Trades Talk Podcast

This week on Trades Talk, Justin White sits down with Tim Hendricks , a 40 plus year California landscape industry veteran who built his chops at Valley Crest, Cagwin & Dorward, BrightView, Site One, and is now running high end residential design build on the Peninsula. Tim walks through the lessons he absorbed from his mentor Roger Fisk, the three things Cagwin did better than anyone (and mos...

It's Fourth of July weekend and K&D is going for the three peat on most patriotic float in tomorrow's parade. But before the fireworks, we've got work to do. This week I'm covering three things every trades leader needs right now. First, Fable 5. Anthropic's newest model is here and most of you aren't even scratching the surface. I walk through exactly how I'm using it: writing proposals and R...

This week on Trades Talk, Justin White sits down with Ben Hansen , founder of Profit Doctor. Ben is a 5x Inc. 5000 founder who scaled his own staffing business from zero to $13 million with 100 employees, and now helps 7 and 8 figure CEOs stop the financial bleeding and become "overpaid entrepreneurs." Justin opens up about K&D's own profit story: $2.5M of net profit on $20M in revenue at the...

On this Weekly Update of Trades Talk, Justin White is joined by Sean Laux, K&D's leader of innovation and technology, kicking off a new chapter of the Friday show: weekly deep dives on AI inside a trades business. Sean and Justin break down the K&D AI stack, why most CEOs are getting AI wrong, and how to actually find ROI in a market where 56 percent of CEOs say AI has delivered nothing. I...

This week on Trades Talk, Justin White sits back down with Jeremy Ross , division lead for K&D Landscaping's Design Build Construction division, for round two. In nine years Jeremy has scaled the division from a few hundred thousand to $8 million in trailing twelve month revenue with 8 crews, 2 project managers, 2 supervisors, and a full pre-construction team. In this episode: How Jeremy built...

Join Disruptors: https://www.skool.com/disruptors/about Year two kicks off here. Justin debriefs the LeanScaper event in Chicago and pulls three takeaways straight from the room. The 131 rule from Dan Martell for handing problems back to your team instead of being the firefighter. Why trust is the foundation under every high performing company, with a nod to Patrick Lencioni's Five Dysfunctions of...

This week on Trades Talk, Justin White brings Michael Ding back for round two. A year ago, Michael was a founder building Bobyard for landscape takeoffs. Today he's the CEO of one of the most talked about AI startups in construction, fresh off a $35 million Series A with Joe Lonsdale (Palantir co-founder) on the board. In this episode: Why the average construction worker is 3X less productive than...

This week on Trades Talk, Justin White sits down with Austyn Roth , founder of Lucky Landscaping in Jupiter, Florida. Austyn started mowing lawns at 11, financed a golf cart at 14 with a 10 percent loan from his dad, hired a driver at 15 because he was too young to drive, and sold the company to Landscape Workshop before he turned 23. In this episode: How a teenage debt strategy turned a push mowe...

On this Weekly Update of Trades Talk, Justin White hits the one year mark with a wide angle State of the Industry, plus the four biggest lessons from year one and where the Friday show is headed in season two. Multiples, margins, organic growth, AI, fuel costs, retention, and a contrarian take on the EOS org chart. The whole landscape industry in 35 minutes. In this episode, we cover: The current...

This week on Trades Talk, Justin White brings Kendel White back for Part 2 of the K&D origin story. If Part 1 was about building it, Part 2 is about almost losing it, betting everything on a comeback, and handing the company off to the next generation in a way most founders never get right. In this episode: The 2010 Driscoll's job K&D still maintains 16 years later — and the maintenance bi...

On this Weekly Update of Trades Talk, Justin White breaks down the 7 day sprint K&D just kicked off to document every leadership workflow, and why that boring exercise is the real unlock for agentic AI. Plus a look at Claude's new Opus 4.8 model, the content strategy that is quietly compounding K&D's brand, and a sneak peek at a big Disruptors announcement dropping June 1. In this episode,...

This week on Trades Talk,  Justin White  sits down with the K in K&D, his dad,  Kendel White , co-founder of  K&D Landscaping , for Part 1 of a 2-part father-son conversation that traces the origin story of one of the premier landscape companies on the Central Coast. Kendel takes us all the way back to 1986. 22 years old, freshly married to Justin's mom, working as a catering chef at Pajar...

