Sign Kentucky Banking RFP Myself

Industry sign banking kentucky rfp myself

hello everyone this is joe blanken with automating success show and this is julia langton and this is george and katie i'll let you guys completely introduce yourself first and last name because i don't like to have the risk of butchering anything but uh uh in the meantime before before you guys fully introduce yourself we like to have people pick a song on uh this podcast and uh i want you guys to explain the song you picked and why you picked it okay so my name is dr george holmes i'm ceo of hire henry we provide commercial landscapers with heavy-duty robotic lawn mowers so we're going to talk a little bit about what our background is throughout the podcast of course but a lot of background and developing research robotics autonomous robots decided to get into the landscaping industry did a lot of mowing and cutting in my younger days with my grandfather so my name is katie moreno bonnet i'm actually from colombia south america um i'm a mechanical engineer and i'm the ceo of hive henry jurors explain a little bit what we're doing and i've been part of it for a while now so yeah and i think with regard to the question about the song uh we picked this song due to the current circumstances you know pandemic socially everywhere i think everything is going a little bit chaotic and and we have a role saying my aunt says all the time she told me growing up um katie everything in life have a solution except that and this song really reminds me of that like don't worry everything will be fine at the end of the day as far as things go so it's pretty interesting that's a great attitude to have i think we are completely aligned in that julia and i feel the same way you know there's a lot of chaos going on but one thing that we know is you know time seems to heal all if you look at it like that and you know you you just you got to move on and take a look at past mistakes and make a better future that's the way i look at life you know so so yeah so so um so we're you know we're going to talk a lot about where we're at currently but we always like to learn about the younger uh the younger ourselves right so whichever one of you guys wants to start first with uh the younger version of you and how you got here what inspired you to be sitting in the chairs across on this beautiful zoom call podcast we have you know um let's give us a general background that gets us to present day okay so in high school i actually went to two high schools one for academics and a different vocational school i studied auto mechanics and really fell in love with working on honda cars and doing a lot of maintenance and repairs on those and my goal was to graduate from high school and go to a post-secondary vocational school where i could then become like a master mechanic and work for honda repairing their cars and my grandma said well why don't you consider engineering if you go into engineering you can design cars and applied for missouri s t which is in raleigh missouri and got into the mechanical engineering program and i got my dream job joe i got a job working for honda up in columbus ohio where they produce all the honda crvs and honda accords and i got in there i learned a lot especially about robotics they use a lot of robotics on the manufacturing line but came back to missouri s t and decided i wanted to get into something different and i was really enjoying this idea of robotics so um started looking at different research opportunities in research robotics and got an opportunity to do some research and fell in love with the field and i thought back to my younger days when i used to cut grass with my grandfather and uh thought about the the drudgery involved with cutting the grass and said this could be a perfect application for robotics yeah yeah i'm so real um i think my upbringing was different than yours actually um i went to high school par like all my life in colombia uh in colombia we only have 11 years of high school like all the way to school to end and i was about to enter my last year and i got offered a scholarship to play basketball in a high school down in wichita kansas um so i went there and started playing basketball and stuff the next two years there i finished my high school i graduated and it was time to move on i actually wanted to be in the air force in colombian air force of course i want to be a pilot so i mean i came to the us and i like it so i was like well i cannot be part of the u.s air force since i'm not from here so i decided to go to college i got an offer to play basketball again for a juco up in kansas city i just started playing studying aerospace engineering because my dream was to be a pilot so i was like close enough i designed the art place i cannot fly them but i can design them i played two years there and then i uh i found a school down in a little town called rolla missouri to play basketball and then they can pay me and they had my major that was the other complication finding our spacey dinner so finally i got here and uh it didn't last more than a year after i changed to mechanical engineering and i met george actually and he was like part of the move because he showed me what was robotics and all these other cool stuff i actually did research with him period to that and then i was like yeah forget about aerospace i'm going to mechanical which is pretty cool so here we are and here i'm sitting down now i played four years of college basketball and now i'm done with that so first of all you two are both very impressive people first you said you went to two high schools i i i i've never heard such a thing before so that's kind of crazy in itself and and and then to hear how you ended up in the united states through basketball with the scholarships i mean that's like that that's just that's a dream in itself for for so many people so um i'm quite impressed so hats off to both of you so so what was it that made you realize uh you know that said okay forget the aerospace like thing and i'm going to get into mechanical engineering explain explain what how george inspired you to say changing it all because because that's the way i see it from this side what happened you know it was it wasn't he was little said all about it i was aerospace and i applied actually for research i didn't got accepted into it and so i already met yours we were friends already and i told him about it like i was interested into like research and doing stuff and by accident that semester just pure accident i took a programming class uh to program stuff actually that was for computer science majors it wasn't for me it was a pure mistake i just pushed through the situation but i was sure and completely that as soon as i finished the semester i would have never seen this again i hate i hate it with the passion i hated it so i told george that i was interested in research that i was looking this and that and he said oh okay he helped me sending some emails to some professors and stuff then one day i'm not kidding you he texted me it was not the best day to be honest but he saved the day that they saying katie i have a an idea for you can you come tomorrow to my office i was like i get it but what he can say through a lot of personal problems at that moment and so i went the next day i was like i have nothing to lose it was fine last week i want to phrase that it was finals week yeah so it was rough it was it wasn't the best moment to meet with him and he said katie i have this project he make it sounds super simple super easy like i i've got this research for you if you're interested and as soon as i saw it i was like this is for a programmer this is for a person that knows how to code i am not the best i'm not suited for this i cannot do it and i keep like pushing him like