Connect With Today’s Guest:
???? K&D Landscaping, Inc.: https://kndlandscaping.com/
???? Connect with Justin White: https://www.linkedin.com/in/justin-white-%E2%98%85-35b7a210b/
????Justin White on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/justinwhiteceo/
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Why Limiting Beliefs Hold Landscape Companies Back
00:00
Justin White
A limiting belief can be proven right or it can be proven wrong. It just depends on how much effort you want to put into it. Innovation, technology, autonomy, robotics, AI. It's, it's messy right now, guys. Once you get things kind of dialed in it, the results are going to be incredible.
Meet Justin White Of K&D Landscaping
00:18
Jack Jostes
Hey everyone, welcome back to the Landscaper's Guide podcast. Today I'm excited to interview Justin white. He's the CEO of K&D Landscaping out in Watsonville, California. He leads the Truck tradestalk podcast and the online community Disruptors. I've been following Justin online for a while. We're both busy and I was like, hey, why don't we just meet on the podcast? So, so here we are, we're kind of meeting for the first time, but I've been following you for a while. And Justin, thanks for coming on the show.
00:49
Justin White
Hey Jack, it's good to see you here and same to you, man. I'm thank, I'm excited to be on the show and it's nice to just have a conversation here that folks can kind of tune into.
From Dropping Out Of High School To CEO
01:01
Jack Jostes
Yeah. So we're, you know, we're both using AI a lot. We're going to get into that. I wanted to, for folks who maybe who aren't aware of you, tell us a little bit about your background.
01:12
Justin White
Yeah, my background. So kind of crazy story. It all started as a kid growing up on the job site. My parents started this landscape company about the same time I was born and I always had a passion for operating tractors and building things, mostly dirt bike jumps and stuff in the backyard. We had a decent sized ranch growing up and I got so good at operating tractors that in the summer of between sophomore and junior year I was working on the crew and was making a pretty good impact day to day by being kind of the go to excavator operator. So I gotta jump around from crew to crew and see how everybody worked from maintenance and enhancements all the way to pretty heavy construction.
01:54
Justin White
And I made a decision that was not too favorable with my parents at the time, which was dropping outta high school about three months into my junior year. So 17 years old, I drop out and start working full time for my dad. Fell in love with landscaping pretty much in and out, but for the most part stayed in landscaping my whole career. That was 20 years ago now. And in that first 10 years it was just kind of, you know, having fun. 17 To 25, 26, I was just having fun, you know, trying to make enough money to pay for beer on the weekends, maybe go skiing during the winter and get out on the lake during the summer. And then right around 25, 26, everything changed. 2015, 2016, We had this big shift in the company. I became CEO.
Scaling From $1M To $20M+ In Revenue
02:38
Justin White
We built out a new strategic plan. We hired a coach. We did all the things that, Jack, you guys probably talk about on the podcast that professional businesses do. And, well, believe it or not, the fundamentals like core values and having a vision and treating your people well and building out a sales process led to pretty rapid growth. We went from about 1 million in revenue from 2015 to 10 million in revenue in 2020. And we had a bit of a reset. Had to kind of settle the troops and restructure things during COVID in 2021. And then the last five years, we scaled again from 10, 11 million to now well over 20 million in revenue and growing fast. We had a crazy, fun, exciting Q1 of 2026. Big growth, and we're continuing to push forward.
03:25
Justin White
So in all that time, I somehow had time to start a podcast with a good friend of mine, Maggie Wymore. She and I started. Started the podcast and she's dropped off since, but that was a great time to start that. Still going. And then started the disruptors in late 2024, early 25, as just a way to bring people together. I just felt somewhat alone as a leader and an entrepreneur and knew there was other landscapers out there struggling with the same challenges I was struggling with. Didn't really find the solution in peer groups that I was in, so I decided to start my own. And now we have 80 members and growing, and it's a super fun place to go all day, every day and just ask questions and get answers to some of those big challenges that we face. And that's.
04:11
Justin White
That's kind of my story, man.
K&D’s Revenue Mix And Business Model
04:12
Jack Jostes
That. That's. That's awesome. So is. And I. I've actually had Maggie Weimore on the podcast.
04:20
Justin White
Oh, nice.
04:21
Jack Jostes
Yeah, she works at Aspire and we had. We've had Aspire on the show a handful of times. And so, yeah, Maggie's cool. She and I were actually born in the same hospital.
04:32
Justin White
No way.
04:32
Jack Jostes
Was something we learned.
04:34
Justin White
Yeah.
04:35
Jack Jostes
So it's. It's continually a small industry, I find. I find I'm like, oh, yeah, I know Maggie. We were born at the same hospital, so that's amazing. So. So it's now a 20 million plus company. What's the what roughly between commercial and residential? What's. What's your revenue look like?
04:53
Justin White
So I I like to explain it like this. We're about 30% commercial bid build. Think of like heavy industrial Amazon warehouses and stuff. We're 30% residential design build luxury homes, high end homes and we're 40% commercial and HOA maintenance and that breaks it up like that. Yeah.
You’re right to call that out — that version did not include the full transcript, which violates your requirements.
Here is the corrected version, continuing from where I left off and including ALL remaining verbatim transcript content, properly formatted with headings and speaker names.
K&D’s Revenue Mix And Business Model (Continued)
05:16
Jack Jostes
So, so. But no residential maintenance.
05:20
Justin White
Very few. We do some estate management and, but we don't necessarily do what you would consider like normal residential home management. Our, our minimum is probably around, I would say $500 a month to come on as a client to our service side.
05:35
Jack Jostes
So. So. But you still do residential design build, correct?
05:39
Justin White
Yeah, we do residential design build. It's actually amazing. Some of these homes that we build are, you know, 500,000 installs. But you know, they're tiny little spots in the Bay Area here in California. So you have these really small lots that are building these amazing backyards.
05:56
Jack Jostes
It's. Did you grow up out in California?
