Connecting Systems and Boosting Sales | Geoff Syme, Saberis

Geoff Syme: 0:00

Looking at that concept of a frictionless environment, you're trying to make it as easy as possible for them to buy from you as a vendor. If I'm able to have the user go into the website, configure all their items, and with the click of a button, get that into their ERP system so they can track it for inventory. That makes it a very easy choice for the consumer of that window manufacturer to move forward with the project. Whereas if they're competing with somebody who does not integrate, and now all of a sudden that salesperson has to spend a few extra hours for a comparable product. Well, the decision's made.

John Wheeler: 0:40

Very, really easy.

Geoff Syme: 0:41

You want to be able to make it easy for the customer to do business. As my dad likes to say, don't annoy your customers. He actually had a different way of putting it in the paraphrase.

John Wheeler: 0:53

Welcome to the Paradigm Industry Insiders podcast, where real people share real stories about what's happening with doors, windows, middlework, and life. I'm John Wheeler, and along with my co-host, we sit down with your peers who are moving our industry forward. These are honest conversations packed with practical insights and lessons you can take and bring value to your team. Here's today's conversation. All right, welcome to the Paradigm Industry Insiders podcast, uh, where we tell the stories of the people and the products and the technology of the window and door industry. I'm joined today with Jeff from Saberis. Jeff, you want to introduce yourself?

Geoff Syme: 1:32

Yes, uh Jeff from Saberis. So we're a family-run business. My dad and my brother started it 25 years ago. I joined about five years ago to help out. And uh we're in the business to basically help Lumber and building material dealers integrate sales quotes and sales orders.

John Wheeler: 1:49

And that's to systems that typically either can't or don't want to talk to each other, and you get that ability, and your dad saw the need 25 years ago that, like, this is crazy. Why are we doing this? Tell me about how that started.

Geoff Syme: 2:03

You you actually just summed up that one line. It's crazy, why are you doing this? So he was working for a kitchen manufacturer out in uh Ottawa, Ontario, in Canada. And then from there, he was starting to do trainings on a software called 2020 design. It's now called Sinkly, but basically back then that was the software for doing kitchen design. So you have a kitchen designer that's putting together this beautiful kitchen, and they've put all the cabinets, they've lined it all up, and then he notices one of them goes over to another system and starts keying in the exact same information. He's like, wait, what are you doing? Well, I have to get this out of the design software into my POS software so that we can track inventory. And that's the way we've always done it. And he's like, No, no, no, there's a better way for this. We we we can help you with this. So sure enough, he goes back to my brother. My brother was just starting off uh um having graduated from computer science, and uh they work together on a system that would allow them to take the information out of the kitchen cabinet software, build out the information so that they can then import it into the POS system.

John Wheeler: 3:19

So interesting because it's one of those you see a need and like almost fix it right away. It's like that smells dumb. Let's do let's do something something else. Or like, and you know, and how many millions of times did somebody do that exact same thing without having the thought? Or they're like, man, this is really challenging. Absolutely. That's kind of the I've known your dad for for a bit, and that's kind of the way that he kind of is. He just kind of like sees something and like wants to go fix it, wants to talk about it, wants to to do whatever.

Geoff Syme: 3:50

Well, this is the great thing I I like about him is that he has that entrepreneurial spirit. You know, it's always been in ingrained in him that there's if there's a better way to do something, he can definitely help in that. And um, you know, he he just looks for opportunities. So like I said, he started off with kitchen cabinets and then he was at a sales conference, he's sitting in the airport lounge after the conference, and he overhears this conversation. One of the people that was at the conference was starting to complain because one of their big window and door vendors had changed software solutions. It's like, ah, geez, now I gotta do the integration all over again. And so it's kind of like, you know, your your little Spidey sense. Spidey sense goes, exactly. And uh so he goes back to my brother and says, I think we can do this for more than just kitchens. So that's where we started to get into windows and doors. You wind up looking at all the different vendors that are out there and same idea. You've got special order items, you want to be able to get them into your POS or ERP system for tracking, and you definitely want to do it once. You don't want to have to like re-key all that stuff twice. It's uh very introduces errors all over the place.

John Wheeler: 5:11

You think of the not just the time saving, but the dollar savings from my favorite thing to do was like type more than one key at the same time, and like you know, a tool, we didn't have tools like that to to help me out when I've when I've had to do that before. And I just made so many mistakes, it's crazy.

Geoff Syme: 5:29

Oh, for sure. I mean that's the great thing about it is just the idea that you're gonna have these consistent sales quotes or sales orders every single time.

