Adam Torres and Weston Zimmerman discuss the landscaping business.
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Show Notes:
How do you help your landscaping team in the field succeed and think like a business owner? In this episode, Adam Torres and Weston Zimmerman, Co-Founder and CEO of SynkedUP, explore SynkedUP and how it’s helping companies succeed.
About SynkedUP
SynkedUP is on a mission to help landscape businesses across North America know their numbers and streamline their processes. Serving each role from the back office to field staff, SynkedUP is a web & mSynkedUPobile app that provides the toolset to streamline accessing info & capturing info, and providing detailed analytics that are easy to discern at a glance. This results in benefits like automated job costing, mobile access to job info, and more.
Full Unedited Transcript
Hey, I’d like to welcome you to another episode of Mission Matters. My name is Adam Torres, and if you’d like to apply to be a guest in the show, just head on over to missionmatters. com and click on be our guest to apply. All right. So today’s guest is Weston Zimmerman, and he’s the co founder and CEO over at SyncedUp.
Weston, welcome to the show. Hey, thank you for having me on, Adam. I’m looking forward to it. All right, Weston. So at Mission Matters, one thing that we’re super passionate about is about missions, about helping others find their missions, and about inspiring others to find their mission as well. Synced up and, and also being an entrepreneur.
Like, talk to me a little bit more about this and really your mission behind it. Well, you know, as probably most things in life, it has evolved and the way I got started in the synced up thing was literally I was working for a landscape company as an employee, and I just happened to be kind of the techiest guy on the team.
And I always loved to look at a particular problem or a particular workflow kink. And imagine a better outcome or a better solution to drive a better outcome and that thing led me down the path of, you know, hey, this product isn’t working as well that could and probably one of the most naive thoughts I ever had was let’s go build our own solution.
But that’s, that’s exactly what we did. We went off to build our own solution and so in at first my mission was all about like just this Relentless tenacious desire to figure out a better way But as we actually built it into a product that was like hey This is ready to go to market and we went to market and we started having Customers and we started seeing the outcomes that was driving for those customers and how they were using and implementing our product in their business That mission Evolved and instead of just being like, Hey, I want to figure out a smarter way to do a task.
It turned into. Man, like, product is having an incredible impact on, you know, hard working business owners and, yeah, it’s crazy. And so, and you’re like, wait a minute. This is actually making a difference. Like, this actually matters. Yeah, just my experiment and it’s actually providing real value and real money, right?
Like, is that weird? It’s wild to me. I love it. That’s right. Yeah, I mean, it’s just it’s crazy how like something that you enjoy finding a smarter way to solve a problem turns into a bigger and broader mission, which is today. Our mission at Synced Up is to end what we call entrepreneurial poverty for blue collar contractors and their employees.
And a thing to remember is I never owned the landscaping company where I worked at for 15 years. I was only an employee, so I kind of have that, I guess, empathy for not just the, the owner operators, which, They take a lot of risks. They work extremely hard, but also their team, you know, and giving autonomy and good systems and processes for their team to work in.
Want to stick on kind of some of the earlier days here. Now I know you, you met, you use the word, I think I’m saying it right that you were, you know, the most techie of them, of them on the team or in the company, whatever. That being said, have you ever run a tech company or a tech startup or anything like that?
I think the answer is no, but I’m just, I just kind of like, there’s a lot of people that are listening that have these dreams. Creating things, but they maybe don’t have the technical background. Like if you didn’t, how do you overcome that? Well I kind of jokingly, you know, say I’m nothing but a hillbilly foreman running a crew from a landscaping company in central Pennsylvania and happened to become an accidental founder of a tech company, you know, that’s basically the, that’s basically the 32nd version.
So no, no tech background, but I always enjoyed technology. Like my dad, right? At a telecommunications company that he ended up selling, actually. But, so I was around computers, I was around technology systems, , more hardware though than software. So, you know, I had that exposure, so I can’t say, and that’s exactly why I was the techiest person on a crew of landscape workers.
But, you know, zero tech background. And that’s why I said it was probably the most naive statement I ever made when I, ever made when I said, let’s go build this. Yeah. So we’re now you’re, in the middle of, and I obviously nothing ever goes smooth. Like when it comes to build, I don’t care if you have the background, like stuff happens, like how’d you overcome those challenges to get to an end product?
And I know there was countless hundreds. I’m sure. How’d you overcome? How’d you persevere to get to an end product that you could test and use? Well, you know, you’re absolutely right there. When I look back over, we’re what, four years into being on the market, seven, eight years into the project as a whole when I look back, I marvel at the fact that we’re just still alive.
You know, that in and of itself is a miracle. But, you know, now we’re, we’ve definitely come through most of the, or a lot of the very significant hurdles that a lot of tech startups never make it through. But, you know, when I look at the early days, and like this incessant Yeah, like, how’d you get through these hurdles?
