.png)
About the Gardner Group
An origin story about our insurance and loss control lineage, from Jim Gardner, CEO of the Gardner Group & ViewSpection.
.jpg)
The Start of Gardner Group
We started with a simple idea—and a snowstorm.
My father, Richard Gardner, was a Vice President of Loss Control for a regional insurance company in Western New York. One winter day, when I was 17 years old, the wind was howling outside and snow was piling up across the driveway when he walked into my room and asked:
"What do you think about buying a campground and running it as a family business?"
At 17, the answer was easy.
"Yes."
That same week, through another lake-effect snowstorm, we walked the property together and decided to buy it. That campground became our family business for the next twenty years.
It didn't take long to learn an important lesson:
​
A business that only makes money three months out of the year does not support a family very well the other nine.
​
So we built something alongside it.
Out of the basement of our home at the campground, Gardner Group was born— originally providing loss control inspections and premium audit services to insurance carriers throughout the Northeast.
What started as a way to stabilize a seasonal business slowly became something much bigger.
Over the years, we balanced both worlds: running a campground by day while building Gardner Group into a trusted regional inspection company known for reliability, responsiveness, and field expertise.
Eventually, my father retired early, and I took over the loss control side of the business full time.
Then life shifted again.
When my daughters, Hannah and Kenzie, were born, it became clear that managing two businesses while raising a family was not sustainable. So I made the decision to focus entirely on Gardner Group — and on being present for my family.
The Mid-1990s
From traditional inspections to digital loss control.
In the mid 1990’s the inspection industry still ran on NCR paper forms in triplicate, Kodak film cameras, and cassette tapes filled with dictated reports that had to be transcribed manually by office staff.
That was simply how inspections were done.
But even then, it felt slow, fragmented, and buried in paperwork. So we started experimenting.
As personal computers began showing up in businesses, I became fascinated with how technology could completely change the inspection workflow. We started small:
-
Word document templates
-
Early digital cameras
-
Simpler report formatting
-
Better ways to organize information
​
But once we started improving the process, it became hard to stop.
Over time, Gardner Group partnered with a group of other inspection companies to co-develop one of the early inspection case management systems. We bought our first serviers, built digital workflows, improved report delivery, and kept pushing the process forward step by step.
Some changes were small.
Some were massive.
That process of continuous evolution carried us all the way through 2012 and eventually led to the creation of ViewSpection—our technology platform designed to modernize inspections, workflows, self-assessments, and underwriting visibility.
Out of the basement of our home at the campground, Gardner Group was born— originally providing loss control inspections and premium audit services to insurance carriers throughout the Northeast.
What started as a way to stabilize a seasonal business slowly became something much bigger.
From a Wood Stove
The beginning of ViewSpection.
Then came another turning point.
Not in a boardroom. Not in Silicon Valley. And definitely not from a group of software developers trying to “disrupt” insurance.
It happened during a Gardner Group offsite.
At the time, we were dealing with a surprisingly frustrating operational problem: Wood stove inspections.
Back then, smartphones were still pretty clunky. Half touchscreen. Half plastic buttons. But policy holders were increasingly asking inspectors to come after work hours or on weekends because they were not home during the day.
Which created a scheduling nightmare for everyone involved.
Policyholder:
"Can you come Saturday at 7pm?"
Inspector:
"I love my job... but not enough to spend Saturday night in your basement looking at a wood stove."
Somewhere during the that offsite, someone casually said:
"What if the customer just takes the photos themselves with their phone?"
Everyone paused. Looked around.
Thought about it for a second.
​
Then someone else said:
"Wait... if they can photograph a wood stove... why couldn't they photograph an entire inspection?"
And that was the moment the idea for ViewSpection was born.
What started as a simple operational idea quickly became something much bigger.
Over time, ViewSpection evolved into the technology platform that powers Gardner Group today:
Guided inspections
Digital workflows
Self-assessments
Field intelligence collection
Photo capture
Structured underwriting data
and eventually, ViewSignals analysis
​But the foundation never changed.
ViewSpection was not created by software people guessing how inspections work.
It was built by a field inspection company with decades of real-world experience trying to solve real operational problems.
And that difference still shapes the platform today.