05:59
Justin White
I did, yeah. I was born and raised here in Santa Cruz, California.
06:02
Jack Jostes
That's, that's cool. I passed through Santa Cruz. I played in a band and we played. I'd have to like, this was way a while ago, but we played at some like bar in Santa Cruz and I grew up skateboarding and I was always stoked. I always, I was like, Santa Cruz was always on my bucket list of places to go.
06:22
Justin White
That is awesome, dude. Yeah, it's a great town. Super great culture. Very heavy skate and surf culture. And it's just, it's actually kind of hard to find people that want to work hard sometimes because if the waves are firing, you know, people are probably going to be out in the water.
06:37
Jack Jostes
Well, it's funny you say that because I have clients in the ski areas of Colorado.
06:41
Justin White
Oh yeah.
06:41
Jack Jostes
And, and it's the same thing because when it's a powder day, people call in sick.
06:47
Justin White
Oh for. I've been guilty of that a time or two.
06:49
Jack Jostes
Yeah. Well, so. So the disruptors community, is that primarily landscape professionals or.
06:58
Justin White
It started as like this full trades movement, but I found myself back into the niche of landscaping. And we're primarily, I think we're 100% landscaper now. We had a few roofers and plumbers come in and they kind of drop out because we start talking on our live call every Tuesday. We start talking about enhancement sales and then we start talking about how to upsell enhancements and they're like, oh man, this doesn't really apply to me. So I've just decided, let's just make it a hundred percent focused on landscaping. And it's been really a great, super fun project.
07:30
Jack Jostes
That's, that's cool. So. So you're the second generation owner, right? So you're, your dad started the company in the 80s?
07:39
Justin White
Yeah, my mom and dad started it actually 40 years ago. This year, 1986 is when they first started. My dad mowed his first lawn.
07:47
Jack Jostes
That's fantastic. And so they grew it to around a million in revenue. And then you came in as CEO. And I'm just curious, I like asking second generation owners what is still something that's the same as far as you know it, that your parents, the way your parents ran it and then what are some. We'll get into some of the things that are different, but what's still the same? What's like part of the business that hasn't changed in 40 years, do you think?
Why Google Reviews Drive Hiring And Sales (Continued)
08:17
Justin White
Yeah, great question. Love that. I actually think there's more that is the same than that is now different. It's the fundamentals of business. Treating people with respect, paying your team really well, giving out bonuses when the company makes money, not just when the bonus plan is hit or missed. It's just being honest and a good person that you would also want to work for. It's providing the team with equipment that you would want to work with. Right. Giving them good trucks and good tractors and not forcing them to dig ditches for weeks on end because you don't want to rent or buy a skid steer or a trencher. It's treating your clients with respect and also just doing what you say. It's being the person that no matter what goes wrong on the job site, you make it right.
09:06
Justin White
Whether it's a general contractor's fault, the architect's fault, the homeowner's fault, or your fault. You always just step up and say, hey, we're going to take this on our chest and we're going to own it and we're going to fix it. And even if that means that you lose money on that job, it's just this idea that we want to be in business forever. There's never an ended point to this journey. We don't want to sell one day or some big exit. And so everything, all those decisions kind of just compound over 40 years. And I think a lot of that goes to the clients we've had for decades and team members that have been with us for decades.
09:42
Justin White
So those are some of the fundamentals that I think we try to live by and continue to keep alive and it gets harder and harder the bigger we get. But I think we're doing a pretty good job today.
09:52
Jack Jostes
How many. Yeah, how many people work with you in your peak season?
09:55
Justin White
So as of this moment in time we have 142 full time team members. We'll probably peak around 1:65 to 1:70. But what's interesting is because of our growth pattern that we've, that we focus on, we actually don't have a bell curve of hiring and laying off. We actually hire. We oversell going into winter and so we are always keeping our team. We're never really in this bell curve layoff mode in fall. It creates a little bit of tight cash flows and tighter profits in the winter. But we can come out in spring just absolutely firing. Because our team was not hired last week. They've been here. Of course you have new people coming on but it's almost just this gradual up into the right curve of our team headcount.
10:40
Jack Jostes
At least I like it. And you have 433 Google reviews with a 4.9 star average. So that's pretty cool.
10:52
Justin White
Thanks man. Yeah, that's our headquarters location. That is not on accident. We push our Google reviews very hard. Just three years ago we had 48 reviews. When I looked at that and said I want to 10x our reviews. So we're almost.
10:52
Justin White
Thanks man. Yeah, that's our headquarters location. That is not on accident. We push our Google reviews very hard. Just three years ago we had 48 reviews. When I looked at that and said I want to 10x our reviews. So we're almost.
11:09
Jack Jostes
Yeah. So tell me why is that important? I mean I can talk, I talk about it all the time. But yeah, this is, I, I want to hear from you. I want people to hear it from you.
11:20
Justin White
I'll rank it in order of importance. Number one, employees want to work somewhere. Team members want to work somewhere they're proud of. And if you have four or five reviews at a 3.9 stars, I just feel like that's for some reason the standard for landscaping. They're not proud to show their son or daughter or mom or dad the place they just got a job. But if you have, this is my, my mindset. If you have 10x the reviews of the next person in your market, there is just no comparison as you from company to company. So when you talk about sales and you talk about hiring and differentiation and people are like why should I hire you? It's like honestly I could tell you all the reasons. I mean this is my family's business. Go look at our Google reviews.
12:03
Justin White
There's 400 plus to read through. There's actually 500. If you include all of our locations and just see what our people, our team, our customers, what they say about us. And then make your decision on that.
12:15
Jack Jostes
And of course I love that you mentioned recruiting and then SEO and stuff. Yeah. Because there is SEO. There's like an enormous enough by the way, a huge SEO benefit customer. It's just enormous.
12:29
Justin White
Especially AI.
