Taylor Anderson has talked to a lot of companies considering a switch to Aspire.

She's been on those calls. She's answered the questions. And she's watched enough implementations go sideways to know exactly where the process breaks down.

It almost never breaks down where people think it will.

"A lot of times, you probably want to send your VPs and your CEOs to these meetings because they want to learn it," Anderson says. "That's not a bad thing. But are your CEOs going to be the ones invoicing clients? Are they going to be the one approving time for your team? More than likely, no."

Anderson is Sunline Landscapes' Aspire administrator and internal trainer. The residential and commercial landscaping company in Bluffdale, Utah, employs about 120 people and has operated with Aspire software since 2021. She's watched the platform become embedded in nearly every process the company runs.

She's also developed a clear theory about what separates smooth implementations from painful ones.

Find the People Who Will Actually Use It

The insight sounds simple. It isn't always easy to act on.

The champions of a software rollout, Anderson argues, should be the people closest to the work, the ones who will feel the friction first and drive adoption across their teams.

"Make it your operations managers, make it your accounts payable person," she says. "They're going to have to know how it works, but also they're going to enable others to continue to follow the process because they're also a part of the process."

At Sunline, the executive team vocalized its support from the start. But the champions who made the implementation work were the people in the middle of the operation, who could answer the question of any skeptic asking, “does this actually make my day easier?”

It did gradually, and then clearly.

"It wasn't a ta-da moment," Anderson says. "It was like, 'Oh, this is working and this is working and this is working.' And then that made the team more excited to be like, 'How can we make this better? And how can we use this even more?'"

One Champion per Module

Aspire is not a small platform, and Anderson is the first to say so.

"It's not fair to expect somebody to know every tiny little quirk out of Aspire," she says. "It is too big and too different for that to happen."

Her solution is to think in modules, such as estimating, operations, and administration, and identify a champion for each, someone who has demonstrated they want it.

"You usually, as an operations manager, know your guys who can be like, 'Oh, I know they're going to try this out if I give them the opportunity to do so,'" Anderson says.

She knows her own limits, too. Despite being the closest thing Sunline has to an Aspire expert, Anderson still leans on her accounting team for invoicing questions.

"They're in it literally all day long, every day," she says. "If I have a question about that, I'm usually relying on them."

That's not a gap in her knowledge. It's the model working correctly.

Don't Stop Them

The most common mistake Anderson sees isn't a bad implementation plan. It's a good plan that gets in its own way.

When someone shows genuine interest in the platform — when they start asking questions beyond their job description, when they want to learn more than they need to — companies sometimes pump the brakes. That's not their job. They should focus on their area.

Anderson's advice is the opposite.

"If you need to create something for it," she says, "create something for them and enable them to do this job."

The return on that investment compounds. Champions who go deep on a module become the people their colleagues turn to. They reduce the support burden on whoever manages the system. They catch configuration problems early. And they become the voices inside the company who make the next upgrade, the next feature, the next change feel less like a disruption and more like progress.

"You'll find them, I promise," Anderson says. "Just don't stop them because it isn't who you thought it was."

Hesitation Is Normal. Commitment Is the Difference.

No software transition happens without resistance. Sunline's didn't either.

"That would've been true for any system we would've switched to," Anderson says. "Even if that would've been staying on our old system and changing processes, we still would've had hesitation."

What moved the transition forward wasn't the absence of doubt. It was the presence of commitment — from the executive team, from the identified champions, and from the company's own stated values.

"One of our biggest things we talk about at Sunline is growth and progression," Anderson says. "That's one of our core values. And I think our switch to Aspire really played into that growth and progression core value."

The hesitation didn't disappear. It just stopped being the deciding factor.