Today on the IC-DISC Show we're talking with Gordon Driscoll. Having spent his early career at Goldman Sachs investing tens of millions into metals companies, he kept noticing they were running their operations on Excel spreadsheets and software from the 1980s. That gap became Green Spark, a cloud-based platform now in over 900 scrap metal recycling locations.
In this conversation, Gordon talks about what it took to break into an industry where relationships go back generations, why he thinks most business owners are thinking about software wrong, and how his team earned credibility by acting more like a partner than a vendor. He also shares a customer story that stuck with me about a scale operator who got his first lunch break in six years.
Whether you're in scrap or not, Gordon's thinking on sustainable growth, earning the right to disrupt, and treating technology as a competitive advantage rather than a cost center is worth your time.
SHOW HIGHLIGHTS
- Why a Goldman Sachs investment banker left finance to build software for scrap yards
- The massive technology gap Gordon kept seeing in companies handling tens of millions in materials
- How Green Spark grew to 900+ locations by acting like a partner, not just a vendor
- The customer story about a scale operator getting his first lunch break in six years
- Why Gordon believes you have to earn the right to disrupt an industry, and what that looks like in practice
- The mindset shift from treating software as a cost center to using it as a competitive advantage
Contact Details
LinkedIn - Gordon Driscoll
LINKS
About IC-DISC Alliance
About Green Spark Software
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Gordon Driscoll |
TRANSCRIPT
(AI transcript provided as supporting material and may contain errors)
Gordon:
And I think that a lot of folks, candidly, just because they're not used to either our model or what technology can do today, they don't realize, which is changing, they still view software as a cost center. And ultimately the tools that we're seeing and the applications that we are pushing to the industry, a lot of our customers view as a competitive advantage.
Dave:
Good morning, Gordon. So where are you calling in from today?
Gordon:
Hey, Dave. Appreciate you having me on. I'm in Brooklyn, New York today.
Dave:
Oh, okay. That is great. So I must say, I know a lot of folks in the scrap metal industry, service providers, yard operators, brokers, but you seem to have a particularly unique background. So why don't you tell the story from the time you graduated college? Sounds like you spent some time in investment banking in New York. And what caused you to have this epiphany that you wanted to go provide software in the scrap metal industry?
Gordon:
Yeah, no, of course. It's worth an explanation because looking at my background on paper from finance to scrap software, it doesn't make much sense. So yeah, started my career in financial services, spent a few years in investment banking at Goldman Sachs and then moved into private equity investing, but all of that centered on natural resources, broadly speaking, but specifically the metals industry. So spent a lot of time up and down the value chain, anything from box site refineries in Australia to working with the biggest mills in the country like Cliffs or JW Aluminum or things of that nature. And then in the investing side, spent really just as much time on what I'll call the kind of conventional resource as I did the technology. And I quickly realized the businesses that we were at times giving tens of millions or hundreds of millions of dollars were either using Excel spreadsheets to run their business or platforms that were based in or founded in the '80s, '90s and 2000s, and ultimately saw similar patterns in the recycling industry.
And by no means is using a system like that wrong by definition or inherent, but ultimately saw a massive opportunity to bring an industry that is deceptively huge that no one really pays attention to outside of the folk in the industry and folks who we saw it when we started in 2020 who are quite literally essential workers, bringing that technology to them. And it's been an awesome six years. It's been very exciting. I think that what we wanted to do, clearly the market has responded well, which I'm sure we will get into. And what's really exciting for me is not only working with the folks in this industry on a day in and day out basis, and I can talk to my relationship to the industry and general thoughts, but also specifically as technology has not really progressed linearly over the last couple years, but obviously I had some step changes with AI, being able to innovate alongside this industry and partner with our customers to bring those step changes to an industry like this.
It's been super exciting.
Dave:
Now, well, thank you for that background recap. So let's talk about the founding of the company. So where did the name come from, Green Spark?
