On this Weekly Update of Trades Talk, Justin White is joined by Sean Laux, K&D's leader of innovation and technology, kicking off a new chapter of the Friday show: weekly deep dives on AI inside a trades business.

Sean and Justin break down the K&D AI stack, why most CEOs are getting AI wrong, and how to actually find ROI in a market where 56 percent of CEOs say AI has delivered nothing.

In this episode, we cover:

• The K&D AI operating system: normalized database, MCPs, and Justin's "Reggie" Claude agent
• Why a CFO skill that runs three recursive QA loops is replacing the CFO hire (and the Instagram hate that followed)
• Dan Martell's three levels of AI (assistant, automation, agent team) and where almost no one lives
• The AI guru warning: why a $250K retainer firm cannot understand your workflow in a day

Two assignments for the week: run a 10 to 20 question self-interview with AI on a problem you cannot solve, and build your first Claude Cowork automated task (a daily brief is a great starting point).

If you are a trades CEO under board pressure to ship AI ROI, a tech-curious operator just getting started, or anyone who has burned cash on an AI consultant and gotten nothing, this episode is the playbook.

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This week on Trades Talk, Justin White sits back down with Jeremy Ross, division lead for K&D Landscaping's Design Build Construction division, for round two. In nine years Jeremy has scaled the division from a few hundred thousand to $8 million in trailing twelve month revenue with 8 crews, 2 project managers, 2 supervisors, and a full pre-construction team.

In this episode:

• How Jeremy built an $8M custom design build division and the operating system underneath it
• Why outsourcing design to Your Haven actually works when you know what good looks like (WGLL)
• Inside K&D's L10 meeting: good news, headlines, to-dos, KPIs, rocks, issue processing
• Why every K&D hire fights the meetings at first, then refuses to give them up

Jeremy's trade secret is simple. Trust your team to do the work and stop getting in their way. Delegation is not about taking things off your plate, it is about giving your team the chance to win at what they do best.

If you are running a design build division, leading a high performing team, or trying to figure out how to actually delegate without losing control, this one is required listening.

JW Group Website: https://www.jwhitegroup.com/ Justin LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/justin-white-%E2%98%85-35b7a210b/ Justin Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/justinwhiteceo/ Justins Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@justinwhiteceo K&D Website: https://kndlandscaping.com/ K&D Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/kanddlandscaping/ Disruptors Community: https://www.skool.com/disruptors Disruptors Advantage Newsletter: https://disruptors-advantage.beehiiv.com/

Join Disruptors: https://www.skool.com/disruptors/about Year two kicks off here. Justin debriefs the LeanScaper event in Chicago and pulls three takeaways straight from the room. The 131 rule from Dan Martell for handing problems back to your team instead of being the firefighter. Why trust is the foundation under every high performing company, with a nod to Patrick Lencioni's Five Dysfunctions of a Team. And the calendar audit that was Justin's biggest aha of the week: 14 days, 15 minute blocks, rate your energy, then apply the four Ds.

From there he digs into the issue squeezing landscapers right now. Profitability compression in an inflationary boom. Two operators, different sizes, same problem. Justin makes the case that the bottleneck is almost always at the top of the bottle, why hiring your heroes beats defaulting to a consultant, and how a simple system like EOS and a Level 10 meeting can break a leader's ceiling.

Brought to you by Kress. Fully electric, now fully autonomous, deploying at scale at K&D. Want a demo or an intro to the right person in your market? Email justin@jwhitegroup.com and Justin will connect you directly.

Upcoming events: Lawn & Landscape Technology Conference, July 22 to 24: Lawn and Landscape Tech Conference Sign Up NALP Elevate, Tampa, November 8 to 11, featuring an AI experience for executives hosted by Justin: https://www.landscapeprofessionals.org/Elevate

See you next week, right here on the Weekly Update. Connect with Justin: LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/justin-white-%E2%98%85-35b7a210b/ Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/justinwhiteceo