Why Over-Engineered System Implementations Fail and Simple Data Scales | Podcast Ep. 290

Hello and welcome to Toolbox for the Trades. My name is Amanda Salvatore, and today I am joined by Ryan Nelson, technology business partner at Vistira Landscape Group. There's one thing Ryan wants every owner to walk away believing. It's this: the businesses that win aren't the ones with the most sophisticated setup. They're the ones that stay simple and consistent. Ryan draws on his experience from every side of the implementation process as we discuss what owners should ask themselves before integrating new technology, why tracking every single hour and every work ticket isn't actually helping owners, and how simplifying the training process for managers can make all the difference. I hope you enjoy this conversation as much as I did. Ryan Nelson, you are the technology business partner at Vestera Landscape And today we are gonna be discussing how businesses can stay simple and find success in their software setup, their data, and their management. Welcome to Toolbox for the Trades.

Yeah, thank you for having me.

Absolutely. I'm really excited to get into it. But before we get into the nitty-gritty, I know that you are a motorcycle enthusiast. Is there a stretch of road at home or anywhere that you've traveled that you would tell every rider to put on their list?

Well, living in East Tennessee, you can't not talk about the Tail of the Dragon or the Cherohola Skyway. So they're renowned for the area that riders come out, whether you're in a car or a bike, and do it.

I love both of those names. I feel like they're probably very self-explanatory of what that ride and what that drive may look and feel like.

Yes, they are. There are hundreds of turns and yeah, it's a good time.

Amazing. I love that. Well, we'd also love to hear how you found yourself in this industry.

Well, I started out in construction. I was part of a family construction business, and then I ended up getting a bad back in my late 20s and I couldn't do it anymore. And magically I landed in landscaping. I plowed for one winter for a company up in Minnesota, and then before I knew it, I was an operations manager. On the landscaping side of things as well as snow removal. And then it just kind of took off from there, kind of worked my way up to being a branch manager, running my own branch in Des Moines, Iowa, and then decided to move south to Tennessee. And I took a little break and then landed in the software side of things. So.

This seems to be a trajectory for a lot of people in the industry. You find yourself here and then all of a sudden, Through trial and error, you find where you really feel like you've clicked into something. Very often it's the technology of it all. So I know that you have sat on these 3 different sides of the software relationship. You have worked with software as a customer, as an implementer, and now you are working with Vistira. What does each seat teach you that the others may not?

It's interesting. You, you always think you know everything going into it, right? You know your spot, you know the company you work for, how it operates. When I got into the Aspire role working with multiple companies, now I realize I didn't know anything. And because everyone does it different. I remember when we first implemented, it was very difficult because you're learning a new software, you're trying to figure out how to integrate it into your specific business. Once you get it up and running, you're still learning. Like you, you're still trying to figure it out. You're going to change things from your first year to your second year, even from your second year to your third year. Now I'm working with multiple companies trying to help them understand that, that they're not going to have it all figured out right away. You know, you're, you're almost more of a coach than anything. Obviously you got to teach them what the buttons do, but you're trying to motivate at the same time just to keep them going. That was that side of things. Now being back on the customer side. in more of a leadership role with the software in the company. That's where it's really a lot of fun because, A, we get to build this really good system because we have all this experience coming together that's used Aspire over the years. It's not just me. We have a team of people. We decide, does this really make sense? Yes or no? And we're not just doing it on a whim, right? We know what to look at, what to compare to, all of that. So leveraging all that knowledge of now being back on the customer side has been really nice and a lot of fun.

To be able to look at how everyone is utilizing their software and how it is individualized to what their goals are must be incredibly interesting to see how, how different companies are utilizing it in all these different ways. Let's talk a little bit about implementation. What's the biggest mistake you made early on in your implementation career that you would warn new implementation managers about today?

Again, don't assume you know everything. If you're coming from the industry, that's great. It gives you a leg up. You, 'cause you already understand what the customer is trying to do. How they get there is the other story. And if you think you're just gonna pigeonhole them into, this is how you're gonna do it, it's how we did it, good luck, 'cause it's not gonna work. You really have to learn to adapt what you know into what they're trying to do and make it all come together.

What questions would you suggest an owner asking them, themselves, before they even start implementation? It, it sounds like implementation is its own unique journey for each company. So before they even start, what are those questions that they should really be asking themselves?

