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Innovate or Die : The Critical Role of Innovation In The Industry
145 Plays2 years ago
Host Brent Oberlink is joined by industry experts Travis May, Strategy and Operations Manager, and Jon Keck, Project Manager and LiDAR drone pilot. Together, they explore the pivotal role of innovation and technology in the lawn landscaping and hardscaping fields. Join them as they discuss how they integrate technology into their daily operations to enhance their company's performance. From leveraging cutting-edge tools to embracing new trends, this episode provides valuable insights into staying ahead in a rapidly evolving industry. Tune in as they also share their visions for the future of technology in the field, offering a glimpse into what lies ahead for contractors looking to innovate and thrive.
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Transcript
Introduction and Guests
00:00:11
Speaker
All right, welcome back to another episode of The Better Contractor. I'm again today joined by John. Big John, the Bean King. The Bean King. And Travis, who still does not have a nickname.
00:00:26
Speaker
Today
Why Embrace Technology?
00:00:27
Speaker
we're going to talk a little bit about embracing technology for a competitive edge. So Travis is a nice one to have on this show because sometimes I think he's a little bit of a tech geek. So, and I am not one. So it's nice to have that strength with you Travis. And John is too.
00:00:44
Speaker
You guys both geek out on that. I'm not a, I'm not a geek, but I know that it's, uh, necessary in order for us to succeed. And that is why we're talking about it right there. So, you know, technology is, is not just software, although it is software. Um, it can be the type of equipment you use. It can be, you know, John is well versed with drones and in our line of work and.
00:01:09
Speaker
It's all those different things, embracing all those different things. And basically in a nutshell, make your business more efficient. And to keep you a little bit of a leg up on your competition. Relevant.
Technology's Evolution Across Industries
00:01:20
Speaker
Yeah. Travis, tell me a little bit about kind of your thoughts on technology in the lawn landscape tree space.
00:01:28
Speaker
I think this is the natural evolution of almost every industry in any point in time where nature doesn't allow us to stand still as individuals, as industries, anything that we're involved in the world. So everything's either progressing or regressing around us. And it's definitely true with technology and innovation.
00:01:48
Speaker
doesn't always have to be technology. Oftentimes it is coupled or that term is used for technology, but innovation is innovation and processes strategy. But technology is more and more being leveraged for the innovation just because we have access to and there's more things available now than there ever has been before. And
00:02:11
Speaker
The long care landscaping hardscaping tree industry is not immune to it. And I think we were definitely seeing that over the last several years. And there are several storms, if you will, and kind of convergence of things, challenges in the marketplace, labor, evolving customer needs.
00:02:33
Speaker
And then there's technologies and innovations, different tools that we can integrate. And so leveraging different tools has always been something that we've adopted in every industry, especially this one, there's always a better, smaller, faster, more capable tool out there. And if we can
00:02:50
Speaker
I guess layer that mentality in front of technology, people get scared of it. But ultimately, when we've leveraged different tools, maybe hand tools, more powerful chainsaw, more efficient fuel, more efficient tractors, those will give it a superpowers where we can do more. We can do more with less, we can potentially take on jobs that we weren't capable of doing before.
Virtual vs. Digital Natives
00:03:15
Speaker
Technology is the same.
00:03:16
Speaker
We just get scared because of the new, but a lot of it, we're at a time too where we're having the legacy businesses and people that have been in the industry running businesses 20, 30 years. There's a lot of businesses transferring over to the younger generations, whether that's handing over the business or that's trying to incorporate younger generations into businesses.
00:03:41
Speaker
We have a generation, so virtual natives versus digital natives. Virtual natives are those of us that saw the rise of the internet. We were alive and functioning in society before the internet and then after, and so we have that contrast. We can see, we know what life was like before,
00:04:05
Speaker
And we can see the value of the internet and utilizing and we still kind of live in both worlds and we're constantly referencing and you can see it in the evolution of the technology. So even in digital forms where a file on a computer is called a file. It's a physical reference to when we had files and file drawers.
00:04:26
Speaker
Younger generations have never touched a file in a filing drawer in most cases. So they're more digital native. So now we've got a couple of generations that have never had a world where they didn't have digital technology, where they didn't have what we see as advanced technology.
