Episode 28

Ezra McCarthy
Welcome back to the lawn care success blueprint podcast. Today we have with me a special guest who’s changing the game for the lawn and landscape businesses—Weston Zimmerman, co-founder of SynkedUP with a K. He joins us to discuss how technology can help transform your business, help you boost efficiency, and help you grow. Whether you’re looking to optimize your system or grow, this will be a great conversation for you. So Weston, glad you’re here today.

Weston Zimmerman
Thank you, Ezra. It’s a pleasure to be on the podcast. Thank you for having me on. And man, I love the podcast format. It’s just a great place to kind of talk business, talk shop, and get beyond the fluff a little bit.

Ezra McCarthy
I enjoyed it myself. listened to probably hours a day, literally. yeah, I enjoy it. yeah. so why did you guys start SynkedUP? and I’m curious, why did you spell it with a K and two capital letters?

Weston Zimmerman
Yeah. it’s not okay because it’s easier to get the domain name. and I thought it was kind of cool, kind of gave a unique spin, like a branding spin, but then everybody misspells it. but the reason we built it, why did we build it? well, so I started working at a company called Tussie Landscaping in central Pennsylvania when I was literally 16 years old. I was just a crew member, just an employee. I wasn’t like an owner or a manager even of really any sort, but I worked there at that company for 15 years.

through that time, did get into a leadership role. but through that time, we transitioned from your typical diamond dozen contractor with a handful of people on the crew trying to make profit and not making it, barely breaking even

to figuring out what it means to know our numbers, how to calculate overhead recovery into our pricing, how to track jobs and understand when we’re going off track or on track, and course correct for the next job that we estimate that’s similar.

in that pursuit, we graduated through all the phases of pen and paper to spreadsheets to our first product and then the second product and then the third product. and eventually it got to the point where we realized there was no one product on the market at the time. this would have been 2015 to 2017 era. there was no product in the market that allowed us to go from lead, consultation, estimate, proposal, invoicing, scheduling, time tracking, expense tracking, and invoicing all under one roof.

the main piece that was missing in the industry was job costing, comparing estimated versus actual. the crazy part of the story is that my dad sold a telecommunication company and went to work for that company, completely unrelated to this landscaping business. but I came home from work one day, he went to work for that company. I came home from work one day from Tussie Landscaping where we were

current state where we were using QuickBooks, spreadsheets, and two or three other different products all at the same time trying to create this flow from lead to invoicing and being really frustrated with how disjointed everything was and there was no place we could go for a single source of truth. and I came home from work. my dad was sitting on the back patio working on his laptop and clicking around on some graphs. and I was super curious, like, hey, what are you doing? I hadn’t seen you work on this kind of thing before. and here, the company he was working for had a software development division, and he was working on testing a piece of software.

I was like, wait, you mean you can just build stuff? tell the engineers what to build and they’ll just build it? he was like, of course. but it was like a light bulb moment for me.

probably the most naive light bulb I ever had in my life. cause I had no idea. it sounded easy, right? oh, let’s go build our own. but today I am a little bit wiser.

but anyway, that’s what kickstarted it. and we literally had started

building a product for ourselves. again, I was still just an employee at Tussie Landscaping, not an owner or anything, but I convinced the owners to build this. I started, as we were getting into this project, I was kind of the one leading it or heading it up. and as we were getting more and more involved in this project of building a software product to solve this problem, I started developing more and more of a vision of this is not a unique problem to us at Tussie Landscaping. this is an industry problem.

and so…

here we are today. I no longer work at Tussie. my last time sheet for Tussie Landscaping was in December of 2020. and ever since then, I’ve been full time growing SynkedUP as a software company, selling it to other contractors all over North America. and so I kind of joke that I’m just a hillbilly foreman from the hills of Pennsylvania that just accidentally became a tech founder.

Ezra McCarthy
That’s interesting. so are you the technical co-founder? did you learn to do that? or do you have people that you brought on to work with you on the technical side?