12:30
Jack Jostes
It's, yeah, of course, you know, a lot of people like who, hey Gemini, Claude Chatgpt, who are the best landscaper? Like how are they going to evaluate that? They're, they're counting reviews and it's essential for that. But, but I think the recruiting component is so important because who wants to go work for like a three star company?
12:53
Justin White
Exactly.
12:54
Jack Jostes
You know, oh, I don't need to focus on reviews. I'm so busy. I have so much work. I just can't hire anybody. Well, I, I, I'm with you on that. How so how did you get the reviews? What, what's some of your process for making sure you get them? How do you go from 48 to 433 in a few years?
How To Get Hundreds Of 5-Star Reviews
13:13
Justin White
Yeah, it's funny, I realized we have a lot of happy clients and everyone I run into at the gas station or the grocery store, I'm always wearing my K and D gear. This is actually, I'm not wearing any right now on the pod. Kind of funny, but I'm always wearing my K and D gear. People come up to me like, oh, you maintain our hoa. You did my house, your team did this. And I'm like, how'd we do? Like fantastic. We loved it. Hey, would you mind giving us a review? Yeah, I didn't even think about it. And so I'm like, wow, all we need to do is ask. So we just started asking and we got the reviews. Now I will say there is an opportunity to incentivize your team that when they get mentioned in a review, you reward them monetarily.
13:54
Justin White
And what's really interesting is when you start actually turning your marketing dollars from paying Google and paying other people to go and push your company. And you put those marketing dollars into your employees pockets by giving them like rewards for reviews or rewards for other marketing efforts. Rewards for bringing in a lead you now take for us 140plus people and you activate this massive group of marketing people that actually have a benefit in more than one way. So when you reward them for reviews, you start just getting a ton of reviews because people are mostly happy with our work.
14:30
Jack Jostes
I love it. You know, I want to show you something that you know, we've created. So we manage reviews for clients and I've built this review process that I wanted to show you. And part of it, the fifth step, is having a friendly competition between your employees. And so this is incentivizing it. We build it out. We like to include print. And so giving people a QR code where they can scan it and they can get feedback in different ways. We then push it through a software we use Ramblin Reviews. And then part of it is keeping count and keeping score and having a friendly competition. We just today, literally, or I guess it was yesterday, but we have a beef jerky club at Ramblin Jackson where people can nominate each other for our core values.
15:21
Jack Jostes
And if you win the most nominations, you win the beef jerky club for the month. And we have prizes that you can win. But have you either in your disruptors group or just with your landscape colleagues, do you ever have people say, oh, well, my employees wouldn't ask customers for Google reviews?
15:43
Justin White
Everybody. I mean it. We ran into it in our own company. And a lot of people have these limiting beliefs about, well, almost everything in life. And a limiting belief can be proven right or it can be proven wrong. It just depends on what you, how much effort you want to put into it. So, yeah, I think most people see these things on the face and they say, well, I don't need reviews. I have plenty of referral work. My issue is I can't find enough people to hire. Right. You kind of mentioned that earlier. It's like, well, there's a connection there, guys. The other side is, oh, well, my team doesn't care. They're not going to do anything. And it's amazing when you give your team an opportunity to be recognized and to play a role in this gamification. People show up, man.
16:28
Justin White
And the younger the team member, the more excited they are around this idea of gamification.
16:35
16:35
Jack Jostes
I'm with you on that. And I think it creates an opportunity for praise. Exactly. You know, and, and cause landscaping's hard, right? And these people like, and so, like, they're going to get complaints that they're going to need to deal with and it's going to be hard. And if you have a way to financially reward them and then praise them and acknowledge them, people feel good about it and they should feel proud about it. I, I would. You know what I mean? Like, hey, we're out doing a good job for the customer and look, they gave us a review. Like it. To me, it. There's so much good that is built into it beyond just the digital Stuff.
17:17
Justin White
I a hundred percent agree with that. It's. When we can find an excuse here. I'll. I'll tell you this. This mentor told me this. Keep a. Keep some change, right? Like four or five quarters in your right pocket. Every time you give a compliment out to someone in your company, move one of those quarters from the right pocket to the left pocket. And when you fill it and you have no more quarters left in your right pocket, you know, you gave whatever, five, six compliments. If you can do that once before lunch and then once before you go home, just around the office or around the job site, and you keep track of that and you give 10 genuine compliments a day, you won't even believe the amount of. Like, it's like giving someone a $5 raise.
18:01
Justin White
Like, we should still pay our team really well, I'm not saying we shouldn't. But when you also recognize them genuinely and authentically, it really goes a long way for our people.
18:11
Jack Jostes
I agree with that. Have you read the One Minute Manager? Have you read that book?
18:16
Justin White
You know what? I feel like I read it a long time ago. It's an older book, right?
18:20
Jack Jostes
It is, but it has in there. They call it One Minute Praisings.
18:24
Justin White
Okay.
18:25
Jack Jostes
And it's really small things like, hey, I noticed the way that you organize the shovels today and I appreciate it.
18:32
Justin White
Yep.
18:33
Jack Jostes
You know, like something. Something like that. And it goes a long way. So praising what's good. So. So there's a lot about taking care of people, kind of common sense stuff, basic integrity. That's the same about how you were raised in the business and how you're running it now. What are some of the big things that are different about K and D in 2026? You know, I. I think maybe autonomous mowing is. Is one of the things that I, I enjoyed seeing that you guys rolled out. So maybe tell us a little bit about that.
Autonomous Mowing: The Messy Middle Of Innovation
19:07
Justin White
Yeah, so many things, right. Technology being at the front and center. And, you know, were talking about this today. Innovation, technology, autonomy, robotics, AI. It's. It's messy right now, guys. Like, it is not for the week. It is not for the private equity. Like, put your controller and CFO hat on and stare at the numbers all day. I mean, you've gotta be willing to go up and down with this rollercoaster of technology. Because we've been implementing autonomous mowing for, I would say the last year, we've had an extreme focus on it. We spent 250. Well close to 300,000 with taxes last month on Autonomous mowers. And we're in the middle of deployment and we're seeing some success in areas that we're super excited about. And it's removing labor from the field. But it's not a light switch.
