Weston Zimmerman (SynkedUP): Why Your Timesheet Data Is Your Most Valuable Asset

Rob Murray (00:29): Everybody, welcome back to another episode of the IM Landscape Growth Podcast. We have returning guest, an amazing human, founder of SynkedUP, Weston Zimmerman. Thank you so much for being on the show again, bud.

Weston Zimmerman (00:39): Absolutely. Thanks for having me. And as always it’s a great time. Every conversation I have with you I remember for the days after. Like it’s always a always a good connection point. So thanks for having me on again. Yeah.

Rob Murray (00:50): Yeah, all the feelings mutual, man, and that’s why I was so excited. You you dropped the MCP for SynkedUP. which for some people listening might mean nothing. But I was just so pumped for you guys to go down this path. And so then everybody knows that the first of all, Weston needs no introduction. Check out SynkedUP, it’s amazing. Know your numbers. He’s been helping landscape contractors and contractors of all shapes and colors and sizes for years and and has just done an incredible job simplifying helping people know their numbers. so look into their software, it’s amazing. All the clients we’ve ever worked with that use your stuff are super fans and they love working with you guys. and you’ve done a you’ve made a big change in their companies. Today though, this so that you know we know that the show is all about the primary growth constraint holding entrepreneurs back. And you were just about to jump into this idea about, you know, having to relearn something that we may already know, or maybe even have to learn something new in the world that we’re in. And I think that’s kind of the theme of today’s episode. So the re the reason I reached out to s to Weston was because he sent this email out to all the users and maybe even prospects. I’m not sure who’s on your list in the email, but it was how you guys have brought in an MCP server to SynkedUP, which is essentially giving access to AI to then go in and interpret a lot of information within the system. So may maybe just for the sake of starting from the beginning, can you help people just understand what an P server and why it’s such a big deal that you guys set one up for SynkedUP?

Weston Zimmerman (02:05): Well, it it and what an MCP server essentially does is it allows you I mean, a lot of people might have heard of Zapier or APIs, and it’s kind of the same family where you’re just able to connect other tools to the data that lives in the wherever the MCP server is connected to. So for instance, if you ha if you use SynkedUP now that we have the MCP server, you can l literally take your AI tool like Claude Cowork, connect it to the SynkedUP data, the raw data, that you would never spend hours and hours and hours, hours of pouring it down over and just ask your AI tool, ask Claude Co-work, hey, how many what’s my unbillable hours percentage this month? Or or whatever. And because it has access to the data, it can give you a plain English answer in seconds. Instead of, yeah, that’s that’s the well, and and that’s just the big yeah, that’s just the beginning. Because then you can be like, Well, hey, take this data and also send me a summary every week with this. Actually, even better, send it to my office admin who’s on responsible for payroll. Like, you know, so you can do you can just.

Rob Murray (02:46): Yeah.

Weston Zimmerman (03:02): build and build and build on top of the data that’s in whatever tool you’re connecting with.

Rob Murray (03:07) Yeah, I mean I Claude cowork too is such a great example because it can get interpretive as well and like help diagnose issues that are repeatable patterns, provide recommendations, and then they they all need vetting. You know, there was this one I don’t know if you remember the movie Fantasia. Anyway, it’s a Disney classic from way back when it’s not quite a hundred years old, but it feels like it when you watch it. I remember I was at a movie theater. My grandmother took me to a movie theater in Smith Falls, Ontario, a tiny little place.

Weston Zimmerman (03:12) Yeah.

Weston Zimmerman (03:22) No.

Rob Murray (03:33) We’re like fifteen, twenty minutes into the movie, and I look over to my mom and I’m like, When does the movie start? I was like, What is this? I had no idea what it was. Anyway, super cool. There’s a scene though with Mickey Mouse, and he’s a sorcerer’s apprentice. And if you check it out on YouTube, it’s Mickey Mouse Sorcerer’s Apprentice Fantasia, you’ll find it. There’s three parts that are all broken up, but it’s still a very, very cool scene. And the reason why it’s so cool is because Mickey is tasked by the sorcerer to fill a well with water, and he’s gotta go collect the water with a bucket and fill up this giant well. And then the sorcerer leaves and he leaves his hat. And Mickey’s all exhausted and tired trying to fill this thing. So he casts a spell on the broom to do the bucket of water. And so the broom starts getting the bucket of water, so it’s filling up this well, and then he falls asleep. And he wakes up to an overflowing well. And now he’s like, my god, this is not good, I a huge problem in my hand. So he chops up the broom. But he didn’t have a stop button as part of his spell, so the broom all the little chunks of wood turn into like thousands of brooms now are grabbing water and filling and now he’s like flooding the entire castle. And I just thought it was such a great example of like AI going rogue. Like if you don’t put guardrails on it and you don’t like a lot of people think that these these tools can do anything. And the reason I bring it up is because when you use a tool like Cowork or Cowork inside a system like SyncDub, the guardrails are almost on it because it’s your system. Like you’ve already structured the data. It can’t fabricate a bunch of things. You still need to verify that it’s not, you know, doing stupid shit, but it makes it so much more powerful to have access to a structured data system like you guys.