Convergence of Emerging Technologies
00:04:45
Speaker
that don't understand the world where you wouldn't incorporate that. So there are several things as robotics, drones, artificial intelligence, virtual reality, augmented reality, AI personal assistants, a bunch of the blockchain, a bunch of these are converging 5G will be another one.
00:05:05
Speaker
almost every industry is touching, including this one, and we're at an expo and then we too at Landrocorp have adopted several things. We've seen as technology and the technology can be so that the electric engine versus the steam engine was a technology.
00:05:23
Speaker
Adopting the steam engine over traditional methods was an innovation or could be viewed by some as technology. Those who adopted the new innovation versus those that didn't has been cyclical with every revolution, with every evolution in industries and society.
00:05:43
Speaker
the Industrial Revolution, people are calling this time period the fourth Industrial Revolution. The first one is a great contrast because it's such the drastic changes that occurred within society, everything. The way we live, the way we conduct business, society, the way we entertain ourselves, the way we conduct work was completely upended in the first Industrial Revolution.
00:06:08
Speaker
We're living through a time now where there's more technology and it's coming so fast and the younger generations are being born with it in their hands.
Risk of Non-Adoption
00:06:17
Speaker
There's tools, there's technologies of innovation that are now online and actually functional. It's no longer sci-fi or hypothetical that one day we'll have this.
00:06:28
Speaker
But there is this evolution about every three to six months smaller faster cheaper, more capable even with some of these robotic motors and drones and software.
00:06:41
Speaker
If we've seen over the last 30, 40 years, industry titans, whether it's Sears or Radio Shack or these cornerstones or pillars of industry that nobody thought could be toppled, they owned that corner of that industry, had the best management, had the talent, had the funds completely obsolete, wiped off the face of the earth, blockbuster.
00:07:06
Speaker
Blockbuster versus Netflix, so we're definitely living in the time and we've got examples over the last few decades that There will be a delineation those who can adopt the technologies and the innovation and those that can't and those that can't will be disrupted in major ways and Predominantly negative ways cease to exist or have their complete market share taken away for those who don't adopt digital technology and
00:07:34
Speaker
Even like the first Industrial Revolution, nobody implemented electric motors in the factories, just completely ripped and replaced all the steam engine. And so there's a hybrid methodology of integrating and learning and understanding these technologies, how it fits into your specific business, and how do I incorporate that. It will give those businesses superpowers where
00:08:03
Speaker
They do, labor shortage has been a constant theme across the businesses in that I can't find the right people, I'm turning down jobs, have constant turnover. There's a lot of amazing technologies coming online that they're starting to become more affordable in the sense, especially if you look at it in terms of labor.
Continuous Process Improvement
00:08:24
Speaker
It will help supplement that.
00:08:27
Speaker
those companies that are paying attention to it, adopting it, paying attention to it, understanding it, and adopting it where it's appropriate, and then scaling as needed, will definitely have superpowers over those who don't. And it's needed. And one of the things that I love about Landcorp is the forward thinking and willingness to adopt robotics, drones, LiDAR,
00:08:53
Speaker
We're playing with virtual reality and augmented reality for 3D, for learning and development, and that's kind of been a strength in my background. But for the successful business now and in the future, the evolutions are happening, the technological and innovative evolutions are happening much, much faster. And yeah, it's so important for, and we just look over the last five years, when did you guys adopt the robotics and drones?
00:09:20
Speaker
The robotics were kind of still adopting the drones really in the last two years, but especially the last year. Yeah, it's Taken off in the last year. We spent I don't know six months a year Trying to learn it and understand it
00:09:35
Speaker
and figure out how to apply it into our business. And then once we did that, we started making purchases, looking at software. I mean, the technology that's involved in drones goes very, very deep. Very quickly. And if you don't learn it quickly and implement it quickly,
00:09:59
Speaker
It passes you by. What's out today is going to change six months a year from now. And you either adopt it and implement it, or you die, in my opinion. Yeah, Atlantic Corp, we talk about continuous improvement and kind of what we view that as is
00:10:20
Speaker
basically just like knocking down all of the other processes, reevaluating them, deciding whether they're the best. And if they're not the best, what can be done better than rebuilding it? And kind of what you talked about earlier, Travis, with businesses, most businesses when they fail, I shouldn't say most, there's a lot of businesses that fail because they completely fail to adopt innovation technology. And just the reality is, you start a business, let's say when you're 30, you operate until you're 60, let's say.
