← Charged Up with Tim Allard
Charged Up with Tim Allard
The End of Social Media Busy Work: Generating Viral Videos from the Job Site Ep. 21
00:29:21
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- [00:04]
A
Welcome to Charged up, the podcast, where the cutting edge meets cutting grass. We're diving deep into the electrification and automation revolution, transforming lawn care from the ground up. Whether you're a weekend warrior, a green tech enthusiast, or a landscaping pro, we're here to keep you powered up with the latest in robotic mowers, battery breakthroughs, and the smart tech reshaping your backyard and beyond. Your host, Tim Allard, has over over 15 years in the industry and has been charged up about the electric revolution for years. So plug in, power up, and let's get charged up.
- [00:46]
B
Hey there. Welcome to this week's episode of the Charged up podcast. I am joined today by Luke Hansen from Company Cam. We've been using Company Cam over here at Elon's for, gosh, probably, I bet you four or five years to a limited capacity. I think we actually use it on a couple of our businesses. But I guess my intention today is to kind of sit down with you. I know when I was back, get equipped, back in October, we stopped by the booth. A lot of new cool stuff going on over on your end. And so I just, I guess first we'll start about who you are, what's your role over there at Company Cam, how long you've been with them, what's going on.
- [01:32]
C
Awesome. Yeah, well, thanks for having me, man. Like, my name is Luke Hansen. I'm the CEO of Company Cam. Founder, started Company Cam. You know, we started working on it in 2014, and then we launched company cam in 2015, like in June of 2015. So that's what I've been up to. I've been working on that. Had a few kids in the meantime, one before that. We are based out of Lincoln, Nebraska, so this last like seven days has been pretty terrible weather wise. But then today it's like we're looking at 42 degrees, which is like actually an incredible. It feels balmy.
- [02:16]
B
It is balmy. What do you think?
- [02:17]
C
But it's nice. The other day I woke up and it was like, negative four. And I was like, oh, that's brutal. I don't even want to step outside. So, yeah, that's. And then the Equip Expo. I wasn't at the Equip Expo this past October. I was at the one before that. I've been to a handful of them. That's my favorite show. I tell people all the time, people come like that started our company. I tell them, hey, you got to get out to these events. Like, you get to meet our customers. You get to meet people who aren't customers. You get to see almost the industry, like laid out in front of you. You can walk around, you see what other people are doing. Like, it's, it's just a win all around. But if you go to equip, you might get to drive an excavator. And that just beats, you know, talking software usually.
- [03:05]
B
Yeah, yeah, no, I. What was this year was our third or fourth year going. And it's funny how in this industry you go around, hey, you going, no, I don't have time. I'm like, you don't have time? You don't not have time. You need.
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C
You gotta be.
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B
And as things evolve, you know, you guys were one of the places that I wanted to get over and talk to because I'm business partners with my brother and I love company cam. We're always trying to find software, you know. Cause obviously out in the field, if it's too complicated, the guys don't use it. And so it's like, why are we paying for this stuff?
- [03:47]
C
Well, it's broadly true. Like, I mean, the guys in the field maybe have less patience. And Ander, the way I, I always thought of it was like, we can't leave room for excuses. Like, if we leave room for excuses, then excuses will fill the amount of space. Like I couldn't find the folder or I couldn't. You know, it's like, no, you just open this app up, it's like, are you here? Yes. Now, it has been work to try to keep it that simple. Like, I think we've actually let it get a little bit confusing and complicated. I mean, it's not. I still think we're doing okay, but we have a big order of business around here is how do we keep. Not just keep it simple, but make it even easier because then it will be used. Like, everyone should find benefit here, not just the owner, you know. Oh. But even the guys in the field. Like, it should help them. But I'm glad you guys are using it. Like, do you. Is it, is it a lighting business? Like, what exactly do you guys. Because you said multiple businesses. Yeah.
- [04:50]
B
So I. Yeah. So I run three businesses. Four if you count the podcast, I guess. Okay, so our primary business was landscaping. So we started out in landscaping. 2022 we went fully electric, hence why we called it Elon's. That, that was our flagship business. That was the main bread and butter for. For several years. I mean, we, we started out. I mean, I've been doing this stuff for years, but we started out as a partnership in 2016. And then 20, 22, we saw the evolution of battery powered and said, hey, let's. Let's hop on that train. That way we're in the front. And. And so we. I mean, we're still. It's. It's still ebbs and flows. I mean, to be honest, this next year, we're totally blowing everything up. We're going back to basics, getting out of hoas. This was my first winter not plowing. This will be our last winter doing anything with snow.
