Burns DirtAssistant: KellenSince January 2026Case 02 / 03

The project he'd been putting off for a year.

When nobody knew who to ask, they asked Garrett. Kellen took enough off him that he finally built the thing he'd been putting off for a year.

3 months

lead time on quarterly meetings, up from chaos

2 divisions

of scorecards and dashboard data, fully owned

1 platform

VoIP researched, recommended and rolled out end to end

The client

Garrett Parish is COO of Burns Dirt, co-running three operating businesses alongside his brother Nic - waste management, logistics, and a growing construction and real estate development.

Where Nic is out front building relationships and speaking on stages, Garrett is in the engine room: overseeing operations, managing data, evaluating software, keeping the machine moving. Before FreedUp, that also made him the default contact whenever no one else had the answer - which was often.

The bottleneck

What was landing on his desk that shouldn't have been.

When you're the operator, everything eventually lands on your desk. Garrett was manually filling out scorecards for multiple company divisions, chasing down data for dashboards, and doing research that had nothing to do with running the business. When the team needed something and wasn't sure who to ask, they asked Garrett.

Two things illustrated how much was slipping through the cracks. The waste and logistics divisions shared a single cell phone between them - passed around, untracked, with no visibility into what calls were being made or by whom. And the digging permits, a spreadsheet critical to construction operations - no permit, no dig - was disorganized and going unmonitored. Neither problem was anyone's fault. There was just no one whose job it was to own them.

Garrett also had a project he'd been wanting to build for the business - a front-load calculator for the trucks - but never the bandwidth to get to it.

How it started

Why FreedUp

Garrett had a front-row seat to what FreedUp was doing for his brother. When it was his turn, he came into the process organized and clear on what he needed. The delegation meeting gave Kellen a strong foundation, and the structured onboarding - weekly check-ins, coaching with Pami, the hierarchy-of-needs framework - meant the ramp-up was faster than it might have been otherwise.

The match & onboarding

This was Kellen's first time working in construction or logistics - an industry full of terminology she'd never encountered. Her approach was methodical: she spent the first month sitting in on meetings, asking questions, and building a working dictionary of trucking and logistics terms just to understand what was being talked about. She learned the vocabulary in English before she could find the Portuguese equivalents. “I know what dump trucks and hauling are in English,” she said. “I don't know what they're called in Portuguese.”

Garrett gave her full access from day one - passwords, system logins, introductions to the team - and made clear that if she needed anything, she just had to ask.

What changed

Within the first few months, Kellen had taken over a significant slice of Garrett's operational load.

Scorecards and dashboard data.
Garrett used to gather these himself across two divisions. Kellen now handles all of it.
Digging permits.
She built a new spreadsheet from scratch, monitors it every few days, and flags anything at risk of lapsing. Construction stays on schedule.
Quarterly meeting planning.
The first quarter Kellen joined, scheduling was chaotic. Now meetings are booked three months in advance.
Ticket review.
A backlog no one was getting to. She and Catalina, Nic's assistant, split the load.

The moment

She replaced the shared cell phone with a phone system.

Two divisions passing one handset around was creating real friction - missed calls, no accountability, no data. Kellen researched VoIP platforms, built a comparison report on pricing and features, and recommended Quo. Garrett approved it. She then handled the full implementation: porting the numbers, setting up contacts, rolling it out across logistics, waste and the sales team. The business now has full visibility into every call.

With those things off his plate, Garrett finally had time to build his front-load calculator - the custom tool for the trucks he'd been putting off for months. He finished it.

From the client

“It's been a game changer for us. We talk to other businesses all the time and we name drop Kellen and Catalina and they're like, ‘who are those? What are they doing? You all don't have one of these?’”