Trades Talk Podcast

This week on Trades Talk, Justin White sits down with Ellen Rohr, the trades industry's favorite money coach, author, speaker, and the person who has taught thousands of contractors how to actually read their numbers. Ellen learned it the hard way, going from dead broke in a four truck plumbing shop to building and selling companies and helping run a business doing hundreds of millions. Her messag...

This week on Trades Talk, Justin White sits down with industry legend Richard Sperber , fresh off one of the biggest pivots of his career. After building ValleyCrest, creating BrightView, and founding Sperber Landscape Companies (now rebranded Cultivar Group), Richard has stepped away to back something entirely new. His new venture, American Operator, exists to keep locally owned landscape compani...

On this Weekly Update of Trades Talk, Justin White broadcasts from the road ahead of NALP Elevate, with a lot cooking in both the public markets and inside K&D. He breaks down what this week's midterm elections signaled to the AI and data center world, why it rattled the market, and why he is doubling down on AI anyway. Then he gets tactical, sharing exactly what came out of a labor variance m...

This week on Trades Talk, Justin White sits down with Marcus Sheridan , bestselling author of They Ask, You Answer and Endless Customers, and the man who saved his pool company during the 2008 crash by doing the one thing nobody else would: telling customers the truth about pricing. Now he is sounding the alarm for the trades. Homeowners want to know roughly what things cost before they ever reach...

In part two of the robotics as a service panel, Justin White gets back in the studio with Joe Langton of Automated Outdoor Solutions and Tyler Reiter of MoTek to go under the hood on the money and the infrastructure most owners never see coming. If part one sold you on autonomous mowing, this one shows you how to actually make it profitable. In this episode: Why your landscape yard will soon need...

On this Weekly Update of Trades Talk, Justin White is fired up and moving fast. He walks through a packed week at K&D, from a brand new autonomous mowing community to two new technology partnerships, and makes one of his biggest calls yet. K&D is going all in on Claude and Anthropic for 2027, betting on one horse and building serious infrastructure around it instead of jumping between mode...

This week on Trades Talk, Justin White sits down with Ryan Hawk , host of The Learning Leader Show, keynote speaker, leadership coach, and author of the new book The Price of Becoming. Ryan has spent nearly twelve years and more than seven hundred episodes interviewing the best leaders on the planet, from Jim Collins to Navy SEALs, then turning what he learns into a coaching business that serves t...

In a special live panel of Trades Talk, Justin White brings together three of the sharpest minds in landscape robotics: Joe Langton of Automated Outdoor Solutions, Tyler Reiter of MoTec, and Todd Zimmerman of Kress. The topic is robotics as a service, the model quietly rewriting how the trades mow. For years, mowing has been the industry's loss leader. This conversation lays out how autonomous mow...

On this Weekly Update of Trades Talk, Justin White gets personal after what he calls the most rewarding, stressful, and change-filled two weeks of his career. Coming back from a three month sabbatical, he saw K&D with fresh eyes and realized how far the company had drifted from its vision. So he made a drastic call: he abolished the leadership team that had been in place since 2015. In this up...

This week on Trades Talk, Justin White sits down with Robert Underwood , founder of AAA Landscape in Phoenix, Arizona. Robert borrowed $1,000 from his mom and a pickup truck from his uncle in 1975 and built one of the largest landscape companies in the Southwest, now more than seven hundred employees strong. Before landscaping, Robert rode bulls on the professional rodeo circuit and served in the...

On this Weekly Update of Trades Talk, Justin White comes to you from the Monterey Bay in the middle of K&D's Q4 all-hands planning session, and the news is stacking up fast. Aspire just launched Command Center, Justin dropped a same day episode with GM Eli Zevin, and K&D's innovation director just got recruited by one of the biggest names in AI. In this update: Why a leading AI lab poached...

This is a special one. Justin White sat down with Eli Zevin , General Manager of Aspire, the same day Aspire launched its brand new Command Center, and dropped the episode within the hour. If you run on Aspire, or are even thinking about it, this is the inside look at the biggest leap the software has taken yet. Command Center brings real time custom dashboards, AI that builds them from a single s...

