Winning vs Failing When Using Software

What does “winning” vs. “failing” look like?

I’m going to dig into it a bit more here.

What does “winning” vs “failing” look like when using a software in your business?

To me, winning is: Identifying an area where I need to improve, I make mistakes, or waste a lot of time, and then leverage the software to solve that problem.

For instance, I was talking to someone yesterday that calculates all his quotes on paper by hand, then writes it up in a Word doc to create a proposal.

That takes a long time. And is prone to human error and mistakes.

Let’s say we identify this as an area we need to improve. So we utilize the software and build out a budget so our pricing is custom-tailored to our expenses and numbers. Then we import all the products we use on jobs into the software.

Now I’m ready to build a quote. So I start a new quote, and drag and drop all the materials and labor I’m going to use in this job into the quote, the software does all the math and markups for me automatically and I hit a single button to send the proposal off to the client.

We have SynkedUP customers that have gone from spending hours and even days on quotes, to minutes. One of my friends from California went from spending 2-3 days on large quotes to 15 minutes.

Now, I don’t know about you, but THAT is what I call winning.

But…

Our minds mess with us. There’s this weird math our brain is doing that is saying “Oh! You’re paying X for this software, it has 10 features, and you are only using 2 or 3 of them, and you are wasting your money! You need to use all of them so that you are utilizing them to it’s full potential. Otherwise, you are failing, and should just cancel the software.

And believe it or not, there are folks that do that.

Deal with reality

But let’s do math grounded in reality.

You are paying X for software. In our example scenario, you just saved yourself hours and hours in your quoting process. And the numbers are DIALED. Eliminating human error.

Let’s go on the conservative side and say you now save a mere 2 hours per quote.

You do 10 quotes per month.

You saved 20 hours. Or 2ish days

What’s your time worth? Let’s go middle of the road for a landscape design/build company and say $75/hr

$75 x 20 hrs = $1,500.

SynkedUP’s highest plan is $599/mo currently. Even at the highest plan, you saved $901 in a single month.

PLUS you freed up 2.5 days to go do more jobs, quotes, etc, and make more money. Or eat dinner with your family more often.

And that is ONLY counting the time savings. We haven’t even gotten into the mistakes that get corrected in your pricing, markups, and man-hour rates when you build a company budget. I know customers that have saved multiple six figures in a single year just from that budget alone.

Now…

Is that all there is?

Funny thing is, there’s still lots of juice to squeeze out of the software. All we’ve done so far is use the budgeting, estimating, and proposal features to generate an accurate quote in less time.

We can still schedule, track time, get live job costing reports, and do invoicing. (and a lot more beyond that yet)

If I haven’t fully utilized any of those yet, am I failing?

You tell me.

I just saved hours, maybe even days, that I used to be spending on generating quotes. I can now redirect that time and energy into working on my business and finding the next bottleneck or issue to tackle.

So, if that’s winning, what does failing look like?

In my humble opinion…

Failing is when you identify the top issue you’re facing right now, and can’t get that issue solved.

Don’t (yet) burn any brain cells on the other future opportunities or challenges you may see looming out there.

In my example story so far, spending too much time on quotes was my biggest issue. Plus I was shooting from the hip on my pricing and markups.

So I used the budgeting, estimating, and proposal features and smashed that issue in the face.

WIN.