you need to find somebody better not me so he was like no i think he'll be fine he's super simple super easy so he just give me one like you make it sound super simple one little work there and i was like okay whatever so i had to transfer some programming language and stuff um so after a week i come back to him and i tell him hey george i'm sorry for the time they took me but here goes here is the project here i give him back the project that he requested it was all programming nothing to do with aerospace nothing to do with nothing that i have learned more than that one mistake of class i took so he was like whoa i didn't expect you to finish this this was the project for the whole summer for the upcoming summer i was like oh i'm sorry my bad i really didn't know that that was the case to be so then he just started giving me more and i ended up doing quite a lot of research that summer we actually uh connected some cameras high-speed cameras actually that they wants cameras that they use for 2k like nba 2k i made them and all of those video games i programmed those cameras and collect all the data for position data that george later on use into his usb right yeah so i'll just add a little bit to that real quick i had started my phd program already and when katie told me about some of her interests and research i talked to my advisor and i said let's try to call car about a project that can be good and give some good experience here both for me from like high level management type perspective and like i knew katie would figure it out and then she could teach me so i felt like i could learn two things at once and like she said we gave her the project and she had it figured out within a week mind you it's finals week she had basketball she had all this stuff going on she had it figured out within a week and i was highly impressed so that's when we said okay let's find more projects let's keep working and then we started talking about the landscaping industry and we ended up getting a grant through the national science foundation which i know we're gonna talk about in a bit yeah so then after that after doing all that summer all the research into mechanical engineering and stuff uh and robotics i was like this doesn't sound that bad and george make one question i will never forget he asked me one day as we were walking and talking about the project he said katie do you like aerospace engineering or you like the name of it so as i walk away i'm like no i like i like airplanes and stuff i answer back to him like this is my thing he was like mainly one airplane yeah he really he really called so i didn't say nothing but i was like you know i'm letting go and throughout the whole summer and that semester i enter into one more semester of fire space i keep thinking about that question in the back of my mind and then i was like this is it i need to go mechanical this is not for me well george good job bringing her over to this side you know i i i hear no talk i think it's you're gonna you're gonna do a lot of great things for our industry and it's pretty exciting i i i think uh as you know so i'm 41 years old so i'm not i don't i don't consider himself an old guy yet but i'm not i'm not young like you guys anymore it's it's you know our industry's in such a need for like an evolution um and a retrofit and it's people like you guys that are doing it um and it's kind of you know it's going to take people like myself to get out of their old habits and old ways and invest in the things you guys are working on and i just think we're going to have a completely different industry in the next decade and it's super exciting absolutely yeah so so um you know you guys if you've kind of you brought up this research study and and in the grant so the first thing i wanted to kind of unravel a little bit is you know how did how did the opportunity or the grant to do the study even come up you know how i think a lot of our listeners would want to know even how that that happens in the first place and then and then from there we'll just get right into then you know once you unwrap that a little like uh just get us right into the study and how that process was and um your guys's findings yeah sure so before katie was even in roller in fact i had already started researching landscaping through a program through my university where they gave me an opportunity to have some some small funds to travel around the state of missouri reached out to commercial landscaping companies reached out to universities high schools ground keepers to figure out how do you maintain properties and what are some of your biggest challenges well once katie and i met this was 2018 we saw that the national science foundation had a program program called i-corps and with i-corps you're able to submit a proposal for an industry that you want to study that you believe have a pressing problem and on the back end you have to have uh demonstrated that you have technology that can impact that industry we're given a lot of the work that have been done prior to developing robotic lawn mowers that we had done within our research lab through my phd program we drafted up a very competitive proposal and we were notified that we were accepted and a part of that program is the national science foundation gives groups like us funds roughly fifty thousand dollars give or take to travel all around the united states so we did just that we went to over seven states including our previous study added with this study we talked to over 300 plus landscaping organizations and we went to the gie we went to the gie maybe two or three years now to learn about what are the biggest problems and and what are some areas where the industry could be improved we got to network and learn from a variety of really cool folks so six major outcomes that popped out from our study and as we're going through this joe and julia i'll mention that um the listeners can go to our website and they can follow along with what these main points are if you go to www.hirehenry.us and down at the bottom it says landscaping study if you click on that you can see all the results for those studies but it's six main points i guess katie can kind of kick us off with the first main point real quick before we kick it off just repeat it one more time for the for the listeners hirehenry.us awesome website where you can follow along with those main points okay all right sorry take it away take it away yeah it's just important i want people to be able to get to that study i think it's i honestly i just have to say like when i talk to you for the first time i think it's it's a it's a great piece for people to actually you know there's a lot of naysayers i i just wanted to say real quick saying there is no problem in the industry and and we're fine and uh and we're not you know um and i so i think it's it's awesome the work you guys did just with that alone not to mention what the other things you're doing that we're going to get into so anyways go ahead now no no i was going to say do you guys have any questions before about it like all that you're stuck before getting to these points before we go there no not unless you want to add anything else i i think he was very articulate yeah it's straight out i mean this is like podcast heaven right here you know so yeah so basically the first main point and i want to recall this was we found out that the unpredictable and unreliable um nature of the workforce like people show up sometimes and sometimes not well we can go in dips into that more later on but at the same time we found out that there is unpredictable solutions to it right now like the current solutions are unpredictable too so already landscaping is unpredictable with the fact that if it rains you cannot cut and then you're adding other more