Ep 022 – Revolutionize Your Workforce: Why Big Landscape Companies Swear By LMN & Greenius

LMN [00:00:00] The Roots of Success podcast is for the landscape professional who's looking to up their game. We're not talking lawns or grass here. We're talking about people, process, and profits. The things deep within the business that need focus to scale a successful company from hiring the right people and managing your team to improving your operations and mastering your finances. We've got a brain trust of experts to help you nurture the roots of a successful business and grow to the next level. This is The Roots of Success. Tommy Cole: Hey guys, welcome back to the Roots of Success podcast. I'm your host Tommy Cole with McFarlin Stanford And we've got two awesome guests here today from Way up north Our friends in Canada. We have Dave and Rich from LMN, Landscape Management Network, a great landscaping software, operation software. How are you doing, Rich and Dave? David Ellis: Doing great. Excited to be here, Tommy. It's always good seeing you but excited to get this opportunity to hop on the roots of success podcast today and [00:01:00] always great getting a chance to talk with you. Tommy Cole: Great. Rich, how's it going, buddy? Rich Thiebaud: Great. Great. Yeah. A little chilly up here, but but we're doing all right getting prepped for for a big 2024 season. Glad to be on the podcast. Hope to see you soon somewhere warmer. I think I think we'll have to, we'll have to meet up downstairs somewhere, but Tommy Cole: I feel like we always meet somewhere where it's cold, right? I, I think in the last, we, we were up north in Canada and, and everywhere we go, it's cold. So we're going to have to find the beach spot somewhere at some point. Backrounds at LMN and Greenius Tommy Cole: Yeah, so let's jump right in. So Dave, what's your a little bit of your background and how did you get here? David Ellis: Yeah. So I'm on the Greenius side of LMN. So we do our training and onboarding product within LMN for all landscape companies. How did I get here? I've been in the tech space for a while, always doing sales within tech. And, you know, when you. You work for a few companies and you're looking at them and you're like, am I really passionate about this? Do I understand this? And for me, when this opportunity popped up at LMN and [00:02:00] Greenius, it was, you know, bringing tech to the landscape industry. You know, there's such a big fit here. I find the landscape industry can be a bit archaic when it comes to their business practices. So for me, it was, okay, here's an industry fit. I can bring my tech, my technology background into this space and really, Just flourish and help empower teams. I think training is a massive portion of it and being able to, provide a product that allows landscape companies to grow and, and flourish really allowed me to, to say, Hey, let's get on board with LMN and, you know, had a few interviews with rich and really liked rich and he kind of sold me on the vision of where it was going and that's how I ended up here. Tommy Cole: Great? Great to have you on Dave. We'll get we'll dive into deeper. What's here from rich rich is the LM inside So for our audience rich handles that side Dave is the greeniest in training side. So, so Rich, how did you, how did you get here? Did you like sweet talk somebody or what? Rich Thiebaud: Yeah, maybe. Um, Big [00:03:00] landscape background for me. So I come from owning and operating a landscape company for 25 years before coming to L. M. N. Right in high school, working my way up right from the bottom, pushing wheelbarrows, laboring Repairing interlock, installing swimming pools, you name it, kind of built it all in the business, got inside as the company grew, like a lot of us do when we're growing the company, starting to figure out how to run the business side started getting into sales, design operations, and made a lot of mistakes on, on the way there, but built a company to a good size. We were about 50 employees at the time looking for another chapter in life, really from there. I ended up selling to my brother. I had him as our operations manager at the time. He I think he was excited to sort of take on that opportunity and. And take the business and do something on his own. So he he bought out my end of the business. Funny enough our CEO here at LMN, Mark Bradley and I we operated landscape companies in the same [00:04:00] space. So we knew each other as competitors. And a casual conversation turned into a job as the head of sales for LMN. and I just thought it was great that Mark valued. Someone from the landscape industry and that insight that they could have taking on the sales team role and basically just trying to pass my knowledge down through there. So now I get to do what I love best. I get to talk landscaping. I get to talk to contractors all over the world and try and bring a little bit of what I knew. Tommy Cole: Yeah. Rich Thiebaud: I can help them out. Tommy Cole: So did you use LMN in your business? Rich Thiebaud: I did. Tommy Cole: Okay. So tell me about that experience. Rich Thiebaud: We brought it Tommy Cole: to onboard it and all and everything else. Rich Thiebaud: Yeah, we brought it on about five years ago five years before I, I sold. And we came from pen and paper paperwork orders. Excel spreadsheets were about as techie as we got at that time. Trying to do our best. Not a lot of insight. Really, I was looking for a repeatable process. I was trying to grow.