Interviewee
With an extensive 25 year professional work history focused on the development, implementation and management of emerging hardware technologies, Jason Aldridge, Founder & President of Turf Tank, joined us to share some details about the company with the coolest GPS autonomous paint robot for sports fields.
Transcript
Jason Aldridge: Yeah, so Turf Tank was founded by myself in 2016 here in Atlanta, Georgia, and it's been an amazing journey from literally sitting on my couch watching an episode of Shark Tank to having my own company that I called Turf Tank. Just as a kind of a, kind of a, a nod to the inspiration from watching that show. There's so many great entrepreneurs that came on that show, and it was just a really inspirational time for me to be able to come up with the idea to bring robotic sports paint machines to the sports industry. It was very exciting and it's been a wild and crazy ride, but we're super excited about what all we've been able to accomplish since then.
Elisa Muñoz: I mean, it makes sense because I know that you have a business administration degree.? Then, why robotics?
Jason Aldridge: Yeah, so I had a background in technology, primarily from when I started my college career. I worked for a lot of Fortune 100 companies managing their ERP systems. And so I did a lot of high level systems level, systems level architecture. But after being in corporate America for a long time, I really kinda had the heart to get into more entrepreneurial, more innovative startup type companies. And so probably before I started Turf Tank around 2012, I actually worked for another startup company that was big in the sports industry. It was a cloud based video editing solution that is very common in the US.
So I worked for that company for about five or six years and then really just kind of wanted to do something new and do something that was kind of mine that I could put my stamp on. And so, like I said, in 2016, I was watching Shark Tank and I was sitting with my 16 year old son at the time, and I turned to him and I said, You know, wouldn't it be cool if we could make a robot that would paint sports fields? And like a typical 16 year old would be looking at his father. He just kind of looked at me, rolled his eyes and said, “Yeah, whatever, dad”.
But really at that moment, I really put it into my heart that I wanted to make this happen. I wanted to, to make it a reality. And so, because I was already working in the sports industry and I worked in the vertical markets that I would take this product to, I started to just ask them and said, “Hey, what if I told you I was gonna create a robot that could paint sports fields and save you a lot of time and save you a lot of money? And the feedback instantly was, “Jason, this would be amazing if this type of product would exist”. And so I, I just really started going down that path of, of developing this product during 2016 as I started the journey to see what components are available, is there anybody in the marketplace that has done this?
I discovered a company in Denmark that actually had started that process as well. They were originally called Intelligent Marking based in Denmark. I had created Turf Tank myself. And so I reached out to them and, and we kind of, the stars were aligned perfectly that we were able to come together and form Turf Tank, and they became king of the, the, the robot geeks, if you will, the developers. They were the ones that, you know, did all of the programming logic. But then from my standpoint, I was the go to market strategy, the business development, the sales strategy, and building up the operations to, to bring the product to, to the US market primarily.
Elisa Muñoz: First things first, congratulations. Because this is a big achievement. I know that your main product is called Turf Tank One. Would you mind sharing a little bit about what the technical specifications are or how does it work?
Jason Aldridge: Yeah, so the Turf Tank one is a GPS guided paint machine that uses RTK technology, which was originally started in a lot of agricultural, you know, machinery so that farmers would be able to use GPS guidance to be able to plow fields because you have a huge open area, you wanna be able to make sure you're, you're, you're plowing field straight and maximizing the, the large area in which you're, you know, trying to grow your crop. So we took that same technology and applied it to sports field line marking. And so the way it works is that our robot acts as a paint machine that will be a mobile device that moves around a field painting a field using geometry.
So we have all of the sports fields programmed in our application and in our software. So if there's a sports field or if there's a geometric shape, we can do logos, we can type text. So there's a lot of amazing things that you can see if you go to our website turftank.com, so we can always show, we can paint whatever you need. And so then the robot connects to a base station that serves as a static latitude and longitude point in the area. And so that becomes like a static reference point that the robot talks to, so that as it's moving across the ground, leaving a trail of paint behind, it knows where it's at on the map. And so that's basically how the technology works.