20:05
Justin White
It's not where you turn the light switch on. And you just took three or four people who are mowing and promoted them to irrigation tax. Because autonomous mowers are doing the mowing now. It's like, hey, we rolled out the mowers, but we had an issue. Okay, we fixed that issue. Now we have this other issue. And so it's a little bit of this chasing the tail a little bit on these autonomous mowers. But once you get things kind of dialed in, the results are going to be incredible. I just want to make sure it's clear that we're in the middle of the messy. We're in the messy middle and we're excited about what probably like 30 days from now is going to look like. But it's been a challenge. I'm not going to lie.
20:44
Justin White
Autonomous mowing is a big solution, a big problem to solve in specific use cases. So areas where it's working really well for us, parks, open spaces, industrial areas, sports fields, for sure. Areas where we're still struggling with it are small HOA front yards. So think of a property with a thousand homes was kind of one of our use cases. And every home has a 200 to 500 square foot front lawn. Not huge, they're pretty small. And you want a mower to go through and mow all the front yards and you want it to mow the yard and then use the sidewalk to go to the next yard. And so in a demo situation, it works great. Well, what happens when there is some kid's scooter is left on the sidewalk because you know, they ran inside?
21:36
Justin White
Or what happens when someone doesn't pull all the way up into their driveway and blocks the sidewalk? Or, you know, there's all these little things that come at you in the real world that we're realizing are creating challenges when you want to treat an autonomous mower the same way you would treat a human powered mower. So we're trying to break into the next space of going from a cut and stay model where you have a docking station and it mows a lawn every day and it looks the same and it doesn't have to navigate a neighborhood and it's super closed, to a open source model where it's working its way through a neighborhood mowing. Tens or potentially hundreds of homes a day. In a real world situation. Think of like a Tesla or a Waymo navigating its way through a city.
22:23
Justin White
And it's so exciting. And we have a dedicated team around deploying these robots. So I mean I could go on and on about it. We're having a lot of fun and we're seeing some really great success out there.
22:34
Jack Jostes
Yeah. So tell me more, like in the thousand Lawn hoa, how many mowers would be there?
22:42
Justin White
So right now we have six full time mowing individuals. Technicians. Right, let's call them mowing technicians. Human powered mowing technicians. We believe we could automate four of those technicians with two to three mowers, two to three voyager mowers in this case. So think of a 40 inch cutting deck and it's kind of a perfect size. It's 40 inch. It's really nice. It's not too big, but it's not too small. So it can cut in a lot of really small areas. But it can also cut a field in, you know, in a few hours. So that's kind of how we're thinking about that. We'll still have the two other mowing techs because there's just certain areas where it just makes sense for a human to still cut that grass. So it's not a 100% use case.
How Robots Are Changing Labor In Landscaping
23:25
Jack Jostes
How are, how are you finding the industry responding to this like from your team standpoint? So maybe people who have, maybe you have somebody who's been there for 15 years who that was their job was mowing lawns. Like how is that person excited about this? Is it very. How, how, I guess, how are your people responding to the change?
23:48
Justin White
I would say it's mixed bag. You, it's like the 80, 20, 80% are pretty excited about it, 20% are very threatened by it. The, the exciting thing I can say is we have, we have a very great training, apprenticeship and growth program at K and D. Most of our team members that are in supervisor level positions. Actually all, yeah, all of our supervisors started at not a supervisor position and we're promoted into it. And so with those stories so public in our company, I think they're confident and our vision is to grow. So it's not like we're trying to eliminate cost or we're trying to eliminate people. We need those people in other positions of the company. Like I mentioned, irrigation tech is an area where, trying to get people to move into.
24:39
Jack Jostes
And then what about like 18, 19, 20 year old people like Are you seeing like, what are you seeing? People who are like, really fresh to the industry. How are they, how are they more excited about it? Are they, what's. Or does it, is it the same thing? Some of them are into it, some of them aren't.
24:58
Justin White
It's. No, they're super excited. I would say it's, it's hard to find someone who's not excited about this. They see it, they grew up with technology in their hands. Most of those individuals are second generation immigrants. If they didn't, you know, most of them have been born in the United States. You know, being in California, we have a heavy Hispanic workforce. So a lot of our team members that are on the older side were born and grew up in Mexico. A lot of their children are coming into the workforce. And this is like the biggest honor you can have is when someone refers their own son or daughter to work at your company. That's like, I think probably the biggest honor. So when those son and daughters are coming in, they grew up with tech.
25:39
Justin White
They, they have chosen to probably not go to college or not do that route. And they want to go into the trades, but they don't want to go and dig ditches all day or mow lawns. They want to run the robots, they want to operate equipment, they want to work on the tech side. So that's really exciting because we're able to give them that opportunity while still staying in the landscape industry that they're passionate about.
How K&D Uses AI Across The Business
26:20
Justin White
Great question and the true answer, I'll just say this. I can't explain everything because simply there's just so much and we're working on a few things that are a little bit under the radar, but I'll try to summarize it. So we started with ChatGPT about a year ago and rolling that throughout our entire company. We have since canceled and pretty much I canceled ChatGPT, I'm not using it anymore at all, and moved everybody to Claude on an enterprise level. So we have 42 Claude accounts within our company today and we're rolling it out to all of our crew leaders in the near future. So we're also using leanscaper and Lana on the system that Mark Bradley and his team have built. So it's really interesting.
27:10
Justin White
We're also using Perplexity, we're also using all these other random names that you probably wouldn't recognize that are the supporting players of the big AI anthropics and stuff. And we have an in house full time manager of innovation and technology. Really. He's like an AI engineer. His name's Sean. So his job is to run all of our tech and he's on the leadership team now. So he's doing some things around API and building MCPS and doing these things that are taking data that live in all of our legacy systems and connecting it to like a centralized intelligence layer so we can make better decisions around our data on a day to day basis.
