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 most still do not), and the playbook for landing and delivering custom estate projects where the budget is "cost plus" and the materials take six months to arrive from Portugal.

In this episode:

• Cagwin's three secret weapons: field-level financial transparency, real leadership training, and 8 percent compounding growth instead of 15-then-0
• Why "we sell hours" is the most important sentence in commercial maintenance, and what most owners get wrong about it
• The contrarian truth on prospecting: stop chasing dog properties and start qualifying out the wrong customers
• The long lead time and cash flow trap that crushes contractors trying to break into high end residential

Tim's biggest takeaway is simple. Don't sell yourself short, do not paint yourself into a corner to win a job, and there is the right contractor for every customer (it just might not be you).

If you are running a maintenance company stuck at 5 percent margin, eyeing high end residential, or trying to build the next great landscape company on the West Coast, this one is required listening.

JW Group Website: https://www.jwhitegroup.com/ Justin LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/justin-white-%E2%98%85-35b7a210b/ Justin Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/justinwhiteceo/ Justins Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@justinwhiteceo K&D Website: https://kndlandscaping.com/ K&D Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/kanddlandscaping/ Disruptors Community: https://www.skool.com/disruptors Disruptors Advantage Newsletter: https://disruptors-advantage.beehiiv.com/

On this Weekly Update of Trades Talk, Justin White unpacks Q3 planning at K&D, teases the K&D Operating System for the first time publicly, and announces he is stepping back from day to day so he can lead the next chapter as a true CEO.

Justin walks through the 90 day planning cadence that has now run 42 quarters without a miss, the hub and spoke design of the KD OS that sits between Aspire, QuickBooks, Predictive Index, Bloom, and Slack, and the non-negotiable vision that anchors it all: a $100,000 minimum wage by 2035.

In this episode, we cover:

• The 42-quarter planning cadence, why departmental sessions must follow the leadership session, and how alignment breaks the moment you skip a level
• The K&D OS reveal: a bespoke intelligence layer with a user experience that adapts to each teammate's Predictive Index profile
• Building an agentic community inside K&D: EST agents for career pathing, PI behavioral agents, and irrigation audit agents that generate proposals from Aspire data
• Justin's sabbatical, John stepping in as de facto CEO, Kendel White staying on as President, and the 2028 vision (Santa Barbara to Santa Clara, doubled revenue, dominant market position)
• The AI market outlook: Anthropic at a $47B run rate, a potential $2 to $3 trillion IPO, and Fable 5's usage credits kicking in July 13

Justin's biggest takeaway is simple. The billion dollar enterprise value, the IPO, the equity for employees, those are hopes. The $100,000 minimum wage by 2035 is the non-negotiable, and every operating system, every agent, every planning cadence is built to protect it.

If you are a trades operator thinking about how to actually institutionalize AI, planning cadence, or a founder step-back without losing the plot, this one is your playbook.

Weekly Updates are powered by Kress!

JW Group Website / Justin LinkedIn / Justin Instagram / Justins Youtube K&D Website / K&D Instagram Disruptors Community Disruptors Advantage Newsletter

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 end of 2024, a $650K loss in Q1 2025, and the climb back to a 3-5% net margin on $25M today. Ben walks through the exact prescription to fix it.

In this episode:

• Why "profititis" (revenue going up while profit goes flat or down) is the real diagnosis behind most trades businesses
• Money Mondays, the simple 90-minute weekly habit that compounds profitability faster than any sales push
• Contribution margin vs gross profit, and why most trades PLs are quietly hiding the real number
• The 50-20 Rule: cut half of your worst 20 percent of services in the next 30 days

Ben's biggest takeaway is simple. You cannot sell your way out of a profit problem. Profitability comes from intentional decisions on your calendar, not from more revenue.

If you are a trades CEO running on 0-5 percent net margin, working harder every year, and wondering why the money is not showing up, this one is a wake-up call and a playbook in the same hour.

JW Group Website: https://www.jwhitegroup.com/ Justin LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/justin-white-%E2%98%85-35b7a210b/ Justin Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/justinwhiteceo/ Justins Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@justinwhiteceo Ben LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/benhansen/ Profit Doctor: https://profitdoctor.com/ https://www.linkedin.com/in/benhansen https://www.instagram.com/profitdoctorben/ https://www.youtube.com/@profitdoctorben K&D Website: https://kndlandscaping.com/ K&D Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/kanddlandscaping/ Disruptors Community: https://www.skool.com/disruptors Disruptors Advantage Newsletter: https://disruptors-advantage.beehiiv.com/

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.

In this episode, we cover:

• The K&D AI operating system: normalized database, MCPs, and Justin's "Reggie" Claude agent
• Why a CFO skill that runs three recursive QA loops is replacing the CFO hire (and the Instagram hate that followed)
• Dan Martell's three levels of AI (assistant, automation, agent team) and where almost no one lives
• The AI guru warning: why a $250K retainer firm cannot understand your workflow in a day

Two assignments for the week: run a 10 to 20 question self-interview with AI on a problem you cannot solve, and build your first Claude Cowork automated task (a daily brief is a great starting point).