00:10:49
Speaker
At 60, if you're like, we're going to do this what we've always done it because that's just it worked. Well, what worked when you were 40 may not work when you're 60. And that young buck that's 30 years old, they decide, you know what, I like this guy's business. I want to take some of that. And because that young guy is willing and able to adopt that technology and you're not embracing it or hiring him or someone like him, all of a sudden you lose 50% of your market share to that dude.
00:11:14
Speaker
or gal. So, you know, I look at it a lot that way that if you have that mindset that, hey, this has always worked, that does not work in business. Like you have to constantly be evaluating what you're doing.
Software's Role in Efficiency
00:11:26
Speaker
And that's in technology, that's in your processes, your procedures, everything. And to kind of go your point, Travis, too, on, you know, like Atlanta Corp, you know, we've, we've always tried to be like the forefront of whatever it is.
00:11:41
Speaker
But we just got back from the equip expo, which is a lawn care landscape, hardscapes, and the tree care industry, which is the TCIA expo. And a lot of good conversations at both of those. But what I was surprised is some of the conversations, like I'm literally talking to people still using pen and paper to take notes. And all I see there is just a huge inefficiency of that means you gotta have somebody in the office putting those notes into something else. Well, that's a spreadsheet.
00:12:07
Speaker
or file, you know, you mentioned files, are there being, what, trying or back in the day when they were sent into a file folder?
00:12:13
Speaker
But all I see there is inefficiency. You know, you're paying someone to do something that you could literally buy an app or a program for for probably 20 bucks a month. And you should be using that labor cost somewhere else. You know, at those expos too, I was blown away. The one expo I've not been to in a few years, and I was blown away just how much the technology has changed in equipment. And that's a huge thing too. We had a good talk with one of the guys there.
00:12:38
Speaker
And his whole thing was like embracing the grapple salt trucks, you know, and how many people and how much labor that saved him. But not only did it saving labor, he's able to do twice as many jobs per day, you know, so yeah, the truck's expensive, but at the same time, you know, he's reducing costs and doubling his productivity. I think he was saying they run through crew three to six. Yeah. So the crew is six, but half the time, the three don't show up. And so it's really a crew of three. And they were able to more than double
00:13:05
Speaker
their revenue by leveraging software and what other people would consider expensive equipment and obviously there's a numbers component there that you have to make make sense. It has to make sense in the operation but they were able to even with half of their crew not showing up and a small crew expand their business by leveraging innovation and technology. So true investment. Yeah, and they were
00:13:33
Speaker
You know, obviously we're going to name names, but for the size of their company, they were probably one of the more profitable ones we ran into, but it's because they were fully embracing technology. And that's one of the reasons I think the writer booth to talk to us a little bit too is, Hey, can this help? Can this help my business? Yeah. You know, so, um, so I hit lander Corp, John, you know, software and stuff like he does this a little bit on your, your mindset on.
00:13:55
Speaker
Well, technology, software, apps, whatever you want to call it, it is involved in every facet of what we do. So we use tablets and software in the shop to help us diagnose equipment.
00:14:12
Speaker
HR uses it. We have apps for employees to request time off, vacations. We use project management software that reports what's done in the field.
00:14:27
Speaker
lets us know what our crew in New York did yesterday. We use it for weather. We use it for our drones, which we talked about earlier. It's everywhere, and it's constantly changing, and we always have to make sure that we know what changes are coming, so we're ready for those changes so we can get them implemented in the field as quickly as possible.
Scaling with Technology
00:14:52
Speaker
What was the process before that?
00:14:54
Speaker
A lot of spreadsheets. A lot of spreadsheets, yeah. And then someone here doing more of that data and then us, you know, requesting a report and then putting the data together for that report. Much more hands-on and obviously slower, you know, because somebody's actually got to create it where hopefully your app or your software, you know, you can literally go hit a generate PDF button or whatever and you have that report immediately. But also too, I guess just recording of what you're doing.
