When the consultant overseeing the bidding process for maintenance of a Charlotte, N.C., greenway couldn't provide Tim Johnson the property maps he needed to submit a bid, Johnson decided to make his own, using PropertyIntel Complete.

The result helped land one of the most significant government contracts in his company's 25-year history.

Johnson, president of Tim Johnson Landscaping Inc. in Statesville, N.C., was competing for a maintenance contract on a property he believed was worth winning. The problem: Those maps weren’t easily accessible for the consultant. 

So Johnson turned to PropertyIntel Complete, Aspire's done-for-you measurement and takeoff service, which uses a professional cartography team to deliver precision-measured property maps directly to a contractor's account.

"I went into PropertyIntel and I created the maps," Johnson said. "PropertyIntel Complete, for all intents and purposes, created the maps, and I sent them over to her and said, 'Were you looking for maps that look something like this?'"

Delivering professionalism from the first contact

The consultant was stunned. The maps broke down turf square footage, bed square footage, bed edging, and linear edging — the kind of granular detail that turns a bid into a business case.

"She was blown away," Johnson said. "She took those maps and went to leadership and said, 'Hey, this is what this company's bringing to the table. That's why they need to be down here,' and we're going to start that contract first of the month."

That win, a government maintenance contract for McAlpine Creek Greenway, highlighted TJL’s sophistication, including the maps, during the bidding process with the City of Charlotte and Mecklenburg County.

"Part of the reason they selected us was because we brought a different level of professionalism through our conversation, through our interview, through everything,” Johnson said.

That professionalism, he said, is backed by data and information available through Aspire, the cloud-based software for larger landscaping companies.

PropertyIntel, which integrates directly with Aspire's business management platform, allows contractors to generate visual proposals with pricing breakdowns, color-coded project sitemaps, and accurate takeoffs — automatically calculating time, material, and cost estimates from the user's own pricing database. 

For a contract like the greenway, that capability matters.

Johnson, a former collegiate baseball player who earned a degree in Environmental Horticulture from North Carolina A&T, started the company mowing lawns in the Statesville area before gradually building it into a full-service commercial and residential landscaping operation. 

Making complicated contracts simple, with the right software

Today, with branches in Statesville and Charlotte, Tim Johnson Landscaping serves clients from the Piedmont of North Carolina to the upstate of South Carolina.

The company made just under $9 million in revenue last year and is budgeting $10.9 million for 2025, with roughly 100 employees. 

The greenway contract — which covers mowing across 97 distinct properties — required Johnson to bid the full package in Aspire as a single property, then have staff enter each site individually so it could be routed and scheduled. He used Aspire's Route Optimizer to sequence the work and leaned on Claude AI to help finalize the county's required bid spreadsheet.

"We are leveraging those tools all the time," Johnson said.

He acknowledged that government work brings a different calculus from what the high-end residential and commercial maintenance TJL is known for, but said the same principles apply: Show up with data, tell a story, and earn the renewal.

Still relying on relationships as they grow

"Us figuring out how we can do this better than the previous contractor is essential so that, when this comes back up for bid, we're in a good spot," Johnson said. "Both entities basically told us, 'If you perform properly, we'll do it that way again.'"

For Johnson, the greenway contract is less an arrival than a next step — proof that a landscaping company built on referrals and relationships can compete for public work when it shows up with the right tools.

"It's not that complicated," he said. "Answer the phone. Call them back. Do what you say you're going to do. And that's all it takes."

Well, along with TJL’s built-in professionalism.