Managing a Roofing Company Was Brutal Until I Learned These 5 Things

Managing a roofing company was a total pain in the butt until I learned these five things that I'll be sharing with you in this video. I'll never forget when I first started managing, I was the youngest person at the company with the least amount of experience. But I had the entrepreneurial spirit, which is why I was in that position. But I had like 30 salespeople at my peak. My phone was ringing off the hook. If it wasn't drama about a salesperson, you know how it is, how there something's going on with their spouse or their partner, there's an emergency or they can't work because this there was an emergency with homeowners, which was often because of the salespeople that either were over promising under delivering, not following through. And then it was dealing with all of the personnel problems in the office. The office manager that on some days you had to like tiptoe around because she was feeling a certain type of way, how a couple of the managers really butted heads because their departments were against each other and one thought it was the other's fault and it was just a total pain in the butt. But all of that got easy and fulfilling once I learned these five things which I will be sharing in this video. Welcome or welcome back. My name is Adam Bensman and let's get started. Roofing sales is personal development in disguise and the reward for growth is life changing. I hope my content helps you create a richer life and bank account. All right, so let's jump into number one on the list. Now, first, if you've ever had issues with salespeople who don't perform well, don't do what you think they should be doing or what's expected of them, or if you have any type of personnel problems where you're like, gosh, that person is just really not carrying their weight, it all boils down to this one thing, and this is one thing that I wish I knew when I got started. And it is this. You get exactly what you tolerate. So if you want to raise the bar of the company, you have to stop tolerating things like, hey, well, he always does it or he never does what he told, or his paperwork is turned in poorly all the time, or maybe it's even one of your managers or your office staff, it just doesn't do what they need to do. And I'm going to tell you this, the more you accept that behavior, it won't change. And then the entire company lowers to that level of expectation. So if you want to rise the Tide of the entire company, you have to rise. Excuse me, Raise your standards. But listen, there's a big difference in a differentiator between having standards and having agreements. And an agreement that you'll have with a team member is an agreement to follow the process, understanding why it's there. So poor leaders will go in and be like, hey, you need to do this. This is the right way. Well, although that may be true, that's not a great way to lead. Whereas if you say, hey, we have this process in place, and the reason we do is because when we didn't have it, we found that people on our team were less successful, their job was harder, and customers weren't taken care of. So now we have this process. So can we agree that we're going to be following this process together? Yes. And then once we have that agreement in place, we simply hold people to the standards of the agreement that they agreed to, which is the best way to serve people. So that's number one on the list, is you get exactly what you tolerate. And if you want to change that, you need to raise your standards. All right, number two, I'll never forget this. Maybe this has happened to you. I would have the top producer, because for some reason, top producers often bring in, like, the rules don't apply to them, which is okay, they're a top producer. And we joke, by the way, drinking espresso here, top producers can earn the right for special treatment. And sometimes it's just how they're wired. They got a little bit of lone wolf type with them. But I'll never forget, like, I would have my sales team turn in turn in jobs. And, like, sometimes the check number was written on and sometimes it wasn't, and the customer forgot to initial on the color because we always required that, because if they didn't, and then they're like, well, that's not the color I chose. Like, you have to initial near the color. So we know that you double checked it. So what I ended up finding is like, this guy's doing it one way, this guy's doing it one way. And that ends up seeming like no problem to the sales rep. But then to the office, they're like, dude, I'm putting in the order. This is different. This is different. And for John's jobs, I got to this, and for Drew's job, I got to go do that. So the key takeaway here is item number two that I realized, which was, everyone needs to follow their same process. I find this with growing sales, to me, growing roofing companies a lot. In fact, there was a recent conversation going inside the RSRA community of someone saying, hey, you know, how do you handle? I get a lot of callbacks on a handful of sales reps. And the community rallied in support and essentially saying it's often because they over promise and under deliver and we have to put bumpers, we have to put a lane. And my advice was, you know, in my sales system that our members are using, there's checklists for each stage of the process. So, so the sales rep is turning something in and there's a mental reminder, okay, I got to do this, got to do this, got to do this. So using checklists and creating a process which