Weston Zimmerman
I can’t code, I can mess with it, but yeah, I can’t code. so I worked, I’m a non-technical founder, meaning I worked with engineers and I have a CTO, a chief technology officer in SynkedUP today that heads up the tech team. but I behave more as the, what you would call the business analyst or the person that’s defining the business logic, heavily involved in the user interface designs and the workflows. I work, I’m basically a stakeholder for the end user, cause I was that end user.

so in our product development meetings, that’s the role I play. the landscaper is not going to like that, or that’s going to make it really nice. and then the tech team goes and actually does the execution of building the code and the architecture behind the scenes.

Ezra McCarthy
So this feels like a huge leap here, just on the business side of things.

I’m the kind of person that I go into a restaurant and I’m looking around and I’m counting the seats and I’m saying, okay, this is how much they’re doing here. and so just from a business side, you went from a foreman, obviously experience. and by the way, you don’t look old enough to have worked there 15 years. I mean, that is a compliment. but you’re working for 15 years. obviously at that point you probably would have been very skilled on the work side and managing people, but had to make the leap to

to managing code. and then how did that transition go?

did your dad think you were nuts?

Weston Zimmerman
Yes, totally. and I could tell you stories for three hours. but it’s like any entrepreneur that starts a new thing. it’s the hardest thing I’ve ever done in my life. there were some rocky periods where it’s very expensive to develop software. it’s much, much harder than it feels. as an end user of really well-defined, really well-done technology, it can feel almost magical. it can just predict what you want it to do. and it does it. but behind the scenes, well, I’ll say it this way.

to create a really elegant and simple user experience on the end user side is a lot of complexity behind the scenes on the architecture and the business logic that creates that end user experience. the complexity is somewhere all the time, meaning if it’s complex for the end user, it’s probably simpler to implement and build. if it’s elegant and simple for the end user, it’s probably really complex under the hood. so yeah, suffice to say that

it was a whole lot harder than any of us ever anticipated it would be. yeah, my dad did think I was crazy. there were definitely some rough spots, some rough patches there. why does it have to be so perfect? why do you care so much? because I have a vision. so yeah, there were some learning experiences. but today, your darkest moments also shape and grow you as a person, or at least they have the potential to.

and I can say that has been the case. today, I feel super blessed. really good relationships with the original founders of Tussie Landscaping, they’re partners with me in SynkedUP.

my dad is still kind of on the advisory board. so it’s really cool to kind of have come through the hard times and be in a good spot there and really been having a great time with building a solid world-class team to actually make the vision come to life.

Ezra McCarthy
I think people don’t understand. now, I’m not technical on the code side myself, but I think people don’t understand how complex it is. I had a customer the other day, they whipped up some code on AI that they were trying to make this—he’s not technical—this custom plugin that was going to calculate square footage and pricing and all these things. and he’s like, oh, just throw this code on the website. and I’m like, did you function test it? where did you get this? do you even know how to read it? to edit it? and he’s just like, oh yeah, I threw it in AI. and I’m just like, um,

doesn’t quite work like that. and throwing this code on there—yeah. so maybe a little bit of a tangent. but I think what you said about simplicity is hard. yeah. so how did you go from getting that prototype? because obviously, there’s a huge gap between nothing, then getting something good enough to sell to someone. yeah. so what did that gap look like?

Weston Zimmerman
Well, it was four years of full-on development, meaning full-on spending money on development with not a dollar coming back.

from my side, I was literally working 50, 60 hour weeks at Tussie Landscaping and coming home and burning the midnight oil on this project. I would regularly get up at 4 a.m. and work for two hours before I’d go out the door to run the crew for the day, and then come home and work till midnight. there were some really crazy

years there where it was just non-stop grinding. and that was my part. on the other part, I didn’t have any money. Tussie Landscaping was footing the bill on all of this. so they were pouring probably almost financially irresponsible amounts of money into this project that there was no guarantee would turn into anything. so yeah, there was a whole lot of faith and no assurance.

Ezra McCarthy
What’s fascinating, your employer, did they come on from the very beginning as a partner? so they must have really trusted you if that was the case.

