So when I talk to a coach, a competent, connected, well rounded flywheel coach, I'm not just getting information, I'm getting informed experience. I'm getting a totally different story than an than a random Instagram Reel that I see on my phone. I would say the coaching is the is the secret sauce of Flywheel.
Joan Kaup:Welcome to On the Fly! podcast, where we talk with people that make magic happen in the social impact landscape. Great entrepreneurs don't build alone. They have a community surrounding them. They have exceptional coaches guiding them. Over the past three years, thirty four dedicated Flywheel coaches have contributed five twelve hours to our flagship accelerators, sharing experience and expertise to help founders scale and succeed.
Joan Kaup:At Flywheel Social Enterprise Hub, the coaching and mentorship is the secret ingredient that helps founders refine their ideas, overcome challenges, and build companies that make a difference. Companies that have a double bottom line both financial success and positive social impact. My name is Joan Kaupp, host of On the Fly. Today, we are joined by Paul Sidlowski, who is a serial entrepreneur and a coach with Flywheel Social Enterprise Hub. With him is Brandon Reynolds, another serial entrepreneur, and Johnny Avant, who joined Brandon in his most recent venture.
Joan Kaup:Brandon and Johnny came to Flywheel as emerging social impact founders. Let's listen in as Paul, Brandon, and Johnny discuss B the Keeper, Sprout, and their Flywheel experience.
Paul Szydlowski:Brandon, you started B The Keeper, and then you and Johnny together started Sprout. And B The Keeper was the first enterprise that you brought to Flywheel. That's kind of your been your identity. If I mentioned the name Brandon Reynolds, people say, oh, B The Keeper. That's who you are.
Paul Szydlowski:I know you've moved beyond that, but what initially was the the idea and the inspiration behind B The Keeper?
Brandon Reynolds:Wow. And be the keeper that it it's funny when you say it is my identity. It it is. It it feels like me. It's it's interchangeable. It's me when think of myself.
Brandon Reynolds:If I were to be a superhero, I think of be the keeper and and environmentalist that's actually moving around the city, making connections, doing magical things. And turning that into a business was my first challenge because you can't just be I mean, it taught me how to build everything that I learned in college, everything that I've seen on TV. You know, when you're on Instagram listening to, you know, Gary Vee and, you know, it was the E, the Hip Hop Preacher. You know, you're watching all these people when you actually have to put it to practice. That was the the challenge of be the keeper.
Brandon Reynolds:And so when Flywheel came out and said, hey, we we're doing an open call for sustainable sustainability Cincy here, sustainable Cincy. I hopped right on it because I had to figure out, you know, because I used to be an advertising guy for a year and a half, but it was enough to see what it takes to take a piece of creative through an agency and back to the client and learning how to relate to people. My challenge was how can I advertise sustainability in a way to get people to think it's sticky and accessible enough to actually make, you know, green decisions, to actually learn about regional conservation efforts to reverse pollinator decline? But B The Keeper initially was how do I keep bees at people's houses? And that is very different than what it is now.
Brandon Reynolds:And even what it turned it I mean, it morphed into what it is now. It started to get its baby legs through flywheel. But before that, I said, oh, I've if I get 30 beehives in Cincinnati and five in Hyde Park, five in Lincoln Heights, five in in Avondale and just keep going and, you know, I'll make about $35 a year. Woah. And that never happened.
Brandon Reynolds:That never happened. And I'm very thankful that it didn't because keeping Brandon or B The Keeper, keeping beehives all over the city isn't the key to conservation. I think it's cool. I think it's fun. I love honeybees.
Brandon Reynolds:But in reality, there are there are hundreds of native bees, butterflies, moths, birds. There's so many other native species that we need people to think about that if I just focus on one, I'm missing the point. And so in Flywheel, I said, hey. I came to them with the idea of I'm gonna keep bees at corporations and residences, and then we're gonna do a little bit of pollinator habitat there to just show people these are plants. And then it turned into, hey, you don't have to do any beekeeping at all.
Brandon Reynolds:If you just focus on scaling up the ecological landscaping and putting these quote unquote, if you want to think about advertising, b b b billboards, "bee-ll boards", places.