unpredictable things into it that is just pretty chaotic and so one of the solutions that is being proposed out there is the h2b visa program uh i don't know if i know a lot of people are aware of this program is basically they bring people to the us for from other countries for a season and then they come back they go back to their countries after the work is done for that season but it is so unpredictable for very reasons first is a lottery system so if you go before you used to be first come first serve now it is a lottery system that randomly they pick if they give you the amount that you want or if they not so already that's super unpredictable so if you invest your mo ey in there you might get the worker you might not so if you are planning to have 10 workers for this season for this upcoming season and all of them are h2b you might get them you might not but you are already planning on getting work done with those 10 people that you are planning to have so it's unpredictable in that that nature it is a lot of politics and regulations around it like it depends on who is in in charge what law they want to come around it and so it makes it more chaotic as we go on uh but not only this program is not only for landscaping it's primarily given for landscapers but it also supplements like fishing like for maids like for any other industry are also taking a advantage of that h2b program so only 49 out of the total amount of pieces that are given are only for landscaping on 49 so it's not that many for to solve the real problem problem the landscape we have right now so uh roughly there is given 66 000 visas a year but they are breakdown into two seasons 33 000 for the first season and then 33 000 for the second season so in reality only 33 000 can be a knowledge for landscaping because the season start they the worker can come to the us april 1st until september 30 which is perfectly what landscaping season is especially in states like missouri illinois and all around this area but the only half is more for october first to march first unless you're doing more than just mowing and landscaping outdoors and you're doing the snowing then it will be feasible for you that time but the other one is the one that you want to apply so it's pretty competitive to get in a it costs a lot of money to get there roughly just to for one worker to bring it here to the u.s and do all the paperwork by yourself without hiring lawyers which normally you need is a between at a 1500 to 3 000 just for one word and normally you don't want to just bring homework but more than that so it can come up to even ten thousand dollars just for one worker to come and still landscapers are willing to do these to bring people because they cannot find people enough and i mean also another thing that we have found out throughout all these studies that we did is that a lot of landscapers we said well right now when we started doing it um they were like well right now the unemployment rates are so low that we cannot find people and i was like yeah that completely makes sense nobody wants to do such a hard work uh i don't blame them and then as kobe hit and we still talk with landscaping we still ask them how their season went they still say even though unemployment rates went up high like ever before we still cannot find the workers so we find out that a lot of people our generation prefer to be under ac conditions working at a wendy's i mean that is not seasonal in nature that is not that working that high in your body even if they get paid less at a wendy's at a mcdonald's then a landscaper can't even pay you double than that but still people our generation will not take it so i think that brings him to the next point that george will touch into yeah yeah i think i mean a lot of landscapers that we've talked to they know that to be a fact the challenges with the h2b program folks that have considered the program will participate in the program they know the challenges and naop and a lot of other folks are doing a lot of hard work to try to fix the challenges with the h2b program but you know it's a million workers in the landscaping industry if you have 33 000 that are coming in through the h2b program that's not going to be enough right so when we look and that's part of what makes what we study so special we talked to folks in our generation and we tried to sell them on the idea of joining the landscaping industry especially since we had met so many companies that were looking for workers said hey here's an opportunity and with to katie's point some of the challenges that popped out of course is depending on the job position but the physical demand of the work the severe heat we all know what what landscaping entails especially if you're working 10 hours a day out in the sun so we were surprised by how many folks were like okay yeah i'll take a look at the landscaping industry it sounds interesting but once we get into kind of the details of what the work entails a lot of people struggle at that point and i don't know julie maybe you can even you can even comment on this because i know you're studying business right yeah business management business management yeah a lot of the folks that we talk to they're interested in owning their own business right they want to have this feeling of of being the boss if you will and when they look at a position in landscaping they don't want to um work under someone doing a task that they may deem as unrewarding so yeah i agree with that for sure i think a lot of people my age my generation even going with what katie was saying they don't want the hard work they want the ac i think everyone in my generation actually is that way i feel like i'm one of the outliers like i really don't care i just want like i would rather have a higher rate work harder but even just looking at everyone around me and business management is everyone i talk to at school like or i mean i guess yeah like we're all going to be in the same classes but any person i talk to i never really hear anyone say they're going for any other other degree like everyone does want that position of i want to you know i want to be in charge i don't want to take those roles like they don't want to be told what to do like you said those tasks yeah i agree with that for sure well and what we're finding in the story i always tell is our stepsons they they work with us and and they're uh ones one's a real install technician um you know because currently we're using the wyoming systems that you know about george and then the other one services the bots that we own but the thing that we found was if i would introduce them at a family gathering or the family says oh what are you doing for joe they'd be like i'm mowing grass this is earlier on okay i mean you could literally see how deflated they looked didn't make a difference what i was paying okay they were just deflated and the biggest thing that i found was when we would go to a family party after we got into the robotics if the family members because we got family all around the country asked them how they were doing there i'm a robotic lawyer i'm only technician that's awesome they're pulling out apps showing them stuff and you know that's important to say and i just want to say it it's not even to say like the younger kids or the younger generations non-common kids but the younger generation they don't want to do the hard work or they want to be in air conditioning it's not that they have grown up with technology so when i bring them to my current landscape situation here i shouldn't say current five year ago landscape situation and they see this zero turn lawnmower that needs grease and grass is blowing up in their face and they need hearing protection and then they realize like this guy's crazy he wants me you know he he made