert
We’ll link to it in the podcast description on our site and your site so that people can go check it out. Because it was actually really helpful. Not to sound surprised, but sometimes industry reports aren’t the most easy to get through. You guys just did a great job with it.

20:50
Mark
So super proud of the team. Robin Medford, who leads our product marketing, put that together and had a lot of help doing it. But really, like you said, really interesting. And that. That’s the report that talked about how for the first time in, again, I don’t know how many years, the number one concern was growth, not labor, which it’s just historically been.

21:16
Robert
And it is interesting how that is starting to shift. And there’s actually something that we’ll get more onto the labor in a minute because this is the other thing that you want to talk about was labor inefficiency or management inefficiency as a broad stroke term based on kind of the way you were describing, whether it’s, you know, how you’re managing the work you’re doing with the customers you’re serving or the team that you’re running. What are some examples of those inefficiencies that in a way, like for the audience to listen to it and say, oh, maybe I’m making that mistake, I should be looking at how to address this thing. Like, do you have a sense of what some of those things were or are?

21:50
Mark
Yeah, I think it starts with underbidding jobs. Like when. When people are putting their estimates together to. To. To do a job, they. They don’t either have, you know, good production rates. You know that they know how, you know, how many square feet of turf can I mow with this mower? Or how long does it take to plant this size plant. And so they put estimates together, they get excited that they win big jobs, only to find out later those jobs are not profitable, that they’ve expended much more labor or they haven’t managed, and Whitney knows this really well, they haven’t managed a construction job.

22:34
Mark
Where there’s been a lot of changes along the road, and that’s where we see a lot of companies lose a lot of money, is they want to go in and make the customer happy, but without diligently managing the project and having the tools to diligently manage the project. And so you can make sure you’re tracking the hours and billing when the client makes a change.

22:55
Robert
And yeah, like if it’s in scope, out of scope, change orders.

22:59
Mark
And you need to be able to do those changes. Right. We all want our customers to be happy and customers, the conditions on the ground will change and we need to make a change or the customers want some change.

23:10
Robert
Sure.

23:10
Mark
Need to adjust. We just need to make sure that we’re accommodating for that in our budget and in our plan and billing the. The customer appropriate for that. And Whitney’s got both personal experience in that and working in a contractor, as well as listening to I don’t know how many of our contractors did you meet with, Whitney? I mean, it was a lot.

23:34
Speaker 3
Our construction advisory board was more than 40 customers to start with, but definitely over time that grew. Whether it was face to face or ignite or one of our customer facing staff members reaching out and saying, hey, can I pull you into this call? You know, probably 50 to 60 is a safe bet. And I did want to loop back around to the kind of the efficiency management piece that you mentioned, Mark, because I think there’s a really interesting kind of correlation there between that and, you know, this lack of marketing that we see in the industry. Because you’re right, customers aren’t bidding their jobs correctly. But a big piece of that I think is there’s so much like underappreciation for overhead costs in the green industry.

24:19
Speaker 3
And it’s really easy for an entrepreneur to say, like, oh, I know my labor cost, I know the cost of materials. I can estimate this absolutely accurately. And then they’re missing that overhead piece. Right. Like the cost of doing business, like, what is their salary? What is, what is all of this? That goes into that isn’t a direct cost on the job. And, you know, fortunately or unfortunately, that’s kind of where marketing comes in. And so I think one of the challenges, Robert, is it isn’t, yes, like, marketing is undervalued in our industry, but one of the other pieces of that equation, I think, is it’s not being accounted for on the front end. Like, they’re not building that into the annual budget and knowing, like, okay, well, I have to put this amount of.

25:03
Speaker 3
We don’t know the data, but we need to put this amount of percent, like, into my budget this year, and that’s going into my overhead so that I can cover my marketing costs and continue to, like, be asked to bid jobs. Because bidding the job and winning it is great. But if you’re not being considered as one of the players in the conversation to be even asked to bid the job, like, you’ve already lost the job. And so I could talk about this for a really long time, but I think that overhead management piece is a really important part. And not toot our own horn, but, like, that’s what we do that no one else on the market does. Like, we can actually tell you what things really cost when you’re running Aspire.

25:41
Speaker 3
And other folks may say that they’re job costing, but they’re only job costing, those direct costs. And we can actually tell you what it really, truly costs to run your whole business so that you can budget for it and grow.