Paul Szydlowski:Did you just come up with that?
Brandon Reynolds:I think I just thought of that. And I had to look at Johnny and say, is this safe? Is this gonna come out okay? What is it? It's "on the fly" right?
Brandon Reynolds:If I keep these bee-ll billboards, I'm gonna try that every every second here. Places, you know, in front of like, you can go there right now. You go to WCPO, there is a really big pollinator habitat with multiple different colors, so many colors, so many species hit it. If I do that and as many residences, as many businesses as possible, the bees will keep themselves.
Brandon Reynolds:Mhmm. And that's when you when you think about scalability, when you think about creating an infinite game, when you think about a renewable business that just keeps producing and creating, that's when it clicked.
Paul Szydlowski:Okay. So so to do that, how do you do you market this and go how do you market this to clients to say, hey, we wanna do you wanna create? Or are you look you start with somebody who's looking for a new landscape, or do you go to somebody and say, hey, there they may be interested in a sustainable environment that would be pollinator friendly?
Brandon Reynolds:Yeah. So one way I think I will say WCPO was one of the best. I wanna say the best because somebody's gonna listen to this and be like, I thought you said that about us. EW Scripps, WCPO, they're they're together. And they're one of the best partnerships I've ever had because when we talked and I actually met Becky Regalsberger at a flywheel event, she said, hey, we are a media company and which means we see we get a lot of eyeballs hourly every single day of the year.
Brandon Reynolds:Multiple years in real life. When you I I was watching WCPO as a kid. And she said, we want to you know, while people see us and all the time, we want people to know that we care about community, but we also care about environment. Those things are interchangeable for us. And I think with media, you know, sometimes you go to the news and see doom and gloom all the time.
Brandon Reynolds:But we don't want that to be our identity. We want we want people to know, like, hey, we we care about being in the community, the positive parts about community, but we also the community is not just human beings. The human being is, okay, how much carbon can we reduce? How much less mowing can we do on our landscape? How do we have not just pretty plants, but plants that, you know, require less effort and absorb carbon, you know, stuff like she was talking to me. She was selling me.
Paul Szydlowski:It's like she knew what what she wanted is what you're offering.
Brandon Reynolds:Yes. I think she's still on the Flywheel board. Great individual. And so she's selling me, and that's when I knew she she is picking up what what I'm putting down. She was putting it down to me.
Paul Szydlowski:Mhmm.
Brandon Reynolds:But she it was it was that's the best relationship is when you have a conversation about the bigger things. When I talk to somebody and they say price, price, cost, cost, my brain immediately thinks, okay, why are we talking it's obviously gonna be more expensive than what you're doing because we're creating a new habitat. And then the price savings will go later because they're perennial plants, they come back bigger and better every year and they eat carbon. You don't have to water them, stuff like that.
Brandon Reynolds:But for me, it's the it's the mission, it's the goal. And that that is that is how I sell the to the best clients, to the the relationships that I still have is when we start thinking about those bigger issues of, hey, if they're a homeowner and they say, hey, I have a lot of parties at my house for my family. I'm a family guy. I'm a one of six. My wife's one of five.
Brandon Reynolds:We have so many nieces and nephews, and we want them when they come out to this nice expensive swing set I bought in the backyard, I want them to walk past a bunch of flowers and see what a hummingbird looks like instead of looking at a magazine. Right. Sold already.
Paul Szydlowski:So let me ask, how did Flywheel help? You mentioned that you came in, you had this idea, but how did Flywheel help you, you know, grow that idea or, you know, turn it into something real?
Brandon Reynolds:Oh, coaching. We we had great programming. We had amazing programming. Bill, Josie, we had an amazing program, but it was the coaching. I still see one of my coaches, Sandy R Hughes.
Brandon Reynolds:Yeah. We talk every almost every week. It's the coaching. It's the relationship aspect of Flywheel when you're talking to a person. You know, you think about Google and things, but you're a database of knowledge. You've been in business longer than I've been alive.
Paul Szydlowski:Thanks reminding me of that.
Brandon Reynolds:Oh, yeah. Sorry. But in the best way.