Weston Zimmerman (05:00) Well, that’s y y yeah, I’m gonna build on that narrative to draw a contrast between d deterministic and generative. So generally speaking, if you open up ChatGPT or Claude and just ask it an open ended question, it’s gonna generate an answer. It will make something up. And it’s coming off of whatever data it has a it surfaces the internet, you know, whatever data it’s connected to, right? The difference with you connecting that same horsepower, that same model, to actual data that’s your your data is it kind of r really reduces the scope from for for what it can hallucinate or just quote make up. Instead it’s just looking at raw structured data and the answer is is much more matter of fact. You know, th there’s no there’s the the the amount of stuff it has to infer is much tighter. And deterministic is like saying two plus two is four. Like it’s always four. That’s that’s a spreadsheet is deterministic. AI can reason on top of the data that was saved by deterministic calculations to kel help you tell the story behind it. So a key concept in AI tools or or just software, technology in general, is is it deterministic and is it gener generative? And this is why there’s a difference between opening up chat GTP and say, hey, price me this patio. It will make something up. It’s not gonna say I don’t know.

Rob Murray (06:15) And and it could be close.

Weston Zimmerman (06:16) Yeah. Right. It and it’ll be closed compared to whether whatever it’s looking at. I actually did it. And it came back with like ten to fifteen dollars a square foot installed. So you know it’s looking at who knows what. You know, probably some Facebook marketplace listings from somebody’s high school. I don’t know. But yeah. But the difference is when you connect that same reasoning power.

Rob Murray (06:29) Spider Man landscape contracting.

Weston Zimmerman (06:36) To your data, picture it being your business costs, your crew, what you pay them, what your overhead is, what your stated profit margin is, what your cost of material is. This is all deterministic data. That that y now you’re taking that same power of the AI model, pointing it at facts, and then asking what the answer is. Way different outcome. And that’s what that’s why you can’t just well to your point, you need to be skeptical of just opening up a chat browser and be hey, what’s the answer to this question? Like there’s there’s times when that’s useful and there’s times when it’s reckless.

Rob Murray (07:05) Yeah. Yeah, like I’m trying to figure out how to rent a boat like a cuddy cabin. Great. Super helpful. Yeah.

Weston Zimmerman (07:08) Yeah, totally different. Yeah. Plan me this vacation. Plan you know, give me a day, give plan this weekend in this city for me. Like that’s completely different because it can generate anything from multiple dozens of variants, and they’re all kinda like, yeah, they work. You know, no harm, no foul.

Rob Murray (07:24) Yeah. Well and so that that’s and I th that is why I got so excited for you guys. for lots of reasons ’cause I hear people are like, yeah, you know, I don’t know about these tools, I think they’re gonna go away the dodo, ’cause now I can just build my own. I’m like Can you though, like have you used a system that you built strictly on vibe coding for twelve months and seen what’s happened? ‘Cause tech debt’s a real thing and

Weston Zimmerman (07:41) Yeah. Yeah. I mean it is Yeah, it in theory you could. I mean it the i it’s it’s unarguable. It’s with you know, th it absolutely that the bar of what it takes to build something or how cheap it’s gotten to build something or the level of skill and knowledge that is required to build something has collapsed dramatically. That is true. But an analogy I look at to kind of help me kind of like reason about this, like, you know, what what happens with SAS in a vibe c when vibe coding is a reality is look at marketing websites. You probably will have a more accurate gut intuition about this analogy than I even do. But like look at marketing websites. It’s been possible to drag and drop and build a a pretty looking website for fifteen years plus. what percentage of the market actually does it? You know, I don’t know. I’m gonna go with ten to twenty percent, if that. And even of those ten to twenty percent that do, how many of them are good at it or succeed at it? Well, I can tell you just from the thousands of contractors I like interact with on a on an annual basis, like it might be your stepping stone to maybe the first thing you do, but then you are as you’re what you’re gonna ultimately learn is like just because it looks pretty doesn’t mean it works. and second, th the time and expertise and skill it takes to make it work, it’s not worth my time. Like, I need to go off and do what I’m good at and trust the expert in the same way the homeowner could do their their own patio, sure. Sure they could.

Rob Murray (09:02) Of course.

Weston Zimmerman (09:03) Yeah. But is it worth it? No. Do I want surety or certainty in my outcome? Yes. I would rather pay for the service and go off and do my own thing. The other thing about the other thing about vibe coding is that AI can’t isn’t really built to tell you what to want. You have to know what you want. and there’s kind of two things I’m touching on here. One is generally speaking, entrepreneurship is is like going to the s to going to school for learning how to think in systems, learning how to think in processes, learning how to build workflows. That is a skill that you don’t learn overnight. and there is a value And being able to just step into a a a process workflows that are that are the that are honed from thousands of other contractors that are like just honed to be able to serve you know all the edge cases that you need. You can go from zero to eighty percent very quickly with, say, your own vibe coded solution, but then to get from eighty to even ninety or a hundred, like

Rob Murray (09:40) a system based approach.

