That’s a wrap on Ignite 2026! Thank you for an amazing event. We’ll keep adding recaps and videos, so check back if you missed anything.

Next year, Ignite joins Pantheon in Nashville, Sept. 13–16, 2027. Mark your calendars!

Jesse Itzler at Ignite: Be a spiritual billionaire

Jesse Itzler wants you to chase two kinds of wealth. And he wants you to refuse to trade one for the other.

Itzler, a serial entrepreneur and best-selling author, spoke Friday at Ignite, the customer conference for FieldRoutes and Aspire customers. DJ Dee Wiz joined Itzler on stage, dialing up tunes to complement a presentation that included video, images, and even a customer singalong.

Itzler’s lesson began at a checkerboard. Itzler’s father, Dan, never let his son win. He showed no mercy when Itzler was 4, heckled him at 7, and at 13 still won after removing his own back row. The message: nothing gets handed to you, even by your dad.

Itzler finally won just a few years ago, late in his father’s life. 

“What I didn't tell you,” Itzler told contractors, “is that when I beat my father in checkers, he didn't know who I was. Because my dad had Alzheimer's.”

His children spent six days in hospice holding their father’s hand around the clock, and Jesse Itzler found he had no regrets. 

"Empty the tank, and you're going to feel really good about it at the end of the day," Itzler said. 

He had poured his soul into the relationship, and so had his father. His father never amassed a fortune, but he mastered the other kind of wealth. 

"If you have a billion dollars and your spirit is zero, a billion times zero is zero," Itzler said. "But if you have $1 — $1! — and your spirit is a billion, a dollar times a billion is a billion. 

"My dad was a spiritual billionaire."

More takeaways from Itzler’s talk:

1. Measure success with SIPPS

When Itzler researched senior living for his parents, he found that facilities grade residents on five criteria: social, intellectual, physical, purposeful, and spiritual. 

Money didn’t make the list, and neither did social media followers, watches or cars.

2. Put yourself where luck can find you

Locked out of a conference where his prospects gathered, Itzler bought every muffin at the coffee shop next door and struck up a conversation with an attendee who needed one. 

That conversation became his first sale. 

“The universe rewards the bold,” Itzler said.

3. Compliment, congratulate, and console

After the first Marquis Jet (a private jet card company) sale, Itzler handed his customer a list of vetted pediatricians and booked spring break dinner reservations. He kept showing up in good times and hard ones, and the customer stayed loyal. 

“Business can be transactional,” he said. “Relationships can’t.”

4. Act with urgency

Itzler’s mother asked him to take her to a castle in London when he was in his 20s, 30s, and 40s, and he was always too busy. 

In his 50s, she couldn’t go. 

Work, sleep, meals, and screen time claim about 75% of the year’s 8,760 hours, he told contractors, so he urged customers to be diligent with the other 25%. 

“When you have a chance to create a memory or a moment, you take it,” Itzler said.

5. Rip up the playbook

Itzler asked the room, “If nobody taught you how to do your job, how would you do it?” 

That question is where innovation and disruption begin, along with a second one: What makes you and your product uniquely different?

6. Watch the words you speak

While training for a 100-mile foot race, Navy SEAL Chad Wright gave Itzler one rule: Never give pain a voice. 

If Itzler was asked how he felt, the only answer was “outstanding.” 

In the 75th mile of the Hennepin 100, Itzler shook with hypothermia and could barely move. Walking beside him, Wright shared a secret: He never gets tired.

When they got inside an aid station, Itzler took a seat.

“Chad grabs me by the shirt, ‘let's go!’” Itzler said. “Mile 75, how do you feel? I feel outstanding, Chad.” 

“77 miles in, there's no one near us. ‘I don't get tired, Chad,’” Itzler said as Bill Conti’s “Going the Distance” from Rocky began to build.

“80, 82 miles. ‘I feel outstanding, Chad.’

“Eighty-five, 87, 89, 90, 92, 95, 97, 99, all the way to the finish line of a 100-mile race. 

“The words you speak matter.”

– Eddie Wooten

Gillam Lawncare & Landscaping Receives Prometheus Award at Ignite

Pathlighter: Gillam Lawncare & Landscaping

Location: South Vienna, Ohio, serving Springfield and central Ohio

Why Gillam was selected: Gillam gives through dollars, labor, equipment, and expertise. The company pledged $25,000 over five years to the Mercy Health Foundation to renovate the Acute Rehabilitation Unit at Springfield Regional Medical Center and gave $5,000 each in 2025 and 2026 to Ohio's Hospice Foundation. 