[00:05:00] I needed to find a way to sort of translate what I knew to do estimating and do a lot of that kind of business operations side to someone else. It became apparent the software was going to be the easiest way to, to make a repeatable process and be able to scale. So we brought on LMN. A few bumps in the road, bringing it on. We didn't really have anybody there that that understood tech that well. And we, we got it in and about six months total which I thought was pretty quick, switching from a manual process right, right into all tech and started taking advantage of it, got insights, started clocking in and out of jobs, understanding our numbers. Creating estimate templates so that we could make a repeatable process. I could hire a full time estimator and kind of put my brain into the system and be able to have them work on that without me standing side by side. So it was a good, it was a good adoption and showed us a lot of things that we didn't, we weren't aware of in the company, which was which is good and bad for the Tommy Cole: so [00:06:00] what kind of revenue were you doing at that time rich? I'm just curious because this is kind of helping some of our audience and our listeners to understand. What kind of revenue were you at? Rich Thiebaud: We were doing just under 2 million at the time. Tommy Cole: Okay, so under 2 million Rich Thiebaud: employees. Yeah. Tommy Cole: okay under 2 million with a handful of managers, I guess and probably several crews. And so you went from pen to paper into LMN, which is most of our audience, right? I mean, most people are, are jumping into that. Oh my gosh, I got a word, I got Excel, I got QuickBooks, I got stuff in my head, production rates, I don't Rich Thiebaud: Way too much of it here. Tommy Cole: Yeah, it's mostly in my head, right? How do I go from that to that? I mean, it can be a daunting task. But in my eyes, you almost just got to do it. Right. You just got to adapt the way. Elem is built and not necessarily what you've done in the past. Rich Thiebaud: that's, that's a great point. Yeah, you're never going to find software that does it [00:07:00] the way you've done it. If you're doing it on pen and paper and it's all in your head they won't make a million different instances of software and everybody has their own things. So I did find some of that although it may be different from the way You, you're doing it or the way you have been doing it, it's all about the results, really. So adapt, just do it, get it out of your head and into the system. It, it's just, it sounds daunting at first, but man, does it make things easier once you get it all in there Small Steps and Template Usage Tommy Cole: Yeah, I'm a fan of small steps. I was speaking with Mark, you know, last week. And I did a presentation and I compared it to, you're not, one big swing is going to chop down the tree, right? You can't hit a home run on one swing. But what you can do is you can chop away every day, right? Every single day, you're just chopping out that tree, and eventually it's going to start to get a little bit of a wall bill ness, right? And then eventually the tree's going to come down after so many months. Of implementation, and I feel like that's a better approach of [00:08:00] stepping into it one step at a time, hitting some milestones along the way to where then you look back six months, you're like, God, we're like 80 percent there. This is like a no brainer, right? And I feel like that's where a lot of people get a little sideways and implementation, so to speak. Rich Thiebaud: it can seem like too much. It can, like you said, it can seem like a mountain and LMN does a lot and it can seem overwhelming, but if you look at it and go, what am I going to tackle first? And just take that step by step or what am I spending most of my time on for me? It was I was spending way too much time estimating in the office and I needed more time to look at production and efficiencies I dove into estimating first They helped me set up my templates and I dove into that reduced my estimation time by oh Like at least at least ten times I'll be created and then all of a sudden I have some more time And I go, okay, now we can focus on production. Now we can focus on setting up this piece of the software. So, Tommy Cole: You know, our [00:09:00] business owners tend to be less template based, right? It's the LMN word or any software But recreating the wheel over and over after every estimate is not good. Right? So it's all of a sudden you're bringing all your costs into the software, like true costs, right? Where you, you know, everything. And then you build an estimate based on that. Is that correct? Rich? Rich Thiebaud: yeah, exactly. You're bringing it all into your budget. And the big thing about bringing all your costs into your budget and then estimating using that cost based system. You know that those costs are covered and those overhead costs and you know, your real number. So when you bring a price to a customer and they say, well, can you do it for this much? You know, if you can. Because you know where your break even is and you know what your profit is, and you're not just going, well, I think I can or Tommy Cole: yeah, or you have no idea and you're