Weston Zimmerman (09:56) the the amount of work I can tell you from personal experience, the amount of work it goes from zero to eighty to eighty to ninety is is like exponentially more because you then r uncover all the yeah well if that happens it’s wrong I’ll have to build the logic my goodness what am I gonna do about that you know it just it just like cascades on and on and on seemingly endlessly and and even real life changes like the Google connector that you had changed and needed an update and it’s broke it doesn’t work you know like somebody has to maintain this stuff so it does turn into is vibe coding a a a game changer? Absolutely it is I think what a contractor would be better served in hey what I’m gonna do with vibe coding is not so much replacing the systems you already bought and paid for, but connecting to them. Connecting to the data in those systems, use the AC the MCPs to then do the little things that you never could figure out how you could get it surfaced. Like take the data from four different things and serve it up to yourself in a daily email or a weekly reminder or whatever, because that is where it’s super powerful, where you can surface little things that maybe like for instance, I use HubSpot internally for SynkedUp in in marketing. There’s things that HubSpot is amazing at, and there’s things that that man, I I really want to visualize that data that’s in HubSpot in a in a r very bespoke way. So what do I do? I just connect to the hot data in HubSpot and I build the little screen that shows the data I want in the very bespoke way. That’s very insightful. That is what’s powerful.

Rob Murray (11:20) Yeah. Yeah, that’s so cool. Yeah, it’s all it’s almost like this like blossom of customization on top of a good foundation. And so we were we were talking before we got on, I like, Yeah, my Instagram feed is all like business leadership and AI stuff. Like all the stand-up comedy and golden retrievers have left my feed because I’m like chomping at the bit to like help understand this, help myself understand this content at like a very core f foundational level. And it’s been

Weston Zimmerman (11:26) Yeah. Yeah.

Rob Murray (11:46) I don’t know, maybe ten years since I’ve been this excited to like learn a new discipline, ’cause that’s what this is. It’s a discipline of study. And you were you were kinda saying like, yeah, that’s there’s like this age of like and and kinda constant theme in entrepreneurship of needing to to learn and and relearn some stuff. But I and I stopped I like, Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, don’t go there. This is content for this show. What were what were you kind of alluding to there with like this idea of learning and especially from an entrepreneurial perspective?

Weston Zimmerman (12:11) I think the the what what what we’re gonna see, and these are just my opinions and my current, you know, version of thinking through my own what I Yeah.

Rob Murray (12:18) Yeah, but just just for the record, you you work with hundreds, if not thousands, of landscape contractors. You understand this industry better than most people I’ve met, and I’ve met thousands of people in the industry. So I’d say your opinion has a little bit of weight. Kinda why I wanted to have you on the show again.

Weston Zimmerman (12:23) Yeah.  Well to to so that point that I was making earlier with like I think what’s gonna happen and this is probably this is tr this is true for more than just landscape contractors. I think this is true for entrepreneurs in general especially true for for teams like ourselves at SynkedUP where the the thing that is going to let’s go back to the context of landscape contractors. What I see happening is probably a a three-way fork, if that even makes sense. Like it’s gonna be the people on one fork, it’s gonna be the people that dive down this rabbit hole and and really leverage the the this what’s possible with AI. There’s gonna be the people that kind of tread water and keep up, and there’s gonna there’s gonna be the agnostics that That never really learn how to adopt. And what I was the point I was the the the the point I was trying to pull out in my own thinking was that I I think you could define it another way by saying that the degree of success that entrepreneurs will have going forward is their is directly tied to their degre to their ability to be able to learn, and and relearn something they thought they already knew. y I’m sure you’ve heard the analogy of like if you learn something by sitting in class, sure, you might feel like you’ve learned it, but you haven’t really mastered it until you’re able to make it simple for the person next to you that’s never heard of it before. Like your ability to simplify something, is is directly correlated to your expertise and mastery of a topic. And so I think that to some extent, if you are a ravenous learner,

Rob Murray (13:45) Mm.

Weston Zimmerman (13:57) stay true to the business problem that you’re trying to solve. Like you know, we’re we’re like for us, it’s like help blue collar pro contractors be prosperous and that comes from pricing the job profitably to begin with. And there’s so many inputs that go to that. So that’s not changing. What is changing is the vehicle with which how we get there. You know, go back forty years, it was pen and paper, and then it was spreadsheets and and then you know, graphical interfaces on top of tables of data, software products like what SynkedUP started off as. going forward it’s gonna be well, what we’re building right now is a Gen Tig AI that will be it would be be building, say, estimates for you. And it’s not only that, not only would just be building it for you, which sounds cool in and of itself, but it will know you and your business better than you ever were able to reason as a human because it’s just taking all this data and considering all these angles in a way that you could never load up in your head. Or the or or said another way, the the expertise you had to gain, the mastery you had to gain over your own business to arrive at the point where you could took many years. Now a new kid can in theory have a world class CFO, a world class estimating agent all in their back pocket and and arrive at the at the correct outcome without the years of hard lessons required to get there, to be able to do that on your own experience, if that makes sense.

Rob Murray (15:11) Yeah, well and I and I think you know, some people I’ve heard talk about this are kinda like, Well, might as well ride it out to the sunset ’cause these young kids are gonna beat me up anyway, and it’s just a lot of people don’t necessarily understand how much further ahead you are as somebody who’s been in business for eight, ten, twelve, fifteen years with that intuition, now with a tool. And I think this is where You know, like pe I remember talking to a client years ago and we were we this is like before we were niched at all in landscaping furniture store and we’re like, dude, e-commerce, we gotta be selling your stuff online. And this guy was just like, There’s no way anybody is ever gonna buy a couch online. Okay. I don’t know about this wayfair thing, but seems to be doing okay. And I you know, e-commerce sales for furniture is higher than retail sales.

