EP178: Boosting Profitability: Weston Zimmerman's Tips For Contractors

Absolutely. Thanks for having me on. I'm looking forward to having a good conversation and talking shop with other. experts in the industry, people that have just learned a lot of lessons from life. So thanks for having me.

Sure. So I live in central Pennsylvania. We live right in the Appalachian mountains of Pennsylvania, basically between Pittsburgh and Harrisburg. And I started working for a landscaping company when I was a 16 year old kid before I even had a driver's license. I love working outdoors. And so. Uh, even if I had to, I bite to work, uh, for two years until I got my license. And it's, I really loved working, creating things with my hands and making spaces beautiful. And so that's how I got started in the industry. Um, and I was an employee in this company called Tussie landscaping. At the time we started, it was a $700,000 company with six, seven guys. And, um, Over those next couple of years, so that was in 07, and then the next season was 08, you know, with all that drama with the recession. And over those, you know,08,09,10,11,12 years, there was a big push from the owners and the salespeople in the company to really get a handle on knowing our numbers and actually be profitable because we were living the life that so many contractors live, which is. work your tail off all year. And then you wonder how we're going to make it through the winter, you know, um, as a landscaping company anyway, with doing a lot of work outdoors. And so over those next three, four or five years, we were, you know, relentlessly focused on figuring out our numbers and, um, did a lot of seminars, a lot of teaching and actually started using a software product that made it easier. But, uh, We had challenges with getting the software to actually do what we needed it to do from the time we got a lead to generating an estimate, sending the proposals out to the client, and then tracking the work and making sure that the actual original estimate was actually in line. And really long story short, in that time period, I came home from work one day. And my dad was sitting on the back patio working on his laptop, clicking around on some graphs. And I was curious. And I asked him, like, what are you doing? And he was saying, oh, well, I'm testing the software project. And, you know, he showed me what he was doing. And I was like, you mean you can just build this? Like, you can just describe what you need and you can build it? And it's like, yeah, you know, so. probably one of the most naive ideas I had at the time was like, dude, let's go do this. Let's go build, you know, what we need that we weren't really finding on the market. And so I went back and, uh, together with the two owners of the company and the two kind of main salespeople that were kind of forming the leadership team. Uh, we decided to go down this path of developing a software company, a software product. At that time, it was more for ourselves at Tessie landscaping, but. It wasn't very long before we realized that, you know what, developing software as a $2, $3 million company at the time, the cost benefit doesn't pan out. It's just very, very expensive to develop software. And by this time, I was beginning to develop a vision of this problem that we're trying to solve in a software product, being able to know our numbers, price jobs profitably, and track jobs, isn't a testing landscaping problem. It's an industry problem. It's a contracting problem. And so I kind of made a pitch to the owners of the company, like, hey, you know, let's actually turn this into an actual product, an actual company. And I still marvel to this day how or why they agreed to do that. Because like, man, I look back at it like, you know, we're talking about hundreds of thousands of dollars. But they did. They said, sure, let's do it. And so, you know, that would have been about 2018,2019,2020, we finally launched. And here we are three, four years later, and I'm a hillbilly crew leader from Podunk, PA, running a software company.

So I kind of had the, I was kind of the one in charge of the, at Tuskegee landscaping to get us off of paper, you know, build the systems that we're going to run the rest of the company with. And they put up the money cause I didn't have the money. I was literally an employee, you know, in my early twenties. And, um, Uh, they put up the money and I put up the grit and the hustle and cobbling it together and working with engineers. And my wife is from Romania. So I had some connections to some Romanian engineers over there and we cobbled together a team and we started building this thing together, you know? So, but yes, I didn't, they put up the money. I put up the long late nights.

I was basically, I was basically running a crew. So 40,50 hours a week out in the field. I was also, before this whole software thing kicked off, I was also working, you know,30 to 40 hours a week in marketing. I was doing a YouTube channel, all the content, all the website, all the marketing for the company as well. And the software was another project on top of that yet. So there was a season where. It wasn't uncommon to see 90, a hundred hour work weeks. You know, it was, it was a grind.