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C
Where are you?
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B
So we're up in Vermont.
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C
So you're familiar with snow?
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B
Oh, yeah, yeah. I mean, it's. Today's actually warm at 24 degrees right now. It's been in the single digits.
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C
Yeah, it was. We were getting that same. That nastiness. Okay. Full electric. How. What. What were the advantages of that versus the, like, what were the challenges? Either that you knew you would run into. Yeah. Or things that surprised you.
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B
So my brother will tell you it's some guy in a Prius. That pissed him off.
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C
Yeah.
- [06:24]
B
Okay. Because. Because I was. I was kind of on that. I kept. Kept nudging. I'm like, hey, I think we should do this. He's like, he wasn't bought into it. And then all of a sudden, when that confronted him one day, he's like, all right, how do we make this work? It took just that nudge. And so we were on a quest. It's like, okay, what company can we go with that will provide everything we want? And so we started down that road, and obviously it was a learning curve for us. We had to figure out, like, we can't go out and do X, Y and Z lawn today because there's not enough battery power. I mean, we. We rolled out with like, 30 handheld batteries, at least three commercial mowers. And just trying to figure out and dial in what can we do in a day to make it a full productive day. And so, yeah, it. It took a while. I mean, the first several months, it was, you know, tracking battery. Like, okay, we go to Property A. We use, you know, 20%. We were there for this long and then doing that for a few weeks and being like, okay, now we shuffle our route. Now we figured out how we can do this.
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C
It's like, now you kind of know, because before that. And I suppose that's the beauty of gas, broadly speaking, is that it's. It's fungible. Like this gas. Is that gas?
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B
Whatever.
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C
And it's available broadly. You can tote it around with you.
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B
Sure.
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C
But electric, I Mean, it's because I have an electric car now. Yeah. And it's totally awesome. I mean, mainly the fact that they just drive you around. It's like this incredible. But I have a. I have like an electric trimmer and I, I just like have this, you know, growing up kind of out in the country a little bit in Nebraska, you know, I don't know. You're trimming somewhat regularly and that vibration that you develop that like because of that engine, your hands right there. And like, you do that for like an hour or two and before long you're like, your whole body's just kind of like twitching. Yeah. That you don't get nearly as bad on the, on the battery powered ones, but. So you figured that out and it seems like you guys are like between. Not just company cam, but if you're on company cam five years ago.
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B
Yeah.
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C
Switching over to battery. Is this something that, like you're. You're really on the prowl for kind of like what the. What kind of new tech is like. Do you think of yourself as being pretty forward thinking? Like, I. Yes.
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B
So, I mean, we. One of our other businesses is construction. And so that's where the company camp comes into play. I mean, we've tried to run different. You know, we're using Jobber as our CRM for the landscaping. We tried. I think, I don't remember. We tried like Monday, we tried something else. You know, the guys aren't on the construction side. It's like they're. They're not doing anything. It's like. You got pictures? Yeah, they're on my phone. I'm like, that helps me. Why are they on your phone? Yeah, why do you want all your company. You know, like, why do you want all your work pictures on your phone taking up space? It just doesn't make sense to me. And so I'm pushing. I'm like, I think we just use company cam across the board because one, it's so simple. Two, you can put together that portfolio to send to the customer. Like, here's before pictures, here's after pictures. Here's what we did. Now there are some hiccups there where, you know, if you're in a big hoa and they all look the same and you don't actually put a description of, hey, this is unit 22, west side window. Then I don't know, I'm like, okay, so what. When we just did.
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C
We just rolled this out. It's called project groups. But it's specifically made for the problem of like this Is like multi tenant or like because the, the core of Company Cam is really based around your location.
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B
Yeah.
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C
And we're trying to treat it. And I did that well, I say for a reason, which is like, I want to protect people from themselves, including myself. That like, if I give you 17 ways to organize something, there's always one person who's like, type A. They're organized, they're going to set up this crazy system and then everyone else at that company is going to have to like suffer through that because of that one person. Now what we found. So we did it very generally, like, hey, it's an address. You can end like you can create multiple projects at a location. But like for, for the first five years of this company it was like, no, you just have locations.
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B
Yeah.
