How to Build Your Own Roofing Call Center

You want more leads, you want more control. Well, what if you built a call center in-house? I'm joined by RSA mentor Cody Landels, who's done it. He built it for himself and he's helped others do the same thing. And in this video, Cody's gonna break down the 5 steps that you can follow to help build a call center in-house without having to outsource everything again. Cody, dude, I'm so glad for today. Thanks for being here.

Thank you. Thanks for having me.

Oh man. So you've been helping our folks in RSA do this. Roofing Strong Alliance. You've done this for yourself and we have run, gosh, I don't know, 2, 3 sessions inside the community on building a call center. So it keeps coming up and there's no shortage. There's agencies that will help people do this. It's far from cheap. And I think a lot of folks have maybe overcomplicated the barrier to doing this. What do you think?

Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I think it seems for a lot of people, um, so far removed of what's possible that they think it's— they only can hire somebody rather than build themselves. So I'd agree with that 100%.

Yeah. So I want to break down— let's give a— if you wouldn't mind just sharing, share your success and the challenges you faced when you actually built a call center in-house. And then let's break down some of the tactics. So let's start there.

Yep. Yep. Yeah. So once I sold Reimagine, part of the acquisition was to build up in-house call center for both Reimagine, but also the other brands under the PE umbrella. And so we did that over the course of about a year and a half. A ton of success with initially, and then also a ton of success rolling it out to the other brands. The biggest thing that was a challenge was just changing and understanding the different type of customer. So I built the majority of my business off of incoming. Traffic, which is a different type of customer than outbound traffic. So what we focused on was warm leads, which meant that we were buying shared data that would then come in, we'd automatically dial it, and then we'd be competing against other contractors. And these, these leads, they had submitted something online saying, hey, I, I, I want roofing companies to contact me. So it wasn't just blatant cold calling where it's just going to list some data. It was warm, warm leads that still required a lot of calling in order to get set. And so the biggest challenge was a shift in understanding the type of conversation and what that customer valued versus an inbound call that was more familiar with the brand, maybe had watched some of my YouTube videos and really wanted to do business with Reimagine Roofing versus the outbound customer just wanted a roof and had no idea who Reimagine Roofing was to start. Or any brand for that matter. Yeah.

So cold versus warm. What did you experience in terms of the way that the sales process needed to unfold with those two different traffic sources, cold versus warm?

I like to think about it on the amount of attention they're willing to give. So they are calling your business. That means they have set aside time, maybe 10 or 15 minutes in their mind. To hear what you have to say and to listen, and they're not going to be doing 10 other things. That is a warm inbound versus a warm outbound means that they may have submitted the information, but they're not necessarily prepared for you to call them right now. And that's only if you get them to answer on the first call. But on average for our outbound, we required anywhere from 5 to 6 calls just for the person to answer. And so what that means is when they answer that call, they are not prepared to give you 10 to 15 minutes of their attention. There is a very high likelihood that they are doing something else, that they're doing the dishes, that their kids are screaming in the background, that, you know, they're driving to work. And so we had to change the cadence and the pace at which we discussed their roof problem. We still wanted to qualify it, but we had to move a lot quicker because they were not willing to give us the same amount of attention in the same time span that an inbound lead would. So the cadence has to be a lot quicker. We have to get what we need immediately while still delivering value, because if we don't deliver value in that time period, then our demo percentage goes through the floor. They'll set the appointment, but they won't show up to the appointment because you haven't delivered enough value. So understanding, you know, really when I tell my team is, do they want to talk to me or do they not want to talk to me? Meaning an inbound person is calling us and they, they want to talk to me. They, they, they're calling me to talk to me. They expect to talk versus if I'm calling you out of the blue, you don't necessarily want to talk to me right then. And so it has to be a different conversation in order to make sure that I'm meeting you where you want to be met.

