Lawn Care Blueprint w/Benji Carson: Lean Systems for Lawn Care Businesses Built to Grow

Ezra McCarthy

Hello and welcome back to the lawn care blueprint. Today we are sitting down with none other than Benji Carson, the friendly Canadian. He is a tradesman turned system strategist, say that five times, who has helped hundreds of businesses transform and grow. He started in the painting world and this mindset has helped as he has now stepped into the Leanscaper.

Benji is doing a podcast for Leanscaper and we are excited to have him on today. We are going to be discussing his story and also some of the frameworks he has used to help other businesses grow. So Benji, glad to have you here today.

Benji Carson

Thanks for having me, Ezra.

Ezra McCarthy

Take us back to your early story. And ironically enough, I can resonate with your painting background. Doing research, I believe you started painting. I did as well. So I am curious, take us back to the beginning. How did you get started in the trades and how did you get to where you are today?

Benji Carson

I was going to university at McGill University in Montreal, Quebec, which was a really good school and I had worked really hard to get into it and I just was not thriving, let us say. About a year and a half into that journey, I decided to come home and kind of clean up my act a bit. My grades were fine, I just was really a bit of a mess, to be honest.

And I came back, I took six months off, I went and worked up north on the oil rigs and I decided to go to school in Kamloops, BC, and there I got recruited into a business which is actually no longer around called College Pro Painters, which is the original and at the time the biggest student painting franchise in the world. So you get taught how to run a business and how to lead people and how to build a budget and how to paint houses and hopefully make some money.

I did that and put myself through the rest of university, which ironically I never finished. I was going to school at TRU in Kamloops and when you are 21 and you start to make $50,000 a year and then $80,000 a year and then a hundred grand a year as a young person, and that was 13 years ago, in today’s dollars you feel like you are doing pretty well. And so I was just like, this whole school thing is kind of stupid. I am sitting here in classes that make no sense and I am going to go and just sell a paint job.

That is how I got started. I did that for a few years and then moved into a more consulting and advising business for the better part of a decade. And now we are here starting Leanscaper.

Ezra McCarthy

So I have to back up a little bit. When you were at College Pro Painters, was Cameron Herold there or was that after his time?

Benji Carson

It would have been after Cameron’s time. He would have been a VP and I cannot remember what his role is. I knew that he was not in the system when I was there. But I know he is from College Pro and I have met him a few times and interviewed him on our podcast a few times. Big Cameron Herold fan.

Ezra McCarthy

Okay.

1 800 Got Junk. He went there.

Oh, yeah.

No, I was not being a fanboy, but I enjoyed his stuff. I just finished reading one of his books, Vivid Vision. It is very good.

Benji Carson

It is really good. Yeah, one of my favorites.

Ezra McCarthy

So when you started in the painting world, what did that season of life teach you, especially College Pro Painting? I presume there is a lot of churn as far as your employees, who you are dealing with. Did you learn a lot of lessons there as far as leading people and a business? And then how has that shaped you today?

Benji Carson

Yeah, I learned a ton. I mean, you cut your chops as a young entrepreneur in the College Pro system. You are given more than enough rope to hang yourself with. And so you learn a ton about the basic mechanics of a business. What does it mean to build a strategy for the year? What does it mean to build a budget for the year? What does it mean to build a marketing plan for the year? What does it mean to cascade that down into a sales and revenue plan and then you are going to need to staff some people to produce that work and then you are going to need to manage and lead those people so they do not quit and then you are going to need to manage and lead the quality of work they do so your customers are happy.

It really does give you an extremely strong dose of business fundamentals at a very young age that I think has helped me tremendously. I am just forever grateful for the time I got there because it really gives you a baseline understanding of the whole thing. And I think as you evolve through your career, generally speaking, you kind of specialize into different things, you find your real power zones, but it is very helpful to have a good understanding of how the whole system works versus someone who just enters into their career in just a sales role or just a marketing role or just an operations role. You miss the bigger picture of how a business functions and there is a lot of value that is given to you when you have a complete picture.