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C
Everything that happens at that location stored in companycam, you can at least find it. But then those multi tenant or even like there's all sorts of those type of situations where it doesn't. It wasn't working as well as we wanted it to for those people in like that situation anyway. These project groups help, which is to say you can like create a, like a project for each individual like unit or thing. And then they will all roll up into this overarching project which is the, the area so that I don't know if that'll solve your problem, but it might helpfully. Hopefully.
- [11:43]
B
Hopefully. And that was so some of the things, you know, talking about the type A person, like my brother, who's my business partner, my oldest brother, he is much more like, he always wants to do everything. He's like, I'm gonna build our website. I'm gonna do this, I'm gonna do that. And I'm like, I run another business, just myself. And I'm like, okay, I'm gonna hire somebody to do my books. I'm gonna hire. I'm a sales guy. I'm a talker. I like to go out. I like to interact, I like to mingle, with people. I like to talk and, and sell work. And I don't, I don't have time to sit down and stare and be like, okay, I'm gonna do this. I'm not a tech labor.
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C
I mean, do what you're good at. And then you have other people. Yeah. That's the story of this company, man. I don't know anything about most of this stuff.
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B
I feel you. I feel you. Yeah. My latest company is a screen printing and embroidery business and I can go out.
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C
Oh, you're all over the place.
- [12:39]
B
Yeah, well, it's it's so real quick. I don't want to take up too much time on this, but. Because my listeners have probably heard most of it. But so where our shops are located. So we run all of our businesses out of one of the. So it's actually a really old, like, military base area. But okay, it's all been, you know, privatized and there's apartments and commercial space. And so our other buildings where we run our other businesses out of are in the same area as this print shop. And so I was kind of, look, you know, I mean, every business needs T shirts and hoodies and hats, right? Why not buy the business? And so I was looking at another one and then my landlord, he's like, well, what do you. Would you be interested in this one? Because it's right here and the guy that owns it's never there anyways. And so it's like, yeah, yeah, why not? I mean, I only have to walk across the parking lot now. And so that's how I kind of ended up in that. But same thing. I mean, I can't. I don't know how to run an embroidery machine. I don't know how to go do screen printing. I can go sell stuff all day long. You know, you want me to get on the phone and send emails and find new business, I can do that. But when it comes to the other stuff, count me out because. And I don't want to know how to do it, I. I a waste of my time to learn how to do stuff. That's just. It's not going to benefit me. It's not going to make me more money if I go learn how to, you know, manually print shirts. So, yeah, I try to stay in my lane, do what I'm good at. Some of the things that I noticed to hop back on company cam is because my brother's always trying to figure stuff out. And so one of the things I noticed when we stopped by the booth this year is it's like you've started to bring in more integrations, you know, with QuickBooks, which, you know, everybody's stuck with QuickBooks. I mean, everybody hates it, but everybody's stuck with. And they are, as I've noticed, slowly. I mean, they're buying up other companies. You know, they bought up mailchimp, Turbo, all kinds of stuff they're eating up and they're trying to become a CRM because I think they saw so many people trying to leave to go to these CRMs. And so they've started to change Their business profile and their software.
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C
They have a name. I can't remember what they're calling that. I can't remember. But yes, they're. They're. They're definitely trying to. Everyone is always kind of feeling out, you know, like, where can we go over here? Can we go over there? And I mean, we're do. Everyone's doing a version of that.
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B
Yeah.
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C
And so. Yeah. But your brother. Sorry, you were in the middle of. Your brother's trying to kind of figure out how to get. It sounds like, get all the pieces to fit together basically into like one maybe beautiful system.
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B
He. He likes everything that plays nicely and, and you know, I know they're. I don't know if it's Monday that we're with right now on the construction side. But I, I don't even like, I don't want to learn how to use it like company Cam. You know, I'm not a dummy. Can use it. I mean if you can pick up a phone.