00:15:19
Speaker
Yeah, we used to have a lot of filing cabinets here. We still have filing cabinets, but a lot fewer. Yeah, yeah, definitely. And single points of failure in the paper system.
00:15:34
Speaker
When it was legacy, that was just the easiest thing to implement. I think we talked on the first podcast about scaling chaos or scaling structure and how that can allow for much more headroom for the company to grow or run into stumbling blocks and now you're cleaning things up and the headache and time and money that's spent to try and organize the things once there's chaos.
00:15:56
Speaker
But single points of failure, if it's paper copies, flood, fire, access to the office, access to the paper components, access to the computer, if it's a spreadsheet, even human error, not that that's completely mitigated by software, but single point of failure in that life happens. Maybe you're out sick for a week, and if that was a critical component or that data drove operations or operational efficiencies,
00:16:25
Speaker
Not having that person in the single point of failure can be detrimental and the sounds almost archaic like that you're even talking about this, especially in this day and age, but 100% we had so many conversations. I mean, I don't know a quarter ish where there were there were still using paper and that's about as.
00:16:45
Speaker
That's mind blowing to me personally, minimal innovation in this day and age. Well, and when you talk about scalability, which you just mentioned earlier, you know, that's a key point. So if I'm five employees now, and I want to grow to 20. Well, if I have one secretary and she's busy with five employees already, and I go to 20, what does that mean? I need four secretaries to transcribe data that's on paper.
Innovation: Sustainable vs. Disruptive
00:17:07
Speaker
But if I have an app or software that's basically let's just say $10 a user per month,
00:17:13
Speaker
Guess what? That's a lot easier to click the button and say, Hey, I need 20 users now instead of five in that system automatically now works for 20 or a hundred or 200 employees. So again, it goes back to the scalability aspect as well. And to me as a business guy, that's one of the main reasons to, to adopt that, adopt that technology right there.
00:17:29
Speaker
So there's an author, Clay Christensen, he wrote the innovator's dilemma and then innovator's solutions afterward. I think he's dead now, but he was the one who coined disruptive innovation, the term. And he broke out innovation into two categories. Sustainable innovation is defined by incremental improvements upon existing processes or procedures.
00:17:51
Speaker
and the disruptive innovation which was typically something that started as a seed that didn't exist and grew into something that disrupted and knocked off whatever the incumbent was but it started out as a seed and didn't exist prior to you and so
00:18:11
Speaker
We're in a time that incremental innovation, and so one of the fascinating things throughout my career, I've constantly been involved in building, creating, or advancing programs. And there's always innovation, essentially. You're looking at how do we fix problems or how do we create things to fix challenges and take a better market share or whatever.
00:18:36
Speaker
And so the incremental innovation is typically a safe bet and so he analyzed in innovators dilemma. One of the things that he looked at it was case studies in that.
00:18:51
Speaker
They were the juggernaut in their industry. They dominated. They had the market. They had the products. They had great management and smart people. And they had the money to invest. Yet they got disrupted by a startup or something that didn't even exist. How does that even possible? How does that happen? And so that was one of the things he was going through into case studies.
00:19:13
Speaker
One of the three lines regardless of the industry and regardless of how it manifested and whatever The disruption was One of the three lines was he's like what are commonalities or what are things that? impacted that decision and one of those was it came down to a personal decision of They played it safe in the incremental if I do disruptive where it's unproven incremental innovation is slight improvement upon existing whatever
00:19:40
Speaker
It's safe. You're dealing with a known entity, a software, a process, a technology that's already been in the environment. If I tweak that, I know it might be only like one or two percent better, more efficient, whatever, but it's safe. A disruptive innovation where it's unknown has the potential to fall on its face and not work. And if I pour money into that and it falls on its face,
00:20:04
Speaker
One of those three lines was that it came down to a mid-level manager or executive that had the decision, had both options in front of them. And like, my bonus, my performance review, my reputation is on the line with this decision.
