Episode Transcript
[00:00:01] Speaker A: Welcome to the Grow Show, Powered By Steel. On the Grow show, we share ideas, tips, tactics and insights to help you grow your landscaping business. Based on our team's 40 years of experience running a landscaping company and working with other owners and their teams to do the same, new episodes are released weekly on Wednesdays. Here's your host, Marty Grunder.
[00:00:24] Speaker B: Well, good morning, good afternoon, good evening, whatever the case may be. This is Marty Grunder from Grunder Landscaping Co. And the Grow Group. Thanks for downloading the Grow Show Powered by Steel. Today we have Mark Tipton and Whitney Griffith from Aspire with us. Really excited for this one, folks. If you follow me along, you know I love Aspire. It's going to be a fun conversation. But first, a reminder. You can get the latest edition of the Grow show delivered to your phone, tablet, or computer by subscribing wherever you get your podcasts. Or Watch us on YouTube for an enhanced learning experience. The Grow show is the greatest thing since Ignite. The Aspire users conference. It's September 15th, 16th. Yes, 16th and 17th in Anaheim, California, and it is full of great ideas specifically for Aspire users. It'll help you move your company to another level. If you run an Aspire, folks, I promise you my team will be there, and you should be there, too. Sign up today, Aspire Users. You won't regret it. Now on to the Grow Show, Powered By Steel, and a big old hello to my friends Mark Tipton and Whitney Griffin. Hello, Mark and Whitney. Welcome to the Grow Show.
[00:01:35] Speaker C: Hi.
[00:01:36] Speaker D: Hey, Bernie. Thrilled to be here.
[00:01:38] Speaker B: Well, we're excited, Mark. You, along with the late, great Kevin Kehoe, started Aspire. And I kind of lose track because, like, to me, it seems like 30 years ago, but I think it's nine years ago.
[00:01:52] Speaker D: Almost a little over 11.
[00:01:54] Speaker B: 11. Okay, so see, it kind of. All right, 2013. And, man, am I glad that you guys came up with this because Aspire, I know this sounds ridiculous, folks, but it's changed my life. It's given us a level of transparency, a view into our business that tells us, I don't even want to say on a daily basis. I want to tell you on a minute by minute basis what we need to do more of and what we need to do less of. And it's just fantastic. So, Mark, why don't you go first, tell us a little bit about yourself and how you got to this point. Maybe give us some of the glory days of walking uphill both ways. When Aspire started and you used stone tablets, I don't know, punch cards.
Tell us a little bit about yourself. Right. Punch cards?
[00:02:39] Speaker D: Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. Happy to do it. Great to be here on your show. Yeah. Aspire has been an amazing experience for me, for so many of our people, our customers, so privileged to be a part of it. But, yeah, started back in 2013, at the end of 2013, but before even that, I was, you know, I went to school to be a software engineer, and I was actually.
[00:03:04] Speaker C: Where did.
[00:03:05] Speaker B: Where did you go to school?
[00:03:06] Speaker D: I did a circuit. I didn't go to one school. I started in community college, went to Missouri State, and graduated from a University of Missouri school, the one in St. Louis. And I only changed my major three or four times. I started out, I was not well educated in what careers look like, and so I was like, oh, I like computers. I'm going to get into computer science. Didn't know what that meant, but I did know I was never, ever going to pass calc 2. About three weeks into calc 2, I got my first test back, and not only did I do so poorly, it didn't even register on the score meter, but I didn't even know what I was doing wrong. I was so lost. And I went to my counselor and I'm like, what other majors don't require calc 2?
So he put me in an mis program, which is basically computer programming for business. And so I went through most of my schooling with that, got an internship that really got me on my way to being a software engineer, and did that for a number of years, and then eventually moved into. To product management and, you know, got the bug to go out on my own. Started one company that. That company ultimately led me into the landscape industry and. And built a platform, you know, back in the early 2000s, for landscape. Learned a ton from that, met some amazing people, fell in love with the industry, knew that that's where I wanted to be and what I wanted to do, and met Kevin Kehoe along the way. Kevin and I became fast friends, shared just a similar vision and passion for the industry and opportunity that we saw in what the industry needed in the way of the business management system. And so we got together in 2013 and launched Aspire, along with a handful of angel investors that kind of believed in our vision and believed that we could go pull it off, which is amazing to think about now, Marty, because, you know, back then, it was. That was a long time ago, and things were a lot different then. And I look at the people that believed in us back then, when all we had were, you know, smoke signals and, you know, you know, hand puppets on walls. It was, we had nothing to show. We called it vaporware. We sold vaporware for the first year. Right. But it, but it was, it was a good vision. Right. It was one that people really bought into and saw the need in the industry and really was the great platform to launch a business from. And, you know, we got traction very quickly. Took. Took us about a year and a half to roll out the first version.
[00:05:56] Speaker C: Right.