Well, the first thing, you know, during the sales process, when you were looking at this software, whatever it was, there was something that brought you to it. Usually in the case of Aspire, it's job costing. Your current system doesn't do that. You don't really know if you're making any money on your jobs. So always keep whatever that reason is, keep that at the forefront of your mind because that's what's going to motivate you to get through this process. And I don't care who you are, I don't care how big you are, it's not going to be easy. I've seen a single owner company that did 350 residential properties get his Aspire set up in less than a month. And I've seen multimillion-dollar companies with plenty of staff to come together and get Aspire up and running, and they can't do it in a year. You'll see everything all over the place. So the first thing is to always remember that motivation, whatever that was. The second part is open up your mind to new possibilities of how you're going to operate your business. Now, I'm not saying reinvent the wheel. You don't want to do that. Right? You've been successful at what you're doing. The whole point of getting a software isn't to change what you're doing, it's to help it. So when I say open up your mind, usually there's business processes that were started and are currently a part of your business, which probably came from whatever software you're currently doing or not doing. If you're working off of spreadsheets and things like that, like some, something motivated or made you do those Whatever you're currently doing. So now switching softwares, we might have to rethink a few things. Nothing big, nothing major, but we might have to, you know, maybe it'd be easier to do it this way or that way, whatever it is. Just have your mind open to that. Don't come into it thinking, well, we're not changing. We have to estimate everything exactly how we have in the past. Scheduling doesn't work how I want it to. It's not going to work for me. Like, you can't come into it with that mindset. It'll never work.

So we're talking about what motivated you in the first place, what drew you to this software specifically, and keep that in mind as well as keeping an open mind, not reinventing the wheel, but being willing to make the system work for you. And sometimes it might not necessarily be how you thought it would work out, but as long as we're getting that end result that you're looking for and have a goal in mind, it's going to be a bit easier of a process.

And I think a third one is be willing to commit the time. It's not going to just happen overnight. Like I said, I've seen people do it in 30 days. I've seen people not be able to accomplish it in 6 months to a year. Like, you just have to be willing to put in that time to get it done. And, you know, depending on the size of your company, how much staff you have that can put time into it, you know, we always used to say it was 40 hours a week for 2, 2 to 3 months to get it up and running. Whether that's 1 person doing that or 10, that's up to you as a business owner. But that's usually about what it took to get somebody live in the Aspire system.

I have to ask, between the 30 days and the 6 months to a year, where— what's the deciding factor in how quick this implementation is going to take you?

It's usually complexity of the business, you know, how How are you estimating? Do you try to capture every little thing, or are you like, you know what, we just need hours because that's what it takes for us to go get the work done? Some companies just throw hours at jobs. Some have some pretty basic, like, estimating kits. We can do 10,000 square feet an hour or whatever it is, and that's just what they go off of, you know. But then you've got other ones that they really get down into the the weeds of every little thing that's happening on the job. And it's not that it's a bad thing, but, you know, all of that takes time. If we have to set the system up to do that and then enter all that data into the system to do that, that's going to take a while.

We are talking about this idea of keeping things simple and operating from a simplistic viewpoint if you can and when you can. And you've said that most successful companies scale by staying simple and consistent. What does an over-engineered setup actually look like versus something on the more simple side that you are encouraging companies to scale down to?

It's funny you say encourage them to scale down. I never liked to do that because I always wanted the system to work for them. But in the back of your mind, you're like, can you just stop doing this, please? Like, You're making this way too hard. I would just cringe when they would bring it up is they want to estimate a certain number of labor hours for crew leaders and then a certain number of labor hours for crew members. Like the pay difference is $2 an hour. Does it really matter? Can we just have one labor hour that averages it out and call it good enough? You know, or labor type. So, you know, that's, that's one example. Another one is estimating every little item that goes into the job. You know, the, like in a weekly maintenance visit, well, we, we're going to use 3 ounces of Roundup. And when we spray the beds, it's like, just call it an overhead cost and be done with it. I know that we, we want to track it and all that, and I get it. But at the end of the day, it's such a minuscule amount of cost. Can we just call it overhead? And, you know, Aspire is designed to calculate our overhead for us. Let's utilize that part of the system and make our life a lot easier.

There are so many metrics that companies are told that they need to keep an eye on. Are there any other metrics that you would say are just noise as opposed to something that you really need to keep track of?

You know, stick to the core items. That's really what it comes down to. What does my labor cost? What does my materials cost? And then I'm marking everything up to sell a job at a certain rate, like, Don't get caught up in, like I said, all the little things. Irrigation is a great example, right? We have all these little parts that go into irrigation that cost 30 cents, 50 cents, 70 cents, you know, all the pipe parts. Just have a miscellaneous item and say, I'm going to need $20 in miscellaneous parts for this job, or $200, or whatever it is, and be done with it. It's all going to get costed to the job in the end. We're just trying to come up with a price. So, you know, that's, I That's a lot of it is that you don't, don't make your life harder than it needs to be. Try to make it simple. Think simple.

