When Cyncly announced the acquisition of Broadlume—its fourth flooring software acquisition in two years—last month, it solidified the company’s dominant position in the retail flooring technology space. This followed purchases of RFMS, Mobile Marketing and Pacific Solutions. The idea is to be a one-stop shop for customers by offering ERP and website solutions, all designed to help retailers improve profitability and efficiency.
Leading the charge is Mark Lukianchuk, who was named general manager of Cyncly’s flooring business unit last May. FCNews publisher Steven Feldman sat down with Lukianchuk late last year to learn more about Cyncly, its goals and objectives, and how retailers can capitalize.
What makes you a good fit to lead Cyncly in North America?
First, back when I was a software developer in the early ’90s, I wrote a point-of-sale system and one of my customers was a flooring retailer. I basically wrote up a system that integrated with his accounts receivable, payable, general ledger, inventory control, even did barcoding of his samples and catalogs—which, for the time—was actually pretty cutting edge. It gave me a good foundation in flooring and awareness about what makes the industry unique. Then I took essentially a long hiatus from flooring and went into global enterprise software, so I have international experience as well.
You’re a software developer by trade.
I’m a software guy, covering CRM, ERP, websites and e-commerce—mission-critical, important stuff that people run their businesses on is what I’ve done. In my tenure at a major software company, I started off as a project manager and ended up as a general manager. When I was approached by Cyncly last year, what really excited me was the opportunity to help customers maximize the value of their software and grow their businesses.
Who is Cyncly?
Cyncly is a global living spaces company. We were created to focus on a few different areas. We obviously have a flooring software business. We have windows, doors and glass. We also do kitchen and bathroom retail as well as manufacturing. So if you think about it globally, it means we work with the Shaws and Mohawks of the world. We do websites and we do ERP software for the flooring industry in North America. We also have large glass manufacturers in France and kitchen and cabinet manufacturers in Germany and Italy as customers. If you think about it, there are a lot of common elements between what a kitchen and bathroom retailer needs and what a flooring retailer needs.
So it’s a group of companies that individually have grown. They’re now brought together under one banner to allow us to really multiply the effect of what we’re doing in the industry.
Talk about the integration of your acquisitions and how they add value under the Cyncly umbrella.
There are three tiers of value. The first is at the product level. You have ERP with RFMS, Pacific Solutions and RollMaster, and then there’s the website business with Mobile Marketing and of course Broadlume. The second is at the flooring business unit level, where we look at the integration points. Our aspiration is to be seen as a one-stop shop for our customers. There are three pillars of how we look at the business. The first is helping customers drive more revenue. The second is helping improve efficiency through better business management. The third is integrating the pieces together. That’s really where the value at the business level starts to happen.
The third tier of value is at the Cyncly level. So many people at the top level of their businesses are looking within the next one to five years to hand their business over to the next generation. We want to help our customers navigate that generational shift. Even though this is still a very high-touch business, customers’ buying patterns have changed, especially since COVID-19. So, their needs are changing. And part of what we aspire to is provide the technology solutions to help our customers drive that.
What was the compelling reason for joining forces with Broadlume?
Broadlume certainly had a story similar to ours at the business unit level, meaning they had a very robust website business, they have an ERP solution. But when you get to the Cyncly level, you’re talking about a company that has over 4,000 people worldwide. We have a presence in many countries around the globe. We are able to invest at scale, which means in technology. One of the major reasons why we were looking to add Broadlume to Cyncly was to leverage their scalable web platform to not only enhance our capabilities for flooring but to extend into kitchens, bathrooms and other segments. Broadlume also has a flooring visualizer that we’re going to leverage, especially as we have one of the largest content libraries in the living spaces arena. We deal with so many manufacturers globally in kitchen and bath, windows, doors and glass. These are things we’re looking to bring to the flooring business unit.
I think our differentiator is not just at the product feature/function level, but at the value we can provide when a customer wants to expand. We did a survey and found two-thirds of our customers are either already in or planning to go into areas outside of flooring. That means countertops, cabinets, window treatments. Guess who is in software for [those categories]? Cyncly. We do those things as part of other business units, and we can share the knowledge we gained.
Short-term/long-term goals?
Short term, typical things. We’ve got to hit our numbers and we’re doing really well [for 2024]. I want us all to think like a slightly bigger company and grow into it. So part of it is just continuing to improve our execution. And then I think longer term, it’s really about more solutions and how to grow our businesses, how to really take over, expand into more living space categories so our customers who want to doall those other things can look to Cyncly.
Are you finding some dealers are still a little reluctant to embrace digital as part of their business strategy?
Yes, but I think it’s changing. And again, there’s that generational shift. I think the embrace of digital is coming. The top three advertising channels people look at today are digital, search, social media. People know they need to do that; they just don’t know how go about it. How do you maximize the return on your investment? I think a lot of customers just don’t really know. They’re looking to partners such as Mobile Marketing to guide them along the way.
Do you do anything with AI?
When you look at AI, there are three areas you can look into. The first is what I would call predictive AI. That’s been around for a while. Predictive AI is like, “Let me do some forecasting. Let me use artificial intelligence to help you predict your business, your inventory needs.” I can see those types of benefits coming into our ERP solution to give more intelligence.
The second area is conversational AI—like chatbots. We’re looking at that right now, and demonstrated an early version of what we call “Fibi” (Flooring Industry Business Intelligence) recently at the Mohawk show, which combines efforts that Cyncly’s AI organization and Broadlume were working on independently. Eventually this will become something we can leverage across all of Cyncly’s business units. It allows you 24/7 selling without having to pick up the phone or answer an email.
But, to be honest, it’s more than just chatbots, it’s also how the experience scales across both customer interactions (what I call external) and users leveraging their systems (what I call internal). As an example, if you asked, “What should I do today?” of your system, in simple language, our goal is to deliver a role-specific, intelligent response. A salesperson would get a list of top leads to call. An inventory person would learn about which products they need to reorder, and an executive how each of their stores is performing and what they need to look at. People entering the industry today don’t have 35 years of flooring knowledge like many owners do, so we’re looking at how we can add more intelligence to our flooring solutions.
The third area is generative AI. I see that as being very valuable. Let’s say you want to write content, you can say, “Hey, ChatGPT, write me a blog entry.” It’s not been perfected yet, but certainly for a lot of the content out there it’s getting quite sophisticated.
Biggest challenge/opportunity?
The biggest challenge is just the market right now, the economy. A lot of retailers already own one of our solutions, and when we position another solution we often hear, “I really want to do this. I see the value, but I just need to wait.”
In speaking at recent events such as the NFA conference I feel that retailer confidence is turning around and 2025 looks to be a much better year. Cyncly will be ready to help flooring retailers when they’re ready.