Weston Zimmerman
Yeah, yeah, there was a lot of faith there. yeah.

Ezra
Because even once you had a viable product, it probably took you a while to get to even that break-even point. how many years, or was it years?

Weston Zimmerman
Cash flow wise, we didn’t hit break even until two to three years in. yeah, not only had we invested four years before we even got our first dollar, there was another two or three years before we even got to not going backwards every month in cash flow.

Ezra McCarthy
I think this is good for people to hear as a classic entrepreneur. it’s so easy to see that shiny object and we think, if I just did this business—you see that, you do the napkin math, you use the software math—and you think, if I had a thousand people signed up at X… but this is, in most of our businesses, this is how life works. I was talking to a family member and someone was saying—because I do web design and we do marketing for people—she’s like, I could do that. but she doesn’t want to wait three years, basically.

or it takes time to get experience and clients. and I think this is just good for people to hear, because they may see someone like yourself, you’ve got a business or others, and they say, that’s so easy, not realizing what it takes. and it’s a lot of work. we’re a little bit off my questions, but this is fascinating. and I’m sure the listener is enjoying this as well. when you went in, what were some common misconceptions as you started? did you think it would take as long as it did?

Weston Zimmerman
Now product management, meaning how long is something going to take? should we build this? should we build it? it is literally the hardest thing, I think, in my current stage of this journey. doing product management well—because poor product management will put you out of business or it will make you very successful. and probably the biggest misconception was, or the lesson I had to learn is that, you know what, I’m probably—my opinion about something, about the way something should be designed or built—the natural thing is, I know how this is for the landscaper or whatever, and I’m right. but the truth was, I was wrong at

least half the time. just because something might be technically the right way of doing it doesn’t mean that people will do it that way. or even if you build the tool to do it that way, that they will. so building something for the masses that human behavior will adopt and understand and use and leverage the ROI from—it is very different from building a widget, like the AI example of calculating some square foot. that’s very different than

actually building a product that people will build their business around and their habits and their usage. I had to learn the hard way on many things. and it costs millions of dollars to understand that the most expensive thing you could build is the wrong thing.

and that it was wrong because I was wrong. so I love the quote, in God we trust, all others bring data.

Ezra McCarthy
I never heard that one.

Weston Zimmerman
So don’t trust my—like, be skeptical of my opinion about how something should be done. bring data to prove out that humans will actually use it if you do it that way.

Ezra McCarthy
So now that you obviously, at this point, you’ve got lots of people on the program. you guys see the backend metrics of business. if someone’s listening and they’re saying, okay, I want to get some value from this—and hopefully they have already—but what are some metrics that you see that lawn and landscape businesses don’t track properly or they should pay better attention to if they’re looking to grow and scale?

Weston Zimmerman
Well, from a sales perspective, I think probably one of the most overlooked pieces of a KPI, let’s say, or a metric that people should be watching and tracking but aren’t, is proposal turnaround time. proposal turnaround time—fast proposal turnaround time—wins more jobs than the cheaper price ever will.

Ezra McCarthy
Can I pause you there? what is fast? can you articulate that?

Weston Zimmerman
Our average turnaround time in the system is around two days. so that’s—yeah. and it depends what it is that you’re doing. if you’re doing multi six-figure backyard designs, that definitely takes engineering and design. that can stretch out the average. but if you’re doing your average $20,000 patio in somebody’s backyard, that should be done before you leave the driveway. and so if you’re coming and doing a consultation for your—

Ezra McCarthy
That’s slow. that really is slow.

Weston Zimmerman
$20,000 patio and then saying, okay, thanks, I got the measurements, I got the pictures, I’m gonna go home and I’ll get the quote to you sometime next week. you’re losing jobs, and it’s not because of price and it’s not because of your competition—it’s because of your process.

Ezra McCarthy
So have you seen that those who get those proposals out quicker—how does that affect their close rate, or does it?

