Walk into Site Landscape Development's Dallas office, and you'll notice two things pretty quickly: dashboard TVs covering the walls and a robot mower cruising around out front.

"We're a cool landscape company," said Andrew Craft, president of Site Landscape Development, with exactly zero apology in his voice.

At $40 million in revenue and growing, Craft has built something that looks, in some ways, more like a tech firm with a fleet of crews than a traditional commercial maintenance operation. That's not an accident. It's a strategy — and it runs through every decision he makes, from the software his teams use to the people he hires to run it.

Technology as differentiator

There are, Craft notes, roughly 42,000 landscape companies in the Dallas market alone. Standing out in that field requires more than just showing up.

"One of our differentiators is technology and our culture," he said.

Site Landscape runs Aspire as its operational core, but the tech stack doesn't stop there. GPS software, AP invoice automation, data pipelines, Power BI — Craft estimates his company uses 20 to 30 different programs across the business. Each one exists for the same reason: efficiency. And efficiency, eventually, finds its way to the customer.

"If it helps us be more efficient or cheaper, then we can be not priced too high," he said. "Everything runs more efficiently, it loosely translates to a better, more consistent experience for the customer."

Craft came to Site Landscape in 2018 when the company was bringing in around $20 million in revenue. The systems in place were QuickBooks and Excel. No processes. No platform to build on.

"It was a hot mess," he said.

When he evaluated what was available, Aspire was the clear answer — not just for what it could do then, but for what it would allow the company to become. And with ServiceTitan now behind the platform, Craft said he's confident that trajectory holds. "There's no shortage of resources," he said. "They can build what they need to."

"We won't outgrow Aspire," he said. "It won't be our limiting factor."

The data underneath everything

If there's one thing Craft can't imagine running the business without, it's the scheduling module. Site Landscape operates more than 80 crews. Moving that kind of operational volume without a system built for it isn't just inefficient — it's nearly impossible.

"Try putting that up on a whiteboard," he said. "I'm not sure how we would manage it otherwise."

But Craft pushes deeper than the standard reporting. When Aspire's built-in outputs don't slice the data exactly the way he needs, his team pulls it through the API into Power BI or Excel and builds what they need from scratch.

He's speaking at the Ignite conference this year on precisely that topic — advanced data analytics, data pipelines and how companies can build on top of the platform they already own.

The point, he said, is that the first 90% of running a landscape business looks roughly the same for everyone. It's that last 10% where companies separate themselves. Technology is how you own that 10%.

The people who fit

There's another place where the tech-forward approach pays off: recruiting.

Craft recently hired an arborist who'd been stuck at a company that wanted to use technology but couldn't get there. At Site Landscape, he found everything he'd been looking for.

"There's no shortage of challenges either," Craft said. "Our people want to figure out how to fix problems — not hand-key 400 invoices."

That's the kind of person Craft is looking for. And increasingly, the technology he's built around the business is what attracts them.

The robot mower up front doesn't hurt, either.