Because that’s not easy. Yeah, it was Well, when I just, when I just stop and reflect on, say, the first three years, three, four years of building this thing, like, in my head, not achieving the goal was just, I never even considered it, like, it was not even an option, like, the thought never went through my head, is this worth it, should we continue, You know, it was always like, this is what we’re doing.
And like, that is the only outcome. And so I think when you second guess yourself, and you’re, and you’re not convinced by a burning vision or a burning desire to, or a passion to solve a particular problem you’re not gonna, you’re not going to survive. And then that’s, that comes from within, not from external circumstances.
Yeah, , that’s great. And that’s good stuff because , I mean, for the entrepreneurs out there, whether it’s tech, whether it’s whatever it was, like, I can’t say it the way you did. You said I was a hillbilly running the crew in Pennsylvania. And then all of a sudden I founded a tech. I’m like, Oh, come on, man.
That’s amazing. I feel like it also eliminates a lot of excuses for people, like in terms of with the techs holding back or other things, cause. And there’s just so many resources now, like there’s just so many, even going back to like, I believe you said four years or X amount of years before that you started this, like so much is changing so fast that I feel like more people can test their idea.
They can test what they’re doing. And in your case, the way that this came about was because you were solving a problem for yourself and for the company you were working for, and then you saw that there was a broader market out there that could also benefit, right? Yeah, and that kind of happened, like, we were becoming more and more active in some networks in our industry, and we won some awards, which kind of put us, like, you know, people in our network kind of knew who we were, and they, so they were, you know.
Like you have over a couple thousand. Yeah, today we’re tremendous growth. I just wanted the audience to understand like they’ve grown like over 2, 000 users. No jokes. There was obviously a need. So go ahead. Yeah. Yeah. So basically what happened is we, you know, , we kind of got some street cred or some visibility in our network.
Right. As we were beginning this project through totally unrelated circumstances, like we want some awards and stuff. Right. And so people, people were like, Hey, you know, asking questions about your business. How do you guys do this? How do you solve this problem? And that’s in through those conversations is where it was like, dude, like, , this is this problem we’re trying to solve.
It’s not unique to us. This is an industry problem, and that’s where that vision started becoming bigger than just the the widget we were building, you know, yeah, that’s, you know,
I was just gonna say, and the thing is, like, today, it wasn’t financially prudent, let’s say. For a little like just for context we were only a two or three four million dollar landscape company trying to build a software product and today I look at that i’m like dude that was Russian roulette if there ever was anything, you know, it’s like yeah you know, the owners of the company dumped in close to a million dollars before we were finally kind of, you know, paying our own bills on our own.
So that just, to give listeners some context about, you know, okay, Hillbilly Foreman to running a tech company. Well, Yes, it did require funds and sacrifice beyond just the idea and sure. I want to do this, you know, And so where does the company stand today? Like, talk to me about the plans for the future functionality, like get into some of the, , like where you’re at now.
Sure. Well, I have a diagram that I call the profit triangle, and that fundamentally is the problem that synced up solves for contractors like , there’s two fundamental issues that rob profit or steal profit out of a contractor business, a small interoperator, you know, type contractor business with, you know, zero to 30 employees, I’ll say and that is either they’re incorrectly pricing their work, like it’s a mathematical problem, Or they’re consistently missing their resources in their estimate, like they’re consistently underestimating how many man hours a job will take, how much material something will take, , and so the way I often give the example is you could have a perfect budget on paper and have perfect mathematical pricing, but if you Estimated job will take 100 man hours and it takes you 150, you still lose money.
And so you have to solve both of those problems, the, what I call the math problem and the resources problems to truly be predictably profitable. And that’s what SyncdUp does. And how we do it is we have a, what we call a budget inside of SyncdUp where you tell the software every dollar your business spends, including.
You know, repairs and maintenance, you know, fuel, insurance, advertising, all the, every dollar your business, if it spends it, it’s got to be in there. And then what it does, it has an algorithm that it calculates exactly, mathematically, what your labor rates need to be, what your markups need to be, to not only cover your direct costs, but also your indirect costs, like your overhead and equipment and that kind of thing.
And what, so now we, now we’ve solved the mathematical problem, but now we have to make sure that when you’re bidding a job for a hundred hours, it actually takes a hundred hours. So what we do is we track all the resources that go into a job. Like there’s a mobile app for clocking in and out and recording labor time sheets for the employees working on the job site.
You can record material usage, consumption, subcontractors, equipment, all of that right in the mobile app. And so then there’s a live real time. Job costing report for every job the contractor does that tells them exactly where they’re going over where they’re going under and the power of that.