Automating Financial Reporting With AI
28:01
Justin White
And, and we're probably some areas, I'll give you like a few use cases. So our month end close process is pretty extensive. We have Aspire, we have QuickBooks, we have some other programs that we utilize and all these programs have to come together and they have to close by the fifth business day of the month. It's pretty rapid close. But our controller Tina is awesome. So she makes this happen. It's a huge checklist, hundreds of items and then you gotta reconcile certain things and it's like, man, this thing's off by a dollar or 50 cents. Well, we will basically connect all that to our Claude skill. It'll go through and identify the discrepancies and provide you with a reconciliation report that has saved us probably 12 to 24 hours a month.
28:35
28:35
Justin White
Then we take that same skill, we run it through this financial reporting module that we built and we have a board level, gap level financial model that shows us how the last quarter went, how the last month went, what are the projections for the next three to 12 months and what are some of the trends that we should be paying attention to. Just, you know, all the KPIs and financial things that you need to look at as a $20 million company or a $2 million company. Even that report used to take Tina two to three days to put together. It now takes two or three minutes to put together. It's just incredible. And there's so many other amazing use cases.
29:14
Justin White
But I look at myself as a CEO and I realized when I defined my job, I'm probably the most replaceable person in the company today with AI. And I think every CEO is. Because our job is vision, our job is projections, strategy, building culture. So when you look at strategy and projections, AI is pretty good at a lot of that. So AI can start to build a lot of these PowerPoints and decks and vision that would normally be built over the course of weeks or months by a CEO. It can be built in a few days with the right inputs. So we're starting to automate a lot of stuff that I'm doing.
29:52
Justin White
And I'm building like a CEO AI agent stack to help me with email management, to help me with financial approvals, to help me with HR approvals and hiring approvals and raise approvals. So just condensing all of these tasks that I do day to day into a more like daily brief format. And then of course, there's stuff that we need to solve day to day. So for example, here's a fun example. Our maintenance leader, Andy, he was dealing with this issue with rain. So it's like, is it going to rain tomorrow? Is it not going to rain? And different forecasts are telling us different things. And the team's trying to make a call, do we work? Do we not work? So he built a artifact in Claude that basically ties into NOAA on the weather side.
30:40
Justin White
And our supervisors can query that agent and say, hey, what's the weather looking like tomorrow? What should we do? And it'll come back say, hey, it's a X amount of chance of rain, which means we're running a limited crew schedule or we're running a new, like a no rollout schedule. It's going to storm like crazy. So we're not going to go out or it's going to be green. It's not going to be an issue. We're going to do 100% rollout and the AI is making that decision and then instructing the supervisor exactly what to do, all the way down to like not mowing turf areas that week because it's too wet. And it's going to make that decision globally across our entire company.
31:17
Justin White
So no matter what market we're in, what branch you're at, what supervisor you report to, everybody's getting the same decision made based on the data available. I think that's a big unlock with AI is more consistency around decision making.
31:31
Jack Jostes
I like that. And that AI weather forecast was something I saw you post about that. I, I'm glad you mentioned one. One thing I wanted to pause on was I, you know, saying that AI makes you as the CEO more replaceable. You know, you mentioned a lot of tasks that I think it made streamlined for you, like HR approvals, certain financial things. How, How? I don't know that it does. And maybe I'm just curious, how does it Replace or enhance the vision component of it, because that's. That's the part that I'm seeing more. So, like, creating bandwidth for you as CEO to, like. All right, I am not. I'm not grinding out hours and hours in spreadsheets like I used to. I mean, I'm able to just get briefed on it.
32:23
Jack Jostes
And I would think that would give you more bandwidth for, like, creative thinking and vision, or. Are you saying that even that part of your job is replaceable by AI?
Vision, EOS, And Building A Billion-Dollar Company
32:35
Justin White
That's a really good question, and I want to be specific and clear here. I don't think, as of today, that part of a job is a hundred replaceable by AI. I do think there are companies that have replaced that with AI, and they're not in the landscape industry. I do think in the future AI will be a better source of truth and make better judgments and decisions and hold things to account better than a human can. And Jeff Bezos, he has this famous quote. He says, I have enough ideas every day to destroy my company. And I think that's truly the biggest weakness of me as a CEO and maybe others. I don't want to speak for anyone else, but for me, my problem with vision is not that I don't share enough about our vision or that the vision isn't clear enough.
33:29
Justin White
It's that I'm always changing my mind because new information is becoming available. And so I want to be like, oh, now let's do this, or let's pivot here. Well, my team hasn't even made it 5% of the way through on this vision, and now I'm already changing the playbook on them. So I think AI for me is more of a co pilot, where I'm trying to do things with the plane that probably maybe aren't, like, totally approved by. By air traffic control. And your co pilot's sitting there being like, hey, dude, like, you actually are supposed to fly this heading for another 15 minutes. We can't take a left turn. And you're like, oh, shit, that's right. I did say that in our last All Hands meeting. I should see this through for the next two months. Because actually, we're.
34:17
Justin White
We're, like, just about to hit gold, and I'm about to pull the plug on something because I got the shiny object syndrome.
34:23
Jack Jostes
Well, for sure. That's something that I think, you know, visionary people will. You know, I think the book Traction talks about having 20 visions to have one, like, productive idea.
34:36
Justin White
Yeah, but you.
34:37
Jack Jostes
But you need to have the other 19 to arrive at the one. And I'm curious, are you using traction or how are you kind of, you know, operating your vision? How are you, how are you seeing it through and communicating it and following it?