It's yeah. It's, it's very expensive to build and the chances that you're going to get it right are so slim. And so you have to basically build some things, put the money up to build something that solves the problem effectively enough that other people will pay you money to use it and get to that point before you run out of cash.

Yeah, exactly.

Well, in contracting, probably the biggest nut to crack is the concept of overhead recovery. Like it's pretty, it's rare that you run into a contractor that feels anxious or uncertain about coming up with how many hours it's going to take to do something or what material they need. Like that's, that's the easy part, generally speaking. Um, the difficult part is, Hey, my insurance went up. I signed a new marketing contract with this agency. I hired a new office admin. I bought a new truck. I replaced this piece of equipment. And how does that impact your markups? Because your markups have to cover not only your indirect costs, your overhead expenses, like what I just rattled off, but also your direct costs. And then there has to be a profit left at the end of that. And, um, it can be challenging. you know, to determine like people get into this mode where they look around and see what everybody else is charging, or they feel like I have to win the job and I'm getting underbid. So there's that pressure, but at the same time, their expenses are growing, their infrastructure is growing, their overhead is growing. And so they're fighting in this, you know, the pressure of winning the job, which they, we tend to think, oh, I got to be the cheapest, which is not true. But with the growing business, it's a hungry, you know, it's got to be fed. And so knowing how to balance, like when I pay $10 for an item or I pay my hard cost is $30 an hour for labor, how much do I need to mark that up to not only cover my indirect costs, my overhead expenses, but also be left with a profit at the end? That's the thing that we get tripped up on. And so what we've done inside of the, and you can do this methodology in a spreadsheet. You can do this really a kind of loosely speaking on the back of a napkin if you want to. It can be as simple as saying, hey, I spend, I'm a million dollar business and I spend $250,000 a year in overhead expenses. And I have 250 working days in a year. So divide 250,000 by 250, a thousand dollars a day of overhead. That's what I got. So if I have a five day job, I got to add five grand to my direct costs. to also cover my overhead before I add profit. That's at the very basic, simple level. What spreadsheets and software can make it easier on is just managing that on the day-to-day. Like you get a new bill from your insurance and you just go into the software and update it and bam, all your pricing for the proposal you're sending out that next afternoon is dialed to the penny. And you can calculate things easier like equipment depreciation. There's a lot of hidden expenses like equipment depreciation, unbillable labor. You know, I'll click on that unbillable labor one for a minute because what tends to happen is you see a line item on your profit and loss statement called payroll. What you don't know is how much of that was actually like in gear producing billable work versus it was a rain day. So we were washing trucks or whatever. It's unbillable. And in the budgeting tool and software, you know, that can really help you get really. granular and on top of that stuff so that when you get to the point of hitting send on that proposal or sliding that proposal across the table to your prospect, you're not second guessing yourself. That's the outcome. You're not second guessing yourself. You are rock solid confident. You know that what's on that number at the bottom of that sheet, it is what it's got to be. And you can stop fighting that mental battle of like, you know, I'm getting underbid. I'm sure that you're getting underbid. you know, ask the client why they haven't gone with a cheaper estimate yet, you know? Right. And it helps bring that confidence and peace that you know what you need to charge. And then the only kind of missing piece is, well, now let's just track how many resources it takes, labor and materials and equipment, et cetera, to make sure that I also got the original estimate correct. Because I could have perfect math and perfect markups on paper, but if I bid a job at 100 hours and it takes me 150, I still lost money. even with perfect math on paper. So there's two, there's two legs to that. I call that the profit triangle, you know, profit at the top of the triangle. One's the math problem. The other one's the resources problem. Both of them have got to be right for you to make money.