On this Weekly Update of Trades Talk, Justin White celebrates 50 episodes from the shoreline of Lake Nacimiento with a debrief from this week's Cal Poly tour and the biggest lessons from the Peter Lemon episode. From applied research labs solving real industry problems to feeding your people and protecting your culture, this one is part field report, part leadership playbook, part rallying cry for...

This week on Trades Talk, Justin White sits down with Peter Lemon , CEO and President of Graniterock, the 126 year old vertically integrated construction and aggregates company headquartered right here in Watsonville. From the Wilson Quarry, the largest hard rock quarry this side of the Mississippi, to bridges, roads, asphalt, concrete, and logistics across the Bay Area and Central Coast, Graniter...

On this Weekly Update of Trades Talk, Justin White breaks down the newly released Lawn and Landscape Top 100 list and the 3-layered capital stack quietly powering the next wave of consolidation. 39 of the top 100 are private equity-backed. $20 billion in combined revenue. And one new entrant most operators have never heard of,  Integrity Partners, that tells the whole story. In this episode, we co...

This week on Trades Talk, Justin White sits down with Bob Grover , Chairman of Osprey Landscape Group and founder of Pacific Landscape Management , to break down the lessons from a four decade career building one of the premier landscape companies in the country. From getting his horticulture degree at Oregon State and working under Northwest Landscape Industries, to launching Pacific Landscape Ma...

On this Weekly Update on Trades Talk, Justin White breaks down what is shaping the landscape industry right now and why the operators who move first are pulling away from the rest. Justin opens with a story from 1879. At the first public demo of the light bulb, Thomas Edison told a reporter, "We will make electricity so cheap that only the rich will burn candles." The same shift is happening in th...

This week on Trades Talk, Justin White sits down with Anna Halstead of Halstead Media to unpack the real story behind building growth, both personally and professionally, in the landscape industry. From immigrating with nothing to building one of the most respected marketing agencies in the trades, Anna shares a powerful journey rooted in resilience, intention, and vision. This episode blends pers...

On this Weekly Update on Trades Talk, Justin White breaks down one of the most important levers in building a successful trades business, understanding your numbers, controlling your brand, and taking advantage of the shifting landscape happening across the industry. Coming off a high level Q&A with the Leanscaper Community, Justin dives into financial fundamentals, brand strategy, and why own...

This week on Trades Talk, Justin White sits down with Kory Mitchell of Iconic Founders to break down one of the most important conversations happening in the trades right now, how to actually build a company that is worth selling. Kory shares his journey from growing a family asbestos business into a $200M operation and exiting for nine figures, then walking away and building Iconic Founders to he...

This week on Trades Talk, Justin White is back on the ground and diving into one of the most important conversations for operators right now, how to turn pain into progress while building a smarter, more financially sound, and AI driven business. From lessons inspired by Ray Dalio to real world execution inside K&D Landscaping , this episode blends mindset, finance, and technology into a clear...

This week on Trades Talk, Justin White sits down with Orlando Castillo of The Sales Collective to break down one of the most overlooked drivers of growth in the trades, building a real sales process that actually scales. After working together to refine the K&D Landscaping sales system, this conversation goes deep into what a sales process really is, why most companies don’t have one, and how...

On this weekly update of Trades Talk, Justin White checks in from 4,500 feet in the air, flying back from Palo Alto after attending the Techo Bloc Hardscape Showcase, and breaks down what is really happening inside K&D Landscaping right now. From new content initiatives to major technology investments, this episode gives a raw, real time look at how Justin is thinking about growth, innovation,...

This week on Trades Talk, Justin White sits down with Naylor Taliaferro , a well known voice in the lawn care and landscaping industry, to talk about what it really takes to build a business while staying grounded in who you are. Naylor shares his journey from running a lawn care company to becoming a trusted leader and educator in the space, and how consistency, relationships, and authenticity ha...

On this weekly update on Trades Talk, Justin White shares a powerful reflection on purpose, impact, and what it really means to build something that lasts as K&D Landscaping comes off a major milestone moment. After being named Large Outstanding Business of the Year in the Salinas Valley, Justin zooms out and connects the journey from early strategic planning sessions to where the company is t...