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C
We're trying to continue to make that easier. Like, yes, there's using it. Gosh. You know, I'm looking at my computer here and I'm running that new thing. It was called claudebot and not to be confused with Claude AI. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Though I think it was actually purposely to be confused with that. But you know, I had a. It was looking at my calendar here. It. I think it might have invented a receipt out of thin air because I wanted it to go through my email and find receipts. This is what happened kind of. A couple people from our company were like, hey, what? You know, did you accidentally make a personal purchase with your company card? And I was like, I don't think so. I'm, you know, not that I'm above that, but like. Right. You know, I'm pretty sure I haven't. And I bought something that it was like it was some other AI service thing that I. Because I impulsively try every. Like, I just. I'm going to try it and figure out what it's all about. Well, when the receipt. The AI I think like read the receipt and then put the wrong
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B
like
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C
web address with it. And so according to the finance department, I've been purchased. I'm on a 25amonth tampon subscription. That's what this other company is like confused the like web addresses and they're like, are you buying tampons with your work credit card? It's for the bathroom. And I was like, no, I'm not the tampon purchaser of our house anyway. Right. And so anyway, we're having some issues where I was going with the story outside of the company card for private use, which we did get straightened away is I really think in the future what we're really building towards is that more and more all I want you to have to do, you, your person is look at the screen, just look at the glass, point your phone at the world, take photos or videos and say what's important? Why are you doing this? What matters? You know, because if you're telling us, oh, I'm giving them an estimate for something or you know, we're seeing which like literally whatever it is, AI will be running more and more of the software. Like it's going to be a long time before it's planting flowers and it's a tool laying sod doing all this. But what it's really good at is writing an estimate, sending an invoice, creating a checklist of things that need to be done to get paid, looking at the photos to see what happened and writing an update to the customer. And more and more we're trying to make it so that your. I view it as like, because our business is not attention based, if that makes sense. Like you think of these social media apps like they need you to be looking at them. Yeah, that's how they make money. We make money by helping you make money, which is to say staying on top of your business, getting more work done. And I view it as like we want the sort of work or the energy, mental energy, physical energy that it takes to use Company Cam to go down always y and if we can make it easier and easier and easier to use and require less from you, less, less time, less everything and then bring more value. That's a winning formula for you, for, for us, for everyone involved and these like, there's still some weirdness with the kind of like what AI can do now, but it's really compelling the stuff that we're seeing, like that we're using it for. And I feel like I think of even like accounting stuff like we're rolling out a marketing suite here in like two weeks which is. Sorry, quick sales pitch on this. My personal thing I'm excited about is that, you know, if you're using Company Cam, you're taking all these photos. Like I think of that as like the, the like root, like the foundation of everything you need to do great marketing. It's like real content. It's the projects you've done. It's like it's your work. But what it does is you just select a, you go to the marketing little hub or whatever and then any project, you basically promote your projects. That's the language we're using. The idea being it will generate this beautiful review request so that you can get more Google reviews. It will update your Google my business page. So it will take a photo or two and kind of write an update like this is the type of job we did. It will update your CompanyCam portfolio, which is like that map and little webpage that you have, which is killer. If you have our widget running on your website, which is another version of that portfolio, it will update that. It will post it to trustee, which is again, it's the same style of thing as that portfolio, but it's like the public version where people from your town can go explore. It will generate social media videos for Facebook, Instagram, TikTok and or posts on X. And the idea is that like we're going to have you just kind of confirm the information of the project which is like, hey, it looks like this is what you did here. But we don't want to just go rampant, you know, AI crazy. The goal being how do we make what you're giving us more valuable to your business? And that's the question we're always asking. And so I think there's tons of marketing opportunity here in what you're doing for us. And then more and more the AI, like as we get continually better at it, that it can run on autopilot with AI where it's just like all you. Sorry, this is my last thing. All you should have to do is actually do good work. Do good work, make your customer happy. The intangibles, you gotta, you gotta communicate with them, you gotta tell them the truth. Be there when you say you're gonna be there. Like there's a lot of hard parts of. And managing the people like it's hard to run one of these businesses. But if you do that, then we should be doing the rest of the kind of like a lot of this overhead stuff to help you grow. Yeah, in a sense in the background. It just follows from you doing good work. That's, that's our goal with this marketing thing. Anyway, I'm sorry. I got on a big sales pitch for our new marketing stuff.
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B
I'm excited about that too. Because honestly, I mean I'm, I'm. Like I said, I've been a fan. I'm the one that pushed Company Cam anyways to be something that we use. Thank you. I'm. I'm one of the few over here that that really continually is pushing to do more with it. Cause I'm like hey look, this does this now or hey, it integrates with that now or you know, it's, it's simple because we can't get the guys to use any of the other dang software. Like all they have to do is take their phone and take some pictures and if they're too lazy to type, use the voice to text. Like there's so many. I mean if it got any easier it would do it without you. I mean it's. And that's what, unfortunately that's what you need in this, in this realm of trying to get guys to go out and do that stuff. And then the other piece of that like you said is great. You know, like on the landscape side if I want to go post some stuff, social media, I have to like can you guys take some pictures of like imoen or doing this and nobody comes back with anything like how, how hard is it? Just take your camera and take a 30 second video of somebody doing something. You know in both businesses the construction and the landscaping like make my life easy, please.