Gordon:
Yeah, great question. I unfortunately can't take credit for it. That has to be my co-founder, but we wanted to pay respect to where the industry came from in addition to one of the overlooked elements of the industry, at least from a public perception per perspective. So green in and of itself is a call to, this is the sustainability of the industry. Again, I think that metal recycling is done, especially around the work that Rema's done has done a great job over the last couple years with, let's say, public perception and really educating folks on not only the importance of this industry, but the benefits of the industry from an environmental perspective, hence the green. And Spark actually comes from something that folks used to do without XRF analyzers or without technology. And the irony is not lost on me. So 50, 60, 70 years ago, and still obviously doable today, when you spark different types of metals, the color of the spark actually denotes the greater the quality.
So a yellow spark versus a red spark. So again, we wanted to, again, combine the importance of the industry with a callback to what folks used to do without all of this new technology.
Dave:
Okay. No, well, thank you. I was really curious about the name, and that makes a lot of sense. It's both looking at the future and still remembering the past of the industry. I like that. So you and your co-founder, did you all bootstrap this or did you tap into some of your investment banking contacts and raise money?
Gordon:
Yeah, so we started that way and quickly realized to do what we wanted to do at the pace that we wanted to do it would require outside capital. So yeah, we ended up talking to folks in our network in addition to capital partners that not only understood what our thesis was, which is, again, it's relatively straightforward. At GreenSpark, we want every single scrapyard and metal recycling facility on planet Earth to use our platform. It's not necessarily easy, but it is straightforward. And we realized the kind of pace that we wanted to move. And candidly, given what customers are used to in this industry, i.e., One platform that spans a large part of their business, in addition to the dynamics in the industry, which is us against folks who have been here for 20, 25, 30 years who have lazed the trail for folks like us, we realized to close that gap, we wanted to partner with folks with the capital to scale the team and scale the product relatively quickly.
Dave:
Okay. Yeah, that makes sense. So what, and I don't want to get too technical, but I do want to get technical enough for this to make sense. So what was the differentiator or the different approach you were taking? I'm guessing you're cloud-based instead of on- premise. Is that a safe assumption?
Gordon:
Yeah, 100%. And yeah, I won't get too in the weeds, but I also think it's important to understand what our thesis was. Back then, what's changed over the last couple of years just given what's happened in technology? So yeah, I think from the jump, there are a couple just clear reasons why we felt good about the idea so far. Number one, we are entirely web-based. And I think importantly, we are web or cloud-based fully natively. So rather than trying to either acquire a business that's already been existing or partner with an existing software in the industry, we built everything from the ground up. It's entirely cloud-based. And I think that outside of the benefits just to this industry, really what we've seen resonate is one, the mobility of a platform like this. So the way that we describe it is every single time you touch the material, it costs you money.
So if you can distribute technology and bring it closer to the material, things like scanning licenses right from your phone, things like mobile grading and inspection, things like cloud-based driver apps. You're able to cut down on those costs because you're actually bringing technology to the material, not the other way around. Number two is integrations, increasingly, which to zoom out a little bit is certainly not true two decades ago, but was true five or 10 years ago. Increasingly, customers like ours don't have the overhead to have a full-blown IT team to have developers on staff, and you're left with a bunch of one, either one system that can't do everything perfectly. So you have one system that other does stuff well, or you have a bunch of these disconnected systems that we call it this latent integration tax. It's not something that kind of hits you over the head, but when you have four or five or six systems, you have folks spending hours a day reconciling data between those two systems, making sure that you can get information from one to the other.
And from day one, GreenSpark was really built as the modern connector in the industry. And again, back to our thesis, getting in every single scrapyard in the world, we want to focus on what this industry needs, and we want that focus to be super narrow. And if someone does something better than us, we just want to integrate with it. So whether it's native integrations with ERPs like QuickBooks and NetSuite and Microsoft Dynamics or CRMs like HubSpot and Salesforce or even, I don't know, things like Google Maps, which kind of auto completes address and powers live navigation directly in the driver app. I'd say folks are using more technology generally speaking versus less. And what we want to do is make sure that all of those systems can push and pull in the right places together versus either having our end customer do it or having our end customer require resources to connect those systems manually.
