The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly of Roofing Sales

The good, the bad and the ugly of a career in roofing sales. I want to have a real talk with you. I've been journaling on the good, the bad and the ugly of this business because many of us, we get lured in by the earning potential that roofing sales has. And we have doubt from our friends, our family members, maybe even our spouse as we consider a career or got started in a career in this business. And sometimes that doubt begins to poison our own mind. We doubt ourselves because then we're like, hey, is what they're saying true? Should I really be doing this? Am I really cut out for this? Is this real? Am I with the right company? And for those reasons, I just wanted to air it all out. What I view is the good, the bad and the absolute ugly of a job in roofing sales. So if you're new, welcome. If you're not, welcome back. Adam Bensman here. And everything that I'm dedicated to doing here with my content is designed to help you and your team outsell, outgrow and out compete the rest so we can stomp the scum out. Now 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, I am first going to jump into the good, by the way, if I'm looking down, it's because I'm looking at my notes that I prepared for this. And the good of roofing sales is starting with the obvious, the earning potential. The earning potential is absolutely wild. And it is incredibly wild even if you're in your first year. Now, your first year may not be your absolute best, but it is very realistic to earn an incredible, incredible income of six figures or more in year one. And that is almost unheard of unless you go to school and continued education and study, career path and landing a job or work your way up a corporate ladder. But in this business, you can make life changing money without a college education, without a high school education, without knowing anything at all about sales and without knowing anything at all about roofing, which is, by the way, how I got started. Because I was a starving massage therapist making $20,000, actually a little less 19,000 and change in a year, living below the poverty line before making the switch and making five times more than five times, actually about seven times the money in my first year. And I started late in the season, so that was generated in just eight months and it can happen. So the earning potential is number one and it's life changing now. Next thing on there is the personal growth opportunities that this industry provides. You'll see in just a moment when I hit the bad going to actually mention the same thing. But there's pros and cons. So for every bad, there's some elements of the good side. And for this I say roofing sales is personal development in disguise. Now, I was forced to face my own inner demon when I got into this business. I grew up in a household that had emotional volatility. I played the peacekeeper. I was horrified of conflict or tension. So getting into a position where I had to go knock on a stranger's door and upset them and have them yell at me or be in someone's house when a construction project went wrong and be the dumpster of their anger and frustration, it was very, very hard for me. But leaning into that, facing my inner demon, I grew a lot personally and I share this story and more in my book, the Roofing Sales Survival Guide. And in my book I talk about assembling your talent stack all these unique talents that often have nothing to do with sales. It could be about conflict resolution or time management or organization. And you combine all these with your sales skills and your roofing knowledge skills. And through this continual growth you gamify your personal development. And the more you grow personally, the more you sell and the more you earn. So it's like a game to like reward growth. Like personal growth equals more sales equals more money. And that's what made it so fun and so addicting for me, which is all of the good, the life changing income, the life changing personal growth, that it's fun and that it's addicting. And it's the very first time in my life where at the end of the day I thought to myself, wow, I wish I had more time to work. Now let's move on to the bad. Now the bad side is, as I mentioned on the good, you got to face your inner demon. Some of us aren't willing to do so or are absolutely horrified. If you want help getting through your inner demon, read my book, the Roofing Sales Survival Guide. I have an entire section dedicated to it because the entire book is about helping you survive the mental and emotional battlefield that is roofing sales. But facing your own inner demon is typically the number one thing that's holding you back from achieving your goals. It is your own inner fear from not wanting to go out and knock doors, dealing with rejection or getting comfortable with instability or discomfort, which are things that are counterintuitive for most. Now the other part of the bad is that it can take some time for you to start getting money rolling in. For many people, it can take matter of months. In fact, I just responded to a YouTube comment today where a guy had only made $200 in two months. And I have another customer of mine from way back when write me a testimonial. And I don't remember the exact income figures, but he went from peanuts to pennies to dollars over 3, 4 months, still making no money, and then boom, the floodgates open and by the end of the year, he made 200 grand. But the first