like, absolutely. We'll figure it out. What you don't, you don't know if you're making money at the start, right? So you don't know your margins, your overhead, et cetera. So I get it. Okay, let's, let's move to [00:10:00] Dave because Dave is chomping right now. But I want to talk about what your background is and what you do with an LMN. What is Greenius Tommy Cole: And there's this thing called Greenius. There might be a little confusion out there of like, well, I thought Greenius was out there, but it's now associated with LMN, but like, can I use it if I don't have LMN and all, all these things. So give me a backdrop of what Greenius does. David Ellis: Yeah. Yeah. So Greenius is pretty much your end to end kind of training and onboarding program for any of your landscapers. So if you think about it, you know, you come in and your crew on their first day has no idea what they're going to be doing. Well with Greenius, you're able to go in and send them all there, whether it's health and safety training, you know, what PPE should I be wearing or how should I use this piece of equipment? You're able to assign all these videos. That are online course content where they go in, they press play, they watch a video on maybe how do I use a blower? And maybe it's a 10 minute video. And at the end of all these videos, they're set up with an exam that says, all these 10 questions, 20 questions on,[00:11:00] the material that they watch so that the day they get there, maybe it's their first day. They've already watched this video. They know how to use this piece of equipment and they're more comfortable on site. Not to mention, all our videos are pretty much in Spanish, which is awesome. tons of landscape companies, and I'm sure, companies you work with, you see every day, how do I train my Spanish speaking employees? Well, you can assign them these videos. It's all done in Spanish. They understand what's happening. It's, it's better communicated. And we find that provides, a better way for, for Spanish speaking employees to learn. Tommy Cole: that's great. so Greenius does so much, it's great. It's compatible with other things, right? Where it's almost a standalone product. Is that correct? David Ellis: Yeah. So it is a standalone product. You don't need to have LMN to utilize Greenius. If you're on a different software, if you just wanted to use it for training, you can sign up for Greenius as well. There's mixed in performance reviews as well. So it's not just videos that we provide. You're able to do a 15 minute reviews with any of your [00:12:00] employees. You're also able to upload any of your own content. This was released this year. It's a brand new feature for us. We're super excited about it. Companies are super excited about it. So if you've got a piece of equipment that you work with that we don't offer on our, on our, on our system, you can go in there, film your own video about it, how to use it and upload that directly into Greenius. Maybe you want to get a weekly update video to your team Maybe you go out and you send an email and you say, Hey, guys, here's a video. Watch it. How do we know if someone's going to watch that with greeniness? You assign it and you can actually see exactly when people finish their training and they sign off on it to say, okay, I watched this. Tommy Cole: Nice. So it's like a course, right? So as they watch videos and certain whether it be, you know, equipment maintenance or how to operate equipment right? So it has a history along the way of what they've been doing. So it's it's very different back in my days of training. It was like you grab a piece of paper and every Everyone's sign is here, right?[00:13:00] And then we got that piece of paper and then the next thing, you know we've got 20 sheets of paper that we've all signed and we're like Well, what do we do with this stuff? And then that person may leave, right? And you're like, what are those 20 pieces of paper? Do you scan them in? Do you log it in? Oh my gosh, those days are long gone. In my opinion. And so the deal with videos, I heard that you're able to take videos and upload videos and grabs like a YouTube that you've seen online, right? You can import that. Is that correct? David Ellis: Yeah. I was talking to a guy out of Nantucket and there's a certain type of flower that grows in Nantucket. And of course we don't have that video on Greenius. So he went to YouTube, found a video of exactly how to prune that flower. Grabbed it from YouTube, dumped it right into Greenius and boom. Now he created content around it, created 10 questions around that video, and then he sent it off to his team. Now he knows every single time when his team watches that video, they sign off to say that they've watched it. And now if any issue arises [00:14:00] coming forward, you can say, Hey, no, you're actually properly trained on that. We have documentation here going forward. And I think that's a massive the important piece within Greenius is. Everything's timestamped. If you need something to fall back on, everything's there for you. Tommy Cole: No, it's great. And talk about a lot of the fact that they does other features besides just training, right? So the old green is, it was mostly just training and it was like specific videos that was. Implemented by Greenius, not bringing your outside video. HR Capabilities of Greenius Tommy