Weston Zimmerman
Yeah, it does. Proposify actually did a study across 1.3 million proposals last year. I forget the exact percent, the exact boost, but it significantly boosts. it was literally the number one factor of who was going to win that job—who got the first quote back.

Ezra McCarthy
It’s so good. and also phone calls—returning phone calls. now this is maybe a psychological thing, but how do you think how long your response rate takes just proceeds value? what I mean by that is, there’s times where things are expensive. if you get back really quickly—say that $20,000 project—do you think if you got back to them really quickly, does that affect how they view that quote?

Weston Zimmerman
Yeah, because the… so what tends to happen is the homeowner will benchmark every other quote they get against the first one they got. whether they think about it consciously or not, that’s what they’re doing subconsciously, right? and so when they say, your competitor’s cheaper—so you must have got another one before me, didn’t you?—that’s what’s happening. and the temptation for the contractor is to blame their price instead of blaming their process.

but unfortunately, I know I’m saying the obvious, but I’ll say it for those that need to hear it—trying to be the cheapest is a race to going out of business.

I don’t care, because there’s always someone out there that doesn’t understand the true cost of being in business, and their rate that they’re using to quote the job is less than what you can even break even at. so if you want to win the job—it’s a hobby at that point.

I don’t know about you, if I’m gonna spend thousands of dollars, I’d prefer that to be on something I want, like a vacation or something—not work.

Ezra McCarthy
Whatever software they’re using, how can lawn and landscape business owners use that software or a system to improve the customer experience? because obviously that’s going to affect referrals and then customer retention if it’s recurring.

Weston Zimmerman
I believe that as a business you want to be the easiest person to do business with. easy wins the day for the customer’s experience. let’s just say—let’s use lawn mowing as an example. and let’s say you’re doing your billing with pen and paper or you’re sending a PDF out on email and saying, here, pay the bill. and the homeowner is late paying the bill.

most of the time they’re not late because they didn’t want to pay you or they didn’t have the money or any of that. it’s the next time I’m at my desk, I’ve got to remember to write a check or log into my bank account. it’s the inconvenience that’s preventing you from getting the money, not anything else. so being the easiest to do business with will definitely increase your client retention and even client acquisition. because it’s kind of just the thing we’ve been talking about with proposals—if you make it really easy, like

bam, you shoot out the proposal, there’s the link. and let’s say you’re doing it virtually. there’s the link, they click on it, they can choose what they want, what they don’t want, sign, pay, all in one stop, and it’s on your schedule. that experience will win a whole lot more jobs than like, here, let me send you an email, and now I gotta open a PDF, and now I don’t want that line item, can you take that off? what happens if we do that? and now you got an email chain going for days, and finally they’re happy. or, and people sometimes want to say—back to your earlier question—people want to say, well,

people don’t make big multi tens of thousands of dollars or six-figure decisions on impulse. speed to lead, responding in the first five minutes, is not a big deal. not true. now I’m not saying you get your proposal back in five minutes, but the response to the lead—yes you do. and not doing that will kill your close rates. you would think, well, a client’s not gonna decide in one moment they’re gonna spend 80 grand and then three hours later decide not to.

you’re competing with the boat. you’re competing with the second home. you’re competing with the thing. it’s disposable income in many cases for design-build. so even though you would think, how can people make an impulse decision that’s such a huge financial decision—it still matters, even though you’re selling a big-ticket item.

Ezra McCarthy
Weston, seems like everyone and their grandma has a CRM. you’ve got Jobber, you’ve got CoPilot, you’ve got LMN, you’ve got your book—obviously SynkedUP. so if you were to put these back to back, who is SynkedUP good for? who might it not be good for? and maybe if someone doesn’t have anyone out there—which I think they’re insane, they need something, whatever they’re using—but when you kind of compare and contrast some of the most popular ones, who is SynkedUP good for, who is it not good for?