25:53
Robert
And I mean, this is overhead management. Overhead recovery. Right. So, I mean, and just for people listening who may be not familiar with it, to oversimplify the approach would be if you have 100% of your overhead and you do 10 jobs a year, then you want to make sure 10% of your overhead is being recovered by each job. Yeah, that. To oversimplify the approach.

26:10
Speaker 3
Yeah, Yep, totally.

26:13
Robert
And it’s hugely missed. Like, my goodness, do people miss on this? And then the other thing, too, I find a lot of people miss on is administrative burden. So, like, the cost, the cost to onboard and even offboard customers. You giggled a little bit, though. So do you have some insight on that one?

26:30
Speaker 3
I mean, kind of like from personal experience in the industry? Yeah, you know, it’s. It’s. We all. We all know, right? It’s. It’s costs more to. To lose and gain a new customer than it. Than it is to, like, keep an existing customer that you’ve already won that relationship with. And so I think a lot of the really successful folks in our industry Understand that yes, this is a green industry, this is the relationship industry, but what we’re really selling is relationships. And once you have built that relationship and put the time into it, you need to maintain that because if you don’t, it will cost you more in the. And I think the really successful folks in our industry know that.

27:12
Robert
So can I just go on that? No. Mark, you got a piece. I’m not going to lose mine. Go for it. You want to add to that?

27:17
Mark
Yeah, so. So just kind of to take that to the next stage. You know, there’s one of the other missions that we’ve had as an organization in changing the industry, in bringing best practice was also to level up the talent that was in the industry to attract higher level talent, which means you need to pay higher wages. Right. To get people who are more.

27:41
Robert
And so you need to have better margins so you can afford better people that do better work and that make clients happier. Like it’s a really crazy little cycle.

27:48
Mark
Exactly. Like how much of a portfolio should an account manager be responsible for? How much should a production manager be responsible for? If you can manage, you know, a million dollar portfolio, that’s one thing. What if you could manage that same person with the right tools could manage a 2 million dollar portfolio. You could pay them, right. And you’re going to get more value out of them. And if you do it right, you’re also going to create a better customer experience and you’re going to generate more profit for your business. So all of these check together. Yeah, yeah.

28:25
Robert
That’s so cool and so important because we hear all the time like good talents, expensive. But like there’s a philosophy I think that if we can start to flip the switch on thinking about this is that a, players are free actually because they pay for themselves. And so like in our experience, running our business, everything, every once in a while we’ve been like, okay, let’s just pay this person a lot of money and just like. And it works out well, swimmingly, to the point of like removing the needle on the entire organization. So having the margins baked into the business to be able to make that happen is super important to your point.

28:57
Mark
And having the visibility into it is so critical because. Because you could pay a lot of people a lot of money and not get much out of it too.

29:03
Robert
Sure, yeah.

29:04
Mark
And there’s a lot of people have done that. But if you’ve got the ability to watch your metrics, to know that, you know, you’re hitting Your job numbers, you know, you’re hitting your gross margins that you’re generating the profitability and you’ve got visibility into that and confidence that it’s accurate. Yeah, it’s huge. And if you want to go pay the next, you know, account manager that you’re going to bring in a six figure salary because you know what they can do and you can watch them do it right? Like, yeah, they’re not doing the job. You’ve got all the numbers there in front of you to say, hey look, this is where you need to improve, this is where you need to change.

29:46
Robert
So then on a very specific question and if you can say no, if you don’t have the answers in front of you or the information available, but this is very selfishly oriented around like helping our customers understand the value that you know, they can get out of working with a company like us. Is lifetime value a metric that’s inside aspire of a customer?

30:10
Mark
Yeah, I don’t know that we have a specific metric around that, but it is certainly visible in all the things that you see.

30:17
Robert
And then is customer acquisition cost also part of the system? Like I’m just trying to figure out, we have a live and die metric of lifetime value in gross profit to customer acquisition cost as a ratio. So LTV to cac.

30:31
Speaker 3
I don’t think we have it as like a, there’s just a field that exists and you can go look at that field, but it’s populated because it does exist both at the customer level and the property level. So different folks in the green industry kind of operate differently. So some operate. If you’re residential, you’re going to kind of go on a like customer by customer basis. And if you’re more commercial minded, you’re going to really kind of think about the property level, maybe even the like the company level. We do have that like the lifetime revenue earned, the lifetime gross margin for those fields and then you can back calculate in your costs. And so like that one metric isn’t on there, but you can easily like.

