The Sprinkler Nerd Show

You're paying for clicks and leads. How much of that is actually turning into paying customers? I'm in St. Louis at Chans Weber's office at Agile & Co., with marketing questions straight from a podcast listener who wants to know whether his money is being well spent.

Google Business Profiles, Google Ads, marketing reports, and return on ad spend are all on the table. How do you expand into another neighborhood without landing in "Google jail"? Which numbers should your marketing company be showing you every month? And with a $700 average service ticket, what can you afford to spend to win a customer?

There's also the part we have to own as contractors: answering the phone, following up quickly, and turning an inquiry into a booked job. Before spending more on advertising, it's worth asking what's happening to the leads you're already buying.

This episode is for irrigation and landscape business owners who want to understand their digital marketing, ask better questions, and grow a business that makes money—not just looks busy.

Daniel Overton is 25 and already has 8 years in irrigation. He works for Ricci's Landscape Management in northwest Indiana, listens to the podcast, and reached out to me back in July. We've stayed in touch, I sent him a soil moisture sensor to experiment with, and I wanted to get him on the show to hear what he's seeing in the field.

We talk about learning the trade, the hardest parts of being an irrigation technician, and why your troubleshooting process matters more than the tools you carry.

I'm curious what keeps people like Daniel excited about this work, what technology they see coming, and what they wish the industry would do differently. There's a lot we can learn by asking the younger people already doing the job.

What if life isn't like a box of chocolates?

Maybe life is like a box of choices. Choose wisely.

Today I'm recording from CitiesAlive, the Green Roofs for Healthy Cities conference in New York City. I'm here not because I have to be. Not because someone sent me. I'm here because I chose to be here.

And that got me thinking about the last 25 years.

I didn't just "end up" in irrigation. I chose irrigation. And I've continued choosing it—through curiosity, technology, entrepreneurship, sensors, water, mistakes, questions, and thousands of little decisions along the way.

In this episode of the Sprinkler Nerd Podcast, I explore what it means to actively choose the work you do, how to know when it's time to choose something different, and why not making a choice is still a choice.

Ask yourself one question:

Knowing what you know today, would you choose what you're doing again?

If the answer is yes—choose it. Go all in.

If the answer is no—choose something else.

You don't have to know exactly where it will lead. You just have to remember that you can choose again.

Life is a box of choices. Choose wisely.

What does it really take to go all in on a landscape business?

Dean Ricci started mowing lawns at just 10 years old, pulling his mower behind a bicycle with a homemade trailer built by his dad. By high school, he had trucks, trailers, equipment, and employees. More than 30 years later, Ricci's Landscape Management has grown into a multimillion-dollar company with more than 65 employees.

But this conversation isn't really about landscaping.

It's about building a business.

Dean and I talk about the transition from doing the work yourself to building a team that can operate without you, creating systems and SOPs, developing leaders, adopting technology, making mistakes, letting go of control, and surviving the growing pains that come with scaling a company.

We also talk about something every contractor eventually has to confront:

At some point, working harder stops working.

If you're an irrigation contractor, landscaper, plumber, electrician, HVAC contractor—or anyone trying to turn a trade into a real business—there's a lot to learn from Dean's journey.

From a lawn mower behind a bicycle to more than three decades in business.

Dean Ricci went all in.

Your next opportunity might start with a message you haven't sent yet.

When I started sharing my cell phone number on the podcast, I thought I might get overwhelmed with calls and texts. Turns out, very few people reach out. But an irrigation contractor in Indiana did—and the day this episode drops, we're meeting in person to explore technology, IoT, and possibilities for their business.

In this nano episode, I'm reflecting on that small step between being curious and acting on it. Asking a question. Starting a conversation. Taking a little chance on something you'd love to understand better.

We spend plenty of time talking about connecting devices. Here's a reminder to connect with people, too.

Bring your curiosity. Just press send.

At some point, growing a service business requires the owner to stop being the person who does everything and become the person who builds the company.

In this episode, Andy talks with Christy Carter, founder of WorkWife. Christy built an HVAC company from the kitchen table to more than $5 million in revenue before selling it. She knows firsthand how difficult the climb from a few hundred thousand dollars to several million can be—especially when every phone call, scheduling problem, unfinished process, and administrative task keeps landing back on the owner.

Christy now helps service businesses strengthen their back-office operations with systems, implementation, and virtual assistant support. Her goal is simple: clear the owner's plate instead of adding more work to it.

Andy and Christy discuss the messy middle of business growth, why the $2 million to $5 million stage is especially challenging, what begins to break as a company grows, and how owners can finally create enough space to lead.

It may be time to put down the tool bag.

Live While You're Young

What if you never hated learning? What if you only hated being told what, when, and how to learn?

It's Labor Day weekend, everyone is heading back to school, and I've been thinking about the difference between school and learning.

I was never meant for school. Both of my parents were teachers. My dad taught teaching at Middlebury College. I played by the rules and did the best I could—but I kept asking one question:

Why?

Why do I need to know this?

Where will I use it?

What problem does it solve?

Why does it matter?

Years later, I realized that kid asking "why" never hated learning. He fucking loved it.

For those of us in irrigation, HVAC, plumbing, electrical, landscaping, and the service trades, the field can become our university. The truck is the classroom. The job site is the laboratory. And when something doesn't work?

Figure it out.

You get to choose your curriculum now.

This is your chance to unfuck what school may have taught you about learning. Take back your curiosity. Ask questions. Get things wrong. Go down rabbit holes. Become the world's best learner.

You're not taking orders anymore.

You're taking over.

You are the captain of your learning ship.

Sail well.

Sometimes the view changes when you stop looking straight ahead.

In this Quickie, I'm thinking about perspective, curiosity, and what happens when we're willing to look through a different window—or maybe even fall through the looking glass. The answer you're searching for might already be there. You may just need to change where you're standing

This week, I'm in Palm Springs, California, helping build a LoRaWAN data layer across a private golf course.

The first use case is simple: BLADE soil moisture sensors in the greens, giving the superintendent real-time insight without relying entirely on manual field scouting. But the bigger opportunity is the network itself.

This isn't command and control. The irrigation controller already owns that job. This is a separate, open data layer — one that can support soil moisture, pressure, rainfall, water level, weather, flow, and whatever else we become curious enough to measure.

Every golf course needs a data layer.

And maybe every large landscape does too.

Follow your curiosity. Try something. See what happens.

Stay curious, my friends.

Try MODURA for FREE: monitor.modura.app

In this episode of the Sprinkler Nerd Show, Andy reflects on a lesson that has taken decades—and a whole lot of technology—to understand: technology is not the answer.

Inspired by Jimmy Buffett's Life Is Just a Tire Swing, Andy goes back to where much of his curiosity began: riding in a truck with Paul Bassett, asking questions and getting honest answers about how irrigation really worked—and how it could work differently.

After a career surrounded by controllers, sensors, flow meters, soil moisture, LoRaWAN, analytics, and AI, Andy is more convinced than ever that the future of irrigation starts with people first, simple mechanical solutions second, and digital technology third.

Because information alone doesn't change anything.

People do.