Weston Zimmerman
Yeah, Jobber definitely has the most market share, and I admire Jobber a lot as a company. they do a lot of things right, and really they have mastered simplicity for the end user experience. that also means that the intentional direction that they’re on is to serve almost that handyman user persona. and once a contractor starts getting up into that $500,000, $1 million, $1 million-plus revenue range, it starts becoming a little…

lightweight, too lightweight. you’re going to have your stack of spreadsheets outside of it and those kinds of things. and SynkedUP is more for your—I would say typically starts at $250,000 in revenue and goes up to $5 million. the sweet spot’s in that million range in terms of who SynkedUP is built for. and for design-build and recurring maintenance services. we started—we’ve definitely been stronger

on the design-build model, more so like installation jobs, one-off jobs that last for a couple of days or a couple of weeks, more so than the recurring contractors who do recurring services like lawn mowing, fertilization and all of that. we do it, we’re just not the strongest product out there. that being said, we are investing heavily and have been for the last year or two in the recurring model. and that’s going to change this year. where if you’re a maintenance contractor, we’re coming for you. because

Ezra McCarthy
Tell us why.

Weston Zimmerman
Even though Jobber does a lot of things really, really simply and easily, there’s a lot that they don’t do. there’s just a little extra layer of depth and functionality that is needed to really actually be able to run a solid business. and that’s what we’re diving into—just with time tracking or recording what services got done, automating things like demand. the moment that service is done—send the bill, card on file, those kinds of things. scheduling and routing, optimizing routes. that’s a big thing that I actually, as we started doing some research on this more in depth as we were investing into maintenance, I couldn’t believe actually how

simply some of these other products were thinking about the problem. cause I knew from my experience of being the contractor, managing these routes and this work, there’s a lot of things that can happen. just mixing weekly and bi-weekly stops on the same day. there’s a lot of real-life edge cases that happen that most of these products just didn’t account for, didn’t do at all. and so we’re rolling out some features that are gonna really solve those problems really elegantly.

I think what’s been missing in the industry as a whole is a product that equally serves a design-build contractor and a maintenance contractor equally well. us included, right? we’ve been stronger in design-build through our whole startup journey. that’s changing, but it’s something—that’s the bridge we want to fill. because a lot of contractors start by doing some mowing right after high school. and then they kind of

graduate up and start doing some landscaping, start doing some hardscape. the next thing they know, they love the design-build, and they kind of like—but they still have recurring services going on, and they still have design-build going on. and now they’re a million, $2 million business or whatever. and they don’t intend on shutting one or the other down. they need both. but it’s really an awkward position to go out and buy software for because typically one would do really well in the one and not the other.

Ezra McCarthy
Can you compare and contrast what is different between you and LMN?

Weston Zimmerman
I would call a little bit on the flip side. I said Jobber was like handyman, small business. Jobber. LMN is a bit more on the flip side. I would call them a heavier product. they probably work—but this is my words, in my experience—they work best for companies that have full-time office admins. it’s a pretty heavy product. it’s gonna be—and a lot of owner-operator contractors that run their business from their truck seat struggle.

I mean, that’s true of any—it’s not necessarily unique to LMN. that’s true. we fight that too sometimes because what we find is the owner-operator contractor that often runs their business from their truck seat tends to not be thinking in systems. it’s more just organized chaos. and when you have to force that organized chaos into systems thinking—the way software works—even if it’s simple software, it can be, it’s a mindset shift. it’s a lifestyle change in your business.

Ezra McCarthy
What about some of the other ones—Copilot—any compare and contrast?

Weston Zimmerman
Well, I am probably the least familiar out of the three that you’ve named. I’m least familiar with Copilot. I know of Mike Annis, respect for what he’s doing and his hustle. he’s an incredible individual. but my impression of Copilot is they’re full-on chasing the recurring home services—not really looking to serve that full-on design-build contractor that’s doing jobs that last multiple weeks. it’s not really built for that. this is my impression—I can’t say I know that from experience.