Weston Zimmerman (15:53) Yeah.

Rob Murray (15:58) And so it’s just like d do we really wanna just ride into the sunset? Like w we have such a huge head start if we can just take one little step to learn these things. So actually that was one of the questions was like if you were talking to, you know, an audience people listening to this, which you are essentially What would you say to somebody who’s like maybe a little hesitant or like I I find there’s some people using like AI for writing emails or drafting ad copy. or they’re like, Yeah, I don’t even want to touch it. I haven’t opened it up yet. I don’t I heard about it, but I don’t need another app. What’s one little thing they could do from your perspective to start learning not only the tool, but like the potential of this thing?

Weston Zimmerman (16:33) Well, what I would there’s a couple angles you could approach it. May the first one my mind goes to is let’s not like make stuff up. Let’s just go to what’s real life free right now. Let’s pick one thing that’s hard, takes willpower to remember to do it, you hate it every time you remember you have to do it, takes hours, you wish you didn’t have to do it. Just pick one of those tasks and if it touches a screen, like where you’re doing something on a screen. That’s the one requirement. Then let’s go automate that thing. And get your high school kids friend, you know, figure out a way to get somebody to get get you over the initial hump of doing one thing. Even if it’s just like pulling your payroll hours and submitting them for for payroll. Even if it’s just like archiving all your spam out of your email every morning before you wake up. I don’t care what it is, whatever it is that’s annoying to you, let’s and and it touches a screen, let’s just solve that one thing and get AI to do it. And what’s gonna happen is your brain’s gonna go off like popcorn. You’re like, wow. I could have, if I just did that, what about this? And it’s just it’s gonna it’s gonna be a never-ending thing. And so I think I think to the thing that you’re calling out so much of the time, it’s just a human psychological response. We fear what we don’t know, we avoid what we don’t know, which kind of ties back into my earlier point. If I had to say it in 10 seconds, it’s like the difference is gonna be the people that are willing to learn and lay aside what they thought they knew and and learn new new ways of achieving the same.

Rob Murray (17:30) Snowball.

Weston Zimmerman (17:52) thing versus the people that are like, nah, this rut’s good, the way I’ve always done it is fine. It’s just, I mean, that’s a principle as old as business. You know, as and and it’s just but even though that principle is as old as business, the rate at which things are changing is accelerating dramatically so that the gap is gonna just widen between people that just kind of do it the way they’ve always done it versus the people that have an appetite for, hey, why do I have to spend four hours every Friday night doing this? You know?

Rob Murray (18:17) Right. I love that. And I and I think the use case around like what’s the thing that’s frustrating you as a great place to start is awesome. And everybody’s using AI right now if even if they don’t use it. Like Google added eight hundred million users to their Gemini when they brought in AI search and now you’ve got this, you know, L L through Gemini, whether you’re using Chat GPT or Claude or not, it’s it’s available to you in a Google search bar. So and you can leverage that thing even to the point of what you’re saying because it can be so much more robust in terms of its contextual search and and and responses. So you you bring it back to what you’re seeing with contractors now and and with SynkedUP and so are are you seeing people starting to leverage this MCP that you guys are doing? Are you starting to see the tech appetite kind of increase a little bit across your user base? Like what are you seeing from from your clients?

Weston Zimmerman (19:04) I mean, honestly it surprises me how far a lot of people that I know or touch through SynkedUP go how far they go, like how deep they go into AI. I mean, building their own agents, like it it’s incredible like how far some of these people go. And of course there’s the people that you know, the the the early adopters, the people that really go crazy, more than, you know, you’re a landscape contractor and you’re building your whole your whole AI back off, you know. That’s not the norm I would say, but it is impressive how many people are leaning into this hard and one question you might ask yourself if you haven’t touched AI yet is why are they? Well, they’re finding value somewhere. That’s why. You know, and so what let’s let’s talk about a little FOMO. What am I missing out on, you know? and so I think my my encouragement to anybody that’s already in utilizing AI or considering doing it or knows they need to do it and haven’t done it yet is yeah, first the hard business pro the hard thing that just takes more time than it should and it’s annoying and you hate doing it. Let’s get that out. Let’s do one of the let’s do a couple of those things. The other thing is just surfacing the data that you already might have, but bring it right up front and center. I can’t tell you how much my own quality of I don’t know how you would label this quality of life as an entrepreneur has changed over the last six months because I could take data that I already had. I could open up a screen and look at it, I could open up my phone and look at it or whatever, but I just take that little data, tell it how I want it written up in a daily little snapshot, end of day, 5 30 p.m. Eastern time, bam, right in front of me. It’s like, wow, hey, let me call that guy. What’s up with you know? And it what’s happening is not that there’s any net new data, it’s just surfacing what’s important in the moment in a timely fashion, so you just kind of keep things flowing. Like for a contractor, like, yeah, that proposal I sent three. days ago, what happened to it? You know? it make up your own real world use case, but like I think not only taking annoying tasks off of your plate, but also what is the thing that you’re checking irregularly that would really be powerful if you got it regularly?