Yeah, that's so what I call the resources triangle is like, did I actually estimate the correct amount of hours and labor materials and everything? And so job costing is, is the answer to whether I did or not. So. Right. I bid it for 100 hours. Now I'm tracking my hours and I came in at 106 or 92 or 78. And then if you go over, this is, I like what you're saying because it's not the crew's fault if it goes over. It's the leader's or the sales or the estimator's fault. So like, I like what you said about like saying, hey, you know, we went over on hours. Can you help me understand what happened here so that I can bid more accurately next time or so we can work on our efficiency? And, you know, one example I can give you how this worked for us at TUSI was before we had synced up the software, I was a crew foreman. Like I would lead a crew and get the job done out in production. I wasn't estimating or selling. And what would often happen is I would complete a job and we were doing job costing manually, you know, pen and paper, spreadsheets, the whole nine yards, which works. It does work. It just takes forever and it's difficult. And what tends to happen is that's the first thing that falls off the edge of your plate when, you know, life gets busy and life gets crazy. But anyway, back to what I was trying to give you. example of what happened is I would finish a job and maybe four to six weeks would go by and I'd get a call from the sales guy like saying, Hey, what do you think happened? Like, here's what happened here. We were over on hours or over material, whatever. Can you help me understand what happened? And the quality of my answer was terrible because I was onto my third, fourth, fifth job since then. And I was just like, sometimes maybe I would know, but sometimes I'm like, I honestly don't know. I can't give you a good answer that we can learn from. After we had synced up, we had that estimated versus actual report live in our app. And the script completely flipped. I was calling the salesperson. We were halfway through the job saying, hey, just so you know, we're only half done, but we've already burned 70% of our man hours. And here's why I think what's going on. Or it could be like, hey, I know we're burning, we're going over hours, but it's an anomaly. Weather was terrible, materials weren't showing up, the crew, the homeowner was extremely picky or whatever. And we, the quality of our learning was exponentially higher.

Yes, that's really what it is.

Exactly. You know, void of software. Let's just say we're doing it the old way. Back when I started there at Tussie, it looked like paper timesheets, literally. It looked like paper receipts stuck into a job folder, then somebody drove over the job folder in a skid loader.

Or a receipt comes in and for whatever reason, the vendor didn't put a job number on it. And now you're trying to figure out where it goes. You know, all of that stuff is friction to getting that feedback. loop. And I, sometimes you see people that go super, super granular and analytical into the job cost and thing, you know, and they're really focused on the pennies and there's nothing wrong with that. You know, I applaud that. But what I would say is I would rather have less granular information faster than granular information in a longer timeframe, because the faster I can get that feedback, the more effectively we can react to it. And as I was saying there in my other example, you know, we were reacting to it before the job was even done. You know, and sometimes we could do things like we could do a change order. We could throw extra manpower at it or rearrange how we were going to approach the logistics to it or and lessen the blow, so to speak, and simultaneously learning from it.

