At a vendor event outside Georgetown, Texas, CTX Mowing Owner-Operator BJ Christlieb met a man who'd just switched lawn services. 

His previous company, the man said, never told him when a crew was coming or when it had left. With CTX Mowing, he always knew he’d receive a text before the crew showed up and another when the job was done. The customer could release his dogs outside the moment he got the second text.

Christlieb hears that kind of thing often enough to know it's not luck. It's the system.

That same system recently helped CTX absorb an entire book of business, 140 customers from an operator who'd been running things the manual way Christlieb once did, in a single month.

"You've never heard of software?" Christlieb asked that operator. "It will change your life."

That gap, between a company still working by phone and one running on software, has become the clearest way to understand where CTX Mowing has been and where it's headed next. The company grew from an owner-operator with two crews into a 28-employee operation with seven crews and a second division. 

Crew Control, from Aspire, powered that entire run. 

Now, as CTX Mowing takes on the kind of complexity that comes with a second division, the company is stepping up to their software partner’s more powerful platform. 

"We are anxious to get onto Aspire and see how much further that can take us," Christlieb says.

From 2022: "CTX Mowing Partners with Crew Control to Scale Business"

Where CTX Mowing started

Christlieb, who started his company solo in 2018 with a Jeep Cherokee and a mower secured in the back, adopted Crew Control for CTX Mowing in 2022 after years of texting up to 60 customers a day by hand. 

The software freed up his mornings and evenings, and CTX Mowing kept growing.

Fast forward to today, and CTX Mowing is pacing to top $2 million in gross revenue after bringing in about $1.7 million a year ago. 

CTX Mowing is running on the strength of five in-house mowing crews, a landscape design/build crew, and a full-time irrigation crew. In addition, the company employs two subcontractor crews for residential overflow. 

From office to field, CTX Mowing employs 28 people.

Growing with Crew Control 

Christlieb credits the growth to something simpler than any one feature.

"The customers call us because of consistency and communication," he says. "Communication's the biggest kickback we get for customers. That's what they like about us."

Crew Control built that consistency into the company's daily operations. Customers get a reminder the day before a visit, an en-route text when a crew is on the way, and a follow-up if a crew documents anything unusual on site. 

Christlieb calls it staying "a step ahead of the customer," so complaints rarely come first.

That discipline is what allowed CTX to absorb those 140 customers from another operator. And Christlieb says the software itself kept pace with the business at every stage of that growth.

"They find a need and a niche, and then they put it out to everybody," he says of Aspire’s Crew Control team. "They're not just stagnant. They've done really well adding parts that help companies grow. It's been great for us."

A second division changes the math

The next stretch of growth came from a part of the business Crew Control helped Christlieb build almost by accident. 

Customers kept asking for flower beds, plantings, and small design work. So this year, Christlieb spun that work off into its own brand, CTX Outdoor Living, with its own website and search presence.

That division runs on a different kind of complexity than mowing routes, one featuring dozens of material types on a single job, vendor by vendor, entered by hand.

"The biggest reason we decided to make the jump up to Aspire was how much more detail we can track," Christlieb says. "It does get tedious entering materials manually into Crew Control, especially when we're designing a pergola — there's so many different types of boards. With the Aspire feature, you can upload or download material lists from different vendors right into your system, so it's automatically there."

What Aspire adds

Crew Control and Aspire come from the same company, but they're not the same software at different price points. Crew Control is built for a business run by an owner or a small office team — one to 10 crews, one division, and an owner still close to every job. Aspire is built for what comes after that: multiple crews across multiple service lines, with a dedicated office staff running scheduling, accounting, and purchasing full time.

CTX Mowing spent most of the last four years squarely in the first category. Now, running seven crews across two divisions with a growing office team of its own, it's grown into the second.

Related: "Aspire vs. Crew Control: Which One Fits Your Company Size?"

Christlieb expects the new platform to change how CTX Mowing prices its work, not just how it tracks materials. With more granular data on crew hours and job costs, he wants to catch pricing mistakes before they compound across a route.

"It's more on the office side of things,” he says. It’ll help us better track, see where we are. Do we need to look at raising this property's price? Did we quote this one wrong? Do we need to reevaluate? It’s really going to help us get our pricing even more locked in and competitive."

He's also counting on Aspire to sharpen performance on the crew level, giving his teams a clearer, in-the-moment view of how they're doing against the clock.

"You can really track and display how a crew's doing for the week,” Christlieb says. “Are they staying ahead of their estimated hours? Are they being efficient, or are they falling behind?"

CTX Mowing will begin onboarding onto Aspire in September. Christlieb has hired an office staffer with prior Aspire experience to help guide the transition, and the team has spent recent weeks making sure customer data in Crew Control is clean and complete before the switch.

"They've done it really well with adding parts that help companies grow to where they need to be," Christlieb says of the Crew Control team. "We've just got to the point where we've outgrown it. That's why we're taking a step up to Aspire."

What he doesn't expect to change is the instinct that got him here.

"Crew Control earned a special place in my heart," Christlieb says. "It helped me build to where we are."