Now, over the last year or two, a lot of that's changed with the admin and increasingly the maturity of artificial intelligence. And I think that's where this gets really exciting. Obviously being built on a fully cloud-native tech stack allows us to leverage that technology very quickly. And I think that the way that our team is set up, not just on the technical side, but also on our customer facing side, our ability to rapidly iterate with our customers and rapidly get feedback from our customers on how we're applying things like AI and Agentic AI to their workflow has been really invaluable over the
Dave:
Last year or two. Well, that is, boy, I've got a bunch of questions. So that's great on the native interoperability or interconnectivity with other apps, but help me understand the ... Because I've seen some companies in this space that maybe have focused on trying to have as much native to the app as possible. So try to do financials within the system and other things. So give me a sense of how you describe the core features of the product and where it ends and where an integration with an ERP CRM or financial software fits in.
Gordon:
Yeah, that is a great question. That line always changes based on what our customers want to do, but at its base, we want folks running their entire business out of GreenSpark. The way we think about it outside of the integrated GL that is on the come, which I can touch on later, is that we want to be the customer's operational system of record. So everything that they're doing on a day-to-day basis from receiving, paying, managing inventory, managing contracts, customers, outbound shipments, invoices, documentation, both over-the-road dispatch and exports and logistics tracking, in addition to our reporting suite, we want all of that to happen directly in GreenSpark. Now, to be clear, that obviously comes with the obligation, honestly, or the need to ensure that the operational and financial systems of record move in lockstep. So again, wherever someone is already working in an accounting system or a CRM, we want to push and pull data to and from those systems, but we want to really cover as much of that workflow as possible.
The product has expanded both in breadth and in depth recently, and I think that there is a desire in this industry to have everything under one hood, not just from the product capability side, but folks in this industry are used to and want to work with people that they trust and that they can rely on. And I think a really important part of anyone, especially as a relative outsider, like either our business or me personally, I think it's the obligation of any vendor in this industry to emulate how the industry operates. So outside of just product capabilities, a lot of folks want to, again, work with teams that they trust and teams that they can rely on, teams that they can pick up the phone and talk to if something's wrong, which is something that we spend a lot of time and resources doing.
Dave:
Okay. So let's say, and this may sound like a hypothetical question, but I see it all the time where there's consolidation in this industry that's been going on for 20 years, yet the total number of scrap yards out there seems to keep increasing. And from my own personal experience, it's because some small yard gets acquired by a big company, the people who sold get disappointed with how the integration of everything works. They get through the earnout, they set out a non-compete, and then it seems like there's two more scrapyards that populate from every one that's sold because one group goes off and starts one and one another. So say somebody was starting an operation from scratch and they said, Gordon, we want to do as much in Greenspark as we can. Can you all do financials? Can you function as a CRM? Could they really run the entire business just in your single product suite?
Gordon:
Yeah, 1000%. We like to ... So it's funny you mentioned that. We've seen the same thing. We probably onboard what we call startup yards. We probably onboard eight to 10 of those a quarter, which really speaks to the just kind of organic growth in the industry, broadly speaking. And the way we market it is it's you and GreenSpark. Those are the two almost full-time employees at the business as you get this off the ground, you can run everything within GreenSpark. Typically, a yard like that will use something like QuickBooks, and especially for yards that are starting out, we try to be as consultative as possible because there are so many moving pieces. And candidly, in many respects, internally, we are still a startup and we know what it's been like to see the cash in, cash out every single day to have way more problems than what you do with when you're starting a business.
So candidly, we love working with folks like that, and we try to extend our reach from anything from software to the scales and cameras that you should be getting, connecting that yard with other folks in our network. But to answer your question, again, we are typically the kind of second employee that folks hire because it's such a comprehensive platform that you can run your entire business out of. The other thing that I think that folks have really benefited from is process standardization. What we try to do at GreenSpark is not only give you the tools to succeed, but really the best practices, standard operating procedures and workflows built around our product that have been hardened by hundreds of customers throughout the industry. So whether it's staying on top of inventory, working the kind of physical flow of the yard out when you're going to get different pieces of information to keep trucks moving.