And you, that's a saying that I've heard you say a lot, meet the customer where they are, meet the customer where they are. And it's something that we shared One of the first interviews that you— no, no, not one of the first interview that we did together here on this channel is when you shared how you built an 8-figure, multi-8-figure roofing company doing over-the-phone selling, which is like such a mind-blowing concept. By the way, if you want to see that video, go check it out. It's fantastic. So for those that want to build a call center in-house, obviously this is like an idea and it was a project that you initiated for your company. After acquisition, and then of course you rolled it, rolled this out with the platform at large. It was really successful. And I remember you sharing with me how this thing was scaling and how transformational it was to go from relying on other people or other third-party resources for lead aggregation or your other marketing budgets to then essentially be able to both hunt and farm, as they refer to it often. On your own. So if you were to walk someone through building a call center in-house, what are the 5 steps needed to go from idea to execution?

Yeah, I mean, number 1 is knowing your numbers. I always like to say that every lead is— people always ask, what do I pay for a lead? Every lead can be the right— someone could charge me $5,000 a lead. If I knew I had 100% close and my average ticket price was $100,000, and my margins were 35%. That means I'm paying $5,000 to make $35,000 because it's 100% close. I'll do that all day. On the flip side, I could pay $1 a lead, but I'm going to have to call that lead 100 times. The set percentage is going to be low. The demo is going to be low. But all that really matters in the end is how much money am I spending versus how much money does that deliver to the business? That, that is essentially what you need to look at. All the other KPIs that go into that are essential and those are levers to pull. But at the end of the day, all that matters is if I put in a dollar to the business and I get out $3 of profit, I will keep putting money into that lead source.

Yeah.

And that is the problem.

No, I really love that you dialed into that for the first point is knowing your numbers. And I've been doing a few events lately on surviving the market at the time of this recording, things are tough for folks. Leads are down, costs are up, close rates have been suffering. And the presentation I've been giving is that you don't need more leads. Most people think they do, but their set rate, their close rate, and their average sale price, which are kind of the 3 bigger levers. I show the difference in a mockup between 100, a company with 100 leads that's, uh, average, good, and great. And the difference is like $2.4 million to $6.2 million. Assuming the same 100 leads based on the set rate, the close rate, and the average sale price. So a lot of folks want more leads to just, you know, cram on top, but they're filling a leaky bucket. When I go through this and I say, you know, are your customer acquisition costs acceptable? A lot of people don't even know what their customer acquisition cost is. Now, I want to break this down because I know that depending on if you're going through quality of earnings or if you're looking at this from a P&L standpoint, the numbers are going to be different. There's different ways to calculate this. For this conversation, the acquisition cost is how much dollars you spent on marketing divided by how many customers you got. You can do that in a month. You spend $10,000, you get 10 customers, it's a $1,000 acquisition cost, just in simple math. So if you are unfamiliar with that number and you don't have a starting point, it's very hard to improve upon. And as you said in previous interviews, what gets measured gets managed. So I love that. Know your numbers and everyone. Will have a different acceptable customer acquisition cost based on their margin and average ticket price. So beautifully, beautifully said. The other thing, Cody, and please correct me if I'm wrong, for a lot of folks who might be tuning in, they're used to direct sales. I call it the you-go-to-them marketing, which is door-to-door, direct mail, cold calling. Example, you are going to them. Many of these techniques, specifically door-to-door, it's very hard to cost calc And people are just like, oh, put bodies out there. Folks are knocking doors and it is what it is, but they're not thinking about what it would take to start the cold call center, get your data, pay your dialers, et cetera. And that every day that they're dialing, their cash register is just cranking up more and more expenses. So really great to just say, hey, if you're not equipped to really dial in and manage a system and know your numbers, this thing will be a, uh, you'll be hemorrhaging cash, which is not good. It's not gonna fix the lead problem. So that's tip number 1. Hit us with tip number 2.

Yep. Number 2, and real quick, I just wanna add something on that as an overall way to think about it is your contacts and really all of your marketing should be a vending machine and not a slot machine.

Dean Jackson is quoted with that one, by the way.