Brandon Reynolds:In the best way. When you think about what that really means, I can get on Google for hours, but you have connected so many different parts of your your human experience, and then you've you've expressed your creative design. Like, you've you've been in the trenches. So when I talk to a coach, a a a a competent, you know, connected, well rounded flywheel coach, I'm not just getting information. I'm getting informed experience.
Brandon Reynolds:Mhmm. And then when I talked to Sandy and she's like, oh, well, I was at P&G for a long time. This is what we did to market products to people. By the way, we're one of the biggest recognizable brands on the planet. I'm getting a totally different story than an than a random Instagram reel that I see on my phone. And so I think that the coaching, it just I'm getting years of college just by talking to people. And I would say the coaching is the is the secret sauce of Flywheel.
Paul Szydlowski:You're a serial entrepreneur, but you're also a serial Flywheel founder. And your second, experience was with Johnny, with Sprout. So, I I I'm gonna ask Johnny this. How did how did the idea or inspiration for Sprout come about? And then we'll get into what Sprout is and what it's become.
Johnny Avant:Yeah, that's always a fun question to answer. I think it probably dates back to actually a couple years of just conversations with Brandon. I saw come from a very, you know, technical background, so like, I always loved, like, data, information, science. And Brandon's very much on the human on the human sciences side, ones like nature, biology. And to some of the points he was mentioning earlier just about, you know, he can't be the one to put bees in homes all across the neighborhoods, states, The US. So that there has to be some way to get Brandon in homes without Brandon being in every home. And I was like, technology, question mark, are you okay with that? I know sometimes like not superhuman
Brandon Reynolds:Oh, wow.
Johnny Avant:But like we can make it work And it was, I think it was like year after year, I was like, hey, have you thought about it? Does it sound cool? Comfortable? He was like, no. No. No.
Brandon Reynolds:Aggressive no's, I think. Yeah.
Johnny Avant:I was like, okay. So we're he's helping me out in front of my house and we're like, you know, putting a landscape in, he's helping me like dig beds, like teaching me a ton of stuff. And to that informed experience point that he mentioned earlier, I think that was the part that like kind of flicked that light bulb to where it was like an infusion of like, okay, Brandon, listen. You have this mission to put billboards all across as far as you can reach them, but you can't your arms are only so long.
Johnny Avant:How about, hear me out, if we use data with people to help spread that message? And we just started talking and talking and talking and eventually he was like, wait a minute. He was like, oh, if I automate or help supplement things that are taking me away from people with technology, I think we can do something with that.
Johnny Avant:And so that's how we kind of came up with the concept of Sprout because it was like, you know, when it comes to ecological landscaping, when it comes to preservation, you know, how do you bring nature back into people's homes? We were like, how do you do that in a way that's, you know, digestible because the content is dense? You know, I didn't come from a very, you know, rich background in this space, but, you know, trying to learn my way through it, there's a ton of content. You know, having people with learned experiences, people like himself and others, being able to disseminate that in a way that people can really kind of champion for themselves was really kind of like the challenge that we wanted to go after when we originally conceptualized Sprout.
Paul Szydlowski:Sprout began as a way to use technology to help Brandon achieve his vision of of pollinator and bee billboards spread as wide a geographical expanse as you could imagine. So what would you say is the most important thing for a founder going into Flywheel? What should be the mindset?
Brandon Reynolds:We have a very warrior mindset.
Paul Szydlowski:Okay. Okay.
Johnny Avant:I think it's it's a it's a pivot, like just be okay with change.
Brandon Reynolds:Okay. We call it we call them audibles.
Johnny Avant:We pulled a ton of audibles and it felt for a while that we weren't making any forward momentum, but I think what it did is hardened our vision and our mission and our understanding of like what problem we're actually solving. And I think that's what Flywheel did like a tremendous job with, you know, with our coaches and the programming, it really hammered on like, you testing? Are you asking the right questions? Are you going after the right problem that people resonate with? And are you saying it in a way that people understand?
Brandon Reynolds:It got to a point it's it's just such a it's such a simple concept. It's are you creating something in your head that you want to throw on people? Or are you actually having real conversations? And and to Johnny's point, we do think of things that are very novel and cool and have worked. But at the end of the day, are you testing?