As far as biggest lessons from that time, there would be so many small ones, too many to list off, but I think the biggest one is the value of action and how much control you have over your own destiny and you can and often will need to will your vision into existence through blood, sweat and tears. And I think people underestimate how much agency they have over their own outcomes in their life because they have never been given an opportunity to test that concept out.

And so one of the things that I think, if I have a strength, and I do not have many, but if I have one, it would be I generally take action and I generally move things very, very quickly and with a lot of force, because that is the only way you succeed in College Pro and that has been helpful along the way.

Ezra McCarthy

So for those of you who are not familiar with the business model, and correct me if I am wrong on the business model, basically all of your employees, are they all college students?

Benji Carson

They happen to be. There is no rule that says you have to hire college students. There is no rule that says you have to be a college student to even be a franchisee. But yeah, you end up hiring younger people for sure.

Ezra McCarthy

So I am sure you see some insane churn with your team members there?

Benji Carson

I did not, to be honest. You hire some people and some of them do not work out, but your first year is a little messy. After that I was able to see some stability. I know other people really struggle with it and I do not think that that is a comment on college students as much as it is their bad leaders. But yeah, generally speaking, I would say that the talent pool trends towards the younger group for sure.

Ezra McCarthy

I am curious, was there a moment where you realized that maybe you cared more about business or the work of business than necessarily painting? Or was there ever really a love of painting or was it more just the first good business that presented itself to you?

Benji Carson

I happen to still really enjoy painting. If I was not building a really cool tech platform for landscapers, I probably would go buy a commercial painting company and scale that. I actually do like that industry a lot. I generally gravitate towards tradesy, more blue collar businesses, because I like working with people and those are really people driven businesses.

And so I think you have to have a bit of, you do have to, you cannot hate the service that you do. That is just not a sustainable strategy. But you know pretty quickly, and I think any seasoned business person is going to share the same insight, pretty quickly you realize your job is, as Elon puts it, your job is not to build the Tesla, your job is to build the factory that builds the Tesla.

And there is a really profound insight about business there. Any company produces a widget or a service and the real game is producing a company that makes that widget or service more efficiently and in a way that treats their people better, delivers better outcomes to the customer and makes more money. And that is the game within the game that I think is the most fun that, if you are paying attention, you realize pretty quickly that is ultimately what it is about.

Ezra McCarthy

I think so many people get caught up in that role. I have heard a phrase or an analogy. They said if someone is a football coach and they lose a player, many times as business owners, they hop on the field as the coach instead of saying, okay, not I need to step onto the field, but I need to go find another great player.

And I think so many times people get caught up in that. The work has to get done, so instead of I am building a factory, like you said, the Tesla, they just hop on the assembly line. I am mixing analogies here, but I think you get the point.

Benji Carson

I totally get it.

Ezra McCarthy

So at your next job that you did, you really spent a lot of time interviewing, I believe it was hundreds of companies, trades businesses, blue collar. Were there some patterns that you started to see? I know one thing you mentioned already was initiative, people just doing it, but I think that is an important one.

Other than that, were there some patterns that you see that really separated the winners from those that were just kind of stagnant? I talk to a lot of landscape businesses all the time and sometimes every year I will call my customers and I will ask them, hey, what are you going to do this year? And there is more than one that is telling me, I am going to grow by X. And you can probably guess where I am going.

Next year I ask them, they did the same amount and they say the same goal year after year. So I am curious, what were some patterns that you saw from the winners to the struggling ones?

Benji Carson

Yeah, so just a little extra context might help. When I joined Breakthrough Academy, which is the last business that I worked with for eight years, one of the first things I did there was in a sales role. We called it an assessment specialist and basically you are tasked with assessing businesses on the way in to make sure that the owner is the right fit for the kind of program that we had built.