100%. Yep. Yep. You put a dollar in, you know, a bag of chips is coming out, which is a sale versus You put a dollar in and you hope you hit a jackpot. And I think that that is what a lot of people don't understand about the contact centers. Yes, there is going to be a lot of money to get it started, but once it gets started, if you measure your, your numbers the right way, it truly turns into a vending machine rather than a slot machine. And that's where you start getting real operational leverage. So, so number 2 is going to be making sure you get your tech right. You have to have a couple of core things. I would say the big 3 is a dialer, a CRM, and then reporting. One, the dialer is a non-negotiable. This has to be automated, has to be, and there's, there's tons of those out there. It's not, it's a lot like a CRM where there's, you know, a bunch of different ones that can work, but the key things you need to make sure you can do is one, progressive dialing. Two, and what that means is that essentially if a new lead comes in right now, that lead is inherently more valuable than a lead that came in 7 days ago. And you need to have the person that I say dialing, but they're actually not dialing. The person sitting in front of a computer is going to call the person that came in, you know, 2 seconds ago. And that needs to happen automatically. And when I say they're not actually dialing, is it just what happens is it just pops up on their screen and the dialing happens automatically. If you have somebody on your team manually inputting numbers, you will not compete against somebody like me. It's just impossible. You're not gonna outcompete tech. And then not to mention that where you're gonna win on these margins, and you alluded to it, where if you just get a 2% increase in set, I mean, that has massive, like when you, when you let that roll all the way down, you're, you're talking about potentially millions of dollars a year. That, that 2% on set happens through technology. It happens through calling deep into your call list, meaning calling somebody that came in 30 days ago, the 13th time. And that's what gets your, your sets up 2%, 4%. And no one, I don't care how disciplined they are, they're not calling somebody 13 times by manually dialing and then doing that 100 times. And you know, every single day it's impossible. So you have to have a dialer, which within that dialer or CRM, however you configure it, a drip campaign, you have to have multi-channel communication. So it has to be call, has to be text. Has to be email, and all of that has to be automated. And then I like to make it strategic as well, meaning that out of the gate we call, text, email within that first time period. But then, you know, uh, then it's, I call at 12 o'clock, I text at 2 o'clock, and I email at 4 o'clock. You know, that way you never know when you're, like I said earlier, when you meet somebody where they want to be met, you never know when they're going to be ready for the conversation. You never know if it's going to be, they want to come up, conversate through text or, or through a call. Delivering things like an appointment booking link. Some people love that. Some people hate that. And so just giving all the different ways people can set an appointment through text, through a phone call, through an automated link, however you want to set an appointment with me, I'm game for it. And I'm going to ask you, you know, 100 times over the course of 90 days, do you want to set an appointment with me? It's going to be serious. It's going to be funny. It's going to be a ghost emoji. It's going to be, you know, everything in the book we're going to throw at you., to every single customer over the course of 90 days or 180 days. Um, and that all has to be automatic. If it's not automatic, you just won't, you'll be leaving way too much money on the table.

Yeah. And one note on that, my rule of thumb, by the way, has been to use two communication paths at the same time, call and text, text, email, et cetera. There is compliance requirements whenever you send texts, emails, or phone calls. In terms of how you get data, in terms of when you contact people. This is a moving target, and it is your responsibility to make sure you're compliant with local, state, and federal laws for all communications and the systems that you use to your— for your customers. This is not something to take lightly, and I just wanted to emphasize that point for everybody, which I'm sure is going to come in when we get into the data standpoint, because it's a— they're very real fines. And And I've spoken to people who've had these fines and they're not pleasant. And forget the fines for a minute, it's just not right to be operating in a business in a way that is not compliant and the impact that that has on the people that we serve. So, now that we've done the—

I would, that would be something I would optimize for in your tech stack. If you're looking at a dialer and there's no mention on their website or on their compliance about TCPA, then that's a red flag for me because yes, I'm ultimately responsible, but I would love to have my tech also be, you know, a backup plan for me, also have my back. I shouldn't be able to break compliance without like a super manual override that only an admin can do. So have your tech be a support system. And if the tech is not worried about compliance, then that should be a major red flag for you.

Yeah. Yep. Very, very well said. Cody, what would be tip number 3?