[00:05:56] Speaker D: So we came out in 2015, like January 1, 2015, version 1.0 of Aspire. I wouldn't recommend you talk to too many people that were on that version because it was a little rough. Yeah, it's a little bumpy. But we've, we got it figured out and obviously not quite the product it is today. We've invested a lot more in it over the last years, but a great start. We had some of those great customers out of the gate that really not just gave us their money and gave us a belief that we could do it, but they gave us their support. Whitney's even going to talk about this as we talk about some of the new things that we're doing. But we developed this group, this concept called Seat at the Table, where we had our initial customers that all got together with us as we were outlining what Aspire was going to be. All the features, functions, where the buttons were going to be, everything you can imagine that goes into designing a piece of software. They were very instrumental, helped us iterate over and over on what was going to be this great version one of Aspire and super helpful and kind of with some of the new things that we've been releasing around construction that Winnie's going to talk about, we've really gotten back to our roots on that and gotten connected to our customers at a deeper level like we did at the very, very beginning stages. We've always listened to our customers, but listening to them in an intensely iterative way is emotion we somewhat reintroduced as part of this construction that's been exciting to see.
[00:07:39] Speaker B: And before we're going to go to Whitney next, but I want to validate something there.
I went to the second Aspire Users Conference in Phoenix, Arizona, outside of Phoenix. And I wasn't even an Aspire user at the time, Mark, you guys hired me to come there and speak.
And I think in retrospect, it was a really smart selling tactic on your part to pay me to come and speak because.
And I don't think I ever told you this, but if you name an industry that has Franchises.
I have probably spoken in that industry, and I have been to untold numbers of user conferences from anywhere from Yum Brands to better get Mako Zbart, Molly Maids, all kinds of. And other software companies and other industries. And I'd go in as a hired gun to do a keynote and rev them up or do a breakout session on leadership. I've been doing this for almost 30 years, and when I went to your conference, I was amazed at the people that were not, I want to be clear, were not complaining about the software.
And I thought, I'm used to going to conferences where, like, everybody's kind of cordial in the room, but then when they go out for snacks or drinks, out comes the. Well, they should never be charging us that royalty. I mean, it's bull. We could do this. We don't need them. All I heard was people saying how great it was. They never had this insight into the business, and that was seven years ago. Aspire is a lot better now than it was then. So you're not a BS Artist. What you're saying there about listening, you do. And I know I personally have had many conversations with you when you've asked me for feedback, and I think that is an important thing, not just about business, but as a business gets bigger, I think it's easy to forget. Like, you talk about a seat at the table, and I love hearing what you're saying. So kudos, Mark.
[00:09:41] Speaker D: Yeah, Marty. And I won't even pretend to tell you it was not a strategy. Kevin and I had to have you out there, so it might be written down somewhere in one of our strategy notes.
[00:09:54] Speaker B: Well, it worked because I left there thinking, we got to get a spire. So, Whitney, let's go on to. Oh, wait, wait, wait. Let me go back to Mark. Mark, tell us just a quick bit about your family, because I know you've got a really. Some really smart kids and doing some cool things. Tell us a little bit, a little bit about your personal life, please.
[00:10:11] Speaker D: Happy to. I hope we got an extra 45 minutes on the podcast.
[00:10:15] Speaker B: We do. I can edit it out if it's not any good.
[00:10:18] Speaker D: I have a wonderful wife who has stood by me through all these grinding years of Aspire. Believe me, they've been grinding. It's been a. A passion project for me, but. But not without intense effort. Many hours. And then I've got two children. I've got a daughter who is a junior at Baylor University down in Waco, Texas, who's a budding accountant. And then I've got A son who's a boilermaker at Purdue, and he's. He's in their aerospace program. He's going to be a rocket engineer. So.
[00:10:52] Speaker B: And. And folks, if you don't know this, Purdue is one of the top engineering schools in the nation. And just. So since you bragged about your academic prowess, I got Ds for Dayton in accounting at the University of Dayton. So let's go on to Whitney and stop right there. So sorry, Mom. Whitney, welcome to the GROW Show. Tell us a little bit about yourself, please.
[00:11:17] Speaker C: Thanks, Marty. I'm thrilled to be here. I will say I'm a little bit starstruck being here with you. I have known who you are. We've never met until today, but I've known who you are since I was an undergraduate student at Auburn University. Oh, were you competing at what was then called the ALCA Student Career Days? And I am dating myself there.
[00:11:41] Speaker B: My goodness.
[00:11:42] Speaker C: Yeah, so. And then later on, as a faculty member at Texas A and M, working, I worked alongside Charlie Hall. I know. He was super.
[00:11:51] Speaker B: Charlie.
[00:11:52] Speaker C: I know. Like, super involved with the GROW group, you know, helping folks overcome the three truck problem. You know, I was kind of tangential to him because I was working with our undergraduate landscape contracting, design and construction coursework. But. So I've known who you are for years, and I'm really excited to be here.
[00:12:09] Speaker B: I'm blushing. Thank you.
[00:12:10] Speaker C: Good. So I am, too. It's really stressful, so I'll stop fangirling. So, you know, I. I wanted to be a landscape designer. I went to Auburn. I. I did not change my major. I didn't have a backup, so I don't really know what would have happened if it didn't work out, but, like, thank goodness it did. I finished in 08, which was, you know, we all remember 2008. All of my.