Ezra McCarthy
Well, it’s just interesting to get different perspectives. I talk to people—we’re agnostic—but we do recommend Jobber. but you just need something, is what I tell people. so whatever it is, if you’re not using some software—because here’s the thing—your value in most of our businesses is your data. and if you’re not keeping track of their name, address, phone number—and even I use a CRM, I use HubSpot—wouldn’t recommend it for lawn landscapers, but for what I use it for, it’s good. and keeping track of, okay, this is when I called them, this is when I messaged them.

and all of those things are really important. but you’re more in the obviously CRM side of things. what trends do you see in the lawn and landscape technology side serving them, and what are you excited about right now?

Weston Zimmerman
I definitely am kind of amazed at how much of an appetite the lawn and landscape contractors have for the AI products. it’s probably—you could say that contractors view themselves as not techie, categorically speaking. then you see them using these AI tools to measure surfaces on property maintenance contracts and stuff—it’s pretty impressive. the thing is, if you make something easier than doing it manually, anybody, even a non-techie person, will use it, right?

so that’s the bar for any software product—it’s gotta be easier than the status quo, whatever the old system is. it might be pen and paper, it might be spreadsheets, might be whatever. so yeah, CompanyCam is another great company where they have that feature where you can do the video walkthroughs and the AI checklist. that’s pretty impressive.

Ezra McCarthy
I didn’t know about that. that’s pretty neat. yeah, I’ll tell you, it’s changing the way I search and learn. I was doing some studying for a test I’m gonna be taking later today, and with ChatGPT, you can do that voice interface, and it’s insane how you can ask it the different sections on the test and then ask for review questions. and literally, it’s pretty insane what you can do. but some of it, I think, is more hype. but even that—some of those things you mentioned are really good. so what innovations there at SynkedUP have you excited about—product build, etc?

Weston Zimmerman
The core thing that we set out to build was the whole—our tagline is “know your numbers.” and that’s probably the biggest differentiator between us and most other products out there,

say Jobber. the most succinct way I can explain it is, let’s say you create a new estimate in Jobber or a new quote and you get a field to type in a description, and you get a blank empty field to type in a number. and the difference in SynkedUP is—you type in your description, and you add your man hours and your materials and all the stuff that you’re going to need to use to do that work.

and SynkedUP tells you what that number needs to be for you to be profitable. and the way we do that is we build a budget inside of the SynkedUP software for your business, where you load up all your monthly expenses, all your overhead, all your trucks and equipment—literally every dollar your business spends is in there. you can do it in an hour. I know that sounds like, wow, really? but yeah, it’s not that big of a deal. and then what we can do is—we know your cost, we can calculate your break even, we can help you hit the profit metrics that you want to hit.

probably people wish confidence came in a pill. well, probably the best confidence-in-a-pill thing I’ve seen for contractors is when they know their break even before they present that proposal to their customer. because when they know their break even, you kill the temptation

to self-sabotage and undersell yourself. it’s just—it’s not my problem if you don’t have the money for what you want. I can adjust the scope, I can make it smaller, I can do something else, but I’m not just gonna do the same script work for less money. I don’t care what my competitor says. I’d be doing it for free.

Ezra McCarthy
I think that’s really important because it’s really easy, especially when things get slow—the temptation to try to slash your prices. and you don’t want that. and then you’re losing money. so you’ve been at this for quite a while, Weston. what keeps you motivated in this, especially—you mentioned all the way back, at this point, 10, 15 plus years, slow beginning—what keeps you going?

Weston Zimmerman
I really love seeing an elegant solution to a complex problem. I love rethinking how to solve a problem, innovating, coming up with new things, getting user feedback, seeing how contractors interact with their businesses and how they operate, and how we can solve problems and make it simpler. nothing makes me happier than watching a process run or a business run like a finely tuned machine. and so it’s really, really rewarding for me to—

probably where I derive most of my personal fulfillment from this venture—is watching a contractor that’s struggling, not making money, having a hard time, come on to SynkedUP, and three months later be—or six months later or whatever—at a later point come back and say,

dude, this thing changed my business. it saved my life or my business and changed my life. and I finally feel I own the business and not the other way around—the business owning me. I kind of jokingly sometimes say that owner-operator contractors are the busiest people on the face of the earth. they’re literally working 14-hour days constantly. employees not showing up, customer problems, trying to manage family and kids. and they’re constantly—what ends up happening is it creates a pattern

or an addiction to the urgent instead of the important. when they come on to something like SynkedUP and they start translating their world—as chaotic as it may be—into systems, into a product like SynkedUP, and fix their numbers and stop second-guessing their pricing when they send the proposal out, and they stop accepting the job for less than their break even—now they got the margin to reinvest in the business and hire the people they need and get the equipment they need. and they come out the other side

actually owning a business they enjoy owning and actually making money doing it and actually having fun.