Tip number 3 is going to be hire for personality, not for experience. One of the biggest mistakes we made early on was hiring too many people that had call center experience, and not all call center experiences is created equal. Most what people call a call center is going to be like customer service. Is going to be, uh, you know, maybe 100 people in there just taking calls from angry customers. That's wildly different than appointments. So making sure that we're, we're optimizing for personality. We really like to have people that, um, we, we view it as a, a pipeline into our closer position is how we framed it. So people that want to break into sales that have a mindset of, I am, I'm a salesperson and, and appointment is a sale is really key versus somebody that has a mindset of, I'm a customer service agent. My goal is just to get off the phone as quick as possible and make the person happy. It's wildly different. So hire for personality. It's easy to train because the script is, you know, only 2 to 5 minutes because it's an outbound. We're not, we don't have to have a massive amount of previous experience. Other things I look for is, is other scenarios where they've gotten told no a lot of times. So we've gotten a lot of like door knockers that were setters, maybe in the solar or the roofing space. So would you rather go knock a door and someone slam the door in your face and tell you get off their property? Or would you rather call somebody and they say, hey, I'm not interested and hang up? Obviously just getting hung up on is a lot less emotionally draining and physically draining, but emotionally draining. So if you've got the door slammed in your face for the last 2 years, I am fully confident you can get hung up on You know, 30 times a day.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Only, although, although I remember the very first sale I made in this industry was a cold call and it was a commercial sale. I was more afraid for some reason to make that phone call than I was to show up at someone's house. I have talked to people just, and this is seeming to be more common than I anticipated. I've, I've shared this story when I was, I've been doing speaking events and I've asked people, is there any other weirdos like me in the room that are more timid to like cold call someone than show up in person. And I've been shocked at how many hands have come up. Now, obviously it's very different for me now, but I, I will never forget, like, I was literally in my truck like trembling on this phone call. So dealing with rejection is not all equal. I just wanted to share that for everybody. But, but it, but it's good. But I also really like when you, when you talk about hiring for personality, not experience, so much of selling over the phone is tonality and energy that is contagious. And there's positive contagion and negative contagion, right? There are the people that you're around that feel like there's a rain cloud out there, and then people that you're around that just light you up and get you excited and motivated. And those are things that are very, in my opinion, and I'm curious if you felt the same way, it's very difficult to teach charisma, personality, enthusiasm, optimism, tonality, All of that is real, like you got it or you don't and you can fine tune it, but you can't take someone that says, hey, thanks for calling. I have customer service experience. I've been working in this call center for so and so long.

Yeah.

You know, it's like, that's not the person that you want to be reaching out to be like, our company is the world's greatest. So, uh, anyway, I just wanted to share anything that you look for besides personality that would help someone spot the right talent.

One thing, not necessarily what I look for, but one, kind of nuance with it is that the, when I, I name the job position, um, I name it outbound engagement specialist. That, oh, what I found is by, I originally it was like, uh, contact center representative or something along those lines, but the outbound engagement, um, got me a different set of candidates than contact center specialist or, or whatever I originally called it. And then the other thing with the behavior is also making sure we set up a comp plan. I love the Charlie Munger quote, show me the incentive, I'll show you the outcome. And one of the biggest mistakes, and we actually made it the first month, is we were incentivizing demos, not also closes. And what that meant is they were, they really focused on setting an appointment and selling the appointment, but they were lacking a little bit on selling the working with Reimagine and selling the outcome of getting a new roof. And so then we, we just, now we do a split compensation with where they get the base plus a demo, plus, plus a close bonus as well. So they're out there like, hey, did you close Jennifer? Hey, hey, that, that, this one's a really good one. She was super excited, you know? And so, so now across the entire thread of the customer journey, they have the same level of, the same level of excitement, but also everybody's incentives are aligned for the same Mm-hmm.

That's beautiful. That was a little nugget that I didn't expect to be shared today. And I, I wanna highlight one thing in case people overlooked it. When you said, when I changed the title, it changed the caliber of person. Beautiful. You've also spoken about this when we have done inside the Roofing Strong Alliance. There's a link in the description, by the way, to work with Cody and I and all the mentors. All the details are on the page and it is now included at no additional cost to the Tampa Edge Contractors. But during our events, you've shared that your phone selling team, you even changed the title to sales professional. They're not a rep. And you're like, the identity around that title take require, like it creates a different level of ownership. So very, very powerful nugget. I simply wanted to highlight. You touched on comp plans. We've got know your, know your numbers, uh, get your tech right outta the gate, hire for personality. Let's hit number 4.