[00:12:33] Speaker B: I remember it well.
[00:12:34] Speaker C: Yeah. My peers went from multiple job offers and they would pit companies against each other to. You know, going into my last semester, everything just kind of dried up, and I didn't want to go into the commercial maintenance, like, side of things. I really wanted to do design build, which is so ironic because Aspire was designed initially for commercial maintenance. Right?
[00:13:00] Speaker B: Yes. And now you're in the middle of construction.
[00:13:02] Speaker C: I'm in the middle of it.
[00:13:03] Speaker B: I love it.
[00:13:03] Speaker C: So I stayed. I did my master's at Auburn. I went to Maryland for my doctorate. I ended up at Texas A and M on the faculty. And then a few years after being on the faculty there, I got recruited out into the industry by A company in Austin, Texas, who had hired several of my former students. And it was kind of a crossroads. I felt like I would never get the opportunity to actually do it ever again. And so I left academia. I joined this company, and I loved it, and it was absolutely incredible. So that was in 2019.
Covid blew the doors wide open in our industry. People didn't have money. Well, they had money, but they couldn't use it to travel. So they were just pouring it into their properties. And I know you experienced it. It was kind of nice, you know, to kind of go through a recession type time and it not kill our industry like it did in 2007 and 2008. Everyone flourished and grew, and it's wonderful.
And then after a couple of years, I kept. I kept getting skin cancer. Like, I got my first skin cancer diagnosis, actually, when I was in grad school. And I didn't really think about it when I left academia and went into the industry, but changing careers and putting myself in the sun every single day in Central Texas, it just kind of wasn't a good fit. And I think my dermatologist got tired of hacking me up every few months.
[00:14:29] Speaker B: Oh, my gosh.
[00:14:30] Speaker C: Yeah, she just said, look, you need to change your career because you can't do this for another decade and expect things to go well for you.
My partner is a software engineer, not at Aspire, but he's very familiar with kind of product management, working alongside product management. And he said, look, you have got the personality for this. And I think he meant that as a compliment. Some days he probably does, some days not.
But he convinced me that I had the skill set. And he convinced me that because I used software every day in my job as a landscape designer and project manager, someone would be willing to hire me, that it didn't matter that I didn't know how to write code. And so I enrolled in some courses and I got certified. And the day after my certification came through, I actually checked Aspire's website first. Even though my former employer did not use Aspire, I knew Aspire was the best. I knew it was better than what we were using. And I thought, well, if I'm going to do this, going to do it right.
So there was a job opening and I just got so lucky because my director, Brian Brinkworth, was willing to take a chance on this girl who, you know, I know a lot about landscaping, but I didn't know the first thing about actually writing code or the, you know, how things work in the realm. And, yeah, he took a shot on me and been here a little over three years and I absolutely love it. It's wonderful.
[00:16:00] Speaker B: Well, Whitney, that's fantastic. And I don't know if you know this or not, but my second oldest daughter who just blessed my wife and I with a granddaughter, Harlow, Vivian is her name. Katie played soccer at Auburn University and she is a 2018 grad.
[00:16:15] Speaker C: Yes, War Eagle.
[00:16:17] Speaker B: War Eagle. I love that school. I tell people all the time I wish I would have gone there. So didn't know about it until they recruited her and she ended up down there as a wonderful experience. We've got a couple members of our peer groups that are based in Auburn, Alabama. It's a great place. So. So let's zero in on talking more about Aspire here. I know that we're using Aspire on the construction side heavily.
What features talk to us about the construction side of Aspire, the business side in general, where it's headed. Enlighten us on those parallels between Aspire and the construction side.
[00:16:54] Speaker C: So I'm so glad that you called out the fact that you've been using Aspire heavily for construction for some time.
[00:17:01] Speaker D: Absolutely.
[00:17:02] Speaker C: So Aspire works for managing a landscape construction business. You are like proof positive of that. However, we recognize that historically the system was designed and built with maintenance operations in mind. And that isn't because, well, I'm going to speak for Mark here. I don't think that's because Mark and Kevin thought, well, we don't care about construction, but the recession 2007, 2008, the companies that came out of that were the companies who were already doing quite a bit of maintenance or the companies who pivoted to do maintenance because that's cash flow. And you know, commercial properties have to do landscape maintenance. They may cut back, they may only do one color change out a year. They're going to trim those budgets, but they had to keep doing it. And so building and designing a system for that use case, it makes perfect sense because in the mid to late 2000 and tens, that's what everyone was doing. And so we work for construction, but because we were designed with maintenance management in mind, I think there were some workflows, change order flexibility. We've always had really good change order flexibility, but it could be a little bit manual in the process. And so opening up the ability to do change orders after you've 100% invoiced a job, who has a customer who hasn't paid you all the money and then said, you know what, y'all did a great job. So can you just like do a little bit extra. Right. You know, additional functionalities that just make everything a little bit more streamlined and a little bit less friction based.