Brandon Reynolds:Is it actually what people need? Are you just being like, hey, I I think you need this. Actually, I really want you to need this so I can sell it to you and make a bunch of money and go to Cabo three times a month. Like, you know you need this. It's it's are you being are you pushing?
Brandon Reynolds:Are you you sort of pulling the the the needs?
Paul Szydlowski:Right. And if you look, you'll see the landscape means the same plants are planted everywhere, because these are easy landscape centers carrying them, but it's not sustainable, necessarily. So when you're asked, it's like, I don't know. So how did that conversation transpire? Johnny, you wanna take that?
Johnny Avant:I think there was I think the opposite happened, where when I was trying to, you know, bring Brandon along with technology, he was like, like, what plants do you want? Like, what do you wanna put here? What do wanna do there? Like, what do you wanna what do you think about this? Like, you know, what's your goal for your yard? And I was I had no answer for any question. And we, like, were asking other people, they had no answer for any question. And we were like, wait a minute. Why does no one have any answers? Some people have answers.
Johnny Avant:Why don't we have answers? We were like, I think this is the this is the North Star. Like, how do you help people answer that question? Because not everyone has a Paul Sidlowski at home or Brandon Reynolds at home. Like, we don't have these experts that we can just, like, say, hey.
Johnny Avant:Thinking about putting something around this tree. What do you think? Because you're gonna Google it, you're gonna find too many answers and a lot of them won't be helpful or be what you need. So we were like, how do we kind of be that in between that translation, that conduit between the curious and the lived experience. Okay.
Paul Szydlowski:How did Sprout take and run with that idea?
Johnny Avant:I think we probably had maybe like million different iterations of what we thought it would be. And in the beginning, I think we started with the solution and that was probably where we were running, like, in circles until we started doing a lot more discovery and asking people, you know, are you even curious about nature? Like, do you know what this thing looks like? Like, when was the last time that you've, like, been this close to a bee? Did you know that not all bees are trying to enter your home?
Johnny Avant:Like, all these things that we kinda just, like, you know, found that, hey, have you tried googling what this plant is? They're like, you know, I have this plant finder app or I have this and that that helps me kinda keep things alive, but they were kinda limited mediums and didn't really like satiate the, you know, the end goal that people wanted. So we just started to kind of like ideate conceptually and like what it would look like. And so we're like, well, maybe maybe it could be a a plant guide. And you know, that's like the most abstract abstract concept you can think of because we were like, how do you take this knowledge and make it available?
Johnny Avant:And we got a lot of inspiration from from you, Paul, with your database of of plants that you archive, a zoo native plant symposium that we went to. We just kind of started to pick up on these nuggets that like, okay, there's the preservation space, the knowledge is kind of locked into brains and not documented, not available. We were like, cool. Can we start by like documenting that or storing it? And that was kinda like the the way that Sprout looked at first, but we had, you know, challenges trying to realize it as something that people can, like, tangibly use because, like we said, the information is dense, but, you know, as we kind of iterate it and iterate it and talk to more people, it started to really boil down into wanting a system that we're in this, like, you know, this AI's phase and, you know, everyone wants this kind of copilot in their pocket.
Johnny Avant:Like, how do we provide, you know, your own plant copilot in your pocket that you can interface with, ask questions from, see what other people are doing to make your decisions less, bring your confidence up. Alright, and then boost your outcomes.
Paul Szydlowski:So so how do you collect that knowledge base? Where is that coming from? Because, obviously, Brandon, you have you're passionate about this, you come you you were involved in the native plants, but you don't know everything about every plant that's native to every region. And so and and, Johnny, as you said, you didn't know anything about plants, so how do you build that that knowledge base? Where does that come from?
Johnny Avant:To Brandon's surprise and and thank, it's humans.
Paul Szydlowski:Okay.
Johnny Avant:Like, there isn't there isn't just a a PDF or zip file that you can download off the web and get it. So it would Sprout kind of formalized in the form of really really community discourse. You know, people on Reddit forums and, you know, other chats, websites who are just asking questions, and that's like a lot of rich knowledge. If someone's like, hey. You know, I live on the West Side of the city and the sun kind of hits my house this way.