Number 4, scripts and adherence. So this goes in with compliance. This goes in with the conversations we're actually having, making sure, one, that we have a definitive script that we can rep on, that we can train our— on, but two, making sure we have a feedback loop on that. Whether that's, you know, most dialers now are going to have a call recording, you know, pushed into AI, or if you're going to have a, like, quality control manager I think with where tech is now, the use of AI can really be a huge leverage opportunity here because your, your, your outbound engagement specialists, they're having on average, they make 300 to 400 calls a day. Usually about, you know, somewhere between 30 to 50 conversations depending on talk time. It's just impossible if you have 10, 10 people doing that to listen to all the calls. Instead, what we can do is we can build a scorecard that puts certain things in a bucket that are, you know, absolute red lines. Like if you say free roof, that should get flagged every time. And that's, you know, 3 strikes you're out. If I hear you saying free roof 3 times, we're going to have to do a write determination because that sets us up for failure and wastes everybody's time. Might be other things that, hey, we really want to make sure we mention these 4 things. But with a lot of the dialers, they're going to have the AI functionality of being able to create a scorecard or pull out key messages and really make sure we are adhering to the script for both best customer experience and highest likelihood of set percentage, demo percentage, et cetera, but also compliance as well. We got to make sure that we're being compliant, that we're making sure that we're doing the right things from both a business perspective, but also from a legal perspective. Yeah. And in addition to that, also providing the frameworks of when are we going to make these calls? We can't do just 8 to 5 when most people don't answer their phones from 8 to 5. We also can't call at 9:30 at night when it's illegal in your state to call past, you know, 7 o'clock. So making sure the tech, the script, and like the whole, all of it works together and the team and the personnel are there when we need them. Weekends are great. A lot of people answer the phones on weekends. I hear some people that say, hey, I want to, you know, make a contact center. And I only want to work Monday through Friday, 8 to 5. And I'm like, mm-hmm, you can't have both. It's, you know, you can't have success if we're not calling people again when they want to be called, which is usually when they're not at work. Now we definitely call from 8 to 5 and we, we have, we set appointments, but you got to win on those margins. Or else you're going to have a big, big drop-off. And so making sure you have the structure set up and then the scripts and a way to monitor adherence and compliance. Ideally through your tech and not through just manpower.

Yeah. And on that note, there are legislation is different state by state in terms of recording laws. There's, I'm not gonna get into this 'cause I'm not an attorney and I'm not your attorney, but it is important for you to be compliant by state. Not all these softwares, at least from the, the research I've done, they're not all inherently compliant. They do require you to know what you're doing. So, um, important to note because You know, we gotta manage our business risk as we do these things. The last thing you want to do is get into something and then find out that you're, uh, you know, not doing things the right way. Uh, all right, let's hit number 5.

Yep. Uh, number 5 is gonna be manage scoreboard daily. Um, I'm gonna leave kind of the lead sourcing as a, uh, bonus item. We'll talk about that, but I think that actually has its own set of 5 things that are necessary in order to have good lead sources and, and start the top of the funnel. So number 5 is manage the scoreboard daily. We said it earlier, what gets measured gets improved, or what gets measured gets managed. It's especially important when you're in the daily grind. And, and I think of it even differently in the hourly grind on the outbound engagement specialist. Sales is emotional by nature, but what a lot of people don't think about is lead gen is just a minor version of a sale. You're selling the appointment. And so if we get our teeth kicked in 4 or 5 or 6 times in a row, That rep might need, need a pep talk. We don't want to go the next 7 hours of the day with them feeling down and, and them having a terrible setting day because they had a bad first hour. So having a scoreboard that's automated, that's ideally driven through your tech, and that is also public. And we want to be able to see that in real time so your contact center manager can, can identify, man, Bob has had a really rough 2 hours. He's had 14 connections and 0 appointments. That's abnormal for Bob. Okay. Let's, let's pull Bob out. Let's listen to his last 2 calls. Let's, let's, you know, maybe give him a pep talk, maybe throw a spiff out, whatever it is, but we got to get Bob back on track. And whether that's at the 2-hour mark or the 3-day mark, if we look at it over the course of 3 days, then we notice a huge drop-off. Alternatively, it could be that, hey, the data that was great last week is not great this week. I give the analogy with, with on the lead side, it's a lot like your subcontractors. You could have the best subcontractor in the world, but if you went and had them do 30 projects with zero supervision, are all 30 going to go perfect? No, very unlikely. You know, if they're going to notice like, oh, by project 5, it looks like Cody's not coming out here anymore. By project 10, it's like, yeah, maybe we don't do such a great cleanup. By project 20, we're lucky if we even get shingles on there. They might just be sending the invoice in and we're just paying it. We don't even know if the roof got Same thing with your lead providers. If they know that you are not looking at your numbers, and I'm not accusing them of anything, but what I've noticed over the— if I'm not looking at my numbers, suddenly I go, you know, from profitable, not as profitable to, you know, by week 4, it's like, oh my gosh, like this is my worst lead source ever. Because you have to be watching that top of the funnel.

