Leigh McGonagle is the founder of Poplar Point Studio, a fine gardening and landscape services company based in New York’s Finger Lakes region. Before entering the landscape industry, Leigh worked in the software development sector, where her practical experience focused on tool selection, cross-department technology integration, metrics and reporting, and continuous improvement and change-management practices within agile software environments.

That background now informs how she builds and operates a multi-division service business—bridging the worlds of technology, operations, and human behavior. Leigh brings a rare perspective that combines fluency in software systems, business operations, and the realities of field-based landscape work, allowing her to speak credibly to how technology decisions play out on the ground—not just on dashboards.