I’ll just give you a before and after kind of. Example to show where the power comes in. So typically job costing is something that everybody agrees that you should do. Job costing is the act of comparing estimated versus actual expenses in every job. Everybody agrees you should do it. Very few actually get it done because it often looks like, you know, plugging in data into a spreadsheet or something.
And so very few people actually get it done. So well, what’s after that if you’re not getting that done? Well, it’s opening up your bank account app and looking to see how much cash is in the checking account. And unfortunately, that’s where most contractors, that’s what they use as their barometer for success.
They look, they open up their bank account, they’re like, hey, how are we doing? And if there’s plenty of cash in there, they’re feeling good. If there’s not, they’re feeling anxious. And the problem with that method is, well, there’s many problems. One is it lies to you, you know, you know, depart. There’s many reasons that that bank account balance could be making you feel anxious or good incorrectly.
And then two is even if it’s correct, by the time your bank account shows you a result, that is, and let’s say that you’re, you open it. You’ve, worked harder than you ever had before. You’ve done more revenue than you ever have before. You’re super proud of your team and what you got done this year.
It’s. And you’re getting to this time of year, it’s last day or it’s October 30th as we’re recording this. And you get to the end, close to the end of the year, and you look at your bank account, and it’s like, Man, what, how on earth is that possible? I’ve done more revenue than I ever have before, but there’s no cash in there.
And the reality is, , we’re now months downstream from the source of that problem. And That’s the power of job costing, you know, because if you’re asking yourself that question in that context, there’s nothing more than an educated guess that you can make at that point. But if you have job costing in real time on every job that you’re doing, as you’re doing it, You know, before the job’s even done, whether you’re hitting your profit goals or not, and in many cases, like when I was still working on the crew at Tessie Landscaping, in many cases, we’d realize, hey, we’re not going to make it here, and we would make logistical moves, we’d bring more team members to the job site so we could get it done faster and free up another production day for the next job on the schedule, that we would do all kinds of things to minimize and mitigate the blow and be strategical And the quality of our learning increased exponentially and we got to the place where we would we went from making estimating mistakes repeatedly to only making them a handful of times before we figured out the source of the problem and stopped making that mistake and hence you solve the math problem.
You solve the resources problem and you have predictable profits and you know what’s going to happen long before your bank account does. Yeah, that’s great. That’s great. And I know that like your clients, you’re in the user base that you’re cultivating. And as that continues to grow, when I think about it, is it’s like, You know, , all the bumps you took along the way to build that app and to build that, I should say that software and all of the things, you know, the, the investors and everything else that poured into that.
Now, the industry gets the benefit from that. I’m a big fan of when people create things and the entire industry, like in all reality, I mean, there’s another, there’s another version of this where it becomes, you know, this is in house proprietary software, right? Like there’s another version of this and it’s only for, you know, that one particular company and they’re going to use it and that’s going to be their secret sauce.
Right. That’s another version. But when you open this and when you create that type of model to where you’re sharing information and helping others succeed, I just feel like it comes back. I can’t say how or why or what, like there’s no business way that I can explain that other than just to say, I feel like it comes back to you.
You know? Yeah, well, that’s why I love software as a business, you know, software as a service is that business is because like, SAS, the SAS industry, software industry has essentially allowed the world to have someone with many years of hard earned experiences, solve a problem, systemically come up with, you know, systems and processes that solve a problem effectively, codify that into software, and now it’s available to literally anybody with the same demographic, Profile of like the same problem solution and and and you know now thousands of people can benefit from a small subsample of people that thought that problem for decades of their career.
And finally got to a solution and now software can make that available to the brand new person. Instead of the brand new person having to reinvent the wheel all over again. Yeah. Well, Weston, I just have to say, man, it’s been a lot of fun having you on the show today and learning more about, your business and really, you know, how you’ve gone from, and you built this thing.
And I mean, a couple thousand active users, that’s no joke. And I know it’s just going to continue to grow. That being said, if somebody’s listening to this, and if. They want to, you know, follow up, learn more and and check it out. How do they do that? Well, for myself, like if you want to follow me in my daily life, I’m most active on Instagram and our handle is exactly our business name synced up, which is spelled S Y N K E D U P.
But if you want to learn more about the product and, the more like, how does this product actually do this our website’s a place to go. Synced up. com. Fantastic. And for everybody listening, just so you know, we’ll, we’ll definitely put the links into the show notes so that you can just click on them and head right on over.
And speaking of the audience, if this is your first time with Mission Matters and you haven’t done it yet, hit that subscribe or follow button. This is a daily show each and every day. We’re bringing you new content, new ideas, and hopefully new inspiration to help you along the way on your as well.
So feel free to hit that subscribe or follow button and Weston again, thank you so much for coming on. It’s really been a pleasure. Absolutely. Appreciate you, Adam. This was an enjoyable conversation. Thank you.