31:08
Robert
Calculate the data structure exists to get it.

31:12
Mark
And we’ll give you the full view as well, Robert, because your initial sale might be a maintenance contract.

31:19
Robert
Right, Right.

31:20
Mark
But then that customer is going to do all of these enhancements and maybe some other add on projects, you know, that are going to drive a lot more revenue and a lot more profitable revenue too. And so we’ll give you that holistic view that says not didn’t you just didn’t sell a $50,000 contract, but you added another $50,000 of high margin work to that. And so here’s your overall margin and your overall profitability on that customer.

31:50
Robert
Awesome. So when we talked about the inefficiency management, inefficiencies, you know, on the labor overhead recovery or overhead management was a big portion of that in terms of considering that in the costing. So, you know, we’re not actually building enough buffer or margin into our pricing strategy. It makes it difficult for us to, you know, recoup our costs and we’re doing big jobs unprofitably. What would be another symptom that someone might be experiencing right now if they’re maybe inefficient in the way that they’re working with their team?

32:22
Speaker 3
I’ve got one. I talked to someone yesterday actually, and they’re mostly construction and they said, you know, we’re having to change the way we handle our inventory management because they’re starting, there’s this economic uncertainty and terrorists, right. And historically, if they sell a big construction job, they’re not going to have boots on the ground for 12 to 18 months. Because we all know landscapers are the last people on the job, right? So like the job is awarded and then everyone else gets to go in. They’ve always just ordered materials in time for boots on the ground, had them delivered directly to the site. That’s very efficient. You don’t have to be a storage facility. But that’s changing now. And they have to start considering buying materials as close to the time the estimate was provided to the estimator as.

33:12
Robert
The costs are real.

33:13
Speaker 3
The costs are real now and they’re changing day by day. Steel costs for rebar are changing day by day. So job is awarded, materials get ordered and stored somewhere. And the cool thing is Aspire has had functionality to handle that job specific inventory for years. But we also have some new improvements that allow users to kind of change. You know, maybe your quote from vendor A was this, but now you’ve been awarded the job and you’re suddenly shopping all of this again because of these changes. That’s going to really increase our efficiencies for folks so that they don’t have to have so much heartburn about, well, rebar is, you know, it’s 20 to 30% more a stick than it was when I bid this job. And now what do I do?

34:02
Speaker 3
They can recoup that a little bit easier on the front end and then.

34:05
Robert
Bake in the storage costs into the bid.

34:08
Speaker 3
Yeah.

34:08
Robert
So it’s all predictable.

34:09
Speaker 3
I know. Now they’re going to be a storage facility. Yeah.

34:12
Robert
Yeah, that’s cool. That’s super cool. Mark, anything you want to add on that one? Because I got a couple pieces I want to make sure we get to before we. Yeah, it up.

34:20
Mark
Keep rolling.

34:21
Robert
Okay. So Whitney, for you, somebody who is talking to, you know, boots on the ground, landscape contractors, entrepreneurs on the regular base and you know, essentially translating that to build an epic product that serves this kind of company. What, what do you hear? What’s the most common issues that landscape contractors are dealing with right now that they’re trying to get you to focus on? And not to say that you’re going to go do it right away, but just what’s kind of like the feedback from the market in the last, say three to six months.

34:52
Speaker 3
Yeah. So I’ve been living the world of construction and obviously Aspire was originally built for maintenance operations and we’ve always had construction functionality, but we’ve spent the last 12 to 18 months really improving that. So I’m going to give you answer that is very like large scale bid build, landscape construction focused, because that’s the answer I have been floating in. The, the thing that we’re hearing most is one, the thing that I just mentioned in terms of like managing material spend, that is becoming more of a like frontward thinking. Mark is right. Folks have historically been very concerned about labor and staffing and making sure one, you keep your guys working full time hours so that they don’t leave to go to another company. But two, you know, managing that overhead you have to plan. Sorry, not overhead, overtime.

