The Commercial Landscaper Podcast

Judith Guido is the Chairwoman and Founder of Guido & Associates, a firm dedicated to helping organizations profitably grow their people, profits, and valuation. Today, she also serves as the Operating Executive and Chairwoman of the Green Summit Landscape Group, which is an investment platform that is a part of the Century Park Capital Partners portfolio and are acquiring distinguished founder and family-led commercial and high-end estate full service landscape maintenance, lawncare, irrigation, design-build, snow and related green industry companies.

Throughout her distinguished career, Judith has participated in more than 100 mergers, acquisitions, and consolidations, advising companies on strategy, execution, leadership development, workforce growth, sales and marketing, funding, and organizational scaling. She is one of only a small group Global Thought Leaders and Executive Coaches affiliated with Verne Harnish, author of Scaling Up and Rockefeller Habits, and has been recognized as one of the most influential women in the Green Industry, earning induction into the Green Industry Hall of Fame in 2017 and has received numerous awards in the Green industry including the Lawn & Landscape Leadership Award..

Prior to founding Guido & Associates, Judith held executive leadership positions with some of the industry's most prominent organizations, including ValleyCrest (now BrightView), ServiceMaster's TruGreen-LandCare, Yellowstone Landscape, and LandCare USA, where she was one of four executives who helped take the company public on the New York Stock Exchange. A respected keynote speaker, business columnist, strategist, and advisor, she has trained thousands of professionals and helped companies raise hundreds of millions of dollars in funding. Judith's expertise spans the Green Industry, construction, technology, real estate, and private equity sectors, and her work continues to focus on helping leaders build stronger teams, increase company value, and achieve sustainable growth while guiding acquisitions, integrations, and long-term business growth strategies. Guido has also helped coach and mentor over 200 men and women in the green industry.

Justin Martin is the CEO of Granite Hills Group, a rapidly growing commercial landscape platform serving the Southeast and Mid-Atlantic. Since joining Granite Hills in 2020, he has helped lead the business from $10 million in revenue to nearly $70 million through strong organic growth, strategic acquisitions, and a relentless focus on people and culture. Justin works closely with the company's leadership team to shape strategy, strengthen operations, develop leaders, and build a business designed to last. He believes success—both personally and professionally—is ultimately measured by impact: the impact we make on our families, our team members, our customers, and the communities we serve.

Justin's career in the green industry began in high school at a garden center in Raleigh, North Carolina. After starting his professional career in management training and sales with Cintas, he returned to the landscape industry and spent nearly a decade with one of the country's largest commercial landscape companies, growing from account manager to vice president. Along the way, he learned from leaders who challenged him to level up and from experiences that reinforced how he wanted others to feel when working alongside him—lessons that continue to shape how he leads and develops people today. He is passionate about building great teams, developing leaders, and challenging the status quo of what a commercial landscape company can be. Justin lives in Fort Mill, South Carolina, with his wife, Michelle, and their two sons, Will and Zach. Outside of work, he enjoys trail running, mountain biking, hiking, traveling, and exploring new places with his family.

Derek Stutts is the General Manager for Granite Hills' Raleigh-Durham market, where he leads a team of experienced professionals and a frontline workforce of more than 70 employees. His passion for the green industry began at just 16 years old, working on the grounds crew of a private country club in North Durham. Originally planning to become a golf course superintendent, Derek attended North Carolina State University, studying Turfgrass Management, Horticulture, and Agricultural Business. After graduation, his career took him into the commercial landscape industry, where he advanced from crew leader into management with a national landscape company. He later helped build a landscape maintenance division for a local contractor before returning to a larger national provider in a leadership role.

Driven by an entrepreneurial spirit, Derek eventually launched his own company, GroundWorks, growing the business from a single truck and one employee—himself—to approximately $1.5 million in annual revenue within just a few years. When the opportunity arose to become part of Granite Hills as an originating platform company, he made the decision to join the organization and help build its future. Today, Derek is passionate about developing people, building strong teams, and delivering exceptional service to clients across the Triangle. He and his family live on old farmland in Hillsborough, North Carolina, where his appreciation for the land extends beyond his career. Away from work, you'll most likely find him spending time with his wife and three children, relaxing anywhere near the water, or behind a drum set playing with his band or serving on various worship teams.

Scott Hutcheon is a landscape architect, entrepreneur, and technology innovator with more than 25 years in design/build construction, green infrastructure, and landscape systems engineering. After founding one of Southern California's leading design/build firms and later pioneering the AquaFelt™ living-wall system for large commercial projects, Scott went on to build ShrubHub, which became the largest online landscape-design platform in the U.S.

Across these ventures, Scott developed deep expertise in automation, data organization, and scalable workflows — long before modern AI emerged. Drawing from his architectural mindset and real-world field experience, he founded HeyFlora, the AI operating system for landscape management. HeyFlora unifies decades of landscape knowledge, comprehensive data sets, and company workflows into one intelligent platform that helps crews, managers, and executives operate with clarity and confidence.

Scott's mission is to modernize the $150B landscape industry by transforming fragmented operations into unified intelligence — a category he calls Artificial Grounds Intelligence™.

Doug Sirkoch is the Marketing Manager at UpRoute, a marketing agency focused on helping green industry businesses grow through paid advertising. At UpRoute, the team goes beyond advertising by using every ad account as a diagnostic tool to uncover what's holding a business back and optimize its broader business strategy, from the offer and pricing to close rates and follow-up speed.

