Cyncly, a leading global provider of AI-driven software for the spaces-for-living industry, recently named Wynn Grubbs as general manager of the Cyncly Flooring business unit. Grubbs brings more than two decades of experience in high-growth SaaS companies and has spent the past two years leading Cyncly’s Kitchen, Bath and Furniture retail (KBFr) business unit, where he built a multi-product strategy to help independent retailers connect their entire business, from design and specification through to customer management and sales. He also brings firsthand experience as a retail business owner and operator, complementing his software background with a practical understanding of the day-to-day demands of running an independent retail business.
James Hamilton, Cyncly COO, points to Grubbs’ track record. “He understands how independent retailers operate, what slows them down and how connected software helps them grow.”
FCNews recently caught up with Grubbs to talk about his experience on both the digital and retail sides, and how he plans to apply lessons learned to his new position.
Following are excerpts of that discussion:
FCNews: Congratulations on your appointment.
Wynn Grubbs: Thanks. It’s exciting. It does feel like a lot of things coming together for me and for Cyncly. While I don’t have deep roots in the flooring industry, I have experience as a retailer and a retail technology provider. A lot of what we’ve learned serving kitchen and bath retailers applies directly to flooring, and so does my software background prior to joining Cyncly.
FCNews: What’s the main challenge facing flooring retailers today?
Wynn Grubbs: Flooring retailers are running sophisticated businesses, but too much of their operation still depends on stitching together tools that weren’t designed to work together. I have run retail businesses, and the administrative burden of managing disconnected systems is real. My priority is helping dealers spend less time on their software and more time on their customers and their growth.
FCNews: Many specialty retailers have diversified into other segments like kitchen and baths, other related home improvement markets, renovations, window treatments, paint and what have you. Can you share with us some of the lessons that you’ve learned in leading Cyncly’s kitchen, bath and furniture retail business that you can apply to the flooring business unit as you transition to that role?
Wynn Grubbs: The amount of diversification in what we call spaces-for-living businesses, and the overlap of services they offer, is larger than most people think. That’s a big part of why Cyncly’s so focused on connecting all the processes that go into each job from start to finish, and to enable different lines of business with software that helps coordinate every step.
The lesson we’ve learned is that complexity and fragmentation can grow quickly as a flooring dealer grows into other types of services. Diversifying into another line of business seems exhausting and scary to a lot of the folks that I talk with. They tell me, ‘I’m adding a second line of business, and that revenue stream needs to grow. But in the meantime it seems like I’m duplicating all of my systems just to go get jobs done. It seems like a tall order to manage all of this.’
So as a dealer grows from flooring into countertops and cabinets, they’re now managing multiple catalogs and multiple scheduling systems, and they feel pressure to add people to fill all of those needs. Adding headcount to absorb that complexity isn’t sustainable. What my team serving kitchen and bath retailers found is that success didn’t come from owners working harder to manage 12 tools instead of the five tools that they had before. It was the ability to start to bring the systems together and make things simpler.
Specifically in kitchen and bath retail, businesses were worried about the upfront part of the process, the design-to-quote stage where things can fall apart. Once they were able to manage quotes the same way across different types of projects, they prevented the downstream mistakes that eat into margin.
Simply put, you don’t want to discover errors during installation—you want to get it right at measure and quote, right from the start. Most businesses moving into new segments are doing it to grow. If you’re going to scale, you need consistency. When you have one segment, you generally have a subject matter expert on hand who knows everything. They can patch everything together and it mostly works. But as you get into diversification of segments, the system should be the guide rather than relying on the experience or the heroics of individuals.
FCNews: You covered a lot of territory there. One of the things that you said sticks out in terms of a slower adoption of new systems, software, etc. As you’ve probably come to learn, the flooring industry has been slow to embrace new technologies. But once they finally do, we find that they are certainly benefiting from that. Looking at some of the obstacles that those adopters on the kitchen and bath side of the business had to overcome, I would imagine that that was a two-way learning experience also for the clients in terms of how Cyncly could adapt and helping those clients accelerate that learning curve for customers.
Wynn Grubbs: It definitely was two-way learning. The biggest lesson was phasing. It’s a biggie. It’s not practical for a business to roll out a system or process that changes everything at once. If a business wants to start with lead generation and inspiration, it can focus there first. If it’s already strong on leads but weaker in the back office, it can start there instead, then connect each step to one record over time.
Beyond the systems themselves, another thing we’ve learned is that training is essential. The team needs to learn how to do things consistently with their software or it doesn’t work. Depending on the size and the nature of the organization, that training aspect can be the longest component because it takes time to get people comfortable and every business is a bit different.
So it’s a combination of the phasing of changes by priority, the training, and then the systems component.