And ultimately, what folks in that scenario should be looking at on a day-to-day, week-to-week and month-to-month basis to understand the trends in their business, we try to make that as out of the box as possible versus just giving you a set of tools and saying, "Hey, go ahead and figure it out. "
Dave:
No, that does make sense. Okay, that's a good overview. What's your iteration cycle like? How often are you doing point releases, major releases?
Gordon:
Yeah, great question. I think that again, this is one of the biggest differences between us and some of the other folks, or said another way, this is one of the main benefits of being a more modern player. We're releasing daily. So literally four or five times a week, we will be releasing new updates on the platform. Sometimes you'll never know. It could be increasing storage for image capture. Other times, you 100% will. About two weeks ago, we released a fully new module that includes live container tracking for your export containers. So if you're shipping on a CIF or a CFR basis, you can see in real time where that container is on the water with live ETA updates. So we don't need to get too deep into that use case, but I think it's a good benchmark for what those releases look like. We have the ability to obviously turn on or off any of those changes for any of our customers.
Change management is obviously a huge part of the industry, broadly speaking, and obviously customers' relationships with technology. So said another way, we don't really try to change for change's sake, especially when folks are running their business in very well-defined workflows. So we're really big on communication upfront for what's going to change, if anything is going to change. And we have a really robust early access period where we'll work with, in that example, we'll identify folks who are already shipping on a CIF or CFR basis, trial that live container tracking, let's say, with 20 or 30 folks beforehand before we roll it out to the rest of the group. So we like to push updates quickly, get feedback early, and then ultimately give the users or our customers the agency to opt in or opt out based on what's most important to them.
Dave:
No, I can really appreciate that update frequency. I've been for about five years owner of one Tesla or another. And one of the things I really appreciate is the frequent software updates. I've also owned Rivians and they also are very good. But when you compare that to the legacy automakers, they just can't do the most basic over the air update. You have to bring your car into the dealership. And so I can appreciate the benefit of that rapid iteration. So talk to me about customer support. What kind of metric and process do you all have? If a customer has an issue, how do you triage the importance of it? How do you escalate it? What's the metrics you use for response times? Just whatever there you're comfortable discussing.
Gordon:
Yeah, no, that is a great question. I'd say a couple things. As I mentioned, vendors in this industry need to emulate how the industry operates and people operate in different ways. Some folks want to figure something out themselves. So we have a really robust help center within GreenSpark that has over 120 articles on how the product works. That's paired with a full online academy. So we like to get ahead of any support questions by giving folks the tools they need to succeed and equip them with as much information as possible. That said, whether something goes wrong or whether they need to talk to someone, we want to create every channel available. So whether it's phone, email, or our in- app messenger, some folks don't want to speak to someone, some folks do. So we want to make sure that we're really meeting our customers where they are, depending on what they are used to.
I'd say overall for support, a lot of folks in this industry and a lot of folks in software generally speaking, always look at response time. They say, all right, yeah, we want to get back to everyone within a minute or two, or we pride ourselves on acknowledging you. That's obviously important. And our response time is under a minute. It's about 56 seconds these days. So we do want to obviously emphasize that. We care about resolution though because folks don't want to be talked to. They want their problems to be solved. So the main kind of success metrics we look at on the support side, outside of just saying, "Hey, I'm seeing what you're seeing as well," which is an important part of it. We really focus on the overall resolution. We also really focus on transparency. No one wants to shoot a message or shoot an email into a black box and not know where they stand.
So average response time is under a minute. If something is wrong, we typically try to keep folks updated every 15 or 20 minutes, especially if it's a critical issue. And our average resolution time is just under an hour as well. So really trying to focus on the kind of outcome in addition to making sure that folks know exactly where they stand.