[00:18:39] Speaker B: Mark, what's your take on this with the construction side?
[00:18:44] Speaker D: Well, first and foremost, I am thrilled, delighted, and so happy we got Witness because she's been an amazing leader on this. But if you, if you rewind and Whitney hit the nail on the head. So we were, we were designed out of the gate for commercial maintenance, primarily knew that there was a construction component to that, whether it was enhancement jobs or design build or just straight up construction. And we had some, I would say we tipped our hat to it. You know, we didn't build a full system around it. And, you know, no one really had. I mean, there is not a great construction system out there. It's a, it's a very sophisticated, complicated.
There's.
[00:19:24] Speaker B: You just think about all the things that are moving in concert with one another. The subcontractors, different types of materials, green goods, hard goods, fertilizers, all the things that go into, you know, grill parts for an outdoor kitchen. I mean, it's just no wonder it would, I mean, it's. I think it's pretty easy to understand why it would be so complicated.
[00:19:45] Speaker D: Yeah. So, you know, that's why we didn't get into it out of the gate, because we were at least at the level we are now. And so. But what we were seeing is that more people were doing construction and more people were doing it at higher levels. And that was even within our own client base. And so we were getting a lot of feedback from clients.
And we were also looking at our market, our market, opportunities to grow in the industry. And it's like, okay, there's a pretty significant segment out there that has a large portion of construction as part of their business. And so if we're really going to be able to serve them, we need to make some big investments here. So between our current clients and our opportunities, we said, now's the time. And this was, I don't know, Whitney, maybe 18 months ago, something like that, 24 months ago, where we said, hey, we're, we're going to do this. We're going to step up and to the plate and do this. And somebody bright enough on our team knew Whitney's background and said, hey, this is the person who can really lead us into this effort.
And I'll let Whitney talk about how she did it. But I mentioned our seat at the table groups that we started with. But Whitney really took that to the next level and pulled in a lot of people to help us do it right. I mean her background's incredible. She understands it inside out and that.
[00:21:09] Speaker B: That makes such a difference. I mean find that it's not the same thing but we find salespeople that didn't understand landscaping and that's just tough. It's really hard. Now selling maintenance, we've done pretty well with getting salespeople and train them how to do that. But the design, building, the construction side, because of the complexity of it, that's just really difficult. I mean having somebody like Whitney or I mean I'm bragging but you know, Whitney and I together would probably be a take Seth, our president with Whitney. God, you'd probably have Lord only knows what you'd do with those two. But yeah, it's so true. Whitney, what would you like to add to the discussion?
[00:21:51] Speaker C: Yeah, I'll just add on to where Mark left off. So you know, about 24 months ago we knew we were going to make a push to really focus developer time and resources on building out some of those workflows that were maybe unfinished or friction based. And at Ignite, I'm not even going to quote the year, I forget, it's been passed yesterday. But when we were in Vegas at Ignite in Vegas we had a construction roadmap session and we kind of highlighted the different types of workflows we wanted to improve high level. And we asked for volunteers in that construction session and said anyone who's willing to give us feedback. Here's a link, fill this out. I was hoping for 10 to 12 people. I thought with 10 to 12 folks I can probably staff enough calls over the next year. And we had incredible feedback. Like over 40 people volunteered to get feedback for this advisory board. And I remember looking at the list of volunteers with my boss a couple weeks later and he said yeah, well what are you going to do here? And I was like dude, I don't know. I can't put 40 people on a zoom call. That's not productive. So I looked at the roadmap and I just kind of broke it out by topic. And so we have like production field management focused and we have an estimating efficiency, financial reporting and then kind of all things submittals. If you're kind of really focused on bid build and you do a lot of GC based submittals or change order management and then I resurveyed that group and basically said, you know what interests you more? Rank these things. And for the most part everyone got into like what they really wanted to talk about. They self selected into those groups, which made my life easier. And so I think every Friday for about three or four months, I had a different meeting with a different group. And we went through every single scope of work of what we thought we wanted to do and we looked and several sessions with each group where we, we started high level and then we would meet again and we would look at mock ups of the UI and have them click through. I would send to the groups prototypes and say very simple questions. Well, when you click here and save, would you rather stay here or go back to where you were?
We got very granular and it was so helpful. And yeah, we kind of went back to our roots and we were willing to make some tweaks to the things that we're going to deliver because they said, you know what, this looks great, but what if we also did this other thing over here and it was just really, really great?
[00:24:27] Speaker B: I wouldn't. Mark just kind of hinted at it or he said it. Whoever was the genius that put you in this position. Because as I'm listening to you, first of all, your approach is classic research. From being a professional student, getting your master's and your PhD. I mean those are, that's what you're trained to do. You're trained to look at facts and you're trained to listen and have a orderly protocol that you go through and a hypothesis and you go through. I mean, I'm listening to you. I'm like whoever. And Whitney, whoever picked you for this was great. Throw in the fact that you have experience in landscaping and now I see why you're making such a great change here. What are the features that you're finding out of this survey and everything? What are the features about Aspire with regards to contracting that your construction that your contractors love the most?