I think the biggest saboteur is our, is the salesperson's own confidence. And I don't mean trumped up, beat yourself on the chest before you get out of the truck confidence. I mean, like you actually know what you, you know, your stuff and you, and you know, you're not, you know, your numbers and you're not, it's, it's really just a matter of. I, as a salesperson, I want to understand the prospect's vision or what they're looking for as quickly as possible. And I can maybe help make educated guidance, you know, along that path of discovering that vision. And then I want to understand what they're willing to invest, what their budget is. Because if I'm going to get a no, the sooner I get that no, the better for everybody. I don't want to waste their time, which is a slightly different. approach, then I don't want to waste my own time. Of course, I don't want to waste my own time, but I don't want to waste their time. Like I have to be in the heart and in the mindset of serving the prospect, serving the customer. I'm here to either help you get you what you want or kindly, gently, professionally educate you as to what you can and can't get with your budget. And what tends to happen, we live in a consumeristic society, so everything's always 50% off, right? So people have discounts and all of that stuff. And so when you say you just slide a quote across the table for 50 grand and the client's like, sure, I love it. Let's do it for 45. You know, I think we've all probably been in that situation where we're like payrolls due, we got vendor bills coming in. We're like, yeah, sure. We cave and we take it. I think that that happens when we don't know our numbers. And when we do know our numbers, we have the confidence knowing that if I did that, I would literally be doing the job for free or possibly even paying to do for the privilege of doing the job. So what do I do instead? Always negotiate on scope, never on price. So if they want to do it for 45, if that's their response, I'll be like, hey, absolutely. I can help you get it for 45. Now it's my job as the professional to give educated suggestions on how they could achieve something similar to what they were asking for in 45. But I'm changing the scope. I'm never just saying, okay, sure, I'll do it. I'll give you a break or anything. And one of two things will happen. Either you'll find out that the customer really was just doing it to see what you would say, and they'll be like, no, actually, I don't want to change the scope. Let's do the 50. Or they'll be thankful and grateful and look to you as an authority and credibility. You'll establish credibility and raise status as a salesperson because you are genuinely helping them achieve the best outcome possible for the budget that they have. And in extreme cases where, I mean, I'm sure this has happened to all of us. If you're in business, like somebody has a quarter million dollar vision and a $10,000 budget in extreme cases, you can at least gently and professionally educate them as to what things cost and make suggestions. You can phase it out. You could finance it, or you could hold off and save, or you could do something like this and still get similar functionality or, or utility out of the, out of the project. But you know, this whole thing of like, well, they said they wanted to do all this cool stuff. So they, you know, they didn't tell me what they wanted to spend though. So I'm just going to shoot them a bid for, you know, you know, a high number or, you know, what, for what they asked for. And then the client comes back to you almost feeling betrayed because you're like, why didn't you tell me? Like, there was no way I was going to spend this amount of money. And now, now you're, now you're at odds instead of on the same team. So the sooner I can, the one way I've kind of. set it to our customers that synced up is like build your budget. So, you know, your numbers, so you know what you need to charge and then go develop yourself as a salesperson to get what you need and stop trying to compete on price. That's a race to the bottom that nobody can win.

It is. And people pick up on that. They can smell that on you, you know? And I guess at the end of the day, we all get to decide what kind of human being we want to be, but I'd rather be on the same team as opposed to seeing if I can get away with or. maximize my own benefit without them catching on or something like that.

Exactly. 100%. You know, and that whole thing in that negotiation of like what they asked for was 50. They say they want to do 40. I saw this on a Instagram reel somewhere and it stuck with me ever since. I wish I remembered, I would remember who it was. It was some for sales contractor pro account, but it was, he was saying that when you do that as a contractor, when you, let's say you give a bid for 50, they say, can we do it for 40? And you go, yeah, sure, let's do it. You negotiate on price, not on scope. When you do that, subconsciously, most times you don't even know you're doing this or it's not at your attention at all. But subconsciously, what you're telling the client is like, I was hoping you would go for the 50, but okay, I can do it for the 40. And it communicates a subconscious message of dishonesty or like, I was hoping I could get you. And so the client's like, wait, you can do it for 40? without changing anything, you know, doesn't support everything we've just been saying about serving the customer, being on the same team, all of that stuff. So in our desire to be nice and in our desire to be, to win the job, we actually fight ourselves.

It's, um, there's a guy here in our local market here in Pennsylvania. It's super nice guy. One of the nicest guys he would meet extremely hard worker. He's been in business for probably 25 plus years now. And what he's charging per hour and what, you know, like there is no way under the sun that he's making money. And he's always in a constant crisis of paying his taxes. This insurance bill come due. And it's like, I pity him.