Johnny Avant:You know, these type of plants don't work for me here. But I've got a bunch of hillside on my in my house and, you know, these plants kind of help stop a lot of the water from entering into my basement. And, like, all these scenarios that you can't really get from Googling. Like if you say, you know, that nuance and that's where we found like that discourse and we were like, you know, before we build anything super sophisticated, how do we just point people in the direction of discourse that they can just ingest and that we can ingest because there's a lot of richness in there.
Brandon Reynolds:And that was the thing is this was several years ago. It was kind of a weird thought. Like, do you I will go. We've gone to Steve Steve Slack's place at Keystone Flora and sat for three hours Yep. Learning about three plants.
Brandon Reynolds:And walking around watching him talk about this prayer that he built by smothering the weeds with the tarp, that's a three hour conversation. And so you think, like, how do you distill that down? And Johnny's like, we can do with technology. When we go to Facebook and you click on National Geographic makes a post and you click comments, at the very top, you see something that says AI summary, commenters are saying yada yada yada. And so that's essentially like we were thinking about that.
Brandon Reynolds:I mean, obviously, it's Facebook. They probably thought about this a while ago. But it's crazy that it seemed like a novel concept except to us, but that's what the standard is. Because we're thinking if 1,500 people comment on a single post with different opinions, some similar, some different, you're gonna have to find a way to to summarize it. But even a summary is not enough because you're still missing the nuance.
Brandon Reynolds:Like Johnny said, there's some people that live on hills and they have rainwater just running down the slope. You go to Google and you'd have to really be serious about saying like, this is what I'm going through, but everybody can't speak to everyone's experience. But we wanted to give people the capability to do so because you were only gonna be able to solve nuance with lived experience and real real things.
Johnny Avant:We we have expanded the team.
Paul Szydlowski:Okay.
Johnny Avant:So as you can imagine, the coalescence of human knowledge and nuance is a big task. When Brandon and I were kind of thinking about how do we kind of expand Sprout, and so what it looks like today is that, you know, as we thought about, you know, how do you disseminate plant knowledge, how do you make people feel comfortable about technology, we still faced some setbacks and roadblocks and challenges, you know, articulating the vision in a way that people are willing to adopt. Because we found that, you know, a lot of our, you know, ICP or, you know, our customer profile, they didn't want to adopt a new technology. They didn't want to, you know, have an app or a website that they had to then figure out how to use. And we found that a lot of the the knowledge was in the brains of people who were very busy.
Johnny Avant:Like, you know, the landscaping preservation industry is a very time consuming process. You don't always have time to document your work and do all these things. With how we motivated, you know, Brandon to be interested in technology for his own business, we were like, can we first start ground floor and just give people more time through automation? That was kind of like where Sprout kind of took that turn, that pivot is, you know, is like, cool. Like, okay.
Johnny Avant:Let's still think about the mission of of preservation, knowledge dissemination, human nuance, getting people what they need when they need it. But, like, let's first free up the brains of people who have the knowledge to help us really pack this database with this information.
Brandon Reynolds:We were so focused. I mean, were even thinking about like let's be the Airbnb of landscaping so that if somebody because my my services are very expensive would be the keeper. Not not very expensive in in comparison to getting can you blow my the leaves off of my lawn? We're bringing in mulch, we're bringing in plants, we're bringing in trees, we're doing so we're we're digging stuff where there's there is very labor. Well, the beetle keeper has evolved since then, but it's very labor intensive.
Brandon Reynolds:More labor intensive than the small things. But the small things are what a lot of people need. Sometimes you need somebody just needs their lawn watered, you know. And and and I'm not ever gonna do that. I'm not like if they say, I got $50 for somebody to water my my plants when I'm away for vacation.
Paul Szydlowski:Right.
Brandon Reynolds:It's not a big enough deal for me to take. And Johnny's like, well, that's a big enough deal for somebody, $50 an hour? Like, that's a thing. And so we just thought like, how do we make these connections where people who have things that they need to get done, and then people who are hungry to get things done.