an eight-hour route but we hit traffic so he wants me to work 13 hours today i had a playstation party with all my buddies that started at 5. this is bs i don't want to do it that's what happens so if you put technology which is what they want to leave that the job for anyways to go use technology in their hands at work they don't feel like they're working that's an important thing to say you know you know generations 50 years ago dream job is different than this generation's dream job and you made a comment it's not even about pay sometimes it's about what they're actually doing you know so it's like you could take a job at walmart selling tvs for 10 bucks an hour and pass up the 16 or 18 an hour position with health insurance because at least you're talking about something you know about well i'll even add and then i'll let you guys keep going but i started when i started working for linkedin group i was just inputting bills and stuff into quickbooks so i was in the ac and i found myself kind of doing the same thing oh what do you do i just input bills whatever then i started fixing the robots oh what do you do oh i fix robots but really i'm still in the ac making the same pay but it's way cooler like you're saying to be like oh i actually fix technology i fix robots so i do agree with that if you add the word robot to anything you do it's cool people are interested you know what i'm saying they're like what wait wait what do you mean robotic lawnmower they and that makes anybody light up i mean both of you laughed when i said it i mean it's it's real i mean it's this is cutting edge stuff we're dealing with right now you know so anyways people already know our story you know it's a big fat back and forth because i agree and i'll challenge landscapers out there um you really want to think about when you give a position to to one of your workers what's the optics look like on their end like joe you were saying you know when they explain this at a party what is what does it sound like for them or is it a position where they're going to want to post it on their snapchat or their answer this is the generation where the word clout becomes very important they want to be able to floss if you will or kind of show off what they got going on so um you know and again a lot of people have the labor shortage and they are very aware that they have the labor shortage challenge but the second biggest thing that a lot of landscapers will mention is that i don't have a labor problem but i want to grow my business i want to increase my revenue and we say okay well what does that mean i said well i can sell work all day long but i don't have the people that are needed to fulfill that work well we said okay well if you don't have the people to fulfill the work then that really means you have a labor challenge and a lot of people don't think of it that way but even if you if you don't have an immediate labor challenge if you're trying to grow your business or you're trying to grow revenue and labor is the bottleneck particularly if it's daily maintenance then then it may center back around how do you alleviate that challenge we know the landscaping industry is extraordinarily fragmented the top 50 companies make roughly 15 of the revenue and an industry like that is wide open for a landscaping company that can leverage technology properly to grow their business so that's one thing that we're very excited about that's kind of the third point as we try to summarize this i'm sorry so i just want to add to it is uh you know you can talk about labor shortage but okay let's let's just say uh labor that is not a problem anymore and there's another million people now all of a sudden for some reason want to get a landscape you have to train those people you know in order to be scalable you still have to train that person to do it the the way the company does it because that's what the customer expects you know and people always bring up the fact that you know well yeah you're a service industry and i'm like yeah it's so you know we're i always have to tell my people like we're customer service industry you know because people the consumer expects a happy technician okay they expect the same cut every time they they want it to look the same they want you know what i'm saying so so you have to be able to duplicate a system and even using the temporary employee okay if you're lucky enough to get in the lottery just to exp you know expand on what you said and get that employee that the acquisition cost is 1500 up to 10 000 there's no guarantee that that person is going to do it the way you want it done and that customer might tell you that person you brought in get them off my site and or her off my site see what i mean with robotics the consumer gets it's that's something they can expect it's it's the same thing all the time so anyways absolutely no i totally agree i totally agree and you know as we're having this conversation with landscapers you know and they're trying to be consistent across the board and spend a lot of time and energy recruiting folks we asked them well what are the costs associated with having a worker and they would say okay well i pay them about 13 bucks an hour well that's that's true but what are the other hidden costs behind that how much time do you have your hr manager going out to recruit the folks how many how much time do you spend at hiring fairs and going to speak at high schools and what's the overhead associated with the given employee meaning how much time does it take for a manager to adjust routes if somebody doesn't show up for a given day of work or you know what's the overhead associated with your zero turn law more in general so my point is a lot of landscapers know their costs extremely well but there are a lot of landscapers that do not fully understand the complexity and the multi-dimensional nature of their cost meaning there's a lot behind just how much you're paying your worker per hour and of course there's a lot of good workshops and stuff like that that take place at gie to try to understand and flesh out some of those challenges yeah i've seen those roi calculators and stuff and i mean as a businessman myself i mean i always talk about like there's two problems in the landscape industry there's there's the person that used to work for an entrepreneur that got into landscaping just a business person that started a landscape company and they understand their numbers and then that person thinks doesn't understand that you know what that business owner is trying to get them to understand they say i'm gonna start my own thing that's where you start to run into the problems because that person can run a successful business with two three four trucks but once they start to try to scale and get larger the wheels fall off right and it's a kind of a cycle but but to go kind of off what you said you know even the manufacturers don't quite understand the environmental pressure which you guys brought up you know what happens when you have to reschedule a work day because it rained now you have to have people work on saturday and pay them overtime what happens when you're two to three days behind the schedule and you have to mow twice to get rid of the clumps or thatcher you have to bag more material and haul it back these are the on these are the unseen uh variables that that happen that those roi calculators don't even take into account respect i agree and we didn't know when we started off researching industry we didn't know how complex this is and all the different nuances that that arise so just learning about the the work that landscapers do is really impressive because it is a challenge and when you think about everything that a landscaper has to do and we take for example uh one specific task which is lawn mowing