When it comes to simplification of navigating through this software, you've pushed back on this instinct to track every hour and every work ticket. Why doesn't that level of detail actually help owners? You kind of already hit something like that, I feel like, but—

I did a little bit. Think back to prior to Aspire, okay? They probably weren't tracking everything. Now they want to go into this hyper-tracking mode where we got to know where every little thing goes. Good luck. Like, you know, you got to take it baby steps. Let's get our jobs in how we've done them in the past, and let's build on that. So you always say when you're implementing Aspire, it takes 3 years. The first year is a disaster for almost everybody. Like, and not a bad disaster, it's just you're learning, right? You're learning How the system functions, how it tracks everything, how do you put this here, how do you cost there, whatever it is. Like there's so much happening in Aspire that you're not used to. So the first year is bumpy, right? The second year you're doing pretty good. Now you've learned a lot. Everyone's kind of fallen into their place of their role, what they need to do in the system. You know, things are running fairly smooth, but then you still learn a lot that second year of, okay, we need to tweak certain things with our estimating, with our processes, with purchasing or invoicing or whatever it is. So that 3rd year is really the year where you're dialed in and you're running pretty, pretty as smooth as you're probably going to get. And then it just goes from there. So, you know, don't expect to start all of these new things right off of the bat. It's not going to happen. Everyone's going to get frustrated and you're going to fail. at some things and then morale goes down because you just can't do it. And now you're doubting the software. Like, it just, it spirals on and you don't want to do that.

Yeah, it sounds like if you start from a complicated place or you might not really be able to hone in on your why, then it can just, this snowball effect, everything's getting more complicated. And when you lose buy-in, That's where I feel like you can feel a lot of tension within your company as well.

We just had an instance with us this week. Um, something went haywire in the system and we had hours that didn't calculate correctly for payroll. And we had to— emergency— our team had to go in and we had to fix all these hours from last week before payroll ran so that we— so the guys got paid correctly. And that's a big deal. Like, that's That's, I don't know if it's because I come from the field or whatever, but to me, the guys getting paid correctly is always like number one. Like, I don't, we can't be missing hours. We can't have issues with that. So, you know, we had to scramble and spend 3 hours Wednesday fixing that before hours went out for payroll. And it's not fun, right? And it's nobody's fault necessarily, but it's things you have to do. So you've got to take those kinds of things into consideration. Like that's going to happen. But let's not take it further and shoot ourselves in the foot because we, we want to do something that just isn't going to work or make it really complicated.

If you could give advice to someone who is starting implementation day 1, what would it be?

Be prepared to commit the time and don't sleep much. No.

Um, drink a lot of coffee.

Yes, yes. No, usually it's, it's just understand the time commitment. When the implementation manager tells you 40 hours a week, it's 40 hours a week. Like, there's, there's no getting around it.

Buckle up, get ready, and get some caffeine, it sounds like.

Yep.

You also have another hot take. It's not just these metrics, but it's about managers, that there is a bit of a training gap when it comes to managers. What does this gap actually look like day to day?

You know, I think it's different for everybody in the industry in general, right? We hire people and call it what it is. It's the Wild West. When the guys get there in the morning until they leave at night, you never know what's going to happen. I mean, you've got equipment that doesn't want to start in the morning. You've got guys that don't show up for whatever reason. You've got Weather, right? That's a factor in our business. All these things are happening. It's— I want to say it's controlled chaos. I hope it's controlled. It's really hard to— whether it's a field person or even an operations manager, maybe an account manager, it is so hard to give them the time that they need to really train them just because there's so much happening all the time. And usually we're hiring someone because we need the help. And we're already tapped for time as it is. A lot of times, even at the management level, you kind of get thrown to the wolves and here you go, have at it, you know, and hopefully they have some experience, right? So it's not too crazy, but they still have to learn how we do business, right? How our company does business. So wherever they came from probably was not the same. In fact, I'd almost guarantee it wasn't. Really helping them learn how we do things, our processes. Yeah, being an account manager is being an account manager. It's almost the same job no matter where you go, right? But our internal steps to being that account manager are probably different than the company they came from. Maybe they've grown up in our company and we've promoted them. Well, they understood whatever their previous role was. They don't understand what their next role is. So again, we still have to train them. We may think, well, they've been here forever. They know what we do. It's not a big deal. Well, again, good luck because they don't know what they need to do for their new job. So it just comes down to being able to spend that time with them. Maybe we have some documented trainings in place. That would be awesome. There's just such a lack of training and it's, it's always learn on the fly, no matter what you're doing. And it just makes it, it makes it tough. You know, it's not anyone's fault. It just makes it really hard.