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C
I had a convo at the, I was like lifting weights this morning which I don't do but I happen to be doing it this morning the gym, talking about social media and you know they're paying someone to post for them and than all these businesses and I. It's like we all have an actual job that's even starting Company cam. It was like if it isn't easier for the person in the field it will not happen because their job is to like, it's to install a roof, it's to port like lay this saw it like they're, they have something they're trying to get done and this documentation, filling out paperwork, it's, it's, it's like an afterthought now and again. Maybe you have better processes, you manage people better. You can get people to do all sorts of busy work but no one likes it. Yeah but we, yes with the taking pictures and talking like the AI walkthrough was. It's something I wanted since before starting company cam. I remember because I come from the roofing industry and so I'm found myself. I'm on these roofs, I'm doing sales, I'm taking a bunch of pictures and I'm trying to like write in this notebook and I'm like man, I just want to take the pictures and talk and then have that all be saved and organized. Yeah, that's and at the time that was like impossible, whereas now that's totally possible. Just take the pictures, just talk and then hopefully we're working towards this. Company Cam is running itself as much as possible and you're just doing the work and then people in the field should be clear what they need to do and then updates coming back. Because one thing we're, we're good at delivering you like a feed where, hey, here's everything. Yeah, you can look through it. I don't think we're very good right now of delivering you kind of like summarized updates like, hey, this is what happened over here today. Or this is whether it's by job, by person, by, you name it. And that's something we think we have an opportunity. And it's just like, how do we, for you as the owner, give you the information without you having to actually scroll through the whole feed and kind of like look at everything that happened? I keep running this combo.
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B
No, no, too much. It's. No, this is good. This is why I want you on, because I want our listeners to hear about Company Camp. Because I know there's probably not a lot of people that have. Because it's not, you know, it's not a shiny little object that, you know, hey, I'm going to go buy this new thing. No, it's a software that can make your life easier, that can help you document stuff better. You know, I like they say, and this is the one reason I push Company Can I make pictures worth a thousand words? I mean, if you can take your phone out and take some pictures of the work you're doing, you don't have to say anything like, here's what it looked like, here's what it looks like now. Enough said.
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C
A picture, you can find that. It's like, that's what we kept running into because it's like scrolling through your phone.
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B
I think we did that in December of 2023 or, or, you know, you
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C
know, it's someone else's phone. And it's like I had people emailing me photos, you know, and they're all named like image_420 or whatever. It's like, I can't, I can't. I don't know what I'm like doing here. But now with Company Cam, the idea being you're seeing it in real time. So it's coming to you in a feed. You can open the app, you can look at it, you can just see what's happening. Or the other big, like valuable thing is that just makes it really easy for it to be organized by that project. Such that later when you want to go back and for like, for my family's roofing business, they're, they've got 10 years of history, so there's places they've been multiple times they've done this roofing or they've done gutters or then it got hailed on and they have this whole history. And I know for me, like, if I look back at a work order. Yeah, okay, I think I kind of remember that like four years ago. Whereas if you show me pictures and I pull it up in Company Cam, I'm like, oh yeah, I remember her. And they had this, you know, leak over here. Whatever. It's like it, it just, I don't know, it just, it becomes a version of your, like, memory almost where you're just looking in there for all sorts of stuff. But is most of your work. When I imagine the landscaping, I'm imagining it's like repetitive, like, like maintenance versus, like the project where you're building stuff.
- [28:16]
B
Here's what happened when we first started. Quick synopsis.
- [28:21]
A
Hey, it's Mr. Producer jumping in, letting you know. This is where we're wrapping up this episode of Charged up to hear the rest of Tim's story and the conclusion of the interview with Luke Hanson from Company Cam. Make sure to come back next week if you'd like to connect with Luke or Company Cam. Check the code show notes for all of that information. And thanks for tuning in to Charged Up. That's it for this episode of Charged up, where tech meets turf. If you enjoyed the ride through the world of electric and automated lawn care, don't forget to follow the podcast. Leave a well worded five star review and share with your fellow green thumbs and gearheads. To connect with Tim, check out the show description. Thanks again for listening. And until the next time, stay sharp, stay, stay smart, and stay charged up.