Dinsmore had already changed software once. The team never fully onboarded its previous platform, so the move to Aspire in 2021 was supposed to be a fresh start. Implementation moved quickly and covered only so much. More than a year later, the company was paying more and still hitting the same limitations it had blamed on the old system. Clayton and his team looked inward and landed on an honest answer: this was an internal problem, and the software alone was never going to solve it.

Aspire was generating and tracking proposals and not much else. Maintenance contracts were not tracked accurately. Some crews clocked in to work tickets and some did not. Job costing lived in large buckets, barely broken out by division. Underneath all of it was a question of ownership. Nobody had clear responsibility for each piece of the rollout, so phases were left half-finished while the team moved on to the next one, at a size where the business badly needed an operating framework.

There was a hidden cost too. Dinsmore had always priced on an hourly rate, and that approach did not translate cleanly into the new system. Markup entry errors meant the company was charging less for some labor items than it had before the switch, without knowing it.

Clayton found 212 by luck, and in his words, 16 months too late. He talked with 2 firms offering Aspire support. After his first call with David Arnold, the choice was clear. 212 dug in, asked good questions, and brought the operational background he wanted in that seat.