Rob Murray (20:54) Yeah. I love it. And I mean and we’re seeing the same thing. Like the idea of being able to I mean, and I think yeah, I don’t wanna get too far down it ’cause we’ve hooked up our s our infrastructure pretty strong. So like our ability to ask anything and automate a bunch of like notifications so that information surfaced prior to getting into anything like it’s pretty meaningful. like the reminder I got for meeting with you, it was like, you know, letting me know what Weston’s up to on you know the SynkedIn website and publishing post and LinkedIn and any conversations we’ve had in the past, that kind of stuff. Emails back and forth and show the contextual relevance of like understanding, especially if you’re in a business where you’re gonna talk to a customer that hasn’t you haven’t talked to but you know your team has, and it’s like, okay, I’m gonna go talk to Jane and Bill and be like, okay, well where did this call get let? Where’s this client at? And documenting this stuff so that it can just be surfaced is just so important. But I but I get down a rabbit hole of like maybe that’s a bit more you know down the line. and so some people thinking this is like, well if there’s so many people d far down this road, I’m already way too behind. I’ll never catch up. And I just think that itself is pretty defeatist. And and once you start I think to your point, once you start trying a couple of things, you’ll really start to see this popcorn effect in your brain and the snowball effect in terms of of of resolve. So then what do you what are you thinking in terms of what’s what’s next or what’s coming over the next six twelve months with the accelerate accelerated change and and people digging into this stuff, like do you think it’s gonna plateau and people can kinda normalize? Or do you think this thing is gonna just go like deeper and deeper and deeper? Like I just where do you see this thing going?

Weston Zimmerman (22:26) Well, there there’s a there’s an element to this whole thing that I I think is overlooked and it’s gonna directly impact the quality that you’ll get out of whatever you try to do with AI and that is your own internal data. Like most contractors in the industry don’t have structured timesheet data. That is tracked to a job. most contractors in the industry, I’m not talking about SynkedUP customers, I’m just saying generally in the industry, don’t don’t have a proper budget with overhead recovery and all of that, equipment depreciation built into their pricing. most contractors don’t have strong systems or data around their sales process. Like, you know, how many times are people opening a proposal before it closes? You know, that you know, they don’t have it. And so what if you

Rob Murray (22:51) Yeah, no, you’re absolutely right.

Weston Zimmerman (23:11) don’t have the raw data, what the only thing that you have is generative aspects of AI, which is just kind of theorizing and making things up off of the broader pool of, you know, whatever the LLM has been trained on. And that I think is the most dangerous version of AI of using AI. I think the most proper and and like so here’s here’s here’s what I’m trying to say. If you’re not using AI today, okay, fine. Just focus on getting your own data. If there’s two things that if I if I was running a million dollar landscape company company right now, there’s two things I would make sure that I have religiously, and that is timesheets trapped to a job, and I would also be recording all my sales conversations and bonus points if I record my screen while I’m building estimates and talking out loud while I’m rec while I’m building the estimate so it generates a transcript that can get fed into AI so it can learn how I work, how I think, how I build my estimates. The the the the transcripts of your sales conversations with your homeowner, like picture you get out of a truck out of your truck at the homeowner’s property, you walk the property, you paint lines on the ground, you take measurements, like record that whole thing. And record if you do zoom calls in your sales process, record those. Just make it a part of your terms and conditions, like hey are conversations recorded. You know, it it’s it’s if if I had if I was too busy to start using AI or figuring it out right now, I would just make sure that that those two things, timesheet data track to jobs, and sales conversations and estimates being created is being recorded so that when I do go to build my you you got you got the bones. Like you’re you’re you skip from kindergarten to tenth grade. Like it’s just yeah.

Rob Murray (24:34) You’ve got it all. Yeah. I love that perspective and I think it’s something and just to like bring it over the finish line, because a tool like Claude or whatever can synthesize so much information so fast, you could probably take two years worth of data of sales transcripts and estimates and all the time cards that come along with it and have it synthesized and narrated five to eight minutes.

Weston Zimmerman (24:55) yeah. Yep. Yep.

Rob Murray (25:02) So  yeah, collecting the information is definitely a huge win and a lot of people do completely overlook it. not to mention that like having clarity in the organization. I think what you said earlier about the entrepreneur is a school for system and process thinking, is probably something a lot of people talk about, but not necessarily explicitly. And I i it’s from doing all of the podcasts and meeting all these successful entrepreneurs, it’s become very apparent that the most successful entrepreneurs, through the definition of building a business that doesn’t depend on them. So it doesn’t matter the size of their business, but it doesn’t depend on them, are system and process thinkers. And and and then they layer in training and development as a priority. So it’s like this three-legged stool of like system building, process building, and people building.

Weston Zimmerman (25:35) Yeah.

Rob Murray (25:44) can you just expand upon the system’s thinking? Like I I think a lot of people hear that. It’s kind of vague, but I I mean for me it it’s concrete and I I I wanna talk a bit more about it. But I think the audience would do really well to hear it from your perspective.