Their business is the type of business with the right core pain points that we can help. They have the right mindset. And then if all those boxes are checked, your job is to sell them into the program and get them excited and take the notes from the assessment and hand it off to their coach and they get onboarded and go into the rest of the system.

And then we started and grew up a pretty big podcast after that where I got to interview not just contractors, but a lot of leaders and authors. So just a little bit of helpful background for your listeners on where this insight I am going to share comes from.

I think there are definitely some pretty clear, predictable patterns between, not to speak categorically, but let us say the winners and the losers in the trades world.

The winners have a few things. One is, there is a pretty fundamental understanding of finance. This is not rocket science, but building a budget, an annual budget, having a job costing system that allows you to see your actual profit made on projects so that you can compare that to the estimate that you did in the first place and start to fine tune your marketing and your sales to get more of the jobs you make money on and do less of the jobs you lose money on, that is a fundamental.

I think that vision and strategy is another thing that is really missing with a lot of the people that struggle, not understanding. You mentioned Vivid Vision by Cameron Herold. That is a really good book that I think every contractor under a million dollars a year in revenue should read because it tells you how to actually do vision. It is a really talked about term that I think is really misunderstood and thrown around a lot. That is actually a process and a muscle that you can develop and a skill that you can develop.

And so I think vision, I think an understanding of financials. I think another one that is slept on would be organizational design, meaning how do you draw an organizational chart that matches up with the strategy and the budget that you have built and also fulfills your customer’s needs. So the right roles in the right seats, are those roles defined well with a clear job description, clear deliverables, clear accountabilities, and can you fill those with the right people? So that is another trait I would see with winners.

And I think, if I were to speak about the other end of the spectrum, the people that really struggle, and this is not unique to business owners, this is just people in general. There is a lot of externalization, meaning the reasons that they are not where they want to be is their market’s fault, it is Gen Z’s fault, it is their parents’ fault, it is their girlfriend’s fault, it is their customer’s fault. There is a lot of excuse making, which definitely can make you feel good in the moment and is comforting, but it robs you of the power that you have to change the direction you are going.

And so I think those would be some patterns I have observed between the winners and the losers.

Ezra McCarthy

One thing I want to hone in, you just said there, you said an organizational chart. Now I know to most of you listening in, that probably sounds like a bad word to them because a lot of us have maybe a disdain for the large corporate bureaucracy. And our first thought when we hear an org chart probably is a bunch of mumbo jumbo, maybe a do not work reorganization chart.

Not literally, but so when you say that, could you describe it a little better? What are you talking about when you say, maybe between half a million to even up to two or three million, what kind of org chart are you even talking about? And how would that help a business?

Benji Carson

I am talking about a simple diagram that you can draw on an app like Lucidchart or Miro or Flow. There are a million of these tools. Most of them are very, very inexpensive. And you get in there and you make a bubble and that first bubble is you, the owner, and then below you there are going to be other bubbles that are your employees or your team or in some cases your subcontractors or agencies that you work with. And you are basically drawing a diagram that mimics the shape that your company should look like.

And it is going to represent the reporting structure, so who reports to who. It is going to sometimes represent information flows, where does this data go to this person, but most importantly, and this is why I think most people have a disdain for these things, is because they are poorly understood. Most importantly, every bubble on that chart needs to have a core deliverable.

And so you as the owner, if you are doing, let us just say $500,000 a year, you are responsible ultimately to sell $500,000 a year, produce $500,000 a year and manage the team in such a way that your customers are happy so they keep calling you back and manage efficiency and process in such a way that you make some money.

There is no one else behind you, there is no one else above you, that is you. So you can start with that. And then off of that, you are drawing little arms. Maybe you have a little marketing division or a salesperson. Maybe that salesperson is still you. Maybe you have a production division, maybe a small crew or a couple of crews, and so you draw them on.

The part that people do not do is they do not really think about the deliverables, meaning the actual results that each of those roles needs to deliver in order to be worth the salary that they get paid. And that might sound like a capitalistic way to think about it, but if you run a business, you are in a capitalistic system, and if you are not obsessed with making money, you are not going to and you are really wasting your time at that point.