00:20:21
Speaker
I can go with a disruptive one. And I don't know if it'll work or not, it could be game changing. But at the end of the year, I lose my job, my business or when most of it wasn't business, I lose my job, my promotion, my bonus, I'll play it safe. And so they had the opportunity and they saw it. And it wasn't that they discounted it, but it was an individual fear. And it came down to an individual impact that made that determination.
AI: Tool for Augmentation or Replacement?
00:20:47
Speaker
So we're living in a time where incremental innovation
00:20:50
Speaker
And what's happening is the evolution of all the tools, the technologies, the market, the industry is evolving so fast and we've seen it. Where we didn't have AI, we didn't have robotics, we didn't have drones, we didn't have FaceTime and be able to see.
00:21:13
Speaker
And then all of a sudden we did. And there's definitely there's bodies of research to help articulate that. Probably a longer conversation than this, but that's exponential growth in multiple areas. And you say you got blockchain, you got AI, you got virtual reality, you got augmented reality, you got robotics, you got 5G, all exponential in their own right.
00:21:35
Speaker
What's happening now is to convergence is you're taking some of these exponential technologies and combining two or three of them and creating a whole other realms of possibilities, both as tools, something that can help your business, but also can disrupt the marketplace and create a whole new realms that nobody even fathomed before. So if you're a company that's focused on incremental innovation,
00:22:00
Speaker
and you're not paying attention to these exponential technologies or innovative things out there as they converge you're definitely not going to understand whatever that new product or service or solution is that's combining three of them and it's so important and this isn't just for our industry I mean it's everybody across all industries are experiencing this
00:22:24
Speaker
They have to plug in, they have to start understanding, they have to start learning from a couple different perspectives. One is how can this be used against me? How are the digital natives that just understand this intuitively, how will they potentially utilize this to disrupt my business, my operation, take customer share? But then two is how can I start playing with this and how can this solve problems for me? They have to start understanding it and we're watching it happen.
00:22:54
Speaker
kind of real time in our industry and in others, the companies we broken out into two companies, those who can adopt innovation and technologies and those who can't and those who can't are are gonna have significant problems. Yeah, I think this AI thing is just going to continue. I mean, we're just in the cusp of it now.
00:23:12
Speaker
or the robotics and drones, AI being integrated with it to even help the robotics and drones do things that they couldn't do and then people couldn't do. Yeah, it's only going to snowball. Yeah, I don't think it's one of those things that's going away. You hear so many people, I've heard a lot of people that are against AI. And I get it. And I totally get it. Like why you would be against it for certain aspects. But at the same time, just like with all technologies, there's pros and there's cons.
00:23:42
Speaker
Social media has got a ton of pros. And as we've realized in recent years, it also has a ton of cons. AI is going to be the same
AI as the Major Disruptor
00:23:48
Speaker
thing. It's going to make some things just insanely more efficient to do. It's going to say it's going to eliminate some jobs. But as we fill the gaps. Yeah, we're labors an issue. And that's definitely an issue in our industry. Yeah, yeah. So I think yeah, so those who fail to adopt it, I think are going to end up paying for it one day. Now, you know, this is kind of you talked about like disruptors, and I
00:24:11
Speaker
maybe five or six years ago before AI was too much in the scene. I remember having a conversation with someone and they were like, what's, you know, we're all old enough to remember when the internet was kind of becoming a thing. And this person was like, you know, what, what's the next big disruptor? You know, at that time, I don't really know. I don't really know what's, what's upcoming. It's AI. AI is the next big disruptor and it's already starting to do it. But I do think, you know, the companies that do not adopt it at all, they're just anti AI. I think you're going to pay for it dearly in the near future, personally.
00:24:40
Speaker
All right, I use the other one that everybody's most familiar with open AI and chat GPT. And why that gets such play in society is it made AI real. AI has been around for a while in different forms. But that was the first one that the average person can use and see benefit like, oh my goodness, now I get it.