Brandon Reynolds:Just like when you think about Airbnb, they solved I think what what and what Johnny's alluding to is there's there's pressure that we were we were finding pressure points. One of the pressure, like and that's one thing we've learned to I I don't wanna say humans, but sometimes you veer away from the pressure and the hard experiences. And Sprout fly will be the key. But it taught Johnny and I, you know, we're best friends. I know he he knows what I'm thinking.
Brandon Reynolds:I know we just we just see each other that way. But one thing that we intuitively do now is we find the pressure. And like Airbnb, you remember when they started, it was we got a lot of people that are going to these cities and they don't want to book hotels, and they don't want to spend the money with that. They want to have a more resident based experience. They want to hang with locals.
Brandon Reynolds:And there's a lot of pressure with that because, you know, you don't wanna wanna want to be safe, want to be affordable. So Airbnb was like, cool. You can stay with book book rooms with locals. And they alleviated that pressure point for us. It's people want stuff, but they can't find the people without putting a bunch of effort to get it. And how do we solve that with automation? And that's when Sprout was like, well, I can do that. Just connecting the dots.
Johnny Avant:That was our biggest takeaway from Flywheel Yeah. Was just that the capacity to understand that the problem that you're trying to solve today, there could be, you know, secondary or tertiary problems that need to be solved first before you get there.
Paul Szydlowski:Okay.
Johnny Avant:And that's a lot of what our coaches were like driving home and it like started to click later into the program and then afterwards we were like, okay, cool. Like, we have this mission. It's a long term mission. It's a grand mission. It's an important mission, but there are things that need to happen first.
Johnny Avant:And by, you know, morphing Sprout into more of a, you know, technology automation focused business where the goal is to, you know, help alleviate the minutiae and the pressure that other people are facing in their own lives, to give them capacity to then want to be excited about talking to us about plants and about preservation, we were like, cool. Let's take that route. So as we exist today, we are not only just a services business where we interface with people and help solve those types of problems for them, we're also a managed service provider where we build tooling that allows people to utilize the automation in in whatever way they see fit and whatever use case that they need.
Paul Szydlowski:So are you saying that this is that Sprout's become is is evolving into a platform that can be used in different in different scenarios, in different industry, different for different purposes?
Johnny Avant:Exactly. Exactly right. And so some of the things that we've done, you know, to date have been, you know, hey, you're a business and you you have challenges like filling out your invoices because you're trying to sell. So we've built we've built technologies to automate the invoice processing process for you. We've built technology to, you know, automatically record your notes so that you can have a more organic interface with a human and not have to continually context switch to jot down what you remember.
Brandon Reynolds:I think one even we were talking with a doula a couple weeks ago, she said, hey, there's a lot of women that there's a lot of doulas, and there's a lot of women who are going moving into pregnancy, who are pregnant, who just have the child, that wanna have a more human you know, they wanna talk to somebody who's had that experience of helping guiding women through that process, which is very personal process. They we it's, you know, they're how do we get them to find each other? That's crazy because that's not landscaping. No. It's not.
Brandon Reynolds:Think that it's it's it's going back to Johnny saying, like, there's so many there's so you don't have infinite time. But there are people that can take the opportunities that you're getting. How do we make it easier to connect the dots?
Paul Szydlowski:How do you leverage that time that you do.
Brandon Reynolds:I think it's not and it's crazy because Johnny said we took the switch. And if we were just doing the let's let's be your the Uber for landscaping Sprout, we might have missed this opportunity. But this is a very real opportunity in a growing category that's helping real people that we know.
Johnny Avant:It's relevant because the same questions asked in the space that Sprout started in are the same questions that are being asked across other domains.
Brandon Reynolds:Right.
Johnny Avant:And it just makes us better at answering these questions so that when we, you know, hit that long term mission and be able to solve that long term problem, we're well equipped.
Brandon Reynolds:Yeah. So it's just it's fun for us because and Johnny, he's pursuing I mean, you're deep in your PhD program at UC.
Paul Szydlowski:That that's the that kind of is amazing. You are work Johnny, are working on your PhD. What is your field of study, but also, how do you balance working on a PhD with being an entrepreneur and and and starting a business?