John Wheeler: 5:38

You know, there's it's 25 years, and you you know, thinking about the hundreds or hundreds of thousands or maybe millions of people um, you know, doing all of that and how many different organizations from the homeowner to the dealer to the manufacturer to the their manufacturer and supplier. Um makes me think you all have seen the industry change over 25 years. Talk about what changes you've seen kind of starting from early days until now.

Geoff Syme: 6:08

So it's funny. So I joined, like I said, five years ago. I was originally in retail IT. And when I first joined the company, um my sister had said, Jeff, you're never gonna find a lower stress job than working for Saberis. And she was right for a couple months, and it was just amazing the transition that's happened. So we talk a lot about the LBM industry being slow to move, and I feel like it was that way for the first 20 years of Saberis. The last five years have made a big change, I feel, in the industry. You're seeing a lot more movement. Um, and there's a few factors that have contributed to that. Uh, number one is well, obviously the pandemic that basically comes in and and changes things a lot. In one sense, because you've got people that decided, you know what, I've had enough, I'm retiring. So the old guard that wasn't as comfortable with technology is starting to leave the industry. And now you've got the new blood coming in. They're a lot more interested in using technology to help automate stuff and and to be more efficient.

John Wheeler: 7:26

They're almost they were almost looking at it like Doug did 25 years ago, like, ooh, that that doesn't make sense.

Geoff Syme: 7:32

Exactly. And then you compound that by the cash flow that I find is coming into the industry because you had all these home renovation projects, because nobody could travel. So you wind up, well, where am I gonna spend my money? I'm gonna renovate my house, I'm gonna put in new windows, put in new kitchen. So a lot of the dealers now had better cash flow. And from there they're able to reinvest it in technology. Interesting.

John Wheeler: 7:59

It's kind of like a convergence of all of it all at the same time. Yes. Where it was also an incredibly painful and it was uh it was a uh a ruckus, but but you know, a lot of good things did come out of it.

Geoff Syme: 8:12

Oh, for sure. Like, you know, I look at the way, like I said, the LBM industry is changing in the last few years. Uh new players coming in as well to try to shake things up, which again for other companies means they also have to raise the bar. They need to be able to meet the higher expectations that are coming in.

John Wheeler: 8:31

That's interesting because I I've talked a lot um with a lot of people on you know the demands of the the industry these days. And like me as a if I put my consumer hat on, I want to show up to a website and educate myself as much as possible and take that to its limit before I talk to anybody else.

Geoff Syme: 8:50

Right.

John Wheeler: 8:51

And you know, your you know, Saberis really allows me if I wanted to take that next step, I'm I might even plug in an e-commerce thing and build a transaction order online or you know, taking the just taking the industry like to that level, which when you think about like like you said, you know, the uh industry that was slow to move into like I can buy a configurable window online sounds crazy to me if I think about me 25 years ago selling it at a retail place. Like there's no chance I would have trusted anyone to do that.

Geoff Syme: 9:26

Well, e even the salespeople back then, I mean, they didn't trust the website. So they would literally be picking up the phone to call their account rep and saying, Hey, can I get these these windows? And then the account rep would be entering it in their system. So again, by having the uh dealers using web portals like the Paradigm Omni Portal, I mean, you're then able to be able to get them to put in what they want, their specifications for the jobs. And again, transmit that easily both on the manufacturer side and now with Saberis by transferring it through the uh APIs that we have, it goes straight over to their ERP or POS system.

John Wheeler: 10:08

That's interesting. So I'm a big believer that it's the right tool at the right time for the right person. No matter what. That's always what what wins, whether that's that's something that we offer or that's something that somebody else offers, like that's the way to do it. And then you're kind of the glue that holds all of that together because the last thing you want to do is solve this challenge and create another one over here because this challenge might actually be bigger. We talked a little bit about this. Some people, um, you know, depending on what level you're at in the supply chain, some people don't know that Saberis exists, right? If I'm I might be a door manufacturer and I might, I've gotten the question, like, what is Saberis? And I'm like, I can guarantee you hundreds of your customers are using it to do something. You just don't know because it's you know, there's a a button somewhere that helps that out. You know, talk about the almost like the value prop, right? It's connecting the different systems, but give a give a couple like value props.

