[SPONSORED CONTENT] CEO and Co-Founder of Aspire, Mark Tipton, talks to Landscape Management Editorial Director, Seth Jones, at the 2024 Elevate Expo in Charlotte, N.C. Tipton shares details about the background of the company, the growing focus on landscape construction and more.
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This video is sponsored content by Aspire
Transcription:
SJ: Seth Jones
MT: Mark Tipton
SJ: Hey everybody, it’s Seth Jones, Editorial Director of Landscape Management magazine. I’m at Elevate 2024 and I’m being joined by the CEO and co-founder and my buddy, of Aspire, Mark Tipton. Will you give me kind of the quick of it, like how you guys got started?
MT: Oh yeah. So I had a background in the landscape industry. I was with a software company previous to this, and just really saw a huge opportunity in the space and wanted to go big. There was definitely a situation where landscape as a whole was a few steps behind most other industries from a technology perspective, and it was growing. There was a lot of new money coming into the industry, as we’re seeing now. And so there was just a huge opportunity to make a big difference. And so I got together with Kevin Kehoe, who long time industry veteran consultant in the industry, and we just shared a passion for the industry, shared a vision for what we could do. Got together and got together with some initial investors, and said, “Hey, this is what we want to do. We want to go big.” And it really took off.
SJ: You have a new focus on landscape construction. What is it? And give me the story on that.
MT: So Aspire supported landscape construction for a long time. We’ve had a certain feature set designed around that, but it really just wasn’t enough. It was good. The things that we had were some good functionality, but our customers needed a lot more, and these were existing customers that were coming to us, going, “We love how we can run this part of our business on Aspire, but this part we can’t. We need to go out to spreadsheets or use other little software packages.” And so about a year and a half ago, we set that as our strategy, and have been working very hard and focused a lot of investment in that area.
SJ: Why is it important for a company to have a construction operating system?
MT: First of all, there’s not really a good one out there that’s comprehensive, so they’re getting information over here, over there, trying to piece it together. Workflows are inconsistent. Data is inconsistent. It’s hard to trust your reports and so and then a lot of our customers were running very effectively a big portion of their business at Aspire, and then having to go pull data from outside of Aspire, and it just was creating, not only, you know, questionable data quality, but it was a lot of work too. And so to bring it all in under one roof just made a ton of sense.
SJ: Mark, can you help me understand like, when you say someone has to go to other systems? And do you know, how much, because I don’t have that job, how much of a time suck is that to have different, you know, piecemeal, as opposed to having it all in one end to end?
MT: Yeah, it’s a huge time suck. Because it’s not just the time you spend kind of muling data, like manually taking data out of some spreadsheets, plugging it into a system over here, it’s the inaccuracies that that creates, that creates redundant work on top of the redundant work, and then you miss a lot of things too. The big thing about Aspire, and our huge value proposition to the contractor, is the accuracy of the data that we have, because it’s all consistent. It’s all combined under one roof, and that allows the contractor to make better decisions. Well, in those scenarios, your data is inconsistent. It doesn’t always match. It gets out of sync easily, and it’s a lot harder to make quality decisions because the information is not as high quality.
SJ: Does this system have a name?
MT: It’s part of Aspire. It’s part of the core system of Aspire.
SJ: What’s comes next on the roadmap?
MT: What comes next? We’ve got a lot that we’re working on. We’ve got some new construction things we’re working on. We’re working on things around time reporting. There’s a lot of new requirements on time reporting and managing time in states like California, things like that. We’re introducing some bar code functionality so you can bar code job sites and bar code products, things like that. One of the things I’m most excited about, though, are site audits and inspections. So we have a platform called PI, or Property Intel, that’s traditionally been a measurement platform, go and find a site, measure it. We combined an application we acquired called Landone that allows you to do some simple diagrams, drawings, illustrations, as you’re selling enhancement work. But we’re taking that product, integrating it another level with Aspire, and introducing the ability for account managers and other quality, focused roles in the organization to go out, visit customer sites, document property assets, look for opportunities for either better customer service. Hey, maybe we’re not taking care of the turf the way that we should, and being proactive about it. To pay this monument sign needs an update. It’s been a long time. We want to propose something, things that allow our customers to drive more revenue, higher margin revenue, and revenue that drives customer satisfaction. And so we’re going to be bundling that in with the combination of PI and Aspire, that’s really going to take it to the next level. And then we’ve got a bunch of AI products that we’re introducing into Aspire as part of our partnership with ServiceTitan, where we get to introduce a lot of pro products. We introduced Marketing Pro this past year. We’re going to introduce a lot of new products, like Sales Pro, Contact Center Pro.
SJ: What’s your perspective on how big this thing’s gotten over the years?
MT: It’s amazing. It’s a little surreal. It’s hard to do. We’re over 600 people today, but it’s been an amazing experience. So we’ve had tremendous partnerships along the way that have allowed us to get here. As you step back and look at this thing and just look at the size of the booth, the customer base, the impact that we’re having on the industry, that’s the most gratifying piece of all of it is when people come up and they’re like, “Hey, thank you. Not thank you for what you’re doing for me and my business, but thank you for the direction that you’re pushing the industry into.”
SJ: Hey, I’m Seth Jones, you guys know Mark Tipton. Thanks for watching us here on Landscape Management TV.