something that all four of us here are very interested in given that we're working with robotic lawn mowers we thought about okay well what does that task provide the landscaper we're spending so much time we're spending so much energy to get this task done what value does it bring to the landscaping company and in general it doesn't bring the value unfortunately it's not a differentiated activity it's not going to give you a competitive advantage we know it's repetitive we know it's hard to get folks that want to do the work so i mean they're doing it in manufacturing already they're doing it in so many farming so many different other industries offload the repetitive stuff and focus on the things that makes your landscaping company special your culture your brand your reputation your horticulture your irrigation i can go on for minutes all the things that make your landscaping company special but it's probably not cutting the grass yeah no i say all the time that grass putting is the milk for the oreo cookies right like like when you go into a grocery store there's a reason the milk's at the back and the cookies are in front of you because they want you to buy that cookie because they might make money on the oreos but they're not making any money on milk they've got o refrigerate it they've got to keep it cold and it's perishable okay but but they all have it because they want to drag you through that store for the milk that's us in landscaping like like we we we all do it we know yeah but right now they have the christmas special i love those ones but okay i have to try the christmas special i'll see how that is so another five pounds later next time you see me on the podcast so um so so okay so yeah so okay so in the study one of the things i've been wondering is you know you had to talk to a lot of landscapers and i know you're talking the landscapes about robotics in a percentage you know and this is something i always want to know for myself because we are very into robotics and we do a podcast with people that are into this type of thing but what you're seeing in general what percentage of the industry is actually receptive to the idea when you bring it up to them would you guys say in your opinion that's a very very good question and you know it varies so much it varies so much folks that kicked us out the office and said you're doing robotics that's not a labor solution go and folks that are saying okay i'm ready to buy tomorrow if you can show me that it works i would say at least 60 percent of people that we talk to are open to the idea 60 that said okay if you can really truly get it to work if the cut quality is there if it's efficient if it's able to get the job done we see from a business how it can take us to the next level now would you say because you you did this study in seven states right what what states did you do the study in by the way we started off in michigan california texas louisiana no excuse me uh louisville kentucky back to kentucky north carolina missouri yeah okay so what state do you think had the biggest labor problem or was it consistent did it not make a difference what state you were in if this findings were the same i would say it was pretty much the same all across the border it was all of them like labor and they just call it differently they would say it in a different way but all they will say the same problem and they say and the problem they do say we can get job every day we can even get people to apply for our jobs not it's not even people not applying people applies all across the border but once let's say i talk to 15 i will end up at the end of the season with one if that yeah and i had three of them i had to give them gear all of these other things but it was the same pretty much across the border and we met a lot of more landscapers in the eiu from different parts of the country and they will say the same over and over and they say i want to grow my business but i don't want to deal with training i don't want to deal with finding the people i don't want to deal with labor costs and all the other things associated with growing my business in that regard yeah one of the things that i think is interesting and never talked about is we um you know our companies at the size now where we had to identify you know the the acquisition cost to get an employee hired and trained up and and we've identified that's about three thousand dollars per employee okay and you just by the time you give them the gear and the training and stuff like that and what i think is ironic is when i tell somebody they can buy a robot for a few grand okay they're like that's crazy that's a lot of money but really when you think about it we spend it already just to get an employee trained up and there's also almost zero loyalty in our industry to stay at a landscape company so if if you can find a landscaper they'll typically leave for 10 cents an hour to go someplace else um so so you know you'll train somebody up for three thousand dollars and they leave you anyways um which is something to talk about with with automatic mowing also um so then going back to the study though so seven you know so in seven states um is there any state that's more or less receptive when you're talking to the landscaper so if if the same thing is uh across the board they all agree that labor shortage is the same are there certain states that seem more willing to adapt the automation versus others have you seen anything like that or is it the same is the answer the same as uh equal i don't think there's a particular state that that's more interested than others but i will say is especially in the early days we didn't just talk to commercial landscapers we talked to high school groundskeepers we talked to university groundskeepers and universities a lot of them are very open to the idea of looking at different type of robotics in their space and you know that's a great opportunity for commercial landscapers to step in and say hey let me partner with your university and provide these robotic lawnmowers because you know no matter who embraces robotic lawnmowers it is going to require a shift in thinking as to how your business or your department operates so for landscapers to be able to offer that service they they want the green piece we all know that and they want the efficiency piece especially with everything that's going on with cove but a lot of university budgets are getting slashed and they have limits on the number of folks that they can hire within different departments so my point is universities college campuses they seem very receptive to the idea and a lot of college campuses already outsource their moment landscapers they know that yeah so i i think i think we've dissected the findings of your study um so explain how that leads and uh if you hopefully you'll divulge a little bit on this i i want to i want the audience to learn more about higher henry uh okay and the partnership uh between you two on that uh kind of break that that down for us if you could yeah of course so one of the things that is very very important especially going forward is to recognize that there aren't a lot of options for commercial robotic lawnmowers currently available and you know joe and i we've talked about this from a high level but we can even dig into this a bit now you know husqvarna and a lot of other manufacturers that are making um robotic lawnmowers their extensive to which they're designing their products for specifically commercial landscapers is limited so we think that as more robotic lawn mowers become available particularly taking the technology and merging it with a business model that's going to provide that roi for commercial landscapers that's going to be a huge selling factor so that's one of the things that we focused on after