Weston Zimmerman (25:53) Yeah. I mean I’ll just rattle off some things that pop into my mind as like this is an example of building systems. Like instead of me building an estimate like s let’s suppose I’m an owner operator and I do all the estimates in our company. Instead of me continuing to estimate slash guess from experience, intuition, and e and and just instinct, I stop that and instead I build an estimating template with production rates in it and then I just plug in measurements and get my outputs. So as the owner all I do is tune the production rates in the template so that the measurements equal the correct outputs. That’s system building versus just repeating the same intuitive estimating experien based on experience over and over and over again. Another example would be when I talk about time tracking, dude, I cannot overemphasize how like the more I think about AI and how SynkedUP is looking and at you at at solving problems with AI, the that the the the timesheet data of your company is the most precious piece of data that you have, and people just brush it off and think it’s not that important. And if you’re tracking time, you know, time on a shop clock on the wall for payroll, that doesn’t count because we need to know which jobs it went to. It has to be tied to a job. And but you know, coming back to my my thing, another thing of systems building is like, hey, instead of a shop clock on the wall or people texting the office admin or texting you with their hours on Friday so you can get paid, instead of that, build a system for time transformation.

Rob Murray (27:06) Yeah, yeah.

Weston Zimmerman (27:18) Tracking that actually works, that the guy that the people are your team is actually trained on, that that they’ll actually do. And systems looks like if they didn’t track, well then I can’t pay you for those hours because they don’t exist. And the way we fix that is not just short circuit the system, but to fix it by inputting the timesheet that you forgot on Tuesday, so I can pay you on those hours. Meaning don’t break your own rules. That’s what it’s like defining what’s required and then not breaking your own rules. Breaking your own rules just defeats the whole process. You may as well forget even building the system in the first place.

Rob Murray (27:46) Yeah, totally. So a I mean the the and the systems thinking I think is the biggest thing of like you know, I think Gerber I think is the one that did it with emeth or coined the phrase that I keep f falling back on is like how do we

Weston Zimmerman (27:55) Yeah, right. Right.

Rob Murray (27:58) get ordinary people doing extraordinary things. And and I think a lot of time some organizations have grown because they’ve had some like, you know, superheroes, like really talented people inside the organization, but when then they leave the IP kind of leaves with them. That that superpower kind of value is gone with the human that brought it.

Weston Zimmerman (28:00) Mm-hmm.

Rob Murray (28:16) Whereas systems thinking and process orientation builds like organizational value that anybody can come into and become better because the s the systems of the company actually empower people to do things that they couldn’t do on their own. And I think that’s maybe where a lot of owners and maybe this is where like you know it kind of like bleeds into imposter syndrome a little bit of like, no, you’re an entrepreneur, you actually did something crazy. You brought something to the world that didn’t exist, your perspective on what should be is a good one, and more people should probably learn from it. And then there’s this weird balancing act of like, okay, you’re gonna do it the way, but you can still do it your way a little. Can you speak a little bit to your experience about that fine?

Weston Zimmerman (28:54) Well, to I very much agree with the point you’re making about autonomy. Like a a a person that’s very experienced in the business and then leaves and then the business takes a big step back tells me you probably had a strong culture, but a week you had a systems debt. And and and to your point about autonomy, like I see I’ll just call most of I’ll just say it most of the time it’s a bucket of of inexperienced contractors, ones that haven’t been around a super long time yet, and they haven’t learned the value of simplicity. What I mean by that is sometimes we’ll come in, and you know, somebody wants to help have us help them build a template or help us build out their different packages of maintenance contracts they they sell. And and it’s they come in with this overly complicated model, and they’re proud of it because of all the bells and whistles they’ve got built into this thing and how complicated it is. But complexity is expensive, simplicity is cheap. It’s it’s that that is true across onboarding people. It’s true across maintaining a standard of quality. and y you know, so you might argue, well, I’m an artist, you can’t systematize what I do. I mean, look at the founder of Aquascape, Greg Woodstock, the pond guy, like building water features is very artistic. he still built it down he boiled it down to the twenty steps. Now, just because you do the twenty steps, well it doesn’t necessarily make you a great artist, but you will build a pond that doesn’t leak, you know? So

Rob Murray (30:10) Right.

Weston Zimmerman (30:11) So it’s it’s s what what I would say is I I think sometimes we can become our own worst enemy where you think like, I’m gonna do all this conditional stuff, all this complex stuff, I’m gonna we’re gonna do this, we’re gonna lay out all this maintenance program package, bronze, silver, platinum, like all all these different add-ons and and it gets so complex that the amount of it just crut it just crushes under its own weight. It’s very hard to administer.

Rob Murray (30:34) Yeah, the amount of resources required to maintain it itself is almost not even worth it.

Weston Zimmerman (30:36) Yeah. Yeah. And so simplicity, like you look at the people that are really good at at at building people, building teams, it’s scaling from like five people to ten people to twenty people to forty people. I don’t maybe that’s not your goal, but the people that know it that they’re that are succeed in doing that, it’s because they’re able to build systems. And complexity is the enemy of systems.

Rob Murray (30:56) I think that’s a good quote. Complexity is the enemy of systems. And it’s true. And I I you know, I always I and I think like I I from what I’ve seen, you can grind yourself to three million bucks. a hundred percent. I I’ve even seen some people get a little bit above it, but like, you know, it’s bananas. I don’t I’ve never seen a a business get to ten without systems.

Weston Zimmerman (31:05) Yeah, the owner and operator ceiling. Yep.