So the way that we teach this is to have very, very clear roles that are described as a job description. And probably what you would do is write that in Google Docs. You would maybe insert the link into the organizational chart so you can click on it and see it readily available. But fundamentally what you want to do is describe different positions, what the results that they have to deliver are. So a salesperson would deliver a certain amount of sales.

They would, through their estimation, preserve a certain gross profit margin. The production team would be responsible to produce a certain amount of work and they would also be responsible to produce it efficiently enough to match the gross profit margin that was designed into the estimate by the salesperson and so on and so forth. You would go through the same exercise for your office staff. You would go through the same exercise for a marketing team if you have one. You would through that one day go through the same exercise for your CFO and your CMO and as your company becomes more and more sophisticated, the roles become bigger and so do the salaries, but so do the expectations.

And I think when you do not have, if you have not trained yourself to think through that lens and understand things visually like that, the reason it is really powerful is because it forces you to lay it all out and actually think through who does what and how it all works.

If you do not train yourself on that lens, it is always just going to feel like a bunch of people doing stuff, a bunch of people working really hard and hopefully we do well by the end, but you have not gone through the design stage of saying, can I design a team that delivers the results that I want?

A good offensive coordinator in football designs plays and eventually they design an entire playbook for a team that gives them the offensive maneuvers that they want to score the points that they need to win the games that they have on their schedule. It is the same exercise, but in the business format.

So I do not know if I explained that well, but that is how I define it. If it sounds like mumbo jumbo, they just have not really tried it yet. Once they do, they will see this is really, really helpful because it forces me to think through some things I have not thought about. It forces me to look at it and make it visual. Now I have something I can show someone else. So when I hire them, they can understand, oh, this is how I fit into the bigger system that I am now a part of. So yeah, that is my definition of an org chart.

Ezra McCarthy

No, it is really good and I like how you said to attach the deliverables. And I think I agree with you. What you said is a lot of times we miss that. We may put the level, put the name, but if we are not articulating, clearly laying down, okay, this is what needs to be done, and then maybe this needs to be producing X for you to be quote and quote profitable in your role. I think that is really missed a lot of times.

And then busy work can happen and then we wonder why we are not making any money. That is not a good place.

In the trades, lawn landscaping, I have heard people say, oh, I wanted to get a hardscape and there is so much money. And then I have talked to business owners, they are like, oh man, I cannot make any money in hardscapes. Well, one, you can, obviously. But if they are not tracking it right, if they do not have their numbers dialed in, then obviously you can lose your shirt on either end of the spectrum.

Benji Carson

Every business is hard, Ezra, and the grass is always greener. Every plumber wishes they were an electrician, every electrician wishes they were a builder, every builder wishes they were a roofer and the whole thing goes around. We have a tendency to desire what we do not have and the reality is they all suck and they all rock. It just depends on your perspective.

I think if you have listeners who think if only I did this, I would be making more money, you are an idiot. I am sorry to be blunt. You have a very, very bad mindset. Are there businesses that suit your strengths better than others? Yeah, and if you are paying attention, you can sort of navigate yourself towards businesses, or even within an industry, you can design your business in such a way that it plays to your strengths, but they are all hard.

Ezra McCarthy

Oh, and I have an unnamed customer that went through a rough two, three months, team members, et cetera. And he told me, I have not seen his P and L, but he said he lost a hundred thousand dollars in a couple of months, spring rush. And so he was like, oh, I want to start an HVAC business. Can you design a website for me?

And I am like, well, I can, but I really tried to tell him, I do not think you should. If you think getting a lawn maintenance contractor or team members is hard, think about a skilled HVAC tech. It can go south so fast.

And it is easy to fall into that trap of thinking, okay, like you said, this other industry or whatever, they are going to be better. And we just do not know the problems yet. It may look better, but it probably is not.