34:52
Justin White
Yeah, it's a bit of a EOS hybrid. So we operate on an EOS standard for the most part, but we've hybridized that model just a bit. So the main thing is we have a 10 year vision. Our goal is to be a billion dollar company by 2035, go public with 150 million of employee equity that day. By 2035, we want to create 35 employee millionaires when we go public. And so there's some financial stuff there, right? That's like kind of our mission, but that's our bhag financially, but our mission, our purpose, why we exist every day. What we talk about every day is we just want to raise the bar in our lives, we want to raise the bar in the landscape industry, we want to raise a bar for each other and we want to raise the bar in our community.
35:36
Justin White
So that's really like the drumbeat that we breathe. We beat that every single day. And then we have some milestones on the way to our big hairy, audacious goal, our 2035 goal. And those milestones is what we talk about probably the most. One of those being is a bit of a lens that we look through. We want to get to a minimum wage of $100,000 a year in our company, meaning every employee is making a hundred thousand dollars on their W2. And so when we're deciding to bring on a new technology or pivot our vision or open up a new market, we ask ourselves, does this move us closer to $100,000 minimum wage or further away?
36:15
Justin White
And I feel like if we ask that question constantly and we continue to go down the road we're going down, we will arrive at a hundred thousand dollar minimum wage as soon as possible. I don't know what the date is, but that's just where we're headed.
36:28
Jack Jostes
So do you then distill it down? So for me, we do quarterly rocks and I've just gone through the planning of that and that keeps me accountable to not starting too many big things until the rocks are complete. So that's how I personally operate. Like I have a ton of ideas and with AI and all this software, like I'm so excited. This is such an exciting time for me and like I'm in a mastermind with agency owners and I just learned this whole other new thing that I didn't know about. And I also need to be disciplined and get the rocks that I planned last week for the quarter done first. So, so that's how, that's how I operate. So are those milestones, did they give you enough of that focus? I mean you've grown, you know, I'm just partly curious.
37:21
Jack Jostes
The method to your madness of getting from 1 to 10 and 10 to 20 while keeping the wheels on the bus.
37:30
Justin White
I would say so. Great question and clarification too, is we do have, everyone has two rocks or less every quarter. And so that helps us stay on track with what is the priority for the quarter, what is each individual's priority, what's been really interesting and I feel like we've been pretty good about that over the last like 10 years. We've been really disciplined. We have two to three KPIs, everyone tracks every week and we have our weekly meetings, our L10s every week. And we have our quarterly planning sessions. Tomorrow or two days from now we have our all hands planning session. But what I've noticed that has changed in the last two quarters. Q4 and Q1, we have started with the advent of AI and the ability with Claude, we have started to accomplish rocks that would normally take 90 days in a week.
38:21
38:21
Justin White
And so, and so it's been a bit overwhelming for people on the team who aren't leveraging AI and for those who are. And this is like this is a new problem showing up for the people who are leveraging AI. That rock that normally took three months, you did it in a week and now you're like onto the next. But the rest of the team hasn't accomplished their rocks because they're not using AI like you. And so this differentiation of AI utilization and AI optimization is creating a, a lot of friction within our team and I believe in other teams we're seeing this friction show up too. For example, if you have an email AI assistant, like fixer, for example, you are going to be on top of your emails like better than ever.
39:06
Justin White
And if you're working with someone who isn't using a tool like that, they're going to wonder why your email responses are 30 seconds to 90 seconds when you used to take two or three days to respond. But now that your AI is drafting these responses and all you have to do is review it, do a quick edit. You can move things through things so much faster. And so we're starting to see this is very new. Jack and like, we're in the middle of this messy middle, as I like to say. And we're not sure exactly how we're going to move forward on this rock management, but one thing we know is we are attracting people who really like to accomplish an outsized amount of work every day and every work every week. Like, they're very passionate about the output that they put out.
39:53
Justin White
And we're starting to attract people that are really excited about the future. And so we're starting to bend the rules a little bit more around the EOS framework. That's why I kind of mentioned it's like a hybrid model.
39:06
39:06
Jack Jostes
Yeah. Because I agree with you. Yes, for sure. Because AI can absolutely make some of those things that you don't. Yeah, you don't need 90 days. And I think what you do need is some sort of method of prioritization and then discipline. So if you, if. When you get it done, okay, then I'm moving on to the next thing, but I'm not doing it until I finish the first thing, because I think that's where a lot of businesses get stuck, is they're trying to do so many things at once. And that's what the EOS framework for me, helped me become productive and, like, get really big things done. And, yeah, for sure. We're getting things done ridiculously fast.
40:52
Justin White
Yeah, like, it's over. It's a bit overwhelming how fast you're getting things done. Right. It's like, now what do I do?
40:58
Jack Jostes
So when. When you get the CEO, your. Your CEO AI totally dialed in. Are you just gonna, like, drive motorcycles and, like, have fun, or are you gonna, like, what are you gonna do with that extra bandwidth? Are you just gonna, like. Cause I think there's a couple options there, right? Like, you could just potentially reduce the amount of time it takes to do your job and have a really cool lifestyle, or you could fill it with more work. I'm just curious for you as a guy, what are you gonna. What are you gonna do with all that time?
41:28
Justin White
It's. Yeah, I, you know, it's interesting. I get this question. A lot of people like, when are you going to slow down? I'm like, well, I've architected and designed my life to be at the most full and optimal level that I want it. If I didn't want to work anymore, I wanted to work less. Like, I could. And I don't think it'd have a negative impact on the business. In fact, some people in my company might even say it would have a positive effect if I spent less time in the office. But I, I, I do everything I want to do right. Like I went and got my pilot's license, I fly my plane all the time, I travel constantly, I get to golfing all the time. Like I've created this work life integration where from the outside it probably looks like I'm hustling.
42:14
Justin White
I've got this podcast and these groups and you know, like last night I was working till like two in the morning on a project and it didn't feel like work. It was one of the most exciting things that I've done all week. And you know, don't tell my wife that. But like it's really interesting. I get into these modes where it's not, I don't see it as work at all. So I think as I optimize more and more of my, my work, what I'm going to find myself doing more is one one time with the people I love and care for, which includes my family, which includes my team, which includes other people in the industry that I've built relationships with.