35:43
Speaker 3
You know, you’re going to hit overtime with every job and how to plan for that and how cost it accordingly. But there’s also this piece of materials management. The other thing that I’m hearing honestly is just kind of change order and invoicing flexibility. And again, not to beat a dead horse, but jobs that were awarded six, 12 months ago were awarded at one budget line item. And now our real estate developers are probably going to be trimming those budgets. And guess what often gets cut? Landscaping. You can’t as easily take 12 stories off of a skyscraper, but you sure can convert, you know, turf and irrigation to rocks. Right. So we’re hearing from our users, they’re being told, hey, you still have this job, we award it at this budget.

36:31
Speaker 3
I need you to send me three different options for how to cut 20 out of this line item and they don’t really care how it’s going to be done. They just need to save 20%. They need that flexibility to very quickly turn around those options, get it to the developer’s hand, let them make a decision. And, you know, I’m proud that’s something that you can do and aspire today, because that’s the reality of kind of where we’re headed is like squeezing every percent out of every line item.

36:58
Robert
Well, and I, I mean, if anything, then it’s just there’s this environment is, I mean, I want to say it’s ripe for people to get more efficient, so they should be looking to aspire more and more. But the idea of knowing your numbers like it’s essentially the foundation for all decision making. You know, your financials and your management metrics are what create the foundations for good decision making. And if you don’t have it’s not only a slippery slope, it’s just like a void. And it’s like you, then you have all these false assumptions that you’re making decisions on top of. You know, that’s kind of interesting.

37:35
Mark
Robert, you will hear stories from our implementation team that’s working with a new customer. And one of the first things we do is we go in and we set up their price right? We, we factor in overheads and make sure we’re recovering all the overheads and get the labor costs in and accurate material costs. And then we go and we set up their bids that they’ve already won, right? The jobs that they’ve already run. And then they go plug in the numbers, right, estimates into this new model that has accurate costs in it. And it is a holy crap moment for a lot of them because they’re looking at this job that they were so excited about, and it was a big job. And they’re like, we’re losing money on this job. Like, we are paying our customer to do this work.

38:26
Mark
When you, when you get your pricing model right and you understand, you know, I’ve got to cover my overhead and I’ve got to, you know, I’ve got. These are my realistic labor rates and, and you plug all that in, it’s like, it’s a very different perspective than a lot of them have. When they were using either the thumb in the air, they were saying, oh, I think it’s going to take four guys, you know, half a day to do this job to, you know, a spreadsheet that’s 10 years old. That, you know, just is operating on old data or incomplete data, and work.

39:04
Speaker 3
Without profit is a hobby. I had a professor that said that when I was an undergrad, and it’s so true, and it still rings true today. And I don’t think any of our clients or entrepreneurs are, like, in the hobby business, as much as you may enjoy it, like.

39:19
Robert
Well, I think they are, though. That’s the issue. I think.

39:21
Mark
I think that’s the big issue.

39:23
Robert
And what I think is so cool about the way you position that is that, you know, and I’m not saying this is the promise for Aspire making you profitable, but the idea is now you see the evidence behind it. And so if you want to lower your price because you think it’s too high for whatever reason, well, you better figure out a way that you’re going to cut the way you operate your company out.

39:40
Mark
Yeah. To use. To use Whitney’s language, you know, when that job goes from a job to a hobby, you know, there is a. There’s a hard line there. Yeah.

39:50
Robert
And then. And then the hobby becomes a choice. Yeah, Right. Yeah. Which is. And I mean, consciousness is the start of all change. So I just appreciate what you guys are doing for everybody. Okay, quick one before we wrap up, though. You got to talk about AI, obviously, artificial intelligence. Huge thing everybody’s talking about. Everybody’s using it. We’re seeing for the first time ever, google.com’s page views are declining. Chat GBT is taking them one to one. This is not just a fad. This is a trend. And it’s not going to go anywhere. It’s painting. It’s going to get bigger and bigger, faster and faster. So what’s Aspire doing with AI? I mean, being part of the service now, family of businesses, massive resources. This must be a huge effort. But, like, what’s. What’s going on with AI for you guys?