Gillam also supports Westcott House Foundation, Rocking Horse Community Health Center, Girl Scouts, and local schools. Its crews prepped fields for Stevie's World of Wiffle Ball Tournament and installed a community garden at Greenon High School. 

What they're saying

"I don't think you can be a giving person if you're not grateful. And I'm extremely grateful for my employees, my customers, and our community. They've been very good to us." – Ryan Gillam, owner, Gillam Lawncare & Landscaping

"I get great joy out of giving. God has blessed my business, so there's just a little bit of a sense of responsibility I feel as well. But I get a lot of joy out of helping other people." – Gillam

About the Prometheus Award: The Prometheus Award recognizes industry leaders who drive meaningful change and give back to their communities through charitable efforts. Winners receive $5,000 donated to a charity of their choice. Gillam is receiving the award in ServiceTitan’s Pathlighter category, representing the green industry.

Earlier in the week, Haley Comfort Systems and Goettl Air Conditioning and Plumbing received Prometheus Awards at ServiceTitan’s customer conference, Pantheon.

Learn more

Command Center in Aspire protects profits that can leak before anyone notices

Tim Johnson was training a new manager when the question came up. How big was one account manager's book of business?

Johnson, president of Tim Johnson Landscaping in Statesville, N.C., and a pilot customer for Aspire's new Command Center, said the old answer meant building a list, filtering it down and sorting through the results. 

This time, "it was one query in Atlas, and then we had the number within 30 seconds," he said, during a video interview shown at Ignite, ServiceTitan’s user conference for Aspire and FieldRoutes customers.

The introduction of ServiceTitan’s AI-powered Command Center, with spots opened on Thursday for 100 Ignite attendees in Orlando, highlighted the Aspire keynote address at Ignite, held at Disney’s Swan & Dolphin Resort. A broader release of Command Center is coming soon.

A harness for Aspire data

ServiceTitan Co-Founder and President Vahe Kuzoyan compared the implementation of AI in the trades to the taming of the horse. Kuzoyan pointed out that with AI, like the horse, a harness "allows you to connect the power … to a specific purpose in order to do real work."

What does that look like in the landscaping industry? Aspire VP of Engineering Kiran Palan described the problem Command Center addresses across a landscaping business. 

"The answers are already in Aspire, but they are spread across reports, screens and people," Palan said.

An owner who wants to know how the business is really doing often has to ask someone, or wait for a report. Palan called Command Center "the biggest thing we are adding to help run the business."

Built into Aspire and accessed via Atlas, its conversational AI, Command Center answers plain-English questions about the business. Or, as Kuzoyan said, provides a harness for the horse to unleash the power. 

The alert does the watching

Aspire General Manager Eli Zevin put a number on the problem during the Smart Estimating segment. "The average landscaper runs 12% over their estimated labor hours and usually doesn't know until the job closes," he said.

Nobody has time to check every number every day, Kuzoyan told the audience, so "Command Center watches for you." When a job runs past its estimated hours in the middle of the week, he said, the tool emails the owner "while there's still time to do something about it." Email alerts are available today, and SMS is coming.

In the demo, Kuzoyan opens an alert email on the way to his truck, pulls up Atlas on his phone and asks how September revenue compares with the year before. The answer: down 22%, about a million dollars. Atlas tied the drop to a warning already on its radar. Design and build was running almost 13% over on labor, with one branch driving most of the overrun.

Ask the question, get the why

Kuzoyan demonstrated what the result looks like in real life. A real-language question about September labor efficiency came back with an answer in two seconds, with crews 6.5% under budgeted hours. But Atlas pointed out that the rosy number didn’t present the whole picture. 

In one division, actual hours were double the estimate. Pulling the tickets behind the overrun showed one property on 13 of them.

"So the crew is fine," Kuzoyan said. "The estimate is the problem." 

The sequence took four questions and maybe a minute, he said, and moved him "from a nice-looking month to the exact estimate I need to fix."

Dashboards work the same way. 

Kuzoyan asked Atlas for a dashboard for branch managers tracking crew productivity and job profitability in the maintenance division, and the AI Builder returned nine widgets, without anyone having to write a single line of code. 