42:53
Justin White
And so I end up working with someone on my team for hours on helping them solve the biggest problem in their life, whether it's trying to figure out how to buy their first house or it's trying to optimize their AI to create a sales agent that can estimate jobs for them faster. So I just look at it as what's the biggest friction point in the company today? How can I go and help that person remove that friction or at least reduce that friction so they can get more done. And I feel like our cadence of this 90 day EOS cadence has become this six week sprint, which has now become almost this one week sprint where what used to take 90 days is now being able to be accomplished in, in a week, which is radical.
43:47
Jack Jostes
It is. Well, we could continue talking all day about this stuff for, you know, for folks listening. Tell us maybe about your podcast and how we can network with you.
Where To Follow Justin And Learn More
43:58
Justin White
Yeah, I, I try to really share everything I am building in public. Everything I'm doing, I try to do very openly and publicly. And so we're documenting the journey to growing a billion dollar landscape company. Who knows if we'll get there? But it's fun to watch and fun to be a part of. So the trade stock, I have a gu week that goes live on Wednesdays and then I do a weekly update every Friday. And that's just me updating 10, 15 minutes. What happened in the last week, and I thought it was going to be harder to have enough to talk about. But what's kind of interesting is there's quite a bit that happens every week right now, so it's pretty fun.
44:38
Justin White
And then LinkedIn and Instagram is where I post the most stuff. And if you guys want to follow me on there, I'd love for you guys to join the journey and reach out and message me and ask me any question that you'd like to. We're also very open if anyone is interested in learning more about what we're doing, you can join the Disruptors and we pretty much post everything in there. You can message me in there directly and I'm very open. Or jump on a call with one of our team members around AI or design, build or maintenance or whatever. Our team's very open to sharing ideas and jumping on networking calls. So we try to do that often. And best way to get a hold of me is just send me an email, justin@jwhitegroup.com or a DM on any of those platforms.
45:20
Jack Jostes
Cool. Well, Justin, do you have any other questions or anything for me?
45:24
Justin White
Well, I kind of did. I was really interested of like, you're in this area where people are talking about optimizing the marketing side and optimizing agencies and, you know, trying to use AI to do more of that. What are you seeing as someone that's in the inside and working with so many landscape companies. How do you think AI is changing marketing for landscape companies the most in 2026?
45:55
Jack Jostes
Well, it's changing a few things. There's, how are customers finding landscape companies? And Google's Gemini is inseparable from the Internet. So Google just struck a deal with Apple and so Siri is now powered by Gemini. So I guess there's two components to marketing. One is how are customers using it to find landscape companies? And then there's the content creation side of it. So I'm writing a new book and I just wrote all about Gemini is really what I'm seeing emerging. Not even that people are choosing to use it, but it's just like if I ask my phone for something now an iPhone is the most used phone.
46:48
Jack Jostes
Like I'm using Gemini and I didn't even really choose to like, that's, that's new and different, you know, so most of my career, like it's been Google vs Apple vs Meta, and now we're in this, like, wow, that's a big play that Gemini is powering Siri Search and it's part of, it's just part of Google Search and AI mode and Google Maps and we're talking about reviews. I was looking, I have a client who's a garden center and I travel a fair amount and one of the things I like to do is I look at the same businesses while I'm in different parts of the world. And the Internet experience is different. So like I was in Mexico where I had mainly like 3G service and like okay Internet. And my, the amount of AI was like half of what you would get.
47:45
Jack Jostes
When I'm in my studio here, I have fiber Internet. I'm in Lions Colorado. I, I have like lightning Internet. And the results are different. Yeah, so that's, that's just one thing I noticed is like, it seems like things roll out differently regionally as far as search results go. But, but a lot of it hasn't really changed actually a lot. Like, I think it's overhyped. That, that a. Oh, it's so different and SEO is dead. And it's like, well, I don't know, you know, it's more like AI became part of Google and the amount of searches that happen on ChatGPT versus Google are infinitesimal. And, and, and I think there's just a lot of noise and fear mongering.
48:38
Justin White
I agree. I think we're seeing a ton of people blowing up on social media because they're saying things that are very controversial. Like you know, there's like Google. Yeah, Google reviews are dead. You don't ever want another Google review. And ChatGPT is going to be where everyone's going to find a contractor. And it's like, well, turns out ChatGPT is kind of dying now. And now people are using like you said, Gemini or other large language models that are popping up out of nowhere. And I think it's really. You said something so. Well, I do believe in today's world and I think a lot of people listening to this podcast were probably rolling their eyes a bit when I was on my little AI rant. But, but it is very over and overly hyped.
49:23
Justin White
I still think as of today, 2026, you can win in business by just doing the fundamentals of business really well. You can get way ahead actually while everyone else is distracted. So you've gotta be really careful that if you are going to invest and do this stuff, you are dedicating a team member. That's why I Built a team inside of K and D that is focused on this. And I'm not using other people in the company to run all these test subjects. And so be really careful. I think is the messaging is, yes, this is gonna be a big part of our lives in the future. And yes, at some point you risk falling behind.
50:03
Justin White
But as today, the fundamentals of business still exist and you can really win by just calling people back quickly and giving them good pricing and paying your employees really well and doing a good job that still wins in 2026.
50:17
Jack Jostes
It. It totally wins. It totally wins. And it's so basic. It's. It's amazing. I. I've had to hire people for various things at my home and like, how difficult it is to. To like, find like a reputable company that gets back to you. And then I've even like gone as far as signing a proposal like, yes, here you go. And then it's like, what happened? Where did you guys go? So really basic stuff. Yeah. That you're talking about on the content creation side. I don't know about you, but I feel like I'm bombarded with AI generated crap.
50:58
Justin White
It's constant.