Cole: So you guys upgraded that. But one of the best features I love the most is this onboarding, HR, performance reviews. Direct reports, who those people are, your job titles, right? All of that is included. and it's almost like a database for all your employees and managers, right? David Ellis: Correct? Yeah. It acts as a database. So you'll dump in your employee list. You can bulk upload that into Greenius. So every single one of your employees are going to be on the [00:15:00] system. It tracks exactly what training they've done from the moment they start to the moment they finished. If you have H2B workers, for example, that disappear for a season and they come back. All their records are still going to be stored. You just deactivate that employee. So they're not activated within your system. As soon as they come back, you activate them again. All their records are going to be stored there. So you always, you're on top of your, your training records and their training history. Tommy Cole: That's good. That's the biggest hiccup in landscape companies, guys. From what I see out there, traveling the country, Canada as well, is basically like not documenting those things. They're always like on a hard drive, a USB. Sally or Bob has it on their laptop and then you can't get hold of Sally and Bob and then you got to repeat this whole process. I'm telling you right that that's the lack of professional that we have in our industry. And I believe Greenius is one that can change that perspective. Best Feature of LMN Tommy Cole: So rich. Tell me about [00:16:00] some features that you are like, Oh my God, these features are game changers with our software. It helps you do this, this, and this. And you've got different avenues. You got sales, you got operations, you got maintenance, install, uh, repetitive technician work. Right. So tell me some features. You're like, yep, this is what we're known for. Rich Thiebaud: really, we're known, as just really someone like looking to create those repeatable processes and efficiencies. Past that Benchmarks is really great in it. That's going to be something everybody's looking at, whether it's benchmarks for small businesses or large businesses. Those are always great to compare from a feature standpoint. My favorites from the new sort of rollout they did this year. There was a ton of stuff in 2023. A ton of things that somebody that maybe was familiar with LMN a few years ago doesn't know. Job costing was the first big one in 2023. That's huge. We did a ton of that. Yeah. We had to do a lot of it manually. It [00:17:00] was one of those things where I always wanted LMN to have job costing. And I, a month after I sold, I went, you guys launch this now, really? I've been doing this. Tommy Cole: stayed where I was at. No. Rich Thiebaud: Yeah, doing it on spreadsheets. So it's not after the fact it's live. You can check out a job anytime middle of the day. How that, how's that job going? Whether it's a recurring maintenance contract, that's the whole season or a design build contract. You can really just get that live data on where we're sitting actual versus estimated to keep things on huge, a huge feature there, huge launch, really easy to use. It just from a landscaper's eyes, again, you're getting it from somebody from the industry. It just, it just makes sense when I look at it compared to other analytics was a big launch this year. That's kind of really closely connected to job costing. What that's going to do is get you all those numbers you're looking for. Maybe those larger businesses, I always say the best way to expand sometimes is just to kind of fix within.[00:18:00] You don't need to go looking for new business. Just get better at the business. You're already doing. That's where the analytics comes in is looking at all your jobs, comparing crew by crew job by job month by month and digging into those efficiencies and trying to figure out where you can get better at the jobs you're doing. So, again, it's everything from job analytics to sales pipeline analytics. It's all in there now. Last one for me quick is we launched a new mobile app it's called LMN crew. It's incredible. It's the, it's the best app I've seen. It does everything the part I really like is for the crews. I just talked about all that job costing efficiencies, all that kind of thing and how the people in the office and the owners are all going to get those insights. Now the crews see it, which is motivating. They're going to see a little gauge. It gives them some accountability and it gives them a goal. They clock into that job that day. They can see exactly where they're at, what their goal is for the day and how efficient they're being. So you can start giving them benchmarks and sort of [00:19:00] giving them almost a scoreboard to work towards. Right. So that's a huge feature. I love that in the new app. Yeah. Tommy Cole: I'm a fan of scoreboards at the end of the day. If you've been around me for a while, um, I love sports and I love scores. And if, and if I'm losing, I'm getting mad. I don't like to lose at all. You can, anybody that knows me well, second place is like the loser. So I want to know how I'm doing as a crew leader. Production manager operation. I want to know how I'm doing as a salesperson, right? How i'm closing my leads how often how many bids are out there? How many are sold? At the