Rob Murray (31:16) And not to say to your point, like not everybody wants to go there. And I think the other thing too is like the artist isn’t the entrepreneur and the entrepreneur isn’t the artist and that’s okay. They’re different. And and if you want to be an artist, be an artist, that’s okay. But I think the entrepreneur, the idea of like building a business, not just a really great job, the systems thinking and the reality of simplicity is hugely important. so where where’s where’s like a piece of inspiration that you’ve got around systems thinking and simplicity that maybe you could share?

Weston Zimmerman (31:23) Yeah. Well, probably the one that’s been the most practical for me in my life is, you know, Dan Martell, his book Yeah, his book Buy Buh Buy Back Your Time. That whole the I think the chapter is called Camcorder Method, like where he creates the playbooks for other people to do the things. And I have really d adopted that in my own life over the last couple of years since he, you know, wrote that book and such. But where

Rob Murray (31:46) Yeah, for sure. Buy your time back or something. Yeah, yeah.

Weston Zimmerman (32:02) If s picture this scenario, your employee asks you a question, hey, how do I do XYZ again? And you could just in plain English pick up the phone, call them or or whatever, in conversation, answer them. But or or respond to their email or text and just answer them. But what I have and and not every scenario fits this shoe, but the point I’m making is what I’ve done what I’ve gotten in the habit of doing is instead of just answering the question in plain text in the in the thread, I will go off and record myself on a Loom video or whatever tool you want to use doing the task, talking out loud while I’m doing the task, how I did the task, and what will inevitably happen is I’ll run into a yeah, it didn’t work the way I thought. Hang on, let me back up, let me redo it. And they’ll see me make a decision right there on the video. Right? And and like but I don’t I don’t edit that out. I don’t polish it out. I just let it right there. You know, so sometimes it’s a very clean sixty second video and I’m done. The next times it’s a three minute and thirty second video and I backed up two or three times and and re came forward and

Rob Murray (32:41) love that.

Weston Zimmerman (32:55) So I finally arrived at the definition of done. But you know, the most practical thing that I’ve made real in my life to answer your question is that camcorder method, meaning like instead of just answering the question, I build the playbook and send a link to the playbook to the employee to answer that question. So that now they can reference it umpteen times in the future. They don’t have ask again. they can send it to somebody else. And and you’ve you’ve built the the the structure, the system for onboarding your next new person in that role. You know.

Rob Murray (33:12) They can send it to somebody else if they ask. Yeah, not to mention the fact that you can now put all those in Google Drive and then have a gem for any part of your business and you can have anybody prompt it and it’ll surface the resource they need based on the question they have and full sp

Weston Zimmerman (33:27) I a hundred percent. Yep. Yep. One of the things in that one of the things that that Dan Martell makes clear in that camcorder method is the concept of definition of done. And that’s been really, really powerful because like you can tell somebody, hey, do this thing, but then when you force yourself to say, and this is when you know you’re done it adds another layer of punch to it. They’re like, yeah. I’m glad I made myself say that because I wouldn’t that wouldn’t have really come out if I’d just said how to do it, right?

Rob Murray (33:55) Well and the clarity is what people are striving or looking for anyway. And I think that’s such a beautifully simple model to remind us to bring it to folks. All right, so go go go go selfish for a minute. What’s going on with SynkedUP? What what should people be looking out for and and what should they be checking out?

Weston Zimmerman (33:58) Yeah. Yeah. But yeah, yeah. So remember the thing I said about the data, your timesheet data is the most precious thing you own. So the reason I said that is we’re building an estimating agent right now that my my vision for this thing, and and we’re launching it in iterative chunks. So it’s not gonna do like it’s not gonna go from zero to hero in in one release. But like essentially what it’s gonna do, the vision is you get up to a homeowner’s property, get out of your truck, you’re on a consultation, you’re recording the whole conversation with your homeowner. the AI estimating agent, the SynkedUP estimating agent, is literally built.  Your estimate and writing the proposal based off of your estimating templates and the conversations being held you’re having with the homeowner in real time. You get back to your truck, the estimate’s done. And the the idea is you already have your products that you buy from your vendors, you already have the the system already knows how long it takes you to do things, not what you said it takes, what your crew actually took off of your timesheets. So it it even protects you from yourself, if that makes sense.

Rob Murray (34:59) Right. Yeah, it does.

Weston Zimmerman (35:06) And so so that’s why so anyway, to finish that like dream story is like the the the the the idea that to build a profitable estimate that you have to become some kind of expert on using software products in your business the the bar is just coming down. Meaning instead of me going through the learning curve of using a system that where the buttons are, how it works, how you set things up to to behave the way that you intend, doesn’t need to happen anymore. You just talk to the agent, tell it what your intended outcome is, and it will produce the outcome for you. You don’t like something it does, you tell it, No, I don’t like that. Change it. it learns from that. and one of the biggest mistakes I see even in s even in our SynkedUP customer base is they’ll do a budget. Awesome. Check.

Rob Murray (35:36) Yeah.

Weston Zimmerman (35:46) They’ll use that budget for estimating. great. They’re solving half the problem. But then they’ll kinda like poo-poo off with the idea of making my crew track time, making sure that everybody every hour is tracked. They’re kinda like, yeah, no, I got I’m good. I got the budget, you know, and they kinda like dismiss are dismissive of the idea of tracking time. I’m telling you that is the input. What is the hardest part about pricing a job profitably? It’s getting the labor man hours right on the estimate.

Rob Murray (36:02) But that’s the input that makes the whole thing run.