I know is very overwhelming for many. It's one of the many things we do with our members in RSRA is help them develop these systems and processes. But the point is, once I learned that everyone needed to follow the same process, things got easier. And if I actually rewind even further. When I first started managing, I was operating, we had offices in five different states at that time. Remember we got super busy. So we had guys come up from one office, they were physically using different paperwork. Now this was back before CRMs. We were still running on a fax machine and everything was in a manila folder. So I had got in touch with all the office managers, had them fax in all the paperwork and I created a system so like everyone ran the same way in all the branches. I know that may seem like super rudimentary now, but remember like it wasn't even that, that long ago. It's just a little over 10 years ago where CRMs and fax machines were. Excuse me. CRMs weren't common and fax machines were the norm. So again, get everyone following the same process and again no, no excuses, no exceptions. Which goes back to number one, which is you get exactly what you tolerate. Okay, now remember, as you introduce these systems, it's important to communicate why they're being introduced, that you've learned what doesn't work in the impact of that, which is sales reps aren't successful, there's more stress, they're running around more and homeowners aren't taken care of. Alright, let's move on to number three. Number three, there's a gentleman named Bob that used to sell for us and I'm going to tell the story and then I'll lead into what number three is. And Bob came from hardwood sales. Excuse me, hardwood floor sales. Bob was a fantastic dude. Still is a fantastic dude. But Bob's Sales were not doing so well. And I asked him. I was like, bob, what are you saying at the. At the door, you know, and by the way, at this point, we were doing door to door. We did both storm and retail. This example was in the storm environment. And he says, oh, this is what I'm saying. And he told me what he was saying, which many salespeople do. And I was like, okay, great, you're good. And then he keeps going, like, man, his sales are just terrible. So at that point is when I finally started to do role play, which, again, is rudimentary for this one camp, and then, like, this totally foreign concept for another. And when I started doing role play, our office. My office was right outside of our war room, which was our room, where our. It was walled with computers and workstations for our salespeople. Then we ran our sales meetings in there. We had our leaderboard up on the wall. So I used my office, and I stood inside, and the sales rep would come up and knock on the door. And we did role play. And Bob knocks on the door, and he goes, this is our first role play. And he goes, hey, my name is Bob, and listen, the reason I'm here is we're inspecting for hail damage, roofs. And if you do have hail damage and we find it, we help you file a claim, and we just do it for what the insurance company says. And that was his pitch at the door. No question. Just, boom, you know, we're here for damage. If you have it, we'll get it done. We'll do it for what the insurance company says. If you. And I was like, wait, Bob, is that really. Because what you told me you were saying and what you're actually saying does not line up. And that leads me to number three, which is role play is the number one ingredient for success. Role play is so freaking important because many people are like, hey, Adam, with your sales system, can we have tester quizzes? I'm like, no, no, no. A test or quiz. They're not going to have a little checkbox like, okay, I got to check this box. What slap stand for? No one cares. Can they use it and can they effectively deliver it? Because sales is applied psychology. All right, so. So the other thing. We ran a RSRA members only workshop at Cody Lando's office. He's the CEO of Reimagine Roofing, recently sold his company, and he's doing incredible amounts multi million in sales over the phone every month. And he was teaching all of our members how to do Phone sales or, excuse me, how to sell over the phone. Not on zoom over the phone, because that's the only way that they do it. And he shared his process. We secret shopped his company from the other room. We were in Cody's office, group of 30 of us, and the sales rep that answered the phone had been with him for, like, a couple months. And, dude, he nailed it. And then Cody says the reason is every single team does role play for 30 minutes every morning before they're on the phones. Just, like, if you're working out, you don't go into a workout cold. So they do role play every single morning. So that's. Number three, is role play is the secret ingredient for success. All right, number four, I'm going to share a story with this. We had a team member who her work ethic was, like, unbelievable. She hustled so hard. She got things done. She was really great at her job. But there was one problem. This particular person had a very unpredictable and volatile attitude that was really toxic. And it got to the point my office was down, so you'd have to walk through. Our office manager was in our entryway, and then my office was down the hall by the war room. And people would walk in. Our team would walk in and, like, check on this on our office manager. And. And, like, it was always this, like, walking on eggshells. Oh, is she in a good mood or is she in a terrible mood? And I remember people