Geoff Syme: 11:07

Well, I think you hit the nail on the head in the sense that uh five years ago, again, like when I first started and I'd have conversations with vendors who are told by their clients you've got to talk to Saberis. Their first answer was, What do you guys do? Yeah. Because I never heard of you before. Uh so thankfully we are more well known in the industry. We've made more contacts both on the vendor side and on the ERP side. Yeah. Um, and like I said, we're now helping hundreds of dealers across North America to be able to transfer their information. Uh again, you're trying to make what uh one of the industry people I spoke to called a frictionless environment. So you're trying to make it as easy as possible for them to buy from you as a vendor. Um if I'm able to have the user go into the website, configure all their items, and with the click of a button, get that into their ERP system so they can track it for inventory, that makes it a very easy choice for the consumer of that window manufacturer to move forward with the project. Whereas if they're comp they're competing with somebody who does not integrate, and now all of a sudden that salesperson has to spend a few extra hours for a comparable product, well, the decision's made. Yeah, that makes it really easy. Exactly.

John Wheeler: 12:38

So you make the makes make somebody make the short list.

Geoff Syme: 12:41

Yes.

John Wheeler: 12:42

You know, when you go to your your website, um, you know, there's everyone, everyone on your website, as far as like the the technology that you plug in together, it seems like you know, there's competition after competition after competition with each other, but I think you know everybody's kind of bought into the idea that it's almost like co-operation. It's my my friend Taylor Parks came up with that. So I'll give him his credit for that one. But everybody's cooperating and competing at the same time, and your customers are doing the same thing from the the dealer and the manufacturer level. It's just what do you what do you see as kind of the the next evolution of that collaboration, even if it's competitive?

Geoff Syme: 13:25

Well, what we're hoping to see is to help uh other areas of the workflow. So when we first started this, the goal was to save the salespeople time. You free up the salespeople, they can sell more. So that's an easy decision to make. But now you have to look at what's happening when you're trying to match invoices, what's happening when you're trying to receive the items at the job site. So, how do we tie in information, data that comes that exists either at the manufacturing level, how do we get that into the POS or ERP system? How do we tie in the quoting information with the manufacturing side of it so that again, when they get the information into their POS or ERP and you go look further down in the system integrations that we can easily identify that product? Um so is it gonna be line identifiers? Is it gonna be tracking identifiers? What can we do to get that type of information downstream? So that's definitely one of the key things that uh I think we're gonna be investigating a lot more in the next, let's say, six to twelve months. Interesting.

John Wheeler: 14:39

Because it you know it's more of an operational focus rather than just on the sales systems.

Geoff Syme: 14:44

Well, I think you mentioned too, like you you wind up solving one problem, but maybe creating another problem. And that's where the focus shifts. You solve the problem of not having to double key entry the items. But wait, now you've got the receiving team that let's say can't quite match up the windows that are coming in off the truck. So there's what one of my clients called a work stoppage. Okay, you've got to stop what you're doing, you're spending time trying to figure it out. That's the type of thing that the dealers want to avoid. So that becomes a conversation now with the suppliers to say, how can you get that information to us so that we can improve the data that's going into these POS and ERP uh solutions? I love that.

John Wheeler: 15:31

We'll end with with this. You have you have visibility into the technology providers, you have visibility into the dealers, the the homeowners, the manufacturers and distributors. What do you think if if I were to start John's door distribu distribution company, what would be my my secret to separate myself from from other door distributors or any window manufacturers, cabinet makers, whoever it is?

Geoff Syme: 16:02

I I think it really does come down to the service you provide and knowing your clients. Um that's a big part of what we do as well. We want to make sure that we do a good job servicing our clients, uh helping them out. We try to respond to their emails or phone calls as quickly as possible. They're busy. So, you know, the again looking at that concept of a friction frictionless environment, you want to be able to make it easy for the customer to do business. Or as my dad likes to say, don't annoy your customers. That's a good way to put it. He actually had a different way of putting it. I'm paraphrasing. Right.

John Wheeler: 16:43

We'll get a that after a couple of cocktails, we'll see what what that looks like. You know, but that that secret, it's funny. The I've worked for a few companies in the industry, and it's servicing your customer is the top priority. Is that's the any successful company that's always been it, you know, it's still old school. Yeah. We talked about lots of plugging in systems and APIs and all of this technology, but I feel like at the core of it, implementing technology in the right way makes it still part of that servicing the customer, but that's always the the focus. I agree. It's like new age, old school, or something. Some sort of there's some sort of trademark in there somewhere.

Geoff Syme: 17:25

Yeah.

John Wheeler: 17:26

Cool. Well, Jeff, I appreciate you being on.

Geoff Syme: 17:28

No, thank you. My pleasure. Thanks for having me. Awesome.

John Wheeler: 17:31

See y'all. Thanks for joining us on the Paradigm Industry Insiders Podcast. If you enjoyed today's conversation, be sure to subscribe on your favorite podcast platforms and follow paradigm on LinkedIn and YouTube to catch more stories, insights, and ideas from your peers across our industry. See y'all.