[00:25:13] Speaker C: The things that are out already in the world that we've gotten really great adoption and feedback for our vendor management has been huge. And I knew it was a great feature. I did not expect it to be such a home run out of the park. So usually our feature adoption is really interesting, Marty. When you look at it, there's usually a bit of a delay because of the seasonality. And so if we deliver something in the middle of the season or towards the end of the season, we'll see some usage, but it really hyper picks up the next growing season, not with vendor management. We released it I think at the end of July, maybe beginning of August, and it was immediate, like immediate great Adoption across the board.
[00:25:59] Speaker B: Help me out here, Whitney. We have a ton of people that aren't using Aspire. There's probably a ton of people listening right here that are contemplating it or wishing they used it. What does vendor management entail? Give us the Reader's digest version of what that is.
[00:26:12] Speaker C: Absolutely. Before we delivered our improvements, vendors could be selected at the time of placing a purchase order. Essentially, you could purchase anything you wanted from any vendor you wanted, but you did that at the purchase order level. When you're doing construction work, you know, it's really important. Sometimes a landscape architect is going to specify really specific materials, sometimes from a very specific vendor. And so also with larger construction jobs, there can be bunts, sometimes years between your estimating phase and your purchasing phase.
Good luck finding those emails and notes. Right. And so all, all we did was allow users to designate vendors at the time of estimating and then give them the flex to change that at any time up until the time when it's billed. So you can still price match, you can still shop a thing, you know what the contract says you're supposed to do, but you have the freedom. And that can be done by any role. It can be done by the estimator, by the ops manager, by the purchaser, which also helps. You know, a lot of our larger organizations will have a person on staff who they are the purchaser. And maybe they don't have a background in landscaping, they don't know a Nelly Arcade Stevens against a Marinell.
What does that even mean?
And so they're just going to order whatever is there. But now you can, like group things by vendors. They don't have to know something is an evergreen. And we always buy this from X Nursery. You can just group things together and order everything all from a single vendor. And you don't have to think about communicating all of those things. It just streamlines it and makes it hands off.
[00:27:49] Speaker B: You don't get to that point, that level of sophistication or simplicity, depending on how you look at it. It's very sophisticated, but it's very simple for the user. I think that's what we want. Like I tell people when they go to Aspire, I say, listen, it's a beast to implement. And they look at me and they're like, oh, well, then I'm not going to buy it. Hold on a second. Okay. Nothing worthwhile in business is easy. The amount of specificity that that machine Aspire is going to crank out for you, it requires you rethinking all of your Workflows with a great attention to detail. I tell people it's a little bit crude, but it's like a colonoscopy for your business. Like it's a chance for you to set, to look at everything and set it up right. It's like a rebirth. It's incredible. And so when I hear you talking about that kind of stuff, to be able to hire a purchasing clerk or someone to help you with that stuff, where the product is that conducive to somebody that doesn't come from the business, that is complexity in how, what you're doing behind it to do that. But the output is simple. And I'm not a programmer, but I would think that's like, that's what you're trying to do. You're trying to make these things that are complex, easy.
[00:28:58] Speaker C: Exactly. We want to empower users to be able to make on the fly decisions and changes as needed. But to also, I won't say spoon feed, I think that's a little bit condescending. But we want to package everything up in a workflow that is clean and concise. And we recognize that often whoever starts a job at the estimating phase is absolutely not the person who even is responsible for the production and the installation in the field. And that's also probably a different person than who's going to actually be sourcing and doing materials procurement.
[00:29:30] Speaker B: That's what goes on here. I mean, we bid the job, it sits there. And you're right on some of these large. We have one gentleman on our staff that does nothing but go after bid, bid, build work. And those pipelines are long and you're bidding stuff we just got, it's a $300,000 plus job, just came in and we bid it 17 months ago. So now you're coming in and doing this post mortem analysis of the bid. And it hasn't been that bad. I'm not the one that's in there, but I just, I've asked, well, oh, it's not so bad because Aspire does a good job with this. I'm like double thumbs up on that. That's what I want to hear. I don't want to hear that we don't know what we're doing and I don't want to hear, well, we'll see if we make money on it. I mean that's like, that gives me an immediate ulcer. It's go to Sam's Club and buy the prison sized box of Pepto Bismol. Because we don't want to go get a job start. And we already know we're in the hole. So you know, it's all about improving your chances for success.
So the vendor management. I see that. Are there any other features on the construction side that you're hearing great reports back from contractors on?