end of the day if you don't have a software that produces a scoreboard You are completely missing out at the day. I I said it last week with mark I said I don't know how anyone can go and out with their dayif they don't know if they're winning or losing at the end Of the day. I I don't know how you do your job Right, but this platform does it well, there's others out there that do it well, but [00:20:00] at the, at the end of the day, this one's great and it's simple to understand and use. You know, it's no different than Greenius, right? You have a scorecard at at the same time to, to see where people are progressing in training, right? I'm a fan of 52 week training. End of story, done. It just should be part of something that you put your seatbelt on every time you get in the car. So tell me a little bit about that, Dave. There's some, there's, there's some breadcrumbs along the way that see how far you've progressed into completing your role now. And then also for room from advancement as far as promotion wise, right? David Ellis: Yeah, that's a that's a great question that you can set up within Greenius, you know, we like to break down your company and maybe you set it up maintenance level one maintenance level to maintenance level three. Let's just use that that use case, for example, and, maybe we start out with these 5 videos and we get them set up and that's maintenance level 1. Okay. Well, yeah. You can see over timehow crew have progressed throughout these [00:21:00] courses and maybe you assign within the 15 minute review process to say okay if you get this many level eights out of 10 on these courses then that allows you to keep progressing to maintenance level two and you'll start to see these over time and with this 15 minute review progression tool that we we discuss when we all think of performance reviews we think of sitting down with your Your boss, your manager for an hour and writing out paragraphs on where I think I can improve and, how well I'm doing, we made this super simple. It's just a ranking sliding scale from 1 to 10, and they can just rank progression so that you come back at maybe a 30, 60, 90 day review and say. You know, you can see how that employees progressed and maybe you can tie that into this is maybe a 25 cent raise or is this how you get progressed to crew leader really just allowing, your crew to have insight into where they're at on a consistent basis. And I like how you said a 52 week training, you know, a lot of companies come to us and say, Hey, I'm just going to do the greenest training on rain days. And [00:22:00] that's not, that's not going to work. You need to have consistent training. Tommy Cole: just kills me. I'm like, that is the old school train of thought. So what are you going to do on a rainy day? Start training? But what if it doesn't rain for four months? Oh boy, yeah, that irks me. Rich Thiebaud: Tommy probably remembers they just have the training day at the beginning of the year, right? Call the staff in the beginning of the year and train, we train them for the day and then we're done. Tommy Cole: that irks me. That's where Greenius comes in. owners tend to overthink everything. So when they think of training, it's like, Oh, I gotta develop a program. I've gotta come up with All these topics. I got to come up with. Oh, no, you don't. Literally, you could sign on for Greenius and hit play, Watch. Maybe there's a short quiz and check that off the box. And you notice. How many crew staff people have watched it and understand it and keep moving forward? You know I believe that this industry is lacking professionalism a little bit, right? And I feel like [00:23:00] you guys are setting the tone sometimes where it's like, no, let's get everything documented. Let's understand why this person should be promoted to the next level. Well, he's exceeded all his training. He's qualified his current role. He's ready to take the next role. And it's not guessing in the air because. Business owner A goes, you've been doing good for the last couple of months. I'm going to promote you. David Ellis: Yeah. I see that quite a bit. Is LMN only for small companies? Tommy Cole: Yeah we're good. So, one of the things I've heard out there, people say as well, LMN is good, but it's only for small companies, right? Because they're the small company provider and other software is for large companies. What do you guys say about that? Rich Thiebaud: I, I think that comes up probably started before some of those new launches I talked about where we were missing things like job costing and that analytics and reporting. I think that's something that larger companies were really searching for that we, we didn't offer. The cool part is LMN recognized it and built it. They really [00:24:00] do listen to the industry and they went out there and said, we need this. We're going to go build it. And they really brought with those larger companies were asking for we do cater to the small companies as well. We really just cater to businesses that are looking to build a stronger, a stronger business and more insights into their business, whether that's small or large. We have some very large customers within our network and we have what they need. We small, big, you don't have to use it all, use parts of it, use the whole thing. but I will say from experience and and even having some more insights