Dave:
Okay. Wow, I don't know the numbers from the other companies, but that seems pretty remarkable. So I've been in this industry for about 20 years and I've been going to the REMA conferences for about that long. And it seems like when I go walk the trade show at REMA, that it seems like there's just a software company on every row. And so I'm curious, I would've been, if somebody asked me, "Hey, I want to start a software business or company for the scrap industry," I would've said, "Wow, it seems super crowded, lots of competition, doesn't seem like a great place." What was the opportunity you saw that what I would call a crowded space didn't scare you?
Gordon:
Yeah, that's a great question. I think, again, back to the original thesis, just given the vintage of our software platform relative to others, I think that at a super high level, we felt really good about our inherent competitive advantage given our modern tech stack, the ability to leverage web-based integrations, the ability to leverage the mobility that other folks candidly structurally can't do given their tech stack and given how they're set up as a business. And again, no disrespect to anyone else in the industry. The way that I think about it is they've done a lot of the heavy lifting of educating the market on the benefits of technology and candidly taking this industry from spreadsheets and DOS systems into the 21st century. But I think that there are, as I mentioned, a lot of different ways to differentiate in this industry. And I think that especially with older products, you're never in a good spot if you are a dynamic business and Scrap is a very dynamic industry using a static software product because inherently the software that you're using or the technology that you're using is not going to be able to adapt to the changes in the industry that you require as a very dynamic business.
Now, over the last couple of years, obviously with artificial intelligence and what folks can do with AI, that's opened up a multitude of possibilities on how folks can use that in their business. And it's a really interesting space, I think, in the market because everyone I talk to, whether it's someone like you, whether it's the owner's son who might be taking over the business or it's a 76-year-old truck driver, it seems like everyone's used ChatGPT or some sort of tools. It could be anything from analyzing their mortgage to asking what the weather's going to be tomorrow. But I think that's a fundamental difference between, let's say, cloud computing, which has happened over the last 10 or 15 years and what's happening now. And the reason I bring that up is there are so many advantages to using AI, not just every day, but for core business applications.
Folks are used to these technologies given, I don't know, they've been in the news for the last two straight years, and if folks can use them for consumer applications, and all of those advantages really accrue asymmetrically to a platform like us. So I think when you think about the kind of advantages and it being a relatively crowded market, we view things a little bit differently because when you look at the market itself, yeah, there are a lot of players and that was born out of regional and territorial compliance differences, obviously founders relationships with folks in specific territories. But when you look at businesses that can leverage that technology that you can reliably think you can use in 2050, not 2027, and folks really are thinking that long-term in this industry, given these are generational family businesses or folks are in this for the long haul, we feel really good that the number of prospective players that you could reasonably think could run your business in 2050 is actually much smaller than the overall market.
Dave:
Yeah. So whereas a layman, I saw crowded market, you saw market ripe for disruption, bottom line.
Gordon:
Yeah. And I think people love to think about disruption in technology. And I think that the way that I think about our product and what we're looking to do, you need to earn the right to disrupt an industry. And I think that we tried to come in with a lot of humility and a lot of respect for the industry. We wouldn't have succeeded if we came in and said, "Hey, I read a 50-page PDF report on the scrap industry. You guys are doing it wrong. Here's GreenSpark." That's obviously not going to work at all. So I think that what we really try to focus on again is meeting folks where they are, evolving their workflow and then being very targeted in places for disruption. So for example, let's take dispatch. Folks are used to either a whiteboard or an Excel spreadsheet or they're using some system that might not have capabilities for a mobile driver app or candidly doesn't have the power with respect to dispatch to scale integration or a modern load board where you can drag and drop trips around.
That I would say is evolving someone's workflow from what they're used to to using GreenSpark. By the same token, our dispatch AI agent actually integrates directly with folks' emails and phone systems to collect that information and autonomously create tickets on user's behalfs that all they need to do is approve, modify, or reject that dispatch request. That's what I would say is something that is disruptive to that yard in a very positive sense. But I think that understanding where to evolve versus where to disrupt given what the industry's used to is a really important part of the story as well.
Dave:
Okay. No, that is very helpful. And it looks like you have a milestone occurring next month. Is it your five-year anniversary?
Gordon:
It is my five-year anniversary. So yeah, sorry, go
Dave:
Ahead. So I'm just curious, how's it going? Have you been able to get even one customer? How's the thesis worked out for you?