So if you had to pick one discipline that you would say most business owners kind of underestimate the value of, would you say it is finance, leadership, marketing, operations, or maybe just a mix of all of them?

Benji Carson

I think it is marketing and finance. I am a believer that the two things that you can never take your eye off completely as an owner, there is a lot that you can delegate and hire for, and there are certain parts of your business that you can step out of entirely and get a quarterly update and tend to it passively.

The two that I do not think that you ever can or should use would be marketing, because that is the very tippy top of the whole system, meaning it is the most upstream. The lead flow that comes through your website, the names and phone numbers that pass through the contact us form on your website is the most upstream point of the system. And if the tap gets turned off there, pretty quickly the whole thing shrivels and dies.

So that is the first. And then the second is finance. And it is for the same reason, but inversed. Finance is almost the end of the game. That is where you start to see if all that work and all those steps from the lead reached out to us.

We called them, we booked an estimate, we did the estimate, we gave them a proposal, they booked the proposal, we put it in the schedule, we scheduled some workers, the workers went and did the work, we performed the work, we did the quality control, we got paid, and so on and so forth. At the very end, if you do not have your own quality control system, which is in a way kind of what finance does, it tells you if this thing is working or not, it tells you if you are doing a good job or not, you will also go out of business.

So it seems obvious when it is explained that way, but I think it is good to just underscore that point. The two things that I think you always have more to learn about and you should always keep investing in and you should never take your eye off entirely, it does not mean you cannot hire a great controller and a CFO to do the core function for you. It does not mean you cannot hire a CMO and build a marketing team in-house. You should do those things, but you are still always going to keep very close tabs on the reports and the data that comes out of those two core functions in your business.

So those would be the two that I think are the most important. But that is my opinion. Someone else might see it totally differently.

Ezra McCarthy

No, I think that is good. And then I would add to the finance part, make sure you are getting monthly reports from your accountant. Because I was talking to people and they do not have one. Unless you are doing like $100,000. And even then, does it make sense to wait till the end of the year, digging in the shoebox? You are just cruising for a bruising.

You are not going to grow very well or fast. It is going to be a mess.

Benji Carson

Yup, well said.

Ezra McCarthy

So kind of pivoting here, you joined Mark Bradley and the Leanscaper organization. I know Mark. I am not sure how much he is still involved with LMN, but obviously Mark came out of LMN, obviously had a huge business there, I believe it was right outside Toronto. Can you tell us what is the Leanscaper, and what is the story? Why did Mark think it needful to start it? And then what problem is he trying to solve?

Benji Carson

So Leanscaper is the first AI powered operating system for the landscaping industry. And I would say, I think this is an important clarification. Mark is the founder and he has sold LMN and has begun this, but it should be said, and if he were sitting here in this interview, he would back this up 100%. It is not just Mark, it is all of us. This is a very, very dialed in and super, super locked in team here at the very beginning.

And so, what are we trying to do and what is the need that we are solving? Landscaping, like a lot of the blue collar economy, is very fractured and fragmented. It is underserved in terms of the quality of education and content and thought leadership and systems that are available for it. Now there are great solutions like LMN and Greenius and a whole host of other tools. It is not like there is nothing here for this industry, but there is not yet a strong industry specific, landscapers only, entrepreneurial ecosystem for this space yet.

And so what we are trying to build is an AI platform for the space. So think of, right now, think of ChatGPT, if it were trained on all of the most industry specific benchmarks and data and could answer very, very specific industry questions. That is what it is right now. What it will be in a number of months will be agentic workflows. What it will be in a few months after that will be wearable technology, like glasses that you can talk to and it can show you SOPs and you can order your material through.

When people say tech enabled, I think that is just a buzzword, but I am talking about a future that is not very long from now where a crew lead can ask for their glasses, hey, I forgot the step on how to build this koi pond. Can you bring up the SOP? And the glasses will go, sure. Do you want the video version or do you want the written version? And he will go, I want the written version. And the glasses will go, cool, what are you stuck on? And the crew leader will go, I am stuck on this, and describe the problem. They will go, okay, great. It sounds like what you need is X, Y, Z. Here are the steps to complete this project.