40:29
Mark
Yeah, this is. This is obviously a big deal. And the pace at which this technology is evolving, it’s accelerating. Right. It was already accelerated. It’s accelerating more every. Every day that goes by. And it’s a great opportunity for those that see it. Right. It’s a great opportunity for our customers who can see the opportunity to leverage it in their business. It will help them be more efficient. And it’s an opportunity for us to incorporate it in the right ways, in the appropriate ways in our software to make our customers more effective. But it’s also. It’s an opportunity to miss the boat, too. And so, you know what we’ve what we have the benefit of, we’ve got immense resources. We’re part of service Titan.

41:21
Mark
You know, R and D, R D budgets are very significant and we have people that are focused solely on this, teams of people that are looking at this. And the way that software is going to change over the next three years, five years is going to be like nothing we’ve seen before. You know, I look at Aspire the way it looked 10 years ago and the way it looks today, it’s not that different. It does a lot more, it does it better, it’s more secure, more stable, all of those things. But you still fill out forms of data that drive the next workflow. I think with this evolution you’re going to see workflows change. You’re going to see way more things automated. The days of filling out forms the way we do today, five years from now, I just don’t see that happening.

42:11
Mark
I think our expectations and the way we interact with software is going to change pretty dramatically over the coming years. We at Aspire, at Service type, we see that, we understand that you’re going to see AI in our products today. You’ll see it on our measuring products. You want to talk about more efficiency and bidding faster. We’ve got Property intel that will automate measurements on a job for you. You just point it at the screen and it’ll say boom, here’s how much turf you’ve got. Things like that. Yeah. Did you just. It just does it right? It’s smart, it looks at the images, it knows what it’s looking at and it can do all the things your brain can do just a lot faster.

42:56
Mark
We’re rolling out some new functionality around that has to do with communications, helping you improve your communications with customer, writing emails for you, incorporating the things you want, but writing them in a nice way. And we know that’s not typically a landscapers forte, right Is to, to type eloquent messages. But some tools to do that, analysis, prediction, you know, looking at, you know, your customers, your history and saying hey, I want to red flag a few customers for you. I think they’re a churn risk because we’re seeing certain attributes of these customers and we analyzed your past data and we’re seeing that replay itself with this customer. We have some marketing tools, you know, Marketing Pro.

43:41
Mark
I don’t know if you’ve had a chance to take a look at that Robert, but it’s a great asset to a marketing program that allows you to integrate some marketing and it’s not just marketing. It’s. It’s a communication tool helping upsells things like that. And like, one of the most amazing tools we have is something we call Sales Pro. We’ve got a suite of products. But Sales Pro is a tool that an account manager, a sales rep, takes with them in the field. It’s on their phone, it records their conversations, it listens to them and it coaches them. Yeah. And it’s, and it’s all AI. It’s, it’s not, you know, where typically you’d have to have a sales manager following a new salesperson or a new account manager listening to every meeting saying, okay, we don’t say things like that.

44:34
Mark
We say them like this. She forgot to talk about this, you know, this thing that we can provide or whatever the case is, or when they asked you, when they asked this question, you gave them, you know, a dodgy answer. And this is, that can all be automated now. And so we’re seeing that with stuff that we have today. But I mean, fast forward a year, two years from now. I mean, we have things we’re working on are going to change within the next year. We will be delivering more of that functionality in ways that it’s so weird to say, but it doesn’t. The capabilities don’t exist today, but they will in six months.

45:16
Robert
Right.

45:16
Mark
It’s just, it’s crazy. Yeah, it’s crazy. And we have the benefit of having, you know, our R D spend at a level that we can go dedicate people to this through our partnership with Service Titan. And because we’re able to focus on all of the trades, you know, so whether you’re in plumbing, H vac, electrical, roofing, landscape pests, doesn’t matter. We’re all deploying crews into the field to get jobs done. And so there’s a commonality with that we can focus on.

45:53
Robert
Love it so a lot.

45:56
Mark
A lot. It’s like, goodness knows, I mean, it’s so hard to come in and like.

46:01
Robert
Our, our business, we’re like building it on infrastructure of AI. Like, it’s. When I, when I talk to other entrepreneurs and hear the lack of engagement with these new tools, it just blows, it blows my mind. And, and honestly, for anybody listening to this thing, if AI seems like, so what the. So Jim Carroll was the futurist that came and spoke at the Leaders forum in Elevate where I met John. And it was actually fascinating to watch a room full of 400 leading entrepreneurs. Like, these are like kind of the cream of the crop, best of the best that go to this type of event. And a lot of them were just putting their heads down in the sand, just being like, this is too much. This is crazy.