Gordon:
Yeah, still waiting on number one. No, kidding. Yeah. So as I mentioned, a lot of work's gone in and the market's responded, I'd say very well so far. We're in over 900 locations right now, primarily in North America, but also internationally with yards of every shape and size. So we work with folks who are doing 50 or 60 transactions a day on the retail side up to anything from 400 to 500. We have folks who are buying specifically from dealers. We have folks who have both demo and scrap operations. We have folks who have 35 locations up and down the Eastern seaboard. So it's a really fun position to be in to have access to the feedback that we have in terms of what direction to take the product. And our focus is in the overall businesses to continue scaling both with larger customers, providing the best experience for some of our single location operations and then moving internationally.
And I think that, again, keeping a really narrow focus just on metal recycling and specifically just on the tools that this industry needs and being able to leverage the integrations to, again, partner with best-in-class accounting softwares, best-in-class route optimization, best-in-class CRMs has allowed us to keep that really narrow focus and serve this industry on what they specifically need, not more generalizable parts of the technology stack.
Dave:
Okay. No, that sounds great. So what was the question I was going to ask you? Oh, so I know when you shared your business plan with your investors, every business plan always shows the same hockey stick growth, especially in
Gordon:
Technology,
Dave:
But your growth rate seems pretty impressive. How close did it come to your projections? Was it close? Were you behind? Are you actually ahead? How's that worked out?
Gordon:
Yeah, no, it's a great question. And we try to stay away from hockey stick growth like that because what we want to do is, again, we want to grow sustainably in this industry and we want to make sure that, again, we're going to be here for the next four decades, not the next four years. In terms of overall projections, we obviously race to that kind of million dollar revenue mark relatively quickly. I've been able to triple that two years ago and then double that last year. And I think that, again, it's come from the reception we've gotten in the market. It's also come from our ability to scale the team to support that. So whether it's on the engineering side or on the post-sales side, I think that there's a bit of a misnomer in folks' perception of software companies, specifically when it comes to companies with outside investment that people only care about growth.
Growth is obviously an important part of the story. Hopefully everyone that listens to this wants to grow their business, but ultimately the software business model breaks if we have a customer for a year. There are high customer acquisition costs in terms of sales and setting up environments, setting up instances, and ultimately our model only works if we have folks for 10, 20, 30 years. And what we try to do is create customers for life very early on in the overall cycle. So said another way, we wouldn't have been able to achieve the growth that we are achieving if our retention wasn't as high, if not higher than our kind of new business growth, and it's something that we probably ourselves on because ultimately our customers are the lifeblood of this business and no one really wants to switch software because it's a pin in the butt.
But what we try to do is again, keep those customers for life so that we can grow sustainably rather than continuing to fill a leaky bucket so to speak.
Dave:
No, that's one of the things I really love about the scrap metal industry. As somebody who's serving that industry like you are and I am, is one that industry tends to be incredibly relationship driven and your reputation is everything in this industry because there's two degrees of separation between every person, at least in the US scrap metal space. It's like two degrees of separation and the relationships people have last decades. I have clients, and I'm sure you do too, where the grandson is buying and selling from the grandson of another company where they've been doing business together for 70 years. And I was in a client's office early on and this guy said, "Hey, I need to take this call." And he just did a deal to sell a million dollar scrap load to somebody. And it was just on the phone call. I'm like, "Oh, do you need a moment to document that?
Do you need to get the contract out? " And he's like, "No, it's done." I'm like, "Well, don't you need payment?" Because literally he was like, ship the product five minutes later. He might've called somebody and said, "Hey, ships up so- and-so." I'm like, "Well, what do you mean? You don't have a contract, you don't have a PO, you didn't get payment upfront. How do you know you're going to get paid?" And they're like, "Yeah, because I've been doing a business with him for 30 years and he's reputable and he wouldn't do that. And if he did screw me, he'd be done in the scrap business because I'd just tell
Gordon:
Everybody
Dave:
I know. " So I really appreciate that because I've found that if you're a reputable long-term thinking company, it's actually easier to get traction in this kind of industry than a business that's not that way. And they all seem to think long-term, like you said, multi-generational, the relationships last decades. So yeah, so speak a bit more to that from what you've seen as far as the importance
Gordon:
Of the
Dave:
Relationships and the reputation.