now that I'm on the sales end here and talking to more contractors that we definitely can sort of service that small, medium and large. Tommy Cole: Yeah. Here's another one for you, Rich. It's tailored to you, but starting out LMN was a little more on the install side, and less maintenance. But I feel like maintenance has just launched crazily to catch up to install. Is that correct? Rich Thiebaud: Yeah, absolutely. We've made sure that that's all in [00:25:00] there. You are right. It might have been a little heavily geared towards that in the beginning, but we've brought in all those little pieces that you need to run the maintenance side, all those little unique reoccurring service modes you need. So the apps great at that. The mobile app was was really big for service and maintenance companies. We've made it like really easy to use. Just Clock in and out in the simplest way. Again, it just makes sense. Tracking now with the service verification messages as well. So we really made sure that we have everything you need for that maintenance end of the business. Tommy Cole: Cool. Good. All right. So Dave, I got a question for you. One of the things they're gonna wonder is like is this like thousands of dollars to implement and what is greenest come? Can you give me like a budget of what this is? Budgeting for LMN & Greenius David Ellis: Yeah. I mean, you're looking at a budget of 10 bucks a person for per month to train, to Tommy Cole: I don't know. I'm gonna have to Cancel my Starbucks coffee for 8 every day [00:26:00] In order to get that going 10 bucks. That is nothing for you guys I mean at the end of day 10 bucks a month for a user You know what you're getting out of that? This is a no brainer. No brainer. David Ellis: Tell me anywhere you can find, you know, how to train any of your guys for 10 for 10 bucks a month. And, and I'm all ears, but yeah, yeah, it's a very low cost to get set up for Greenius. And I think that any company can benefit from it. Tommy Cole: Great. Rich, same question to you. So, what's some, some basics here that you know, I, I believe it's really affordable for the most part. So, can you give me some big bullet points there? Rich Thiebaud: Yeah, absolutely. I mean, we have the, we have the monthly platform fee. A couple of versions, basically. Approximates are 350 to 450 ish a month. Depending on on what you're looking for. There's a few added features on the top end and then you're you're 20 bucks a month for a user 1997 to be exact. That fancy number. But yeah, [00:27:00] I mean, you don't have to have everybody on it. Some companies prefer to just to give everybody insights and data or you could just have your crew leads on it really right. So it is flexible at the moment of of How many need to add, but when you start doing those numbers and compare to other softwares that can do the same thing, it starts looking pretty inexpensive. That's for Tommy Cole: yeah, yeah. It's, it's very affordable and I'm looking at some numbers now just to share with our audiences. You're anywhere from, you know, average monthly price is 400. Okay, check. 20 a user, check. And a one time startup of 1, 000. I mean, all in, you can have a 5 million company and spend less than 1, 000 at a month. Rich Thiebaud: absolutely. Tommy Cole: I'm looking at here, that's, that's, that's, and this is operational software that can completely revolutionize your business to be duplicatable every day, whether Bob or Sally is still in the business, right? Rich Thiebaud: Yeah. [00:28:00] Love that. We're duplicatable repeatable, but that's about what I was paying. And I had 50 employees just for, just for some insight. So What's on the horizon for LMN & Greenius Tommy Cole: Okay, Makes sense. So, all right, What's coming on the pipe? Like Greenius and LMN, like what's coming out there? I know you can't spill all the beans, but there's got to be some cool things coming up. Rich Thiebaud: what's new with Greenius, Dave? David Ellis: There is some secrets we can't share. But you know, we're really looking to shape the industry from a training side, you know, looking at apprenticeship programs really just trying to figure out how do we solve this labor issue. And I think there is some exciting things coming up within the next couple of quarters. I can't get into too much minutes. Do much detail. We're really trying to blend the two and together. So how do we get users from LMN? They're on the crew app. How do we blend that with Greenius so that it's kind of more one mesh product? But yeah, really excited just to see, you know, where it's going and how it's going to change the industry and really help with that labor shortage. And I think with a couple new upcoming [00:29:00] releases, you guys will be able to see a little more insight into that, but I'm going to keep my mouth shut for there. So I don't put in. In too Tommy Cole: You're not going to spill it too much. I get Rich Thiebaud: Yeah, LMN. We got some we really are digging in. The analytics and reporting I mentioned, that came out with sort of a standard set of analytics and reports. We're really going to expand on that now and really dig into the numbers people are looking for. Taking requests all the time from existing clients on, on what they're looking for and new things like that. Perfecting that SMS visit reminders and notifications on there. Few a few other