46:38
Robert
He’s Talking about Google LLM showing how to use ChatGPT transcripts and creating podcasts with deep research. Anyway, it was amazing. And so what my takeaway from that was, and just for anybody listening to this thing is just start using it. Like, if you don’t know what to do, you can actually ask it on how to use it. You can just even start to, you can use it for introspection of like, I’m in this position at this company. How can I use you to make my job easier and better? That, that can give you so much insight. And so I think people are overcomplicating the way to engage with these tools. And I just appreciate the fact that you guys are bringing it to the forefront right out of the gate, which is amazing.

47:14
Mark
Yeah. And I think one of the best things you can do is just start simple, right? I mean, go create an account on Chat GPT. Like, I, like, I’m planning a vacation right now. I don’t know that there’s a better tool out there to plan a vacation than ChatGPT. I mean, you go in, say, hey, here’s where I’m going. You know, I like to hike, I like to fish, I like to whatever and say, recommend an itinerary for it. Just do simple stuff like that and then see. Okay, how can I apply that to my business now? Like, okay, it’s, you know, the fear of it, the unknown of it. We’ve got to get over and get comfortable with it. So then we can take it and utilize it for bigger valuable things that we do in our business.

48:05
Robert
Awesome. I gotta wrap up because we’re out of time. But before I do, I need one resource book, speaker, leader that has motivated you or inspired you in your career? Whitney and Mark. So whoever’s ready first. And it could be a couple if you’re like, there’s not just one, but what. What would be a resource the audience should check out that’s kind of hit you over the head and give you a couple aha. Moments.

48:33
Mark
Yeah.

48:34
Speaker 3
This is super crazy. Oh, go ahead, Mark.

48:36
Mark
No, no, go for it, Winnie.

48:38
Speaker 3
This is crazy. It seriously, honestly is John Goal, who, you know, on the staff here at Aspire, he is incredible. He one of his. He has so many catchphrases. And I promise, like, the John that you saw on your podcast as a guest, like, that is really John, and that is what he brings every single day to Aspire. And he loves to say we never walk alone. And I think, like, he has built that culture here at Aspire as well. And. And it’s. It has made this company what it is today, I think. And it’s. It’s pointed us in a really great direction. And anytime I feel like I’m bogged down or struggling with a problem, like, I’m a problem solver, like, that’s what I do every day.

49:23
Speaker 3
Like, I have these problems and, like, I have to figure out a novel way to solve it. Right. And we don’t walk alone. And I often have his voice in my head when I’m struggling with something. And I think, okay, I need to talk to someone else. Like, someone else needs to bring, like, be brought into this conversation to bring a different perspective. And, yeah, strong goal. Like, just throwing this off the cuff with no planning. It’s John goal. Yeah.

49:49
Robert
So if you’re listening to this, you should listen to John’s podcast. Clearly you check it out on the list. Anyway, Mark, go for it.

49:54
Mark
Yeah, I couldn’t agree more with. With Whitney, by the way, on John. But I’m trying to think of the book. It was. It was by a marketing guy, so maybe you know it. Robert, you can help me. Is it Brogan? Like, he. He publishes a lot. I can’t remember, but it was a book on culture and. And how to, you know, how we build culture within our organizations. And it was just very impactful. I wish I could remember the name of it so I could recommend it to you, but it was by somebody you would never have thought would have written a book like this because he was more known for. For his speak around marketing topics. But was it.

50:37
Robert
Is it a book written by Seth Godin?

50:39
Mark
Seth Godin? Maybe that was it. Seth.

50:42
Robert
I mean, Seth’s epic.

50:44
Mark
Yeah. So I’m looking at his books here. It was. It was. It was one of his books.

50:49
Robert
And he talks a lot about the idea that half of marketing is making a promise. Half of marketing is delivering a promise. So having a culture of delivering promises is, like, how you win. Anyway, I appreciate you guys popping up.

51:01
Mark
At the top, but great book, highly recommended. Look up Seth Godin and whatever book he has on culture.

51:09
Robert
There’s a bunch. Okay. Thank you for doing this. Appreciate you guys and everybody for listening to another episode of the I Am Landscape Growth podcast.

51:17
Mark
Thanks, Robert.

51:18
Speaker 3
Thanks, Robert.