And then the glasses will go, do you need some more materials for tomorrow? Because it looks like you are kind of running low and you have not ordered in a couple of days. Would you like me to call the vendor? And you will say, yeah, I would actually. We need more of X, Y and Z. Can you have it here tomorrow? And the glasses will make the phone call and they will come back a couple of minutes later with a notification saying that the vendor is out. I have tried another two. Here is how we can get the materials you need by tomorrow.

That sounds a little bit outlandish, but I think that when you are as close to the technology as we are blessed to be, that future I am describing is right around the corner, very, very soon. And so that is what we want to build. Wrapped around that, we want a really, really powerful and tightly knit community of forward thinking, systems thinking, values aligned landscapers who want to change the industry together.

So part of it is there is a technology platform in the middle and there are going to be various ways to interact with that. There are going to be a whole bunch of different features and ways that it adds value to your business. But more importantly is the people part of it around that we want to have.

We have huge events, we have a really vibrant online community. We are growing a big following through our podcasts and our YouTube and our various channels. And so this is part product, part movement, but that is what we are trying to solve. We think that this industry deserves better. We think that the technology is here to do that, and we want to be the people to bring it to the space. So that being long winded, that is kind of the quick pitch on Leanscaper.

Ezra McCarthy

I am curious, honing in on one thing you said, has he tried implementing? I know there are some glasses. I am curious how developed are those? Has he tried to mess with any or has the team messed with those yet?

Benji Carson

Yes, glasses are. The actual hardware?

Ezra McCarthy

How advanced are they with stuff like you were just saying? Yeah.

Benji Carson

Well, you can order the glasses right now. They are made by Meta, they are made by Ray-Ban, they are made by Oakley. We are not a hardware company.

Ezra McCarthy

Oh sure, right, right.

Benji Carson

We will run our platform. People think.

Ezra McCarthy

Reintegration.

Benji Carson

Right. So right now you use LMN through your phone or through your computer, or you use Leanscaper through your phone or your computer. You could think of glasses as just another device type that this stuff will basically run through. Does that make sense?

Ezra McCarthy

Makes sense.

Benji Carson

So we are not actually building prototypes for glasses.

Ezra McCarthy

More software.

Benji Carson

Exactly, yeah.

Ezra McCarthy

So obviously I think all of us get this for landscaping and the Leanscaper, but could you define what made the team and Mark choose the term Leanscaper? That is kind of a different term. So why did you guys focus on that word lean?

Benji Carson

Yeah, so at the core is Leanscaper OS, the Leanscaper operating system. And the Leanscaper operating system is the way we believe you should run your landscaping business. There are four pillars, finance, people, customer, operation. And at the center, you could think of it like a wheel, at the center is your mission, vision and values. So maybe we call it a five part framework. There are systems and processes and frameworks for every single one of those pillars that we have developed and we teach to our members in our accelerator program.

It is baked right into the software. So when you actually use Leanscaper AI, and maybe you can include a link, people can go and use our product for free, leanscaper.ai. You can go and create an account in a second. All of that framework, all of that operating system is baked right into the software. When we say it is an AI powered operating system, that is what we mean.

Why the name lean is because this whole operating system is based on lean principles, on lean thinking. If you guys are familiar with the Toyota production system, lean manufacturing.

Ezra McCarthy

Just give a brief overview. I have heard of it some, but I will be shocked if the listeners have much.

Benji Carson

Okay, so lean is a business philosophy would be the best way to describe it. And the philosophy centers on some really core ideas like eliminating waste, continuous improvement, creating flow, enabling people.

Where lean thinking, and if somebody just searched lean thinking, you would get a really good description of it, better than what I can give you right now, but I will give you the CliffsNotes.