00:25:07
Speaker
But that's a, that it's not a classic example. It's a modern day example of all those classic stories of the blockbusters with the Netflix and the Sears or Amazon typed in Walmart. Um, open AI launched last fall. Um, the first month they launched a million users, two and a half months. It was a hundred million users, fastest growing software that's ever been on the planet. Um, the biggest juggernaut in the space for search was Google. Um,
00:25:38
Speaker
when OpenAI launched and got that much market share that fast, it forced Google to launch, borrowed their generative AI platform early before it was ready. And it's significantly underperforming what OpenAI and ChatTPT and the generative AI have. Nobody thought Google could be knocked off of their throne. This company, by all intents and purposes, OpenAI didn't exist two years ago. So we're watching real time evidence of
00:26:07
Speaker
And then and then I think this is of spring I don't have the updated stats but I think every week there is a hundred new applications leveraging generative AI. And typically like a business or a new tool that significantly impacted a business. So that snowball effect or.
00:26:31
Speaker
We're watching more companies get disrupted in major ways, real time, just with AI. And it's one of those technologies, it touches everything.
00:26:42
Speaker
Yeah, no, I totally agree.
AI in Customer Service
00:26:44
Speaker
The one, the one thing as you brought that up, it made me think about it. So the one place that I don't think AI has, it's a spot for. And I think it's a way for some of these businesses to, to harness that. So when you think about customer service or like issues, what's one thing you hate if you, if you're listening, you have an issue with a company and you're like, I'm going to jump online and I'm going to, you know, chat with a, basically it's a bot you're chatting with. It's frustrating and it's annoying. I think companies can,
00:27:13
Speaker
leverage AI a little bit though too and keep that part of it still an actual true customer service experience. You know, people still want a human.
00:27:21
Speaker
And I think the companies that can adopt AI and do so for efficiency purposes, but yet still deliver fully on the customer experience, that human connection point, I think those are the ones that succeed. I don't think you can completely replace it. I'm not saying that's what you're saying, but I don't think you can replace the human connections part. So I think the companies that are able to do both, those are the ones that will truly succeed.
00:27:45
Speaker
AI will augment and make humans more efficient, more powerful. It's showing remarkable improvements in communication, human communication to empathy and helping craft communications. But again, it's an augmentation.
00:28:07
Speaker
Yeah, who knows in the next couple years, what place that will have but it's showing so much capabilities on such a broad range of things. But that is an example of one technology. Yeah. And outside of AI, I mean, it's even simple stuff to like, there's still, I'm shocked, there's still companies that
00:28:27
Speaker
you know, still actually manually mail me an invoice. Like, I expect now to be emailed with a payment link and everything, I can just pay it right then. So I'm even shocked. And I we dealt with some landscapers at the house. And I love the ones who actually, you know, send me a CAD drawing of the landscape idea. I have a quote in my email, I can pay via my email, you know, and I have a I can pull up any invoice I want to for two or three years back.
00:28:54
Speaker
And even that stuff, I mean, it's still technology, it's not AI, but it's still very simple, but there's still people that don't do it that way. Like I have to call, talk to a human, request an invoice, they mail me an invoice because they don't want to email it to me. Little stuff like that, guys, is even important to make sure you're doing. You know, and we started a, we haven't really talked about it in the podcast yet, but we started a barber shop several years ago. And one of the things that made it unique at that time was we did online booking.
00:29:20
Speaker
And I remember some people was like, oh, it's weird. Why would you do that? You know, it's like, cause that's what I would want. If I was a customer, I want to be able to book an appointment on my phone or why I'm at work without actually having to call, wait on the person to check that specific date and time and then get back to me. And so I think in the beginning, this is roughly, I think this is 2014. So I think roughly at that time, like the first year, like 30% was booked online and 70% were still calling.
00:29:48
Speaker
Now we're like 95% online and 5% at calling. You know, usually the calling is because we're booked online and they need to, they're trying to find if they can have an appointment. So it was, you know, still a technology, but it was one of the reasons I think that we booked almost immediately.
00:30:02
Speaker
So that might be a great example of the hybrid thing. So change management process for any of this going to be extremely important to you in your own corporate unit. So what was the initial feedback for both your, or for what your staff, you already said that the customers were like, for those that weren't booking online, what was the process?