kept coming back to me, like, oh, you know, she's in this kind of mood today, or she's in that kind of mood today. And by the way, this was not anything to do with whether it was male or female. It was the fact this person's attitude was just unpredictable. And as my coach, Devin Bannison says, like, she let her feelings bleed into her being. So it was like if she was feeling a certain type of way or frustrated, the entire office knew, and it became so toxic. And that led me to the fourth lesson, which is you need to cut toxic people fast. Now, sometimes there's a time and a place to try to correct it and address it. Of course, you don't want to cut someone who's been with you for a while. But this particular person had been part of our team for a long time. And it was like, I remember sitting down with Jesse, who was the owner. Not at the time was the owner, still is. And we were talking like, man, what do we do? You know, she's been such an incredible, loyal part of the team. She bust her Butt like this is toxic and it's poisoning the culture. So we learned very valuable lesson. And what we ended up doing is cutting it. But I think it was too late. So key takeaway is cut toxic people fast, which again kind of circles back to number one, which is you get what you tolerate. Now let's lead into number five and I'm going to share how I learned this one. Our company. I remember my phone was ringing off the hook and people would call this person for one thing, there was like not a. And then this person for another thing. And then some people were calling. I'm like, dude, you're calling me. That's, that's a question for Brian, who was our production manager at the time. And there was not cohesive communication. And this brings me quickly to number five, which is you need a communication system. Now I am soon. I'm actually in the process of developing this to roll out a very, very done for you simple way to support our members in RSRA through this. But I'll share what we do now at our company at RSRA is we have an internal communication channel. And it really doesn't matter where you house it. It's how it works. So we use Slack. You could use anything that has different communication channels. But I would avoid just the group chat. Because the group chat, you're going to have different topics of discussion. Like, this guy's celebrating a win. This guy says he can't come to work or he's running late. This guy's got a production question. It can't all be in the same channel. It needs to be in the appropriate area. So as an example, the framework we use is we have every team member open up the day in the. It's called the mit. The most important thing. What's the one most important thing? They're getting done today and everyone checks in in the morning. And then we have a channel that's called general, and that's just for general conversation, you know, having fun with each other. Maybe it's just an FYI, I'll often send voice notes in there like a State of the Union or a company update, what's going on. And then what we have is our sales channel. And the sales channel is at the end of the day, a recap of the activities. So for you, what that would look like is either how many doors that were knocked or how many appointments were run or generated. The total sales for the day, the total amount of total sales in number, meaning like how many deals and then the contract total. And this way you see, like who's working, what's going on, there's visibility and you have a daily pulse. The other thing that we do is we have a share the win. So it's a place to celebrate the wins. We celebrate the wins of our community, of RSRA members. Like how Micah was, who just shared in our community, was competing against four roofing companies, including one of the biggest ones in his area. And he ended up literally turning the homeowner like it doesn't matter. And I'm paraphrasing here, like it doesn't matter who you choose. My job is to help deliver the best information and support you through this process. You can find the right roofing system, the right roofing company to help you. And he ended up winning the deal and he posted like, hey, this is a reminder of falling in love with what I do and that you lead with service and instead of trying to close the sale, we lead with service and the business follows. Like, what a powerful lesson. How cool to celebrate. So we share that and share the wins. And then we also have a channel for, you know, any for you, it would be production. For us, we call it production, then another one which is our weekly report. So at the end of each week we all reflect what we do. Well, what can we do better next week and what's our plan to take what we could do better and bring it to life. And what we've done is created an ecosystem where there's public accountability so everyone knows what's going on and we are able to communicate effectively in the right channel so it doesn't get lost and people don't get billboard blind. So there you have it. Managing a roofing company was a pain in the butt until I learned these five things in summary. Number one, you get exactly what what you tolerate. Number two, everyone needs to follow the same process. Number three, roleplay is the number one ingredient for sales success. Number four, cut toxic people out fast. And then number five, you need a communication system. Thanks for joining me in this video. I got one more for you and it is what not to do as a manager. I think you're really going to love it. Jump into that one right now and I'll be seeing you very soon.