The one thing to focus on today

Kuzoyan closed the keynote where he opened it, with the mathematician Paul Erdős and the problems that sat unsolved for decades before they began to fall. Then he turned to the people in the room.

“Margin, labor, knowing which clients are slipping away—these are problems this industry has fought with forever, and they’re starting to move,” he said.

GM Zevin had described the aim earlier in the keynote. One of Aspire’s largest multi-branch customers told the company his top priority for AI is raising what every person on his team can handle.

That means more book per account manager, more selling per estimator, and a lot less time on administration, Zevin said.

Johnson has seen that already at Tim Johnson Landscaping. 

He said the data now coming out of Command Center has his team asking a different kind of question: What is the one thing we can focus on to move the needle on profitability today?

What comes next, in his telling, is a change in timing. 

Command Center, Johnson said, “is going to give our account managers the data in a proactive manner rather than a reactive manner to lead our teams forward.”

In other words, the ability to harness the data, in real time.

Ignite 2026 opens with a clear message: the contractors who automate will win

ServiceTitan CEO and co-founder Ara Mahdessian opened Ignite 2026 with a straightforward case for landscape, lawn, and pest contractors — the trades will not be automated away, but the businesses that automate their back office will pull ahead of the ones that don't. 

In front of a packed house at the Swan & Dolphin Hotel in Orlando, Fla., Mahdessian also announced Command Center for Aspire and FieldRoutes — and confirmed that Ignite will join Pantheon in Nashville next year.

Customers who keep showing up

Mahdessian started with four entries from a note he keeps on his phone, each one a moment a customer reminded him why ServiceTitan and Aspire exists.

• Zeppa's, Louisville. In May, a fire destroyed 25,000 square feet of the family-run landscape company's office and warehouse. Brothers Antonio and Andre lost every truck key along with the building. Crews already had their schedules on their phones, so they clocked in as usual while the brothers ran the business from a kitchen table. The company started that morning only two hours late. 140 days later, revenue is up more than 30% year to date.

• EnviroGuard Pest Control, Austin. Luke Carter started the company in 2015 and knocked on doors with Aspire's mobile sales app to land his first customer. EnviroGuard has opened 14 new branches this year, serves customers nationwide, and is building a headquarters in St. George, Utah.

• Anchor Pest Services, Manchester, New Hampshire. Josh and Daniel Brady started in pest control to pay for college. Today they do $7M in revenue from a single location, and $1.4M of that was added this year.

• Tim Johnson Landscaping. When Tim's son TJ needed critical surgery on both hips, Tim spent a month in Philadelphia, 400 miles from his business. "When the business lives inside the system instead of your head, your team can lead without you," Tim said. His company now earns $11M, up from $4.5M when it joined Aspire, and has added only one admin position along the way.

Nearly 600 customers had a million-dollar month this past year.

Why contractors are well positioned

Mahdessian pointed to a Microsoft study of the jobs most exposed to AI. Purely cognitive roles sit at the top of the list. 

Work that demands physical dexterity in unpredictable environments sits at the bottom. That describes diagnosing a property, showing a customer what the fix takes, and doing the job.

"You're dead last on the list of jobs to be automated away," Mahdessian told the audience. "In this case, being last means being best."

The real competition comes from inside the trades. Mahdessian compared the moment to Blockbuster and Netflix, which both started as DVD companies. One adapted to streaming — and the other didn't.

Four takeaways for contractors

1. Automate the supporting work. The fieldwork stays human. Scheduling and routing, payments and proposals, payroll, and procurement are cognitive work, and they can — and will — be automated by someone.

2. Commit to AI now. Mahdessian said AI's weaknesses will close as fast as its capabilities grow. He said ServiceTitan is all-in on AI and automation, and it is building the tools to make that easier for contractors.

3. Pick the right platform. Contractors should expect best-in-market products without juggling multiple dashboards. Being first can be valuable — but being best is what matters.

4. Expect more growth and more profit. Mahdessian walked through a simplified example. Two contractors each earn $5M a year at a 10% margin, or $500K in profit. One automates, grows revenue 20%, and adds five points of margin. That contractor now earns $1.2M in profit while the other still earns $500K. The extra profit pays for more customer acquisition and better crew pay.