If you are a trades CEO under board pressure to ship AI ROI, a tech-curious operator just getting started, or anyone who has burned cash on an AI consultant and gotten nothing, this episode is the playbook.

Weekly Updates are powered by Kress!

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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 RFP responses, deep research on M&A activity in our industry (223 confirmed transactions and counting), and training it to run legacy software workflows so your team stops clicking buttons and starts reviewing drafts. I also share how it did a complete takeoff on a residential design project and priced it within a few points of a job we already won.

Second, Bill Campbell. The Trillion Dollar Coach who worked with Steve Jobs and Eric Schmidt. I built a Claude project trained on his coaching style and I've been talking to it almost every day. It pushes back. It gets to the core issue. It got me frustrated, which is exactly what a good coach should do. Link below so you can use it or build your own.

Third, burnout. We're 182 days into the year and a lot of you are feeling it. Heavy mornings. Emails you keep putting off. Sunday night dread. I name what burnout actually looks like and give you three moves: stop looking to your business as your only source of fulfillment, cancel the one meeting you're dreading most, and audit the people draining your energy. One person can derail your entire year. Don't let them.

Burnout is not a weakness. Talk about it. Deal with it. Then get back to work.

Weekly Updates are powered by Kress! Go demo the self propelled 21 inch mower.

Bill Campbell Coach Project:

JW Group Website / Justin LinkedIn Disruptors Community Disruptors Advantage Newsletter

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 an $8M custom design build division and the operating system underneath it
• Why outsourcing design to Your Haven actually works when you know what good looks like (WGLL)
• Inside K&D's L10 meeting: good news, headlines, to-dos, KPIs, rocks, issue processing
• Why every K&D hire fights the meetings at first, then refuses to give them up

Jeremy's trade secret is simple. Trust your team to do the work and stop getting in their way. Delegation is not about taking things off your plate, it is about giving your team the chance to win at what they do best.

If you are running a design build division, leading a high performing team, or trying to figure out how to actually delegate without losing control, this one is required listening.

JW Group Website: https://www.jwhitegroup.com/ Justin LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/justin-white-%E2%98%85-35b7a210b/ Justin Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/justinwhiteceo/ Justins Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@justinwhiteceo K&D Website: https://kndlandscaping.com/ K&D Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/kanddlandscaping/ Disruptors Community: https://www.skool.com/disruptors Disruptors Advantage Newsletter: https://disruptors-advantage.beehiiv.com/

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 a Team. And the calendar audit that was Justin's biggest aha of the week: 14 days, 15 minute blocks, rate your energy, then apply the four Ds.

From there he digs into the issue squeezing landscapers right now. Profitability compression in an inflationary boom. Two operators, different sizes, same problem. Justin makes the case that the bottleneck is almost always at the top of the bottle, why hiring your heroes beats defaulting to a consultant, and how a simple system like EOS and a Level 10 meeting can break a leader's ceiling.

Brought to you by Kress. Fully electric, now fully autonomous, deploying at scale at K&D. Want a demo or an intro to the right person in your market? Email justin@jwhitegroup.com and Justin will connect you directly.

Upcoming events: Lawn & Landscape Technology Conference, July 22 to 24: Lawn and Landscape Tech Conference Sign Up NALP Elevate, Tampa, November 8 to 11, featuring an AI experience for executives hosted by Justin: https://www.landscapeprofessionals.org/Elevate

See you next week, right here on the Weekly Update. Connect with Justin: LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/justin-white-%E2%98%85-35b7a210b/ Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/justinwhiteceo

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 the rest of the US economy, and what that gap actually unlocks
• What it took to raise the largest software Series A in construction history (no pitch deck, no data room, fully oversubscribed)
• Why Bobyard builds a custom AI model for every trade, from landscaping to electrical conduit routing to MEP
• The YSD hiring philosophy doubling revenue every quarter, and the bonus structure that turns recruiters into operators

Michael's takeaway is simple. AI models are middle to middle, humans are end to end. Your company is running optimally when everybody is only doing the things that only they can do.

If you are running a trades business, evaluating AI tools, or trying to understand where pre-construction software is actually going, this one is required listening.

JW Group Website: https://www.jwhitegroup.com/ Justin LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/justin-white-%E2%98%85-35b7a210b/ Justin Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/justinwhiteceo/ Justins Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@justinwhiteceo Michael LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/michael-ding-933185189 Bobyard Website: https://www.bobyard.com/ K&D Website: https://kndlandscaping.com/ K&D Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/kanddlandscaping/ Disruptors Community: https://www.skool.com/disruptors Disruptors Advantage Newsletter: https://disruptors-advantage.beehiiv.com/ 5th Annual K&D Water Summit: https://www.eventzilla.net/e/5th-annual-central-coast-water-summit-2138673574 Leanscaper: https://www.jwhitegroup.com/leanscaper