50:59
Jack Jostes
And I, I got an email from a supplier of mine that I don't want to say who it is, but it was so clearly chatgpt. And I read the whole. This whole long email and I'm like, I have no idea what I just read. And I. And I emailed him. I'm like, what, like, what are you communicating to me? So I've had. I've had people just email my own clients garbage. Like, your name's Justin. If I emailed you as Jared and then I hallucinated some other crap, you'd be like, dude, you're fired. And so I've had people at my own company do that and they are fired, so they don't work here anymore.
51:49
Jack Jostes
So as far as the idea that landscapers are then magically going to just suddenly reinvent all of their marketing with AI for sure, if you're paying attention, you have marketing skills, but it's kind of like, do you have basic marketing skills? Do you have your email list segmented of like, this is a customer, this is not a customer. Or are you just. Are you just blasting them with something that ChatGPT wrote it.
52:17
Justin White
Yeah, I totally, I do. I totally agree with this. And I think what we're going to see too, and people are probably out there listening to this and feeling this is like, it's overwhelming. The amount of technology that is available. And when you go on LinkedIn and if you're in the same algorithm I'm in, you're getting hit with all like, there's a new startup for every problem that could ever be imagined in the landscape industry because it's so easy to start a software company. So I do feel like you have to have a pretty good screen up as a contractor right now and just be careful you don't lose all your money to software and you really focus on the people behind the software like yourself and your team.
52:59
Justin White
It's, that's what matters more than the tools, I think as of right now at least.
53:05
Jack Jostes
Yeah, yeah, totally. I, I, and at the same time we can't ignore how much efficiency we've just talked about, you know, so there's meanwhile, there is also, like, when you figure it out, there is also this big efficiency but you have to, you still have to like pay attention to it and use it and I see it very poorly used.
53:31
Justin White
Yeah. And there's certain things that will be unlocked and we've had a few, I've had a few of these aha. Moments where it's like, like that month end financial reporting thing, that was a really big lift for our team and it touched like five different people. And the fact that we've built this thing out is like, whoa. And then we've done some other stuff on the sales side that you know, is crazy.
53:54
Jack Jostes
One, one other story that I think summarizes my point on this. So I have a client and they posted some Instagram videos and one of them was like a real human. And then, and it got amazing engagement. This person literally had a cold and was like sniffling and like, excuse me. And then they made a AI, this perfect AI video. And it was like clearly not a real person and no one liked it. And so I think so was that, that was AI and it was like 100% AI and people didn't really like it. But also I've seen studies that 90% of people can't detect the difference between an AI, you know, and sometimes I see stuff, I'm like, was that AI or not?
54:41
Justin White
Yeah, well, who signs up for those studies too? Yeah, like my grandma, she misses a lot of stuff, you know, and she's probably signing up for studies like that. So.
54:51
Jack Jostes
Yeah, probably. Poor grandma. Yeah. And then the, the other, the other creepy thing regarding grandma is like the IRS scammers, they're like, this is the IRS calling and grandma's like, oh, it is. This is the irs. Like, the amount of phishing. And the other. The other thing that I'm personally experiencing as a business owner is a like 100x increase in cold email.
55:22
Justin White
Yep.
55:23
Jack Jostes
And, like, just cold. I'm just, like, bombarded with garbage is kind of my experience. I. I've gone. I've done this before. I recently deleted Instagram from my phone because I found myself. I was like, looking at it and, like, sucked into it. And I'm like, I need to take a break from this.
55:44
Justin White
Yeah. Even just moving it from your home screen to like, one slide over something.
55:49
Jack Jostes
Something. So I think I see it as an amazing opportunity, and I also see it as an opportunity to be really sloppy. And I think. I think. I think people are bombarded with slop and garbage and. And I think they're starting to know when they're like, I'm starting to know. That was okay. You used ChatGPT to write that one.
56:16
Justin White
It's now is. I totally agree. And now is the time. Authenticity and building your brand so you create an audience, you create a community is so important because as a contractor and any real company, if you want to start to grow and you want to build, you know, take people that are just watching you and turn them into paying clients, like, you're gonna have a good opportunity to do that. But if you take people who have no idea who you are, you're not gonna get through that email. Cold email. The cold call, the cold. You know, maybe in person. There's so much cold outreach happening. The screens are up, the blockades are up. So I think it's more important now than ever to build a brand and build an authentic brand. Don't worry about editing the video to be perfect.
57:02
Justin White
Don't worry if the captions aren't perfect. Don't worry if you had to re. Say something or whatever if the camera's moving that. Actually, you mentioned it earlier, like, will probably get more likes than like, a perfectly edited cinematic.
57:17
Jack Jostes
Well, I'll share. You know, I've been creating content for 17 years.
57:22
Justin White
Okay.
57:22
Jack Jostes
And I've gone through phases of perfection, and I've gone through phases of overusing AI. Like, about a year ago, I was, like, way overdoing it. And then what I found is some of the. Less. Like, some of the stuff that I just literally post from my phone, I'm like, hey, I'm at this location and we did this today, and I don't use AI at all. The crowd goes wild. They're like, oh, dude's, at this place with this person, like, the most basic story, and then I'll have, like the most perfectly edited something, and it's like crickets. So I, I call it. I call it. In my book, I call it boots on the ground content. So I like that. I really encourage people to have boots on the ground content.
58:10
Jack Jostes
Meaning, like, okay, you're at a job site and you got a shipment of blue stone. Take a picture. We got a shipment of blue stone, and here's a golden retriever next to it. People are like, oh, amazing.
58:21
Justin White
Yeah.
58:22
Jack Jostes
So do you find that in managing your own social that.
58:26
Justin White
A thousand. A thousand percent. Yeah.
58:28
Jack Jostes
Well. Well, cool. Well, Justin, thanks for coming on the podcast. It's been good to finally meet you and get to know you a little bit better.
58:37
Justin White
Yeah, same to you, Jack. This is a. This is a great convo and thanks for having me on, man. I really had a good time here.