[00:30:36] Speaker C: Yeah, so this is a newer one that we delivered in December and it's the end of January and we've already gotten a really good feedback from. It is item substitution. And it actually works very similarly to vendor management. But it's the idea of if you bid a specific item, being able to change that to a different item without having to do a change order in the system. And here's the thing, it gives so much control to our users, the people who are running the businesses, because you can do a change order if you want and you need to sometimes if that change is going to come at an additional cost to your customer, but sometimes you don't want to push that cost to your customer. You want accurate job costing. So you want the right item in there, but you're not going to change the customer's price. And that's what item substitution allows users to do. They can go in and update an item. It will keep the costing appropriate and accurate. That's the thing. There is no other platform in the system that does accurate job costing. They say they do, they don't. Aspire does. No one else does it. Because if you don't know what people are doing and where they're doing it and what their time is doing, you haven't job costed. We do that, but we've increased the flexibility. Because before, if you wanted to adjust an item at a zero price change to your customer, you still had to do an internal only change order. That's out the window. You can make those changes. You don't have to change the price. You still get your accurate job costing.
[00:32:04] Speaker B: Well, this is fascinating discussion. I want to just take a little bit of a pause here and I want to tell everyone that's joined us today on the Grow show Powered by Steel. We are with Mark Tipton and Whitney Griffin, two extraordinary talents behind this awesome product called Aspire. If you're like me, the best way you learn is by seeing it in person and putting your hands on it. And there may not be a better way to do that than one of our field trips here at Grunder Landscaping Co. Where you can see how we use Aspire as the main foundation that has enabled us to go from four and a half million in sales to 15 million in sales. Three short years later, we're on track. Our budget this year is 17 and a half. We're going to put a slide up right now that if you're watching on YouTube, you can see when our field trips are. But there's a couple that are just for Aspire users. And that's where we have members of Mark and Whitney's team join us here at Grundier Landscaping. And we go kind of hands on. And Aspire, it's like Aspire for junkies that are really into stuff. I am bragging. But Seth, our president, is one of the foremost experts on Aspire in the country, folks. And Mark and Whitney can back me up on that. He knows what he's doing with it. And it sounds crazy. I say this all the time, Mark. You've heard me say this. I said it at your all hands on meeting a couple weeks ago. I asked if I could talk to everyone because I was so grateful for what Aspire. It's changed my life. And I know that sounds ridiculous and people are thinking, oh, well, Mark must have paid Marty half a million dollars to say that today on the Grow Show. No, he did not. Okay. The product has changed my life because it's given me a level of insight into my business that I never had before. And the fact that Aspire was bought by service titan and over $50 million in the last couple years, I think is a correct number has been.
[00:33:54] Speaker D: Annual budget.
[00:33:55] Speaker B: Yeah, annual budget is being put into the improvement on it. I mean, I think you can start to see. So look at one of our field trips and see if that's maybe something that wouldn't be of interest to you. Mark, are there other features you want to touch on or. Whitney, other things we want to talk about in terms of Aspire with regards to contractors?
[00:34:15] Speaker D: Yeah, we're. We. While we focused, you know, heavily on construction, that was a big initiative for us over the last 18 months or so, we, we have been doing a lot of other things. The client portals one of them. And we've got a lot of things on our future roadmap too, by the way, that, that are queuing up as, as Whitney and her teams are winding down the big push on construction, which will continue in perpetuity at some level. Right. But we'll continue to invest in other things. We rolled out one of the other challenging tasks that we've done over over the past year, plus is we rolled out a whole new mobile platform for Cruise, which the, the unique feature we offer in it now. It does a lot of the same things our old platform did. But it does it in a way where you can be in remote areas where you don't have access to the Internet. And so previously, if you didn't have access to the Internet, your job list disappeared.
[00:35:16] Speaker B: You were doing this trying to find a cell signal.
[00:35:19] Speaker D: Exactly. That's no longer the case. The. The app is smart enough to know that, hey, you're offline now. It downloads your information so you still have access to your jobs and everything associated with them. And then, of course, being able to accurately report your time and punch in, punch out, report your materials is all still supported. And when you get back to a spot where you have Internet connectivity, it'll just pick up and resync itself and download all that information as if you were on it the whole time. And that sounds like a relatively simple thing to do, but it was a very complicated piece of software to write, and the team did a phenomenal job doing that. So that's just another example of some of the things that we've done. But yeah, Whitney, what are some of the other things that you've got coming out? I mean, we've got a release coming every nine weeks, and so I know you've got some new stuff coming.
[00:36:16] Speaker C: We do. We have some new things coming. Something that's going to be exciting, I think, for everybody on the platform is the concept of property availability. If you, you know, sometimes customers want you to be on site at certain times or. Or like only certain days, we're gonna support users being able to identify that at the property level and then follow that up with the ability to schedule against that so that you don't have to just keep.
[00:36:42] Speaker B: So when you go to do your route optimization, it'll tell you like, when it's like, it could be whatever. And this could pertain to maintenance or whatever. But let's say you have a chain of Panera restaurants and the local manager doesn't want you in their lots between 11 and 1, then that would block that out. Is that an application?
[00:37:01] Speaker C: Exactly. You're describing how it would work in the ui, and I think we're still working on those details because we're just now starting that discovery. But look for that coming this year. Look for a new subcontractor portal. As Mark mentioned, we previously this previous year delivered a new customer portal for customers, and we have all of that going. Everyone's really loving it. And so we are pivoting to subcontractor portal, which, yes, that's important for construction, but it's Also important for snow management. It's important for other types of green work that we support. So being able to coordinate with your subcontractors directly so that you're not getting random emails or pieces of paper with time on them, like, is this.