When World War II ended in Japan, the country of Japan was basically decimated from a war and then two nuclear bombs. They are trying to rebuild their country and they are trying to sell their cars on an extremely competitive international market and they are competing against the big dogs like Ford in the States. They have no cash, they have limited resources, they are a deflated country, they need to figure out how to compete on a global stage and there are some pretty big dogs in the arena.

And these two people at the Toyota plant named Taiichi Ohno and then the other guy’s name is escaping me right now. Two really, really brilliant manufacturing minds, come up with this lean philosophy and they focus on eliminating waste, designing a production line that does not have excess inventory. It does not have overproduction, it has fewer defects, the entire thing flows very, very mechanically.

In the late 1940s, early 50s, this was a pretty profound idea. Now it has become so well versed in the manufacturing space that you would not even think anything of it. You look at a Tesla factory line and the humans are working here and the robots are working here and everything moves through so quickly. It maximizes throughput. There is a whole bunch of lean thinking baked into that assembly line.

Where it is missing, we think, is in the trades. So we think that lean, it is time for lean thinking to be brought to the landscaping industry, which in many ways is a lot more challenging than a manufacturing setup because you are on different sites, you do not have a roof over your head, you are out there in the elements, you are working with different customers and different specs and different designs all the time.

A factory makes one or two car types. So there is actually quite a bit more about landscaping that makes it more challenging and actually more ready for lean thinking. And so we have designed an operating system with lean thinking embedded, woven into the very DNA. And we call that Leanscaper because when you implement it, your business will be lean.

Ezra McCarthy

Yes, it is really good. Have you read the book by Atul Gawande, The Checklist Manifesto?

Benji Carson

I have not, but I know about it and I write a lot of checklists. So I am not saying I cannot cheat and say I have read it. I feel like I get the gist of it.

Ezra McCarthy

Oh no, you do not. You have to read this, Benji. This book is amazing. So one of the examples is that Atul Gawande is a doctor, I think he is an American doctor. And he talked about, in World War II, I believe it was the B 17 or one of those early big bombers that they made.

The US Army was doing a demonstration. A couple different manufacturers were bringing in their models and the US Army was trying to figure out, okay, what do we put I do not know how much money, they were obviously just pouring big money into airplanes. So they got these manufacturers together and one of these, I think it was a B 17, one of these huge four engine bombers, the first couple trial runs, literally these experienced, very intelligent pilots crashed it. And these are not rookies right out of the training school. And they were going to lose the contract with Boeing.

And this is when they came up with a pre-flight checklist. And this is where they came up with airline checklists. And he talked about in hospitals when they introduced checklists, something as simple as just simple things, how it drastically decreased mortality rates, even in, and I mean this with all respect, dirt poor hospitals in third world countries that do not have the opportunity for the resources that we have in the United States and Canada.

And he talked about checklists. Now you say, okay, Ezra, whatever, go on, landscaper, do we need checklists? Yes. Now maybe a little differently, but anyway, it is a great book. I highly recommend you read it. And for those listening in, audio, get that, Atul Gawande, Checklist Manifesto. But that reminded me of lean.

Benji Carson

I would take it one further. I would take it one further. Go to leanscaper.ai and ask it to build you any checklist in your business. Tell it a little bit about your company and it is going to build you the best checklist you have ever seen in four seconds. It will blow your mind.

Ezra McCarthy

I am not as familiar. Obviously I know what Leanscaper is, but how do you use checklists, now that I am on my soapbox here about checklists? How do you use it within your program, maybe that is not the right way to put it, but your frameworks that you guys use?

Benji Carson

One of the core principles of lean thinking are what they call standard operating procedures, which is just a fancy word for checklists. Honestly, it is. So standard, you want to standardize the process. Operating procedure is just the steps involved. We would say that any part of your business that gets repeated with any regularity at all needs to have an SOP built for it.