Yeah, that's what it is. Because I've sat, like, I'm genuinely friends with this guy. Like, I like him and all that. And I've actually, as we were doing this whole synced up thing, I sat with him and I wanted to help him. And he was asking for help. And he was really, he needed help. So I sat with him and we built a budget. And we got to this point where we knew exactly what he had to charge to be profitable. And he stuck with it. I think he won one job at those rates. And then he caved back. to his old mode of operation saying, I just don't think Mrs. Jones is going to pay that rate. Like it's, it's head trash, this thing of being nice, this thing of, I don't, I don't want to be viewed as expensive or I don't want to be viewed as taking advantage of old clients or whatever excuse or reason you place in there. But to put it this way, the price of doing that is costing not only himself, but his team and his family. And so, you know, I forget, this is another piece I saw on social media. I forget where I saw it, but it was something along the lines of every time you're tempted to come off your price, pull out a photo of your family sitting around a dinner table that's empty and ask, who are you going to serve in this moment? Yeah.

Yeah. And the other thing that in that story, we tell ourselves about like, oh, I don't need to charge as much because I don't have as much overhead. Well, with that increased overhead, you can also produce more. And like in a small, in a small young business, and that often cancels itself out. So there's actually not often that big of a difference between a two, you know, a two man show and a 30 employee team with a fleet of trucks. There's usually not nearly as big of a difference in what they have to charge and be profitable as you'd think. Because, you know, a two man team where they got exactly two people that can produce billable work. Right. Whereas the 30 man team has 30 and they, and the equipment is just helping them get more work done. Yes. At a price, but they can produce more value. And so that, so it makes sense to invest and grow and scale.

does happen. Yeah. We do this all the time. We build budgets. It's like people think, Oh, I wish I could hire another crew or I wish I could hire a foreman or, and we, when we do it, it's like. You can actually see the price per hour in the company go down because now you got somebody else doing billable work, completing work, and the overhead gets spread across more billable hours from the whole company perspective.

That's right. So what tends to happen? I've seen, I wish I, yeah, I've seen this in a visual chart already. What tends to happen is you make an investment, like let's say an office manager, and now your monthly expenses spike. But your revenue is just growing at a steady, you know, a steady. So revenue tends to grow in a steady curve, whereas overhead or infrastructure investments, team investments tend to come in big spikes. And so when there's a spike. you know, there's a delayed reaction or a delayed effect to that revenue growing from that investment. So when you make the immediate investment in the overhead, there tends to be a spike. You're making less money month over month for a time until that full power of that infrastructure investment kicks in. And it starts growing and growing. And then you make the next investment and the next investment. And that's how you build up to the fleet of trucks and new equipment and a team of office people. That's how you build up to that.

That's right. Yes, I agree 100%. When someone signs on with SyncedUp and we, the first thing we do is we build their budget because we want to establish right out of the gate, you know, what your pricing actually has to be. And really what building a budget means is you just plug in every expense your business ever has. That's what it looks like. And when we're done plugging in every expense the business has today, what we like to do before we say, okay, cool, done, let's apply this. is just sit back for a minute, reflect and say, okay, what about where do you want to go?

My truck keeps breaking down. I'd like to replace it. I am working 80 hour weeks. I'd like to hire an office admin. I wish I could have a foreman that's running the crew. I started putting a budget for the business you want to be tomorrow, which has the exact effect as what you just said. You know, like now you're charging at rates because the budget dictates the floor. You can never go. You can never charge less than what your budget tells you. Right. But the market is the only thing that dictates your ceiling. So as long as your sales ability, what's that

Exactly. A hundred percent. You're right. But what tends to happen then is like put in the, put in the wishlist items into your budget, the things that you wish you could spend money on and grow and, you know, get that new truck or whatever it is. And then if you can still sell the jobs, there's your permission to go spend the money. Yeah. You know, and it's a beautiful thing. It's the most fun thing about budgeting because I have literally seen business owners go from, I can't make it. I can't charge more. Like that's their mindset, right? The thing we're talking about to in a matter of weeks, they see the principles of how the numbers work. And they're like, dude, I can actually charge less if I hire another foreman. I'd have, if I do this and if I do that, and if I put in this new piece of equipment, I've been wishing I could get. my man hour rate only jumps by $8 an hour. I am so totally doing that, you know, but they don't, you mean I

I mean, it's the most fun thing about it.