and that’s why entrepreneurs do what they do. they have a dream. and so we’re really just empowering those dreams to be reality for people as opposed to I’m going to go back and get a nine to five again because I just can’t do this. like we’ll kill those problems and remove those obstacles and help them actually make it a reality.

Ezra McCarthy
That’s so good. I want to highlight one thing you said there about people getting addicted to the chaos. it reminded me of something Tommy Mello talked about—being the firefighter in your business. I’m on the volunteer fire department here at my house. and there’s something about—you get that ring on your phone, you run out the door. and so many people in their businesses get used to that excitement—maybe not intentionally—but they get used to always being needed. and instead of putting these things in place, they would rather always be needed,

and chasing things around, than taking the time to put these things—because then it may not feel like you’re needed. but that’s when your business is going to grow. you’re going to have to put these things in place. just wanted to highlight that.

Weston Zimmerman
I love systems and processes. and I think if you’ve ever read the book E-Myth—or if you haven’t, you should. it’s a really good book for owner-operators to take in. it’s the keys out of the entrepreneurial prison—systems and processes are. and as an owner-operator, you are not a doer of work. you are a builder of systems and processes that do the work, right? it’s a slight subtle shift. and another one of my favorite quotes—from a book called Atomic Habits—is,

you don’t rise to the level of your goals. you fall to the level of your processes. we all can have a goal of making 20% net profit, but the only people that will actually have it are the people that built the systems and put in the work to ensure that they’re never going to sell work at less than 20% net profit. and if they do—let’s say we underestimated how many hours it would take or whatever—they have the processes to track that and make it obvious and course-correct and fix it for the next one. and void of that

in your business, your first indication that you have a problem is cash flow. and by the time you have a cash flow problem, you’re typically speaking months downstream from the actual thing that caused that cash flow crunch.

Ezra McCarthy
It’s so good. want to highlight two great books you just mentioned there—Atomic Habits, definitely worth the read, and then E-Myth. hopefully everyone’s read that. if you haven’t, go check out those two books. well, Weston, this has been a great help. it definitely sounds like you’re a reader. so before we go, do you have one other book recommendation? I love reading. maybe the listener wants to find something to do on the mower.

Weston Zimmerman
Yeah, the book that probably—I would say I give the credit to—it was the first book that I read that changed the way I think. I never thought the same again after I read that—was Extreme Ownership by Jocko Willink. if you have a problem, it’s your fault. it doesn’t matter. it’s still your fault.

and just—not getting into all of it—but it’s definitely something that every business owner and really any person should read. it’s…

in a world where victimhood and it’s everybody else’s fault all the time is kind of more the status quo, it’s a breath of fresh air.

Ezra McCarthy
It’s a great book. I’ve got to ask—have you read the book Buy Back Your Time by Dan Martell? go read that book if you haven’t. I mention it all the time in the podcast, so people are probably tired of it, but it’s worth reading. so good, Weston. well, thank you for taking time today for stopping by. and if you’re interested—perhaps you’re into the hardscaping or maybe adding in routing stuff—but that’s a wrap for today. feel free to check out SynkedUP and—

Weston Zimmerman
Yes.

Ezra McCarthy
Thank you, Weston, for taking time today and for another value-packed episode. if you enjoyed today’s episode, be sure to subscribe to the Lawn Care Success Blueprint, share it with other lawn and landscape pros who are looking to grow their business. and until next time, keep building—and remember, success is just one SynkedUP away.