Gordon:
Yeah, 100%. I think back to the point about getting blackballed, we always joke, a happy customer tells, I don't know, maybe three people, if we're lucky, pissed off customer tells about a hundred. So by the same token though, I always joke with my sales reps, I don't care how good you are at selling GreenSpark. If David, you owned a yard and you were excited about GreenSpark, you're going to be our best sales rep. So again, back to the retention story, it's a double-edged sword because obviously their reputation is very important in this industry. At the same time, to maintain the growth rates that we've had, this isn't really an industry where if you triple your sales team, you triple revenue because of the network effects and because of the connectivity in the overall industry. And I think that what we really try to pride ourselves on is not just being a software company, but a partner to these businesses.
So I already talked a little bit about with startup businesses, we'll consult on scales and cameras and we'll send over EMAC item list so you can get started very quickly. One of our sales reps just connected Azorba buyer with one of our new shredder operations to help grow that business. Over the last three months, we've brokered six different sales of businesses that are either using Greenspark and are looking to sell or are using GreenSpark and are looking to buy in the broader market. So outside of just being a software company, again, as I mentioned, vendors in this industry need to emulate how the industry operates. And I know that I'm probably beating a dead horse with that, but understanding how our businesses operate and trying to be the best partner to them outside of just their technology layer is really important. You'll also see us at conferences, I'm probably on the road two or three times a week, either visiting existing customers or prospective customers, and whether it's our onboarding team getting onsite for go live or same thing with renewal conversations, we try to build that relationship as much as possible because as you mentioned, that's how the industry does business.
And I don't think you can be successful in this industry, whether you're buying and selling scrap or selling stuff to folks who do that if that's not core to your overall business model.
Dave:
No, that makes sense. I can't believe how fast the time has passed. I've just got a couple more questions for you. One is share some things that your clients have told you about why they've been really happy with the software, happy they implemented. What are the kinds of things they say to you? Is it that we really appreciate that your salesman took me out for drinks three different times? What are the things they tell you that they just really appreciate about your company?
Gordon:
Yeah, that's a great question. It runs the gamut based on different user roles, and it's going to be different whether it's an executive or an owner, an operations manager, a commercial buyer, or someone on the logistics team. But again, typically it is around the people that work here because those relationships are so important. So I think in terms of overall feedback, I'm actually just pulling up, we do what's called a net promoter score. And so we send out ... Yeah, exactly. And I'm just going to read you the last five, honestly. We have one owner feedback of all of these, our last six are all 10s, and the inventory tracking is unbeatable. It's user-friendly and the support team Greenspark has is the greatest of all time.
Yeah, we were pretty fired up with that one. Another owner in Kentucky, I like the web-based interface. I also like the progressive attitude the company has in regards to being a leader in the space. Another one out of Texas, it is so easy to use. Another owner out of Texas, the transition was smooth. The assistance for help has been great, and so far the product delivers what was promised. And I think that ... Yeah. And again, these are all of our customers on unprompted feedback when we send these emails out. So I'd say it's a really good example of that. We're getting a lot of traction from a bunch of different people within the actual yard. So anything from, again, the scale operator to the owner is looking at different reports. And I think outside of that, we take a lot of pride in helping the folks on the front lines.
We had one customer down in Louisiana, I don't know, about six months ago, we were on site and the operator said to our onboarding rep, "I can't thank you guys enough. This is the first time I've had a lunch break in six years because I can finally manage all the work that I'm doing right, right at the scale." And I'm not naive enough to sit in my ivory tower and think that we're changing the world with a scrap software, but stuff like that really does matter to folks. And making a difference, not just in the overall business growth, but for the people on the ground that are using this every single day is super rewarding.