And it just cuts the fog. It just helps you. It makes it so that you don't have to be a spreadsheet guru to figure this out. And, you know, what I see happening in like the growth journey of contracting businesses. is when you're in your 500K to a million, maybe even up to 2 million, it's like there's just hardly not enough money there to bring in a CFO or a really good bookkeeper to really help you. Because you could do everything we're talking about in spreadsheets. But unless you yourself are a spreadsheet nerd or really understood like numbers, you're not going to do it. Most contractors are allergic to the office, you know. And so what tends to happen is... It's only the businesses that make it through brute force, through three, four, and five million, until they can have a full-time, you know, have the budget available to actually have a financial guy on the staff with them to get this stuff. And this software just brings the accessibility of that way down. The other thing I wanted to mention about, you know, we were talking about the sales process, and I just thought about this that I didn't talk about, was I think a huge way that you can set yourself apart. from others in the industry around you is by your, quote, turnaround time. I think more jobs are lost in slow, quote, turnaround time than price ever lost for them. And one of the, you can, again, you can do this in spreadsheets. You don't have to use a software, but software just makes it easy. It's like plug and play. What I think is huge in estimating or what has been a game changer for us, I'll say it that way, was templates. and production rates. And now we've deployed that for synced up users all across North America. And I've seen it again and again and again and again, where contractors go from quoting, say, a multi six figure big project in days to doing it literally in 10 to 20 minutes through the power of templates and production rates. Oh, yeah.

And what tends to happen is that estimating is captured in whoever's been doing it for 20 years. It's captured in their heads. Nobody else knows how to do it. It's a magic black box. And so. When they're, you know, like you were saying, they're physically wore out. They can't do it anymore. They want to hand the business off or they want to be done with it. It's like they realize that they only owned a job. They don't actually own a business because nobody else can do what they did. And so that's one of the powerful things about templates and production rates. It's literally like the metaphor is do brain surgery on the owner operator's heads and get that information out from the brain and into a repeatable process that I've seen even. One of my favorite stories is one of our customers in New York, he literally has his 13-year-old son bidding $80,000 jobs off of templates and production rates, and he gives them a commission for it. Nice. And it's because he's done the work of templates and production rates. And if you've never heard of – templates is pretty self-explanatory. I think most anybody knows what that is. But if you've never heard of production rates, really what it is is let's say you're building a patio. And you know from your 20 years of experience that it would take 15 ton of stone to do a 500-square-foot patio. for the base rock. How do you know that? I don't know. I just know from experience. The production rate is take the square footage, the 500 square feet. I'm using hypothetical numbers. Take the square footage divided by the total quantity you use. Bam, there's your production rate. 500 divided by 15. Bingo. Got it. There's your production rate. So a lot of times people tell me, I don't know my production rates. I have no idea how I would even start figuring it out. I feel like I have to start tracking everything with a stopwatch. And, you know, it's like, no, you don't have to. It literally take, you start as a baseline with the information you do know from your years and years of experience. Just take the measurement divided by the quantity or whatever and get your production rate out of that. And bam, now you have a baseline. Now you can start tracking. And if your job costing is saying, I used more, I used less, you can update your production rate. And the person that's producing the bid, the amount of field experience they have to have dramatically drops.

Yes. Which is going to

Yes. You know, at a super, maybe, yes, maybe slightly oversimplified comment is you are building your templates and production rates every time you bid a job. If you just did that one time, now I never have to do it again. I just plug in my measurements. Bingo. I'm done.

Have you ever read the book compound effect?