Change management is a big aspect of our work with customers. I think everyone we talk with has a vision of how their people, their processes and their systems should work, and part of our job is to help them overcome the fear of disruption, which is completely understandable when you have a business to run. There’s rarely a perfect time when you can pause everything to make a change. And as a company, we’ve learned to bring customer success, training and the system change together as one program.
FCNews: The fear of disruption—I get it. In your experience on the kitchen and bath side, where’s the greatest need? Are clients having more difficulties or challenges in developing bona-fide leads? Is it streamlining certain aspects of their business? Based on your experience with clients thus far, where have you seen most of those needs?
Wynn Grubbs: The data we’re seeing from the Cyncly Flooring platform is that there’s a shift in where leads are coming from. Many businesses are seeing fewer phone calls, while online form submissions are holding steady.
Some independent dealers see new approaches to lead generation as a challenge because they have done business one way for a long time, and they don’t want to lose the sense of community and locality that builds referrals over time. Like flooring dealers, a lot of kitchen and bath retailers rightfully take pride in the way they win customers. But the reality of the situation is, businesses need a digital storefront as another way of creating leads on top of referrals.
One of the great things about lead generation technology is that it shows you what each lead costs, what it produces, and whether the jobs you’re winning are growing in value.
Embracing new approaches to lead generation at a dealer level starts to get you on par with larger operators who can solve a problem by adding headcount. As a dealer, you can’t scale by adding staff for everything—you have to embrace digital tools to compete.
Cyncly Flooring is building a full, closed-loop lead generation system, where dealers start to get much more efficient at generating high-value projects. Our leading dealers see which online journeys and first conversations lead to the biggest jobs. So even though they take pride in referral business, the successful dealers will be flexible in the way they bring in more jobs.
FCNews: You bring firsthand experience as a retail business owner, and that certainly brings a lot of credibility and credence to the dealers once you start meeting and sitting down with them face-to-face or at trade shows, et cetera. Can you share some more details in terms of specifically what type of retail business that you specialize in in your former life?
Wynn Grubbs: I’ve owned and operated several retail businesses. One was what I would call a “resort general retail store” in New Hampshire, which my brother and I operated for quite some time. It helped me to understand operating on thin margins and the importance of consistent accounting. My brother and I also owned and operated a Dairy Queen franchise.
I also started a landscape and garden center business from the ground up with a partner— we bought the land and built buildings to start it up from nothing.
Building a business from scratch and working alongside family members has given me a lot of experiences in common with the flooring dealers I’m now serving. It helps to have walked a little bit in their shoes. I’m also spending a lot of time visiting our customers to shake their hands, walk their stores and understand their businesses. It’s been a great learning experience to hear from them firsthand.
FCNews: Certainly a varied experience, but relevant for sure.
Wynn Grubbs: Separate from my direct retail experience, I’ve spent a decent amount of my career serving retailers from the software side. I sold point-of-sale systems to industries including dealers and agents in the wireless industry. I spent time at a company called Commercialware that offered order management and e-commerce. And when I was at PTC, we offered CAD and product lifecycle management tools for the retail industry. So for me, it feels like a lot of things are intersecting, and I’ve been getting a crash course on the specifics of the flooring domain.
FCNews: Lastly, you’re coming on board a few months ahead of the official rollout of an exciting new launch you have for Surfaces. I’m quite sure there’s certain things that you want to keep under wraps until that time, but perhaps there are certain aspects of it that you’re still putting the finer points on? Are there any details that you can share with us at this point?
Wynn Grubbs: I can only give you the shape and a little bit about it at the moment. We’re building a cloud-native business management system, created from the ground up, specifically for this industry and built for today’s environment. It will offer a single connected system, rather than pieces bolted onto each other. One record for the whole job, if you will, from the first contact all the way through the process until you get paid. It will make that process far more efficient, improve the customer experience, and help our dealers get paid faster.
What I like about how Cyncly is approaching this is that we’re not doing it in a vacuum. We’re doing this with a co-innovation community of customers and, in some cases, dealers who aren’t yet customers. They’ve given great feedback and shaped this product, which means it’s designed around the way the work actually happens today. And it’s resulting in a more effective product than the standard approach of building something and then trying to get customers to adapt their ways of working to fit.
That’s about all I can share so far, and we’ll have a lot more to say in the coming weeks.
FCNews: It definitely sounds like a more customer-centric approach.
Wynn Grubbs: Very much so. It’s helpful that Cyncly already supports a lot of these workflows: websites and digital storefronts for lead generation, payment systems that help our customers get paid faster, CRM, supply chain management, and accounting. That experience is what we’ve built on. The new platform puts the whole business on one record, on one cloud-native system, so dealers can bring all their business together on one record.