00:30:28
Speaker
So, you know, they would call the shop, you know, usually say, Hey, do you have anything available on a weekday between, you know, on my lunch break, for example. And that went away pretty quick once they realized, you know, I can do this online. And the other aspect too, is it allowed them to modify the appointment, cancel the appointment, you know, all the stuff like that that happens all the time in that industry. So
00:30:48
Speaker
You know, it was a earlier adoption at that time. Most of our competition in town were not, was not doing it. And now I think every single one of them probably does online booking. What was the percentage? 30%. It's like 30 in the first year, approximately. And now it's like 95%. A hybrid and it quickly, or like it happened quick, but it was, there was a hybrid process. Yeah. And it was good for our staff too, because we took payment up front.
00:31:11
Speaker
You know, and we had a cancellation policy in there. That was one of the big issues in that world, is that people cancel or just don't show. Well, we allowed them to do a 50%, you know, booking, you know, or a fee upfront. And then as a person, no shows, you keep the 50%. So the stylist or barber, you know, isn't kind of screwed out of that hourly wage. So just another example, not necessarily in the contracting world, but it's just another example of embracing that technology to make your business more efficient, to make it leaner.
Drones in Business Operations
00:31:40
Speaker
So John, what do you guys or how are you using the drone currently? So we use the drone to do inspections. We use the drone to put together bids. So a customer will tell us or ask us to bid 100 miles of pipeline right of way that needs to be mowed or cleared. And a lot of times they don't know what their rights of way look like.
00:32:08
Speaker
and we can take our drone out there, use a LIDAR sensor and fly their right of way and see exactly what's out there. How much vegetation is within their easement and how many trees need to be trimmed or removed, how much brush needs to be removed. It's really changed how we do the things that used to be done on paper, looking at pictures.
00:32:35
Speaker
What, uh, what would be the process for capturing that amount of detail without the drill? Um, it would take hours and hours of walking or using a UTV side-by-side to physically drive every mile. And that's just to get a visual. You're not getting LIDAR or anything with that LIDAR. So there's stuff that gives you that the old method doesn't give you at all. So, so, uh, for the, what LIDAR?
00:33:01
Speaker
LiDAR is a laser that shoots from the sensor and it reflects off of vegetation or the ground. And with the software that we use, you're able to remove
00:33:16
Speaker
what's not ground, they call it, or what is ground. So we can get a visual of the earth from the sky with no vegetation. And then we can put that vegetation back and see what's in the boundary of the right of way and know exactly what needs to be removed.
00:33:36
Speaker
So from the technology and the operation, what we're producing to the customer, what's the ROI on it? I don't have that. Yes, we are literally just launching the whole drone thing.
00:33:49
Speaker
And so where I'm getting at is, that's, I'd call it a superpower, you're doing something you couldn't even do, right? Like, like that, implementing a technology, you're not only just from the inspection perspective, much more efficient, efficient, but you're actually getting a visual that you can plan off of and maybe produce more accurate quotes.
00:34:12
Speaker
show the customer and tell that story and if there was any ambiguity about like I don't know if we need to do like you can show them and articulate in ways that you wouldn't maybe be able to do before. So truly giving you more efficient calculation, inspection, understanding and then communication but then also in a much deeper way of superpower you could never do before get that same visual.
00:34:40
Speaker
Communication is a big part. You know, you can send a customer an email with four or five pictures, or you can fly the drone and build a 3d map and send that map to your customer and they can see 1000s and 1000s of pictures. Yeah, yeah. It'll definitely help the bidding process. It already has. Yeah. Yeah. And it's another one of those things like the customer sees it the first time they're like, Oh, that's, oh, cool. You guys are doing that, you know, because nobody else is really doing it.
00:35:10
Speaker
Which is a part of the brand too. Showing that it's not a static status quo brand, that there's always ways that we could be more efficient, save the company's paying us money, do things better. So it does become part of the brand story and the culture. So one aspect of it in that the customer can view you as
00:35:36
Speaker
Yeah, they're not just doing things because they've always done it that way. They're constantly looking to improve, which means that they have a value system potentially that's going to translate to better quality work and potentially more efficient too in that it will save us money. When they put their bid across, it's not inefficiencies, but they're looking for efficiencies. And then when you look at the labor challenge,
00:36:04
Speaker
We're talking about younger kids who are digital natives and want technology understand technology. That's a cool application. That's a cool technology. That's a technology that a lot of them have played with, or it's intuitive for them shows that that can get into the whole conversation about talent acquisition and stuff.