things we have on it. The cool part is LMN. Customers can see it all. There's a road map right in the software. You can do what we're working on by quarter. What's coming? What's under review? We got things like proposal, customized proposals better material ordering and purchase orders. Big update to our estimating software vendor bill scanning for job costing. Really cool stuff. Really what we're trying to do is we feel all the features are there, all the [00:30:00] big ones, and now we're just going to sort of dig into those and figure out how we can make a more efficient, really, really smooth. Tommy Cole: Yeah, no, it's good. a couple of things that stood out here is the apprenticeship program with Greenius. I think that'll revolutionize this landscape industry as a whole and, and, getting trades back onto the road map for a career, right? Landscape professionals, electricians, and HVA, all that whole service side industry. When people are in high school, they don't know that that's a career at the end of the day, and I, I believe you guys are changing that you know, one school at a time, one technical school at a time from what I hear is, is really starting at the grassroots level of the education side, which would help bring in people through the program, which would help, you know, relieve some of this labor issue. Field staffing, even, even account managers and project managers out there to be trained. I know you guys have this thing called LMN certification, which I'm all, I'm all about, right? I love that thing to where you can kind of [00:31:00] get certified as a professional, right? In LMN and understand that the A to Z of the software. So. Definitely check that out. Okay. So as we wrap things up guys, this has been this has been awesome I got one thing that you guys can provide advice for anyone out there and I'll go first I wrote a note here basically for all business owners to listen up and in quite frankly anyone That's a middle management or in the field, but at the end of the day pick a software Go with it and be all in on the software. Don't buck the system. Don't argue about the system Don't feature on what it can't do and what it it can't do this and it can't you have to transition from what you've been Doing to what you're gonna be doing at the end of day if that makes any sense Listen, we're landscape professionals, we're not engineers. I don't want to be a software engineer. I don't want to learn all the tricks of the trades of how things work. I'm just going to accept it and move on. That's the [00:32:00] way I got to roll, right? Because us owners just overthink of the reasons why it doesn't work. At the day, and if anyone's listening out there, you just got to get a software and you got to go all in, not 30 percent of the way and go, man, this is terrible. I don't understand this, right? That's my words of wisdom to anybody about software. Anything from either one of you rich Dave? Rich Thiebaud: kind of echo that a little bit, to be honest. I mean, that's, that, that's what I ended up having to do. I I, I wish somebody yelled that in my ear a little, a little earlier in the onboarding process but also that you don't have to be involved in the whole thing, especially that part. Right. It's just. Pick the software, onboard it. Funny thing I like to say about Greenius, sometimes I had Greenius as a landscape owner. My favorite part about Greenius was that I didn't know anything about Greenius. And I never heard anything about Greenius. Because I gave it to someone in the office to run. They were the champion. All my staff was trained. Everything was documented. And I never heard about it. And that was my [00:33:00] favorite part about Greenius, was that I could just give it to someone. Delegate it. Here you go. So don't be afraid to do that and get some help when you're implementing the software. Don't take it all on as the owner and think, I need to know every detail of this. Tommy Cole: love it. Love it. You get your team involved, right? And there's the buy in, not just the owner. I love it. Dave. David Ellis: Yeah, I think to jump on that, I think any way you can incentivize safety on the job site. Your team's going to love it. At the end of the day, everyone wants to go home with all their fingers, all their limbs. And if, if you can ensure that your crew get home safe every night, they're going to want to be a part of that team. We've seen this screeniest deployed across teams of 500 employees and, you know, keeping them on, keeping them safe is massive and they'll stick with your company and want to be with a company who empowers safety. So I think give training a shot. And again, the bonus is a Spanish. Tommy Cole: Yeah, that's great. David Ellis: Well, Rich I appreciate it a lot. Dave, thank you so much for both of you. We need to do this [00:34:00] again and catch up some more. It's been a pleasure. I think we're going to run into each other quite a bit this year. Tommy Cole: I'm excited about all the trips coming up, but we'll see you on the road soon. Have a good one. Rich Thiebaud: absolutely. Thanks for having me David Ellis: Thanks, Tommy. John: Ready to take the next step? Download our free Profitability Scorecard to quickly create your own baseline financial assessment and uncover the fastest ways to improve your business. 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