That's going to be really exciting. It's not my team, so I'll be sad, but we're going to be looking at doing some additional site audit and inspection enhancements around site inspections.
[00:38:05] Speaker B: The salesman in me loves that Whitney. Go, girl.
[00:38:09] Speaker C: Well, it's just about relationships, right?
You build the relationship and then you show over time. Like, here is where you started, and we've been together for three years, and here's what your property looks like today. And it's so important because your customers can forget how good they've had it. They forget where their property was when you first put boots on site. And so it's a way to track that historically. It's a way to have upsells. How long has it been since you upgraded your irrigation system? Oh, we haven't done this in five years. Let me put an enhancement proposal together.
[00:38:44] Speaker B: This customer, whatever, you know, just back to that. The routing and what you were talking about. I don't. Mark, I don't know if I ever told you this, but, you know, we kind of got off the rails here. Our slogan is where service is always in season. And as is the case with a lot of things with the guy that's hosting this show, Marty, I went too far with that. And so if Whitney wanted her yard mowed on Thursday and Mark lived two doors down and wanted his yard mowed on Friday, we did that. Well, Henry. Henry Ford said back in 1919, you can have any color car you want as long as it's black. All right, we had to do that. And I had thought, like, I'm going to do what the customer wants. And we knocked 37% of time, indirect time and travel when we went to the route optimization feature in Aspire and was able to put routes together in a better fashion. Then we trained our people. Yeah, then we trained our people. And we. We called Mark because we liked Whitney a little bit better. And we said, hey, Mark, Whitney, two doors, downs, lawns mowed on Thursday. We'd really like to move yours to Thursday as well. Can we please do that? I don't know. I mean, you've cut it on Friday for so long. I don't really like that. All right, well, I can look into doing it on Friday, but it's going to cost you $50 more a week. Are you sure you wouldn't consider us doing it on Thursday? Would you be able to help me out there? So we both win, and 99 times out of 100, what do you think? The client said, save 50 bucks, that's fine. And that was like a drip. In my business, I'm a pretty smart guy, but I didn't realize what we were doing with that stuff. And that was just one of the many things Aspire has enabled us to do. We've got a few more minutes here left on the Grow show Powered by Steel. We're visiting with Mark Tipton and Whitney Griffin from Aspire.
Tell me what the best users of Aspire do. Is there an attitude, a mindset implementation method? What is it that makes them take Aspire and excel at it? And I'll start with you, Mark.
[00:40:48] Speaker D: Yeah, I think it's what you've done with your team, Marty, what you and Seth have really pushed, which is you went all in. You said, this is it, we're doing it, and we're going all the way and use the system the way it's designed to be used. You know, so much of the challenge of implementing Aspire is change, right? Change management and accepting the change that's. That's happening to your business. And there's, you know, there's. There's three different types of change that happen as you go and implement any system, not just Aspire. And that's change for the better, right? You can see a process. Hey, this improves us. You know, our estimates are more accurate, our crews are more efficient, whatever the case may be. Those are great. Those are easy. You don't get too much fight with that.
The real challenge that we have with our customers is change. That's just different, right? Where it doesn't necessarily make things worse, it doesn't make things necessarily better, but it's the way it's designed to work, and it works really well that way within the system. And that's where we get a lot of pushback from our customers, where they're like, hey, we've done it this way. Well, why do you do it that way? Well, we've always done it that way, and we don't want to change it.
And that's. And that's the people that can't let that go. You know, where it's not. It's. It's. It's not their unique value proposition. It's not anything that differentiates I get. Yet they hang on to it so tightly, and then obviously, every company has Some special sauce. Right. Some things that they do. And that's where we need to adapt and we need to help you work within Aspire to say, how can you keep that unique thing, but continue to use the system effectively and efficiently? And those. Those are. That's the smallest list, you know, those unique, special things. Those aren't the big things. It's those things that just are change that people fight with. And, you know, super impressed the way you and Seth have embraced it and took it on and, you know, modeled your business around the way that Aspire is designed to work.
[00:42:54] Speaker B: Well, you're probably giving me too much credit. The smart part of me was recognizing that Seth was a flipping genius with this thing and just get out of the way. And I learned so much from him. You know, he's got some monikers that he shares. Like, if it's. If you're finding it hard to do, then you're not doing it the right way, because it's not hard in Aspire. I can't tell you how many people an Aspire user have told me that this doesn't work or that doesn't work or that. And I'm like, aren't you having that problem? No, we're not. And I'm telling you, I would know if it was a problem. You're not doing it right. And most of it has to do with this philosophy of the one that you spoke about, where instead of wrapping themselves around the software and doing it the way that Aspire is telling you, they want to try to have a custom thing or have something unique, that's like, well, we're still going to use an Excel spreadsheet for this thing, because we don't like that. And I just. I've come to realize that is so dangerous, and it's foolish, because those little workarounds that you're doing in your mind, you think they're moving you ahead? I don't think they're moving you ahead. I think they're actually holding you back. And it's all about this legacy stuff, because that's the way we always did it. So I was smart to get out of the way and let Seth run with it. And he's taught me a lot through this process. Whitney, yourself, what are the best users of Aspire? What do they do?