doing the study is being sure that we're developing technology and a business model that's going to have the roi for the landscaper and immediately involved what's your thoughts on that joe yeah so i agree so i think with the current setup you've got to take this is what i've been doing i i've been taking what's already there and and making it work to gain the market share but my eyes are constantly open on the latest greatest solution for the industry and you know i think that's it's an opportunity for people like us and when i say us the people on all of us all the four of us because we're really we're so early to the game right um i i think that but i think the the it's almost like i feel like it's our duty one of the reasons we have this podcast is since we are early to the game to instead of hoard the knowledge to kind of explain and expose the the the best and the worst of the technology but then to realize it's not every piece has to be all inclusive so there's going to be a robot that works best you know in the yards that are an acre and a quarter and under okay there's going to be a robot that works best for municipalities and and you have to just be willing to keep your eyes in mind open to the endless possibilities of type of the technology and then i think you'll be able to capture everything the space can offer uh that hopefully that doesn't sound like a big but that's how it made sense all right i was literally just football in there it was literally flowing out as i thought it but that's it yeah so there's going to be robotic lawn mowers to your point joe it's going to work best for some folks and there's going to be other ones that work best for other folks the most important thing is keep an open mind look at the different mowers and see what works best for different landscaping companies because you know there's there's so many different ways that the the um technology can be approached and one of our key takeaways i think you know if you want to walk away with one tidbit to consider from our research findings is that look at the robotic mowers and consider developing a department or a small unit within your landscaping company that's going to take on the challenge of incorporating technology within the business and we've met landscapers that have already done this we think it's very very impressive it's a good way of approaching it but assign at least one person the task of looking at battery technology of looking at software of looking at robotic mowers and maybe that person is a younger person that you see has a lot of potential to one day take over the company or be in a senior management position but it solves so many different challenges by approaching it that way you get a 20 year old that that you know wants the clout piece so now they're saying you know i'm cto of xyz landscaping company they can go out there and they're advocating for your company and then you're doing a lot of training and leadership development to get them to the next level there's different levels of autonomy you know when you look at for example self-driving cars so and i'm going to get into the way that we've decided to approach developing our robotic lawn mowers here after this statement here but there are different levels of autonomy and right now we're seeing those levels start to progress and we're going to see them all continue to get better over time our approach has been one single goal which is to develop a robotic lawnmower that's indistinguishable from a human operator on a zero turn lawn mower so that's in terms of the operation you know how well does it mow in straight lines that's the cut quality we want all of that to be indistinguishable from a human on a zero turn the second thing that we really wanted to look at is how are zero turn lawn mowers already designed and as us being mechanical engineers we wanted to break that down to first principles so why is a zero turn lawnmower the size that it is right well a lot of it is because it's carrying around a 200 pound person all day so we get the 200 pound person off then maybe we can make the size a little bit more compact maybe we can make it safer and maybe we can make landscapers more efficient as they're moving their lawn mowers around and of course we've seen rc mowers that have already started to move that direction where they've taken a large zero top zero turn lawnmower type structure and made it a lot smaller so we think there's going to be a lot more of that going forward and that's one thing that we're excited about and that we're focused on improving george can i i i want to expand on what you said about the size of mowers yep so and this has happened in all of our service industries it's happened in the snow removal industry and it's happening in the landscape industry okay and what it is is this as the cost of the equipment gets more expensive okay it's more expensive manufacturing distributed equipment and the cost of the labor increases okay so like you said people are on average higher in 13 bucks an hour but if we went back 10 or 15 maybe 20 years it was probably seven bucks an hour right so how how do how do the landscapers compete when the cost per acre of mowing seems like it's been the same i mean i started doing this in 2005 and the cost per acre of mowing it's like pulling teeth to get an extra five bucks an acre and actually i've been seeing it decrease with all these you know national or you know big national bids that go out now and it's it's i don't even know if you guys have seen but like a guy like myself compete in online auctions so what will happen is you put in your best price first and then people just keep low bidding low bidding and then you have to enter it knowing this is my seat my my basement i can't go any cheaper than this right so how do you do it well now instead of doing it with a 48 inch stand-on unit i need a 72-inch because i need to be able to mow a bigger chunk in one pass that's why the equipment is so large and it's important to talk about an automation you don't need it to be big if you don't if you can do it more efficiently it's all about robotics and automation is about efficiency and less about moving mass snow removal same thing instead of having an eight foot snow plow you go 20 foot box pushers on big heavy phone unloaders so anyways i just it's something else that i just wanted the listeners to think about um because i think it's an objection that i hear is a dealer from people i talk to when i show them the pieces we currently currently have right that thing is way too small to do this and it's like you got to get size out of the equation so anyways um so very agree and i'll i'll even build on that and say even for landscapers that say i need a 72 inch cut or i need a 60 inch cut i believe we'll see robotic mowers that'll be able to have that size that's needed for making a cut pass but still does not need to be as large as a zero turn lawnmower and that's that's one of our focuses is making sure that we can develop something to to deliver on that point now that's a differentiating factor because there aren't a lot of robotic mowers that are focused on doing that but in addition to that since there's going to be a range of autonomy levels for these different robotic lawn mowers we know on the front end from the conversations that we've had with landscapers is that a lot of folks don't want to have to to stop whatever tasks they're doing whether that's trimming whether that's talking to a customer whatever the case may be they don't want to stop their task and have to go intend to the robotic lawnmower so one of the things that we're focused on is having a remote monitoring with our robotic lawn mowers and what this means is that there'll be an operator that's able to monitor our robotic lawn mowers in real