K&D Landscaping in Watsonville, California, shows how it works. Owner Justin White pays his newest gardener $22 an hour, with a path to $45 an hour as a crew leader and strong health benefits. He leverages the excess profit to acquire additional customers, and give better benefits to his employees.

"This is not my prediction. We’re not guessing," Mahdessian said. "We simply have data that no one else does — and we see this happening across the country."

Introducing Command Center

ServiceTitan announced Command Center for both Aspire and FieldRoutes. The new intelligence layer gives contractors a near real-time view of their operations, so they can spot issues and opportunities sooner, make better decisions, improve efficiency, and drive more profitable growth.

Aspire customers can see Command Center in this morning's product keynote with ServiceTitan’s co-founder Vahe Kuzoyan and Eli Zevin, GM of Aspire. FieldRoutes customers can see it this afternoon with Scott Traina, GM of Property Care.

What's next for Ignite

Attendees will find dozens of customer-led breakout sessions and can build their agendas in the Ignite app. Entrepreneur Jesse Itzler, who built and sold Marquis Jet and Zico Coconut Water and completed an Ultraman at age 53, will speak on the Main Stage on Friday morning.

Mahdessian also announced that Ignite will combine with ServiceTitan's Pantheon user conference in Nashville next September 13-16, 2027. Landscape, lawn, and pest contractors will get a dedicated track, plus the chance to trade ideas on leadership, scaling, and labor with contractors from other trades.

"Every dollar we invest, every product we ship, is a bet on you," Mahdessian said. "And for my money, that's the best bet one could make."

Estimators put AI to work from the site visit to the final review

Chris Brasington spent 10 years in construction and worked in landscaping for eight more, helping companies automate. The biggest loss of time in estimating, he told an Ignite session, is finding, organizing and re-entering information. He sees estimators “start digging through data and they dig and they dig, and eventually they may find it, they may not — then they start estimating.”

The session, “Real-World AI: How Estimators Are Cutting Bid Time in Half,” paired Brasington, founder and technology strategist at Global Solutions, with Ramel Sanchez, founder and principal of Miri Consulting. Joshua Martin, group product manager at Aspire Software, moderated. From there, the conversation followed an estimate from the first site visit to the review afterward.

The site visit came first. An irrigation company Brasington works with takes video of the walk-through with the client on a phone. An AI transcriber turns the video into text, and the company’s AI searches previous estimates and returns the five closest matches. The estimator starts from those. Martin, who spent a decade as an estimator and salesperson, said it also removes an awkward moment where the client, excited and showing things off, waits while the estimator stops to write it all down.

Then comes the bid. A Utah landscaping client of Sanchez’s learned late about a request for proposal involving a three-year snow contract with a possible two-year extension across thousands of church properties. The client wanted to bid on 1,000 of them in two weeks, with one estimator. AI built the kickoff data and the structure for pricing readiness fees and per-push fees.

“I think it is moving a little bit more to like a shotgun approach and then refine afterwards,” Sanchez said.

In its AI-compiled bid, the team only missed a couple hundred square feet of pavement. “But I think it will come out in the wash,” he said.

The price still belonged to the estimator. “AI, to me, is not making the decisions on an estimate. It’s actually helping the estimator make the decisions,” Brasington said.  

After the work is done, Sanchez said, comes what he calls “a feedback loop of estimating” —how the job performed against the bid, and whether the numbers change the next one, such as an installation rate for hedging. Brasington said AI can see every past job instantly, not only the one just finished.

Trusting the answers took the most care. Connecting AI to a business system is “like having a college student that just graduated,” Brasington said, so it needs guardrails. One of his clients asked AI to pull vehicle prices from Kelley Blue Book. The numbers came back wrong, and the AI later said it could not connect to Kelley Blue Book and had used the internet.

“No, don’t believe everything it tells you,” Brasington said.

– Scott Goldman

Inside Ignite 2026: Scenes from the show floor 

Ignite is bringing landscaping, pest control, and commercial cleaning professionals together in Orlando. Here’s a look at what’s happening across the floor.

Ignite is the difference

Still on the fence about Ignite? Here's what you're missing. Ignite is more than just a landscape conference. It’s a chance to connect with your peers in the industry and learn new ways of doing things, or get support to solve your biggest struggles. Past attendees have walked away with everything from new sales strategies to operational fixes that paid for the entire trip within weeks.