Neal Glatt is a sales and leadership coach, trainer, and speaker who helps green industry organizations scale revenue and profit through better hiring, stronger systems, and improved execution. He brings real-world credibility from his role on the leadership team at Case Snow Management, which he joined in 2010 and helped grow the business from a single pickup truck to more than $40 million in annual revenue in just seven years.

After leading the sales effort as part of the leadership team, Neal launched his own coaching practice in 2017. Today, he works with companies to coach sales leaders, hire high-performing B2B salespeople, and train frontline retail staff to consistently convert opportunity into revenue.

Neal is a Certified Strengths Coach through Gallup and a John Maxwell Certified Coach, Speaker, and Trainer. He holds bachelor's degrees in Marketing and Spanish from Northern Michigan University and a Global Executive MBA from SKEMA Business School.

Mike Montenaro is the CEO of Yardmaster, Inc., where he leads the company's growth, innovation, and commitment to helping customers create and maintain exceptional outdoor spaces. With extensive experience in business leadership and customer-focused operations, Mike has played a key role in strengthening Yardmaster's reputation for quality service, industry expertise, and trusted relationships.

Passionate about entrepreneurship, leadership, and delivering value to customers, Mike focuses on building high-performing teams and driving sustainable business growth. On the podcast, he shares insights on leadership, business development, and the strategies that have helped shape Yardmaster's continued success.

Kayla Lujan didn't plan on a career in the green industry. After graduating with degrees in marketing and sports management and spending two years in professional sports, she found herself in transition and took a temporary position on a flower crew in Virginia Beach earning $8.15 an hour. What started as a stopgap became a 17-year career that took her from gardener to VP of Sales, moving through field operations, account management, business development and eventually leading a sales team of her own.

What set Kayla apart wasn't just her ability to sell. It was that she understood the business from the ground up. She knew what ops needed, how the field worked, and what it actually took to deliver on what she promised a client. That operational foundation shaped how she led, how she coached, and how she thought about developing the people around her. Through every role she kept noticing the same thing: the people who struggled weren't struggling because they lacked talent or drive. They were struggling because no one was intentionally coaching them.

That experience is what led her to found GRiT³, Green Industry Talent, a placement, training, and coaching company built exclusively for commercial landscape sales professionals and leaders. GRiT³ connects companies with the right talent and stays involved through structured training and coaching because Kayla believes the hire is only the beginning. Her philosophy is simple: attitude first, skills second, and development never stops.

Jack Jostes is the CEO of Ramblin Jackson, The Snow and Landscape Marketing Agency that helps landscaping companies throughout the United States attract more qualified customers with professional branding, direct response marketing, sales consulting, website design, and search engine optimization. The author of The Tree of Good Fortune, Jack hosts *The Landscaper's Guide to Modern Sales & Marketing*, a weekly video podcast and YouTube show covering sales, marketing, and leadership for the green industry, ranked in the top 25% of all podcasts on Buzzsprout. He regularly speaks on AI, sales, and digital marketing at major green industry conferences including the ProGreen EXPO, Farwest Show, NALP, TNLA's Nursery Landscape EXPO, and state association and landscape supplier events. He lives in the foothills of Colorado with his wife and two boys, where he enjoys homeschooling, playing bluegrass mandolin, fly fishing, bowhunting, and spending time in the great outdoors.

Learn more about Jack's new book, The Tree of Good Fortune.

Christopher Thacker is the founder and CEO of CrewVision, a map-native dispatch platform built for landscape and snow removal companies. He got his start in the industry at 12 years old, shovelling walkways and mowing lawns, and today owns and operates Mr. Mow It All, a roughly $10M property care and snow removal company in Toronto. The business serves as CrewVision's live proving ground, where every feature is tested by real crews, on real routes, under real operational pressure before it ships.

CrewVision is built around a simple belief: any crew should be able to service any property, at any time, and know exactly what needs to be done. The knowledge that keeps a company running can't stay trapped in one person's head, one veteran operator's memory, or a pile of job notes. It needs to live on the map, where the people doing the work can actually see it, trust it, and use it. Christopher also serves as Vice Chair of SIMA and is an advocate for field-first software: tools designed around crews in the field, not just managers in the office.

Josh McMillan is the President and CEO of Roebuck Landscaping, a company he has spent more than 30 years building from the ground up. Starting in the field and working through every level of business: operations, estimating, management, and executive leadership. Josh has transformed a small family-owned landscape business in Upstate South Carolina into one of the fastest growing landscape companies in the Southeast. His expertise spans commercial landscape construction and maintenance, preconstruction and estimating, business development, financial discipline, labor efficiency, and long-term strategic planning.

Over the last two years, Josh has led Roebuck Landscaping into a new era of intentional growth and disciplined scale, completing the company's first acquisition of The Greathouse Company in Nashville, developing new branch models, and building leadership pipelines designed to support a multi-state footprint. A hands-on, people-first leader, Josh refuses to sacrifice culture or quality for growth, grounding every decision in Roebuck Landscaping's Core Values: Integrity, Excellence, Teamwork, Determination, and Passion. His vision is clear — to build one of the largest and most respected landscape companies in the Southeastern United States!