When John and Mike Caramanico took over the family business in 2014, it was primarily focused on big-ticket construction work. The Caramanico brothers sought to refocus the operation, channeling 50% of its revenue into maintenance with the balance addressing enhancements, snow and ice services, and lastly, construction.
With these new organizational goals, the Caramanicos realized they would need to shift from relying solely on all-manual processes—which had led to the use of disorganized spreadsheets, inaccurate reports, and ineffective production meetings—to software that could standardize and streamline their processes.
“We'd have tons of production meetings where we'd find out our reports were inaccurate—that there was a mistake or somebody didn’t update what they were supposed to, and it became very frustrating,” said Caramanico.
That’s when he realized it was time for a difficult—but necessary—change. After researching software options and briefly considering developing their own in-house solution, the Caramanico brothers decided on the Aspire platform as their primary cloud-based business management solution.
“We decided to implement Aspire in 2017, and Kevin Kehoe gave me some advice, as the leader of Aspire Software. He said, ‘This is going to be hard. You've got to tell everybody it's going to be hard. We're going to take your ships, beach them, and then we're going to light them on fire, because we're not going backward,’” said Caramanico. “That advice hit home. We'd been doing things a certain way for a long time at our company, but we had to change everything to make Aspire as powerful as possible and to get the most out of it.”
After getting his employees on board for the business transformation, Caramanico assigned one of his employees as their Aspire power user, or point person, so that anyone with questions or concerns knew exactly who to consult. This individual quickly became an expert and was instrumental to the organization, managing the entire implementation and onboarding process for the company.