It's literally that. It's literally what you just said. It's the idea that 1% better every day compounds dramatically. And bite off, what we tend to do, this is another quote, we tend to, how does it go? We overestimate what we can do. in a year and under what we can do in five years, something along those lines, but we tend to over bite off more than we can chew in like a Friday afternoon or whatever, you know? And then we're like, Oh, I didn't get it done. It's still not usable. And so I just sideline it and I procrastinate. Whereas, you know, like you said, just pick one thing, build one production rate for one thing. it turns into a mindset, really. It turns into a way you view your life and the way you view your business. And you start viewing yourself as like what you said, not so much a craftsman, even though most people in this space get into it because they love the work, you know, you start viewing yourself not so much as a craftsman, but more of a builder of the systems and processes that produce the craft.

And builder of people. Yeah. Yeah. Which, yeah, and the systems and processes are in, yeah, I like, thank you for that. Because the systems and processes, they're not there to collect dust on the shelf. They are there to serve your people, to build your people, to make it, set them up for success. Yeah,

Yeah. How did you, in your experience, how did you get over? Because like something I've kind of learned is both looking at my own life, but also just working with hundreds of contractors all across North America is it's easier to keep doing what you've always done, even if that way is broken or less than ideal. In your experience, what finally flipped the switch for you? Like what finally led you to be like, okay, I've had enough of this. I'm actually going to do, I'm not only going to buy the gym membership, I'm actually going to go to the gym. Like what happened for you?

I agree a hundred percent. This battle is won or lost in between our own years. It's in the mindset. And I know that sounds, Until you realize that, it can sound really cliche. Like, oh, yeah, sure, poo-poo, you know, kumbaya, your way to success. It's not, you know, I'll just work harder. Because that's the easiest thing for us as craftsmen to do, contractors to do. Like, we have challenges, I'll just work harder. I'll just work 100 hours a week instead of 80 hours a week. You can do that. It is an option for a time, but you will inevitably have had enough at one point. And you won't be able to, it won't actually produce the results that I think I'm assuming we all want, which is I want to do what I love to do. I want to make a good life doing it. I want to provide for my family and I want to build an amazing team. And that's an amazing lifestyle business. But you're not going to get there. Like if you are selling work at less than profitable rates, doing more work just digs a bigger hole.

These things are true.

to. Amen.

I could not agree more. Like when I look through some of the most difficult challenges in my life story and business, like what brought me through, what helped me level up, what helped me open my eyes, what helped me get to the next, you know, phase of growth was that being in the same room with other people that are in the grind of business, just like. just like you are just like I am, you know, that I think is probably one of the most, it's probably one of the most effective antidotes to the stories we tell ourselves. Like what you were giving examples of earlier, like we convince ourselves that I can never get 50 bucks an hour or whatever that way, you know, and then you hear somebody else cross the table and be like, dude, you gotta get past that. There's no way you're going to make it. And you're like, Oh really? You know, it's, that has, I could not agree more. And that's that, you know, that actually I'd love, um, to have you once a year, we do an annual summit. We have a tremendous group and community around the synced up community as well. And once a year, we do an annual summit where everybody is invited. It's a private event. Everyone's invited to get together. And I'd love to have you there. Like you can be my guest, come on out there. And even if you want to make it open to your audience, I'd be happy to give you a discount code for your audience that's unique to you. But really what it is, it's an event where we bring in, like we're going to have the author of the book, Simple Numbers, Greg Crabtree. He's going to be a keynote speaker there. I haven't heard that one. Yeah. So there's a lot of professional business or motivational speakers there. Of course, the Synced Up team does some presentations as well. And we always do a business spotlight. So this year, we're highlighting a business, a pool contractor that does outdoor living spaces in Dayton, Ohio. So most of the events at a venue in Dayton, Ohio, then we leave one afternoon and evening and go out and do a business spotlight, literally at his physical location. It's an October 3rd and 4th this year. But I'd love to have you there, man. Be my guest. Come on out. You're invited.

Okay.

I mean, I'm just hearing you talk about your group and what you're doing. And I'm like, dude, like we're doing this in different ways. We're doing the same thing. So it's inspiring.