Dave:
That is awesome. And then so the last two more questions. One is, so what do you enjoy the most about your role within the company that just gives you the most just enjoyment, satisfaction? Yeah,
Gordon:
A couple things. I'm just a huge nerd, man. I love commodities. It's the coolest thing ever. The entire world's based on resource scarcity. I think we were talking about this before, whether it's what's happening in Venezuela, what's happening with tariffs, what's happening in Greenland. Everything is about resource scarcity and everything is about being as efficient with the resources you have as possible. So talking with customers, and I think not trying to have the answer all the time, but working with them to solve their problems is really fun. I don't know, two weeks ago, copper ripped to 660, and I was some of our customers first calls. They're like, "Hey, what do we do? How do we respond so quickly? Where in Greenspark can I tie things to benchmark prices so I'm covered? What are other customers doing with these movements?" And I think that it's obviously been an uphill battle, just given you need credibility, you need a reputation in this industry, but over the last six years, getting to know the industry really well, getting to know our customers really well, and candidly, being viewed as a partner in their businesses is really exciting.
Internally, ramping new employees is so fun because
There's always that moment of like, "Oh, I'm not sure I knew what I got myself into with this whole industry." And I think that a lot of people, whether it's on the technology side or the actual yard side, if you haven't grown up in it, you might not know the, it's called nuances, how business is done, which is super exciting. And then third, on the product side, it's a privilege to be able to not just hear feedback from our customers, but actually be able to deliver them the new technology that we're seeing in the market. Historically, product development has been very bilateral. Customer says, "Hey, I need this field for this reason on an outbound ticket software company, build that field. The field gets built and you can go on in and do your work." The paradigm shift of what we're seeing in AI just changes all of that.
So now I get to sit in my seat and pretty much say, "Hey, we can take any document in your business, ingest it, and turn it into something else." Whether it's a rail car notice that we turn into a pending load, whether it's a consumer PO that you can upload and automatically create a sales order. And we get to sit here and I get to have conversations with customers all the time and say, how would you want to apply this new tool or this new technology to your business? Hey, we can use AI material recognition to better understand how good your guys are at grading quality. Hey, we can spin up a voice agent to take phone calls and immediately surface to a buyer if someone has a load over a certain size to sell. Would that be helpful? How do you want this to work?
And ultimately, what value do you see to these kind of big new categories of software? It's so fun.
Dave:
Wow. Yeah, your enthusiasm comes through. So my last question, is there anything I didn't ask you that you wish I had?
Gordon:
I don't know. I don't think so. I think we're in a really fun spot and I'd say that the folks who are listening to this, what I recommend, especially with new technology is one, obviously keep an open mind, but we have a lot of folks who traditionally approach software transitions or software generally is, do I need to do this or what is the worst that would happen if I went through a transition? And I think that a lot of folks, candidly, just because they're not used to either our model or what technology can do today, they don't realize, which is changing really in real time, they still view software as a cost center. And ultimately the tools that we're seeing and the applications that we are pushing to the industry, a lot of our customers view as a competitive advantage. And they might not love me saying that, but I would because then that'll go away over time.
But I would really challenge folks to think about how they can use software and technology as a competitive advantage rather than just a record keeping system. Similarly, how they want their business to run, not just today, but in 2030, 2040, 2050, and really challenge themselves to think whether or not the systems that they're surrounded with can support that. And I think that when folks apply that framework and then take a look at businesses like ours, it becomes a decision that is not super difficult.
Dave:
Well, I think with that, I think that's a good stopping point. Gordon Driscoll of GreenSpark Software, thank you so much for coming on the podcast. Just a really lot of great information, and I know our listeners are going to enjoy it.
Gordon:
Awesome.
Dave:
There we have it, another great episode. Thanks for listening in. If you want to continue the conversation, go to icydiscshow.com. That's icy-DISCSOW.com. And we have additional information on the podcast, archived episodes, as well as a button to be a guest. So if you'd like to be a guest, go select that and fill out the information and we'd love to have you on the show. So that's it. We'll be back next time with another episode of The Icy Disc Show.