This week on Trades Talk, Justin White sits down with Andy Worshek , retired US Navy Master Chief and the man who actually implemented Intent-Based Leadership on the USS Santa Fe under Captain L. David Marquet. When David declined the podcast, he personally referred us to Andy, and this conversation reveals why: David wrote the book, but Andy is the operator who lived it at the crew level and rebu...

I sat out Aspire Ignite this week for the first time in five years and recorded this one from the hangar. If you came home from those events feeling behind, this episode is for you. You're not behind. But you might be about to automate a mess. I walk through the algorithm K&D is using to get ready for 2027: delete, simplify, accelerate, and only then automate. It comes from Elon Musk's playboo...

This week on Trades Talk, Justin White sits down with Ed LaFlamme , landscape industry legend, author, and co-founder of The Harvesters. Ed borrowed $700 from his mom in 1971, started cutting lawns, and built it into the largest landscape company in Connecticut before selling in 1999. Along the way he landed Jack Welch's GE World Headquarters, pyramided that one account into ten world headquarters...

Landscape business owners have a massive opportunity in front of them. Owners are retiring, AI is getting more useful, and robotics is changing how work gets done. The challenge is turning that opportunity into a stronger company while taking care of your people, your clients, and your bottom line. In Weekly Update #67, I’m sharing how I’m thinking about 2027 at K&D, including the real tension...

This week on Trades Talk, Justin White sits down with John Lee Dumas , host of Entrepreneurs on Fire , the only daily podcast in the world interviewing entrepreneurs, with over 100 million listens across 5,800 plus episodes. For 14 years JLD has published every single day, and his message to trades owners is blunt: reps beat talent, and most people just do not want it bad enough. Justin and John g...

On this Weekly Update of Trades Talk, Justin White is recording from the backyard on a milestone day. For the first time in eleven years, he is sitting out K&D's quarterly strategic planning session on purpose, and he pulls back the curtain on why stepping out of the room is exactly what the team and the ten year vision need. It is part behind the scenes, part playbook for any owner trying to...

This week on Trades Talk, Justin White sits down with Joe Langton , CEO of Langton Group and founder of Automated Outdoor Solutions (AOS). Joe went from 11 years as a union electrician to running a 186-employee full service landscape, snow, and construction operation, and along the way built one of the largest robotic mowing fleets in the country (roughly $7 million in deployed robots across resid...

The future of landscaping is already here, and it starts with the 60-inch Voyager that maps faster, stripes cleaner, and frees crews to do higher-value work. If you lead a landscape company, care about automation, or are trying to make AI actually useful in the field, this is the episode you need right now. Justin White takes you inside a live Kress Voyager demo and shows what changes when robotic...

This week on Trades Talk, Justin White sits down with David Meltzer, legendary entrepreneur, speaker, and former CEO of the most notable sports agency in the world. David lost more than one hundred million dollars and went bankrupt, then built it all back with two coaches, a set of non-negotiables, and a mission to help over one billion people be happy. His message to the trades is direct: most co...

On this Weekly Update of Trades Talk, Justin White runs the show like a newsroom, rapid firing the biggest headlines hitting the trades and the wildest month yet in artificial intelligence. From a two billion dollar garage door exit to an Anthropic researcher sounding the alarm, there is a lot to unpack. It is part industry briefing, part gut check on where the smartest operators are placing their...

This week on Trades Talk, Justin White sits down with Jack Jostes , founder and CEO of Ramblin Jackson, the snow and landscape exclusive marketing agency, host of The Landscaper's Guide podcast, and author of the new book The Landscaper's Guide to Direct Response Sales and Marketing. After 17 years building marketing systems inside the green industry, Jack lands on one core belief: the company tha...

On this Weekly Update of Trades Talk, Justin White is back after a week off, recording with his newborn daughter asleep right beside him. He opens up on what stepping away from K&D for 60 days has actually felt like, then turns to the forces about to reshape the trades: humanoid robots, AI adoption, and owning your own intelligence. It is part personal, part strategy session, and a real look a...

This week on Trades Talk, Justin White sits down with Fitz Owen from Garnet Captive Insurance. Fitz runs business development for one of the most respected group captive programs in the country, working with trades operators who are done watching their insurance premiums balloon 20 to 30 percent year over year despite running safe, well-managed companies. Justin brings Fitz on to demystify what a...