Johnny Avant:Yes, I did. I did make the decision a few years ago to start a PhD program and honestly have been one of the best decisions I've made. I was just, like Brandon, just unsatisfied with only having a certain level of depth of an answer to a question. And I just love the way that, you know, information excites me. And I think there's like a beauty in math and science and technology that I really wanted to, like, really, really, really explore.
Johnny Avant:And, you know, I've always been a I've always been a fan of Ironman for this technology side. Mhmm. And I've always wanted to, you know, be known in my brand to be an inventor, like solving problems for people just as his brand is, you know, about conservation. And so started started at UC, PhD program, my focus of study is is actually a little bit kind of full circle because my undergrad was in biomedical engineering. Then I kind of pivoted away for a while, was in transportation, CPG, consumer product good companies.
Johnny Avant:But now I'm in a field of called cognitive science where we're using machine learning to understand and be able to predict, you know, human behavior as it pertains to mental health. And that's been super interesting, super rewarding.
Brandon Reynolds:I wanted to clap when you said that.
Johnny Avant:Thank you. And so it uses a ton of psychology, econ, and it just kind of gets back at our understanding of like judgment and behavior. And so a lot of what we face on a daily basis, we have interactions with situations that we then do something with. We have a reaction to. And so if we can understand that a bit deeper, we can help people assess what's happening for themselves.
Johnny Avant:But then how it then can tie into what we're doing together is how do you put plants in front of people's yards that give them that sensation, that response that they need, those, you know, monomeric, you know, hits that kind of make them feel good about being outside.
Paul Szydlowski:People plant the plant and they go, oh, that looks so nice. And then the next day, it's like, okay, when's it gonna grow? It's like, how do you learn, how do you create something that people will enjoy today, tomorrow, and forever?
Brandon Reynolds:It's the long game.
Paul Szydlowski:It's the long game.
Brandon Reynolds:And that's where I think we're at as a team is that, you know, sure, it it would be great to say, hey, we we just IPO'd Sprout in two years. Oh my gosh. Sprout has become Sprout and Be The Keeper. I mean, it's all it's all it's it's getting kind of murky. I mean, they're two separate businesses and they do two separate things that, you know, but for Sprout, it's become our crucible and it's being supercharged with Johnny.
Brandon Reynolds:I mean, it just but we just wanna find problems and then solve them.
Paul Szydlowski:Because you can't solve every problem. So you've got B The Keeper, you've got Sprout. How can people find you guys?
Johnny Avant:So for Sprout, you can find us at go sprout, that's gosprout.us
Brandon Reynolds:Go Sprout us. You can find me at b the keeper, that's b, the letter bthekeeper.co Bethekeeper.co. I have a lot of fun on Instagram, that's just be the keeper, b underscore the keeper, And I talk a lot on there and obviously, LinkedIn.
Johnny Avant:And we're always outside, so you'll also see it. We are always outside.
Paul Szydlowski:There's a lot of entertaining stuff on bthekeeper. So real quick, give one for each company. Elevator pitch in ten seconds.
Johnny Avant:If I gave my ten second elevator pitch for Sprout, I would say Sprout is a business that works hand in hand with you and with your problems to automate them in a way that helps alleviate pressure and gives you time back to do the things that you find important.
Brandon Reynolds:Okay. And I'd say B The Keeper, simple elevator pitch is that with landscaping, a lot of times what we find is people they want the aesthetics of a landscape, but they struggle trying to maintain it for the long term because beauty doesn't always translate into function. It would be the keeper, you get both. You get something that looks attractive to the human eye, but it's also functional for the environment so that you can live in harmony with the ecosystem, the habitat that you call home.
Paul Szydlowski:Okay. Beautiful. So well, guys, I've enjoyed it. Thank you. Yeah.
Paul Szydlowski:Yeah. Brandon's so happy with his response.
Johnny Avant:It was clean.
Brandon Reynolds:So Wow.
Paul Szydlowski:Excellent. It's been great. I you know, I loved working with you as a coach. Great to see you again. And I'm glad to see that things are are progressing so well for you.
Paul Szydlowski:So thank you.
Joan Kaup:On the Fly is produced by Joey Scarillo with music composed by Ben Hammer. Recorded at 1819 Innovation Hub in Cincinnati, Ohio, courtesy of the University of Cincinnati.