Staying Ahead with Technology
00:36:29
Speaker
But yeah,
00:36:29
Speaker
Yeah, it shows that there's a career path for them that it's not always about I'm standing out there with the trimmer. And that's what that industry is about. There's opportunities for them to leverage their understanding of technology innovation, things that are career paths for them in this industry as well. So it can definitely be a talent attraction acquisition retention tool is to leverage some of these technologies and show that they can grow their skill sets beyond just manual labor.
00:36:57
Speaker
Definitely. Yeah, that's one of those things too, you know, because I realize talking about this in the podcast that hopefully a competitor is listening to this podcast. So we're sitting here telling them what we're doing. But the whole purpose of all this though, you know, you'll hear us could talk about like continuous improvement. My goal is that we're always at the forefront though. So the next thing, whatever that is beyond drones, we're doing that before they are too. So let's start wrapping this up a little bit and kind of tie it all together. So
00:37:23
Speaker
You know, I think when it comes to technology, you look at like just the power of software. So I look at, you know, in our industry, what some of the issues a lot of contractors have is like data recording. And that's not necessarily just for their in-house work. It's also to help with bids. Because how in the world do you do a bid if you have no historical data?
00:37:44
Speaker
You know what I mean? So it's the software that can tie all of those things together. So you go out to the field, you prepare a bid, or you're doing work and, you know, well, an example of some technology when we first, I forget the name of the software we were using at the time, but a customer had had a complaint that we had damaged something. And one of the things we required back then was that you did an after photo as you're leaving the job site.
Hybrid Technology Integration
00:38:08
Speaker
Well, in the after photo, you can tell all the equipment is loaded and we're done.
00:38:12
Speaker
But the item that they claimed was damaged was clearly not damaged in the photo. And the gate was locked back. So, you know, clearly like in that example right there. And that's just simple as a photo, but the photo was saved in our software.
00:38:24
Speaker
I can go back to the date, immediately pull that photo up. I sent it to the customer and said, actually, it was fine. We left. So it's just little stuff like that. It's just those efficiencies. So I was reading an article a couple months back, um, that a lot of the lawn care industry, I say a lot, uh, there were several case studies that were shown that they were wearing like GoPros or a version of a recording system on their crews that would go out and do lawn care and landscaping.
00:38:50
Speaker
and they they would pretty frequently get questions from the the customer like yeah you didn't put whatever down chemicals or fire ant or insect type stuff whatever that what and the initial response for their cruise was you're just trying to watch me every day and then very quickly it became the tool like yeah no we did and they would offer those videos up in kind of the post-mortem of
00:39:17
Speaker
Hey, we did your your lawn today and here's the video and so that even the customers could go back and look but it became a valuable tool for maintaining customer relationships like being able to prove like hey this what we did are these are challenges that we encountered or proving that they did those services and so.
00:39:35
Speaker
Really quick within I think like 45 days it went from majority of their their crews Hating the idea of this to I want to wear it every time and record and it's a valuable tool So like that kind of stuff is yeah
00:39:50
Speaker
Yeah, so if you're wondering, you know, hey, should I be embracing technology? I think we're pretty uniform in saying the answer. Yes. Absolutely. Yeah. So yeah. And one last thing, I think we look, it doesn't have to be a complete rip and replace. And I think that's what people get so fearful of is we're just going to replace it. There's going to be a hybrid period.
Conclusion on Technology's Necessity
00:40:09
Speaker
Oh, yeah. And plan on that integrate test.
00:40:12
Speaker
do with the accelerator model as far as test it and if it's going to fail, fail fast and you either scrap it, shelve it or scale it. It's not right for you and get rid of it or it's not ready right now for your operation whatever and shelve it and continue to look at it. We're 100% and look to scale it efficiently. Don't be scared of it. Play with it. Start understanding it. Yeah, you'll hear us talk a lot in future podcast about scalability.
00:40:40
Speaker
If you guys are serious about scalability, you have to absolutely embrace technology. I don't really know how you would scale without it. We'll talk about systems and processes, all of that anymore, especially the systems part is built on technology. So hope you guys found some value today. If you did, please share it. Thank you for tuning in. Thank you.