time and if the robotic lawn mower does approach a certain situation then it doesn't know how to handle the remote operator can tap in and say hey here's how you can handle that situation and the operator has all the important features that it that they need to make that decision like camera feeds and stuff like that so that a lot and that's being done already by the way military drones and modern equipment and manufacturing there's somebody sitting in a room and they're looking at you know 100 different machines out in the field so we think landscaping and robotic mowers are going to eventually go that direction and also it also gives a level of safety to the landscapers and a feeling of you know there is somebody behind it like this is not going to take over like black mirrors and netflix type of mood like it gives a safety factor and even like sometimes humans make mistake robert's probably less likely than human that's for sure less likely than human but having an extra pair of eyes watching over it over the technology is always a great safety feature to be having for robotic knowledge absolutely well it's important to add for people that don't understand robotics like we do when when a when a robot or an automatic piece of machinery encounters an issue its program makes it stop it just stops so it's important to know when you guys are talking about your concept is it sounds to me like your guys thought process is okay so the person checks in the machine uses the cameras that are around it figures out what made the machine stop and if it's a bird that flew past it we know we can slip we can override that reset and let it move again on the flip side if there's a five-year-old kid that thinks the machine is cool and keeps running circles around it we leave that machine sit until the kid gets bored and walks away and then you're running i i think that's righ that that's the thought process exactly that's a spot on joe yep yep absolutely so in addition to that i'll say you know a lot of different business models will come out to deploy the technology the landscapers you know if folks want to learn more about the technology that we've developed or some of the business models that we've considered go to higherhenry.us we got demonstrations of our fully functional prototype on the website where you can see it working you can schedule a virtual demo or an in-person demo we can show you more about what we've been working on but this this is an exciting point for the industry i think i just want to know why i haven't got an in-person demo already when you guys coming out to see us in real time is are we waiting for koda to finish up what's happening that's near chicago right yeah in chicago i'll i'll buy a nice chicago pizza like every other person that comes up we'll we'll have a blast yeah yeah you know we can definitely get that schedule we'll make it happen absolutely in chicago yeah you know you know the uh might be not coming at the best time of year you know we might have to see when we're gonna do it but we we've got to make it happen so i have seen the video one of the reasons why this relationship started people listening and i i think it's totally awesome there's uh i i saw the potential value from several different industries and we're talking about grass cutting right now i think from when i saw your video and i'll keep this broad some of the things that um you can do with the things you guys are looking at i think is it's almost untapped potential you know it starts with the lawn mowing but you can use it in so many other segments in the outdoor service industry um so i urge anybody to go on and actually take a look at it um so well so i'm curious with what you guys do what are your biggest challenges and what lessons have you learned from from all that or from any challenges you guys have faced your question you wanna go ahead and pick it back out of you okay i'll say that a lot of the robotics technology you know from us studying robotics is it's not that complicated stuff from a technology perspective it's not easy don't get me wrong but it's not that complicated you know especially we get people when we're testing they'll stop their car and be like oh man that is so cool that's so neat can i take pictures which i think is a great selling point for for landscapers out there that's looking at their business but you know the robotics piece we can figure that out and eventually you know a ton of folks will figure that piece out the biggest challenge julie is the business model just talking with landscapers and to your point joe being sure that they understand what job the robotic lawnmower is doing because it's not doing the job of your typical zero turn it's doing the job of the zero turn plus the person sitting on top of the zero turn and we want to capture that value we want to explain that value we want to have a business model that incorporates all of that so that's that's the biggest challenge yeah and i mean adding to what you're saying biggest challenges for people to understand that you're just not paying for a machine right you're paying for a machine and a worker in one it does not look like what is a machine an order and a lot of people have like no no this is a machine more than that yeah he's more than that yeah you know the biggest people will have to overcome i i believe is actually once the contract was adopted the next group of people are the banks um and lenders right because lenders are used to looking at a typical p l of a landscaper and they say okay yeah if they they buy that thirteen thousand dollar zero turn they're going to put a forty thousand dollar a year employee on that zero turn so really that zero turn is you know fifty five fifty four fifty three thousand dollars depending on the piece of equipment um and that's the thing that i that i always even telling banks because that's the level we've gotten into now you know we're looking at some of these deals or we're talking about you know 9 000 to 40 000 acres of mowing with robotics right now and then to get an investor to understand so there's there's two things i i'm just telling you guys there's the the first is to get the people that want to buy it to understand it and then secondly to get the people that are gonna have to be willing to lend to it to understand that you're getting two for one that's right and you're not paying nine dollars a hundred for workman's comp insurance and you don't have the variability of that workman's con and god forbid something does happen to that employee okay um with that zero turn flips over and they get trapped underneath it that you know people ask me how we sleep at night with uh with the amount of robots that we have mowing and i tell them much easier than if i had an employee out working at night because at the end of the day if my robot gets run over or stolen i just replace it i don't have to i don't have to look a family member in the eye when they come to get that person's check or their belongings that were working for my company that got injured you know and i just said that's just some plastic and some boards yeah life goes on it's just move on and then i also say from a level of management when i'm training a young uh younger generation wave of managers it's so much easier because there's not any emotion tied in you know it's like i mean people people don't value middle managers in landscape companies enough to have to answer to someone like myself to say hey we've got to make x amount of margin and we have to keep our customers happy but the middle managers have to keep those employees that they've acquired there so when that employee doesn't feel good and doesn't want to come in it's not like you can just say you're done the customer says i want you here but you have to deal with all that with