In any given company, I can ballpark it. There are probably between 100 and 150 SOPs needed for a landscaping business. And those SOPs are going to describe the steps involved from how to design, how to do an estimate, how to prepare a budget, how to set up a crew on a job on the first day, how to close out a crew on a job when you finish, and how to do certain finance things. Every single part of your business one day needs to have an SOP for it.

How that fits in is we have created a really cool tool. One of the many, many things it can do is help you build much better checklists for your business because it is conversational AI. So when you say, can you build me a checklist for quality control, it is going to say, yeah, sure, let me ask you a couple questions about how your business works. And it is going to ask you the exact right questions to extract the exact right information that it needs to build you a checklist. And you are going to look at it and go, that is pretty good.

That is 99% accurate. I might add this or subtract that, but I have got an SOP that I did in five minutes and I am going to now take this to my crew and see if they like it. I want to make sure that they agree with it. One of the things that is really important when you are building SOPs is that it is an agreed upon way to do the right thing. If it is just your idea of a checklist, nobody follows it. And anyone who has tried to implement a checklist and has been frustrated with nobody giving a shit.

The reason that is, is because they were not involved with the making of it in the first place. And so there is a level of consensus building that you need to do to get the team aligned and excited and agreeing that that is indeed the right way of doing it.

But to answer your question, checklists or SOPs are involved at almost every layer of the Leanscaper operating system.

Ezra McCarthy

I think someone just choked on their coffee when they heard you say 100 to 150 in their landscaping business.

Benji Carson

It is not that many.

Ezra McCarthy

I could not agree more.

Benji Carson

It is really not that many. People make this way harder than they think. Literally start with a checklist. Do it on your phone. You make a checklist when you go to the grocery store. I do not know why you cannot make a checklist for one time to save your crew hundreds of hours over the next year or two.

I think honestly, when it comes to system building and people getting over, I think people make this a lot harder on themselves and they think it needs to be fancier or more special. There is very little in your business that is so complex that it cannot fit on one page.

Ezra McCarthy

And I will add into this.

Benji Carson

Honestly, truly there is not. There might be a couple things that are a little bit more nuanced, but almost everything you could make a one pager out of and that is going to get 95% of the information out there into the world, out there into the hands of your crews so that fewer mistakes get made. And when they do, they have a pathway to go back to and say, where did we go wrong on this checklist? Oh, the reason we crashed the plane is because we did not close the door or whatever.

Ezra McCarthy

Do not let Benji pilot you. He will not close the door.

And I do not know if there is a checklist thing or SOP thing there on Leanscaper.

Benji Carson

I am a big checklist guy also.

Ezra McCarthy

But I think it’s really simple. It is called Trello. Super cheap. You can build it. Literally, you can explain how to use it in 10 minutes. Anyone that understands English can get it. And it is really good to make repeatable checklists. It does not have to be complicated and it is really helpful.

Benji Carson

Trello is really good. I love Trello.

Ezra McCarthy

So to close out here, I know you have the Leanscaper podcast. You mentioned leanscaper.ai. If people are interested in hearing more about Leanscaper, perhaps the podcast you are doing, where is the best place to find you and Leanscaper?

Benji Carson

The Leanscaper podcast is on every platform every Tuesday. Find us anywhere. It is a really good subscribe. I produce and host it. We have amazing guests on. We are growing our audience really quickly right now through that, which is exciting.

Leanscaper.com, you can learn about the whole business and the movement we are creating. Leanscaper.ai, if you want to build a free account, we have a free product that will always be free. So it is not even a trial, you can just go and make one right now and start playing around with it.

Ask it some hard questions, try and break it if you want, really get specific with it and see what it comes up with. I think you will be really impressed. That is our digital footprint. @leanscaper on socials.

Ezra McCarthy

Thanks here today to Benji for taking time to come on and share some insights about the Leanscaper and hopefully you enjoyed this episode. If you did, be sure to hit that subscribe button and do not forget to leave a rating or review if you have not. I am sure you have already, but if you have not, be sure to do that and we will catch you on the next one.