So what metrics in your, in your scorecard would you recommend would be the top, I don't know, 2, 3, 4, 5 that should be measured?

Yeah. Um, so for, for a caller, uh, caller one is going to be, um, calls. So I, we always, um, control what you control. You can control your activity. We can coach to the performance. And so the non-negotiable is activity. Um, you're, you need to make a set number of calls per hour. And again, that's tied, you know, if they have a 20-minute call, obviously their, their calls in that hour are going to drop off., but they, you know, it needs to be a set amount. If they have no connections, they make it, making 50 calls an hour, or maybe more depending on how your dialer is set up. And so they, if they have zero connections all day, we should have 400 calls at the end of the day. That's what you can control. Um, so that's, that's the first thing that, that we're constantly looking at. Um, the next is gonna be set rate. Yeah. Not necessarily something you can manage with the, the, uh, the customer or with the the client, but connection rate's important too. So connection rate is, I make 100 calls, how many people pick up? So if I make 100 calls, 50 people pick up, that's a 50% connection rate. And then of those 50 connections, how many do I turn into an appointment? So I have 50 connections. Let's say I turned 40 of those into an appointment. 40 divided by 50 is an 80% set rate. Now the set rate on the actual lead is 40 sets off of 100 leads. So the set rate from the business is 40%, but the set rate by the caller is 80%. The caller can't control if someone picks up. They can control if someone picks up. Do you set the appointment? So these, these KPIs kind of get a little muddy when you're looking from a business versus from a caller, but they're the same, you know, the same value. And really what it's giving us is a leading indicator. If I know last week, you know, 1, 2, 3 leads was 20% set rate and we're into Wednesday and they're at an 8% set rate, that's a 60% drop in quality. And we need to flag that on Wednesday, not 3 weeks down the road when we, you know, look at the end of the month and be like, wow, we lost a lot of money on that. And we need to potentially pause it. If I have a 60% drop in quality, I might need to pause it tomorrow. And if I don't know that, then I can't tell my lead provider, my partner, that, hey, I'm gonna, I'm gonna turn you off if we don't get better leads. So, so set rate. Um, and then demo rate from there is, um, for the callers and, and for the business, but we'll focus on callers first. Demo rate. Okay. You set 10 appointments. How many of those showed up? So if 8 showed up, 8 out of 10 is 80% demo rate. This is extremely important. This is, um, in my mind, The gold standard of what we measure. Yeah, set rate's important too, but it does no good if you have a world-class set rate and your demo percentage is terrible. That's actually a bigger problem than having a lower set rate because you're setting bad appointments and you're killing the morale of your sales team, especially with the field sales team. There's nothing more demoralizing than having 3 appointments in a day and having 3 no-shows.

Oh, it's the worst. And people, there's different names, by the way, that people use for these metrics. When you call it demo rate, other people will call it a sit rate or an appointment rate. And I, yeah, or a show rate. And I just wanted to share that in case someone's measuring it on their, on a different, same metric, different naming convention. Cody, you threw in a little bonus and I took a note and I want to circle back to it. And you talked about lead sources. I'm going to guess that there are some listeners or viewers that heard that. They're like, get to that. I want to hear about that, those lead sources. So give us a little nugget. You know what? I'd like to have you back actually. I think it'd be great to have an interview with you on how you view vetted different lead sources. That'd be a beautiful topic for us to dive into. And if you want to see that, drop a comment below, by the way, that'd be helpful. So we make sure to provide the content that you want to hear and that you want to see. So Cody, talk about lead sources for a moment.