[00:44:14] Speaker C: I think I'm just going to echo what you and Mark just said, Marty, and maybe kind of rephrase it in a different way. But the most successful users of Aspire, it doesn't really matter what they were using. Before we've had customers come in from other platforms from no platform, those who, as Mark said, go all in. But I'll take that a step further to like creating tight sops.
I think the most successful customers and users of Aspire are those who understand that, yes, this is a business management platform. Yes, it is an end to to end solutions. So you shouldn't have to be running things on Excel spreadsheets. Everything is here.
But understanding also that it's kind of a roadmap for good efficient processes. And if you view that as the framework upon which to build your SOPs. And as Mark said, everyone has a little bit of a different secret sauce or like they do things a little bit differently. I would like to believe that a system Aspire allows for and encourages that flexibility within good efficient processes. And so you can buy in and you can drink the Kool Aid top down. But I spoke with a customer, Jeremy Ross from K and D Landscaping out in California, and I want to put this on a T shirt because he's a VP of construction and he said, you know what, there's pain points that I experienced. But I don't want you to listen to me. I want you to talk to my people because we need bottom up buy in. And I care more about them understanding and hearing what the best workflows are supposed to be because that's how we get people to really follow the processes. And so you have to have SOPs and get buy in from the bottom up. It can't come from the top down.
[00:46:02] Speaker B: That is so well said. What a great way. We're about up with time here, Mark or Whitney, was there any last words of wisdom you wanted to share?
[00:46:10] Speaker D: What I would say is I need to talk less of Whitney needs to talk more. But just to touch on a few, a few things. You know, Whitney just kind of mentioned maybe two or three things that are part of our construction. I mean, she touched on revisions and change orders, but there's equipment scheduling, work in process reporting, Gantt scheduling, dynamic forecasting. I mean, all these features that are part of construction. She did a great job describing a handful, but it's so big. We need a few hours with you, Marty.
[00:46:40] Speaker B: Well, that's okay, Whitney. Is there any last thing you want to add?
[00:46:43] Speaker C: You know, cut this out, Marty, if you have to, but if you are running a landscaping business and you want to scale, you want to grow exponentially and you're not on Aspire.
[00:46:55] Speaker B: Yeah, well, we're not cutting that out. We're leaving that right in because I agree with it. What is the best way for somebody that's not using Aspire to get a demo? What should they do?
[00:47:05] Speaker C: Whitney, I have no idea.
[00:47:09] Speaker D: All right.
[00:47:09] Speaker C: Well, Mark, I bet if someone likes.
[00:47:12] Speaker B: I love your answer because that tells me they got you locked down in the basement there, working away on coding and making it better. So that was the perfect answer. Mark, you're in sales. Go ahead.
[00:47:24] Speaker D: I can get you there real quick. Marty, it's your aspire.com and ask for a demo. Just.
[00:47:30] Speaker B: Okay.
[00:47:30] Speaker D: And then there's three fields to fill in and we'll call it within minutes.
[00:47:35] Speaker B: What if somebody is on today, they're using Aspire, they're one of those grumpy people that thinks Aspire doesn't work, right? And they're like, okay, maybe Uncle Marty's right. I really like that spunky little Whitney. Mark was pretty good too.
[00:47:47] Speaker D: What should they do, Marty? They should go to one of your sessions that you hosted. Your shop. I mean, those are fantastic.
You have said amazing things about Seth, but I don't think you really get the gravity of Seth's ability to run his business and run it so effectively with Aspire. He is hands down at the top of the list of Aspire users. And to sit, to have the opportunity to sit and watch how you guys use it in your organization is incredibly powerful.
[00:48:21] Speaker B: I have chills listening to you. I appreciate. I'm very grateful for Seth. I'm very grateful for you, Mark, and, and the Yang and the Yang that we have with your fine company. Whitney, I've heard about you. It's so nice to meet you in person. War Eagle to you, sister. War Eagle. That's going to do it for this week's edition of the Grow Show, Powered by Steel. Folks, if you haven't done so already, subscribe to the Grow show. And if you can give it a rating or share a comment that helps more success minded landscape professionals find us. And if you really want to help us share this episode with your team or any landscape pro, you know, take your phone out right now. If you're listening to the Grow show on the podcast feature and you can very easily send that over to someone else, well, that's going to do it. Thanks for joining us, Mark and Whitney, on the Grow show this week. We'll talk to everyone next week.
[00:49:07] Speaker A: Thank you for listening to this episode of the Grow Show. Be sure to subscribe so you never miss an episode. And head to growgroupinc.com for more information and resources to grow your landscaping business. A special thanks to the folks at Steel whose support makes this podcast possible and whose reliable handheld power equipment makes our jobs easier daily. We'll talk to you next week.