with robots it's easy if that robot is not functioning properly you take it out of the fleet and you put a fully functioning robot onto that account problem is solved but so another thing when you're talking about scalability with robotics it's it's it's not personal at all it's does it cut the acreage that we bought it for once it stops cutting that acreage we figure out how to replace it yep absolutely absolutely i mean both sides here we already thoroughly believe in the technology but i think a lot of your listeners they're going to see it more and more the value of what we're working on so yeah and i i know for you guys the things that i'm saying you probably already know but the whole point of this podcast is for people that don't think like us to start to know so sort of you know so yeah so um so where do you see let's let's where do you see your guys's future in five to ten years right like now we sit where we're at expand on where you think the future is gonna go yeah we know what you're already working on you said go to the website and take a look at it but where do you think you know explain that a little bit from your guys's perspective so folks that go onto the website at higherhearing.us they'll see our fully functional prototype that's out cutting grass and all that good stuff this upcoming season we're coming out with a model that we're going to be conducting a pilot program with with a select few of landscaping companies this is a heavy-duty version of the prototype that you see on the website currently has all the necessary features that that's going to bring the value that we've been talking about throughout the show so that's our immediate goal is focusing on this summer focusing on our landscape and partners is going to be testing our robotic lawn more over the summer five years i'm hoping that this will be in you know i don't know 60 percent of landscaping companies across the united states right that's ambitious right for five years you know um but i think there's a cautionary tale you know that we can get from a lot of other industries for example let's take uber if cab drivers would have embraced uber then you know they would be making money out the wazoo right but instead a lot of cab companies resisted against uber so i think that the landscapers once landscapers start to adopt the technology and they're competing with other landscaping companies we're going to see a phenomenal amount of growth you agree completely with that katie or you add anything you want to add i know i completely i agree with that i mean i think like what george said in five years from now um hopefully the technology i know for sure the technology will be way more advanced than we currently see battery technology all these other things and as a company i know 60 of the landscaping companies is quite a bit but that's the goal and i'm looking more forward to this a short-term goal that is our summer looking forward for that so but no yeah i completely agree with yours okay so you're you're you play basketball we haven't heard george are you an athlete what do you do in your spare time no i'm not a big fan of the athletics i'll read you know i'll do programming and technology and stuff like that but i'm not a big fan of athletics i'll leave that to katie yeah we we we always we we always like to mess around and ask if people have any uh health and wellness tips you know that collectively as we round out the show you know just to just to kind of bring us down and and and kind of get it get us off the business talk and just get a little comical right at the end well i am i am an avid yogi i've been practicing yoga for almost eight years no our last guest told me he wants to see me doing yoga the the next time we talk and i hello man no i keep saying we have to do it and i think now we truly have us yeah it's the second person now i think we haven't come up with a demo we'll get a yoga session going because you guys are going to play volleyball right yeah she's a basketball player it helps with injuries and stuff like that to prevent that type of stuff so we'll get a yoga session going yeah absolutely i want to be back in that actually when i met george he was this yoga stuff i saw him walking this little mad [Laughter] and you're a little bit too much and when he offered me that day that he texted me about coming to his business it was finals week a lot was going on and that he texted me like hey there is a yoga session i actually injure myself lifting weights that we can i dislocate my my my shoulder and so you're saying to me like hey come to this yoga session i'm like this is trashing and i'm super competitive like basketball is all about competition and i want to be like all this time i just have met george as the person that is super calm likes to read kind of in the nerdy side so i went to yoga and i was like whatever i'm going here because because let's see what's up so i went really good like it have really helped with my back a lot and stuff but always my competitive nature i was always like looking around like oh i can bend more than so it's my competitive nature that keeps me from doing yoga because i'm a big strong dude but flexibility not high on the chart for me so i i would be like knowing somebody like you is looking around and being like damn it she sees i can't bend for like that's my problem you know that happens to me the first time i saw george i thought he was not going to be i mean i don't see him as an athletic person at all like as i met him at the beginning so i saw him i was like i'm going to beat him i'm not i'm a collegiate athlete i've been doing this for a couple of years now i'm going to be more flexible than you you know my flexibility wasn't there well i can't even touch my toes so i guess i i don't know yeah i have to get a yoga we'll get a yoga session going and then we'll get a 202 volleyball match going in a two-on-two basketball match so here i'll tell you what you do those other things with us i'll i'll i'll do the yoga mat that's a lot that's a lot for him yeah you're gonna realize i'm really i'm stepping out of my comfort zone you know okay so yeah so but it sounds like it's a good compromise right you got we're doing basketball for you which you're gonna school us on all right it'll be amazing yeah okay but just know i'll throw my way around under the hoop so i will i am interested opportunity sports player just so you know number one we will do yoga and you'll far exceed all of us and then volleyball she'll she'll be in her element and i'll just exist in all three but it'll be okay it's a deal yeah all right well we gotta truly set up the date and i i actually uh i i'm being honest when i say like hopefully i can convince you to let us be one of the people testing your prototype it's it's it's something to be said um how large this industry is and you might mention how fragmented it is that everybody's kind of got their own little pilots going on without people even knowing about it you know um but but the cool thing knowing that is it's such a massive interest industry i mean from everything i see 75 to 100 billion dollar opportunity and i think it's awesome to be a part of it especially when i see the people that are a part of it because you two are amazing yeah you guys are awesome yeah seriously like just podcast gold right here i think it's awesome i'm totally glad we met and i hope this is the first of many conversations like this absolutely it's just the beginning man awesome all right well i i think if there's nothing else that you guys want to add i think i think we're perfect perfect time to sign off and thank you guys for your time um it was a blast and i just greatly appreciate it let's do it again thanks joe thanks julie thank you for sure see you guys thanks guys have a great one