Yeah. The biggest thing I would think about first is, is a behavioral change from you, meaning that you need to dedicate at least 2 hours for some of you, 4 hours or even, even 8 hours, depending on how big of a constraint your business is on leads. With the caveat, first, make sure you plug all the holes and we're not leaking leads. But let's say you've plugged all the holes, then you need to spend at least 2 hours a week meeting with lead providers. And this is not old lead providers, this is new lead providers. And maybe that's 4 hours or 8 hours, but what it is is just, you know, 15 to 30 minute meetings. So let's say it's a 30 minute meeting. That means you're meeting with 4 new lead providers every single week. Because like I said at the start of this, every lead has the right price. If it's leads for $100,000 roofs and it's only metal roofs, I'm willing to pay a lot more for that. So you always just need to shake it out through the numbers. You take your lead cost, look at your set percentage, your demo percentage, and your close percentage to see if that you're going to get a solid ROI. And my secret with that is have the lead providers provide that. Say, what is your average set percentage? What is your average demo percentage? And what is your projected close percentage? And then you run the numbers. Some leads are going to be $10 a lead. Some leads are going to be, you know, $300 a lead. All you need to do is look at it. If these metrics that they say are the standards hold, is this a profitable lead? And then you have these meetings, you know, 2, 4 hours a week, um, every single week. And now you'll have, you know, 15, 20, 30 different lead providers. And then you, then you look at which one is going to be the most profitable based on what they say. The predefined metrics, even better. Are they willing to commit to those metrics? Are they willing to say, hey, we don't hit these metrics, we're looking at a refund. I just had a call earlier today with somebody that mentioned he was actually in our RSA and he went through one of the group trainings with the same logic. He just got a $60,000 check from one of his lead providers because they did not hit the metrics and he got— and they were able to negotiate That was in the contract. And so they wrote him a check for $60,000 because the leads were not producing like they had promised. So I can't give lead sources because even across my own business, my best lead source in Arizona was not my best lead source in New Jersey, which was not my best lead source in Florida. So you have to just go through the exercise of meeting with them and see which ones are willing to put their money where their mouth is. If they're willing to guarantee these numbers and those numbers, those numbers give you a good ROI based on your margins and close percentage. That's the only thing they won't guarantee. Then great. If someone tells me I will give you a lead for, you know, $500 and it's a guaranteed appointment, guaranteed appointment, $500. If they don't show up, I give you your money back. And I know I close 1 in 4 of those. That means I'm paying $2,000 customer acquisition. All right. Well, let's say my average ticket price is $20,000. And my margin's 40%. Well, that means I'm making $8,000, assuming I have a 25% close. So if that all holds, that means I'm paying $2,000 to make $8,000, which gives me a 4-to-1 LTV to CAC. That means I put $1 in and put in $4. So am I willing to pay $500 for a guaranteed appointment with those numbers? 100%. Why not? I will buy all of those. But if I told you right now, would you be willing to pay $500 for an appointment? You're, you might say, hey, that's really expensive. But when we look at the numbers, I mean, that's really cheap. That's, that's exactly what I would want. And so that's where every lead has the right price. As long as the numbers have some backing, whether that's, we'll give you more leads for free, we'll give you your money back, whatever, some type of guarantees. And that's what I would look for. And the less infrastructure you have as a business, the less amount of, if you don't have a contact center optimized for less amount of variables, meaning right now you don't have the capacity to call somebody 13 times to set an appointment. You don't want a cheap lead that has a 10% set rate. It's too much work. Buy the lead that has a guaranteed demo and then optimize to make sure your close percentage is at least 25% or higher, and then max those out. Eventually you can't get any more of those, and then move up the funnel chain and start building your business from there.

Yeah. Cody, you just shared in the last 34 minutes what could likely be a 5-day workshop on all of that. And I know that there are oodles of questions. So if you're interested in working with Cody and joining some of these sessions, click the link in the description to learn more about becoming a member of the Roofing Strong Alliance. Or you can watch Cody explain how he was selling $2 to $3 million per month over the phone in his roofing company by jumping into this very next video. Cody, thanks for being here.

Definitely awesome.