Well, you said it's the Wild West every day. You walk in, you don't know what's gonna happen, and inevitably there's going to be 3 or 4 problems before you even open up your email. So, what would be your advice to that manager, boots on the ground, and they are in the thick of it with minimal training?

Ask a lot of questions. No one's gonna come to you and just Provide information, right? Usually there has to be either a problem or a question asked to to get somebody to open up to you about something. So come into it with you know what? I'm gonna annoy the crap out of you guys, but I need answers because I need to know how to do my job. That's okay. Like yeah, they might not like you for a while. You've got to be successful for yourself. So and do you know do a good job. And the only way. You know, you might be able to get that information is to ask a lot of questions. And that goes for any position. I don't care what it is. When I was an implementation manager and I still do it today with when we partner with a company, when we come in to do a lot of fact-finding or, you know, learn about the business, figure out how they're doing things, it's just all it is is questions. I need to know how you do things in order to actually train you on what you need to do with the system. And make sure we even can set it up right. And all it is is asking questions. It's not rocket science. It's just, how do you do this? How do you do that? Who handles this? Who handles that? It's no different in the ops or account management side of the world. You know, you just gotta learn how everybody operates and, and then that'll just help you do your job that much better.

What would be your advice in keeping it simple for these companies that maybe are in the thick of it and they have a manager, they're excited about them, they're a great worker. But they just maybe don't necessarily have the systems in place or the time to give them that proper training. What would be your advice?

Give them a little bit of a support system. Don't just expect them to say, here's your, here's your 50 clients and have at it. Like, you got to give them something. So, you know, let them shadow some people. That might take 2 months, right? You know, it might not be every day, but Let them shadow some of your leaders in the company. Let them go out and see what the crews are doing. Let them, you know, just get a feel for everything that's happening. Even somebody that maybe you had a crew leader that you promoted to some kind of ops manager. Well, they know what they did. They didn't know what everybody else was doing. So they need to go out and see the crews and see how they're doing works, see the different properties that they're handling because they That crew leader probably didn't know all the properties, you know, things like that. Like, get, get them exposure to everything that's happening in the company, and then they will learn as they go. And then add on to that the client interaction or crew interactions and all of that, and they'll learn quickly. But you have to— you got to give them some kind of support system. It might not be every day, but it's something.

When it comes to Technology, I want to shift to what's kind of coming down the pipeline and what's getting you excited. But let's keep simplicity in mind. I know that AI— everyone is assuming that they have to partake in AI. They are learning it. It is the hot-button topic for 2026 and beyond. So with simplicity in mind, how do you view AI and all of these new tools coming down the pipeline?

I really think it can be a good thing. I think of like autonomous mowers, right? So maybe we're struggling with staffing and we think, oh, we can get these autonomous mowers where the guys get on site and they hit go and it mows and they go do other things and we're one less person on site, right? It's a great idea and it can be a really good thing. My worry is it's technology. Do I now have to hire a special mechanic to operate? Do I, when it goes down, how do I replace that? I now don't have the employee. So how do I get the job done on time if it goes down? Like, that's the kind of, that's where my head goes.

Yeah.

Um, same thing with the software. I think it, there's a lot of good things you can do in the software. I just don't want to make it more complicated. Um, I know Aspire is rolling out the, um, purchase receipts. Basically, you take a picture of it and it creates the receipt in Aspire. That is awesome. Like, that will save a lot of time and has really good application for everybody. I think everyone's been wanting something like that for a while. That's a great thing. As far as other, like, AIs they're trying to introduce to the system, I'm not super aware of anything else right now. I know they're working on some things, but I don't know what's coming up. I think it can do a lot of good things. I think Maybe need to temper expectations a little bit, make sure things actually make sense to happen. And any technology like that, it should be making your business run smoother and easier, right? So really reflect on that. Is it really doing that? Um, it should, right? That's the whole point.

We, we hope.

But, you know, just really kind of, if you're somebody that's new into Aspire, Or really thinking about it, trying, weighing the pros and cons of getting into something like Aspire. Again, start simple. You're not coming into the software with, I'm gonna use every feature it offers. Don't even try cuz you, you're just, you're gonna fail and you're not gonna be happy with it. Come in with the basics, learn the basics, and then grow on it from there.

Amazing advice. Ryan Nelson, thank you so much for coming on Toolbox for the Trades.