Weston Zimmerman (36:12) The materials are pretty they’re pretty cold cut calculations. Like s area, you know, surface, lineal feet, whatever. it’s it’s it’s a it’s a calculation. You it’s unless you read a tape measure wrong or something, it’s hard to screw up. But the labor, there are so many variables that can that can kill that, which is whether materials didn’t show up on time, the homeowner was difficult. the this you forgot about travel time. You you forgot a piece of equipment, you had to go back. Like there’s some

Rob Murray (36:33) Drive time, had to go back to the shop. Average sick days over a course of a year.

Weston Zimmerman (36:39) Yeah, yeah. So what if your system you what if the way you look at your s say you’re using SyncDub, you view it as nothing more than the pla the system of record. It’s where all the truth about the way your company actually operated in the field is lives and then the estimating agent is reading that and it’s not even asking you necessarily how long you think it’ll take, it knows how long it will take. So it’s essentially saying, Yeah, I know you told me this should take ninety hours, but based on on this track record, here’s the data, so you can inspect it for yourself if you don’t believe me. I think it should be 120. you ultimately Yeah. Yeah. Now you can of course veto it and override, but I mean that even when you when you when you veto an override, that’s also another data point that gets logged. So when you go out and you do the job and it takes 115, let’s say.

Rob Murray (37:12) Yeah. For the sake of you and your business profitability.

Weston Zimmerman (37:28) I won’t say it it’s we’re not gonna program it to say I told you so, but we’re you get the idea. So the idea is my my my dream is for what we’re doing with this with these agents is where

Rob Murray (37:30) I told you so. Yeah.

Weston Zimmerman (37:40) You don’t have to be a twenty-year veteran in the industry to do good quality work or to operate with the degree of professionalism or accuracy that that twenty years you you in the old days you had to have those twenty years of experience to execute. My my dream is take the young kid just starting off on a dream, and let that kid that’s never built an estimate for a patio before in his life, produce an estimate that is dialed to the point that his twenty-year vet uncle that lives in the next town over would look at it and be yeah, I couldn’t improve it. Like it’s it’s bang on. That’s that’s that’s the that’s what we’re gonna.

Rob Murray (38:11) Beautiful. And and if someone wants to check out SynkedUP, where do they go? What’s coming up that they should look look out for?

Weston Zimmerman (38:18) so synkedup.com and there’s a little banner at the top end of our website where you can sign up for this agent waiting list. So we’re building a waiting list for when this goes out that people can sign on and get early access to. So synkedup.com is the homepage. Synkedup.ai is where this waiting list is. And I’ll be regularly doing content pieces on our Instagram, which the under s it’s just a handle is just SynkedUP spelled with a K, S-Y-N-K-E-D-U-P, where we’re going to be talking about the the latest things that are rolled, rolling out as we roll this thing out. and and it you know if you just want to see a little taste of it’s a tiny taste as of of what the kind the kind of thing that’s possible to make it easier. I have this little AI hourly rate calculator that I built just as an experiment as we were testing and and R and Ding these different what’s possible, right? And essentially what we did is it used to be to build an accurate budget, the old days people would build their own homegrown spreadsheets or a CFO would do it for them or whatever. And then, you know, products like SyncTap came along and made it easier where you just fill in a bunch of inputs, but it was still very spreadsheet oriented, like a lot of data inputs, right? and one of the things that we’ve learned over the thousands of budget calls we’ve done for contractors is, when I ask this question, they don’t know the answer. Like things like how many unbuildable hours do you have what percent what’s your envelopable percentage? Nobody knows. So, what we’ve learned is how do you phrase the question in a way that we can derive the answer? And so essentially what that has led to is this little AI based hourly rate calculator that just interviews you about your business and it’s designed to be questions that you know off the top of your head, and puts industry benchmarks and assumptions on top of your answers to arrive at what your hourly rate should be. And of course, you can tweak it and Well, I don’t pay, I don’t pay 30 grand a year in shop rent, I only pay pay 10 because I have a sweetheart deal. Whatever, fine. You can you can you can override it. But the idea is that the the the effort required to arrive at the outcome is literally minutes. Like I’m I’m saying the average completion time of this tool is less than five minutes. Versus I remember in the old days building budgets at Tusking landscaping that we we would take weeks to complete that thing, you know. So

Rob Murray (40:11) Love that. Right. So you’re using global data, like aggregated data from all your accounts to help lead people down the path of success so they don’t have to make all the same mistakes.

Weston Zimmerman (40:24) Yeah. I mean Yeah. In in a world where anybody can put vibecode any button, that that’s not the product anymore. Data is the product. So yeah. Yeah. So data is the product. Meaning like, sure you can go build your own button, but you can’t build the intelligence into it that says, This looks good, this looks bad.

Rob Murray (40:33) Love that, buddy. I could so we invested six years ago into landscape marketing index where we started aggregating all of our clients’ data into one spot. We had no idea AI was coming. But now that it’s here, man, is it more valuable? And but it’s like almost 200 companies of all their marketing data. You can’t you can’t get it anywhere else. Yeah. Anyway, you guys are crushing it. I appreciate you. Thanks for doing another episode, and thanks everybody for listening to the IM landscape growth podcast.

Weston Zimmerman (40:52) unbelievable. Yeah, yeah.