And so we have very intuitive software that is super easy for our customers to use, and they literally just pull up a map and say, I want a soccer field, or I want a football field or a lacrosse field or a baseball softball, any, any sport that you can imagine or they want to, like I said, we have logo, we, we can customize logos, we can do text, we can do the American flag or breast cancer awareness. So we do it all. And so it's, it's really amazing mainly because it saves so much time and so much, it saves a lot of money really because we live in a day in which labor productivity is super important. We started the company in 2016, but we experienced a hundred percent growth even during 2020 during Covid because labor productivity, social distancing became such a huge aspect of our life.
“We have all of the sports fields programmed in our application and in our software. So if there's a sports field or if there's a geometric shape, we can do logos, we can type text, we can do it all.”
Elisa Muñoz: So you have been in the market for quite a couple of years now, did you have any challenges when COVID came?
Jason Aldridge: Yeah, so that's a great point. So when we first introduced the product to the US market, it was an outright purchase option only, and it's a, you know, it's a, it's, it's, it's not a cheap purchase, right? So, you know, it took some funding and people to get in their budgets, which is okay for a lot of municipalities. But our goal as a company was to be able to provide this to any size organization. So we have churches that have recreational fields that use this robot all the way to professional teams and the largest sports venues in the world that use it. One of the ways that we've been able to do that is we do a subscription as a service program now.
Elisa Muñoz: I mean, I've talked with different founders and CEOs and whenever we come to this point of talking about the 2020, everyone complains about supply chain. Did you have any problems like that?
Jason Aldridge: Yeah, so we make the robot ourselves. So we do have components that we purchase from different vendors. And so the supply chain has been challenging, but we will definitely manage during the 2020 epidemic year. We, you know, I think a lot of those orders that we had, we were able to sell or pre-sale in 2019, a lot of those orders are what happened in 2020. And so we had, we had the supply on hand to be, to be able to fulfill those, to fulfill those needs. And so definitely 20 20 21 and 2022, you know, 2021 especially was a challenge, especially in the paint industry. So paint manufacturing.
So there's a lot of ingredients that are used in making the paint. So with our subscription, we also provide paint that goes with the robot in the subscription. And so we've partnered with three primary paint manufacturers that are pretty large in the sports industry. And so they make us a customized solution for the robot. So they ran into challenges. So paint was definitely a definite supply chain challenge for us, but we really came together as a team, worked really hard and got what we needed to get done. In fact, some of our sales reps, for instance, if we weren't able to deliver a robot for them on their own, we would take our own unit, our own demonstration unit and paint their fields for them.
If there was a delay of whenever they would have their own unit, we would even have stories of our customers helping other customers. So if they had a problem with their robot that, you know, we need to send them apart, but they had to get a field painted, our, our other customers would gladly go and help that customer. And so we've, we've really created a family atmosphere with this company. And so we call it the Turf Tank Army, and that goes for our employees, but it also goes for our customer base. A lot of our customers, we've actually poached and they now work for us. So we have sales reps, we have operations men and women that were customers, and now they actually work for Turf Tank.
So that's really exciting just to really think about the culture that we've created at Turf Tank because culture is so important. I mean, you can have a great product, but if you don't have a great culture, it may be hard to sustain. But I think because of the culture that we've established and the reputation that we have in the sports industry, everyone is most of the time pretty understanding if supply chain issues happen or if problems occur because problems do occur, right? I mean, it's, it's technology and things fail. And so if, if those types of things happen, we, we, we really try to be on the ball and we've, we've established a great company culture, we've established a great level of customer service, and so we, we kind of take the, the motto, whatever it takes to go the extra mile, we're gonna do it. So it's really worked out well for us.
Elisa Muñoz: Oh, thank you so much for sharing. And one last question: Do you have any advice for future entrepreneurs, future engineers, maybe starting on this technical path?
Jason Aldridge: Yeah, so I, you know, one of the things I would say is just, you know, follow your passion and follow your dreams. I learned a lot of great things from my father. My father was, he’s retired now. He definitely was the generation that you go to work and you work for the same company forever, and you just keep your mouth shut, put your head down, work hard. And so he taught me that concept of hard work and doing the right thing and treating people right. But the one thing I think that he lacked was kind of that risk taking, which is what is part of entrepreneurship.
No matter what type of company that you're gonna start, if you, if you create that foundation of building that foundation, you're gonna have success in whatever you did. So that would be my biggest advice.
Elisa Muñoz: Jason, thank you so much for taking the time. Iit was our pleasure to have you here at Builder Nation.
Jason Aldridge: Thank you.