So we serve contractors that are typically find themselves in the 250 K to 2 million range. We have plenty of contractors that are in the five, six, seven,8 million range, but. It's the sweet spot. The reason that the $250 to $2 million is kind of the sweet spot is because that is where contractors typically tend to wake up to the fact that I've got to figure out this numbers thing. I've got to figure out a system to track my jobs so I know when I mess up the bid. And that's when we meet. That's when we start doing business. So that's really what we do is we solve both of those profit killers, the math problem and the resources thing with job costing and tracking jobs. And so what it is, it's an app that it's like a project management or a CRM app where you can put in your customers, your leads, schedule consultations, create estimates, send out proposals in digital. They can sign them digitally and pay. Schedule the job. There's a mobile app to track time and materials. There's like a digital job folder with all the pictures and material lists and everything right there in the app for your crew out in the field or even for yourself if you're the one out there in the job. And then what it's doing is it's collecting those actual hours and materials, et cetera, in real time to give you that estimated versus actual job costing in real time, which is really the power. So that's what it does. And then, of course, it integrates with QuickBooks Online.

So for all the accounting stuff. So that integrates seamlessly. And if you want to learn more about it, I'd just tell you to go to our website, you know, syncedup. com. It's spelled with a K. You know, the thing behind me there is. The little neon is S Y N K E D U P. com. And there's videos on there that describe how it works. And you can also book a call with one of our people and what that call, like kind of the way we were talking about the sales process for contractors. We kind of believe like we try to embody the same principles in software sales. It's like, look, we solve a problem. And if you have the problem, we can totally help you fix it. If you feel like we're, you know, we're not a good fit or we don't really, you don't really have the problem that we solve within no pressure. Like we're here to, we're here to serve you. So yeah, but you can book on a book, a live call and we can just get a deeper dive with you, how it works, how it flows and whether that's the right fit for where you're at in business and what your needs are.

know, another thing I'll give you that you can put down there is I have a bunch of free freebies that I give away. Like I have a production, I have a production rate calculator. Like it's a spreadsheet template giveaway. There's also a free version of the budgeting tool that I can give you. So it's basically just synced up. com forward slash resources. I'll get you the link, but under that link is all the freebies that we have, the budgeting tool. a production rate calculator. There's a free job costing spreadsheet. There's a bunch of resources there that it's a great place to kind of get your feet wet, if you will. If you feel like you're not quite ready to actually get a tool for this for your business.

So the one I'm currently reading is heavy reading. I'm struggling to get through it. It's called the three laws of performance. It's good stuff, but it's very mindset stuff. You know, it's, it's heavy reading. Um, probably the, probably a book that has been extremely influential for me that started to probably the first book that I would say started to change the way I think was extreme ownership. This was when I, this was when I was an employee at Tossie landscaping. Um, another one. that was really practical for this other stuff that we're talking about systems and processes is it's a combo it's the e-myth i don't know if you ever heard of the e-myth book the e-myth but then a immediately follow that up with reading buy back your time yep so those two books in combo are a deadly combo and i i use that buy back your time the principles in that buy back your time but you have it there don't you that's awesome I know Dan Martell. I'm in his, I'm in his SAS mentorship group that he runs. Yeah. So fantastic book. Like I, I literally, like my assistant and I literally opened that book up and almost implemented, you know, some of those things like the email and the perfect week. Like we implemented that stuff, like almost verbatim, you know, as he, and it's been a game changer for us. It's been awesome.

That's awesome. Here, hold that up. I've got to get a picture of that.

Exactly. I got them to autograph one for me at one of the events we were at together, so that was cool.

And I think, I think the reason I said that that book changed the way I think is because I started thinking less like, you know, the, the, the typical employee and more like an owner.

And your employees can feel that. And it feeds on itself. It's an energy that feeds on itself. It's awesome.

That's awesome. Uh,