three, four months, it wasn't even enough money to live on. But he didn't give up. He was relentless. I've interviewed numerous people who've shared their stories. So if you jump on my YouTube channel and you click playlist, you can see the interviews and you'll find lots of people that are in your shoes who've gone through this and had similar struggles. Now, the other thing on the bad is that with the high income, which is good, you give up stability and security since many of these jobs are commission only or heavily based on commission. So you get to pick one. Do you want high income or do you want stability and security? Now if you want high income, you have to give up the stability and security. And that can be a little bit more challenging for folks in the northern markets where I spent most of my career, because you can only roof for so many months of the year. In Minnesota, there might be three, maybe even four months of the year where really nothing's going on. So you got about eight months to make hay while the sun shines. So that can be part of the bad. The last couple of things in the bad, expect very long hours. If you had an advice to like make all this money and they say flexible schedule, be your own boss. That's not true. You might have a flexible schedule, meaning you don't have to clock in and clock out. But I'll tell you, when I got into this, I didn't have anyone looking over my shoulder and. And I was working from pretty much the minute I woke up to the minute I went to bed for a long time. Now it paid off. But with that, those long hours, which you don't need to do hours as extreme. In one of the interviews I did with Mitch, he. He's got like a heck of a lifestyle balance that I struggled with achieving back then. With those long hours can be long drive time. The upside is you can turn windshield Time into classroom time, which means you can invest in yourself, listen to podcasts and audiobooks, and level up your sales skills while you drive. Well, with that drive time, the bad you can be chewing through some vehicles. I put almost 30,000, actually a little over 30,000 miles a year on my vehicles when I was in the business. Depending on your service area, it might not be that much, but that's a lot of fuel as tires, oil changes, and obviously vehicles. My personal little trick, by the way, was buying used high mileage trucks. Once they've depreciated, I'd run them for a year or two and sell them and take a very minor, minor loss or sometimes even sell them for what I paid. All right, the last thing here on the bad is sometimes it can be hard to find the right company. Some folks get set up with the wrong company on their first go in this business and they call it quits far too soon. But trust me, good companies and great companies are out there. If you want to get connected with on, you can fill out the form in the description and it'll submit inside the roofing and Solar Reform alliance, which is the private application only network that I run. And if any companies who are in there interested in you, they'll reach out and should you work with them, you'd have access to my sales system system and you'd be working with me and other folks in the trenches like Daeshun Bryant and John Cenac, Cody Landles and Jim Alleyne. All right, let's move on to the ugly. The ugly is pretty simple here. It starts with this scumbag companies. I hate to say it, there are a lot of scumbags in this business. Now, the good news is I do see the tides turning. And the reason I see the tides turning is that more and more people are sharing a voice. And the scumbag companies are like the squeaky wheel that gets all the grease. They may be the minority, but they get a lot of attention and they've ruined the reputation for many of us, myself included. When I got into the business in my very first interview, I had someone, the guy that was interviewing me, teach me how to conduct insurance fraud. Now, needless to say, I did not work for that company. But I knew at that moment that this industry was corrupt by greed and greed is what poisons it. So I was ashamed to tell people I was in roofing sales. They'd say, what do you do for a living? And I'd say, hey, I'm in, in home sales. So scumbag Companies who again result in generally sales reps not getting paid or working with a company and then finding out that the they were taught to do business or the homeowners they sold weren't taken care of. And it really hurts their heart and their integrity when they unknowingly participated in not great things with not a great company. There's a video, by the way, on my channel, how to choose the right roofing company to work for. If you're on the fence, I recommend watching that again or filling out the application in the description below. Now the last few things here on the ugly category. Burnout is real. Burnout is real. Burnout is very real. With the long hours and how addicting this industry is, it is not difficult to burn out. It happened to me and it can happen to you. You got to take care of yourself, okay? When you get paid for what you produce, your mindset on work is very different because the analogy is when there are employees is the employee will work the least amount they can to not get fired and the company will pay the least amount they can. So people don't quit. But when you're in this commission only or performance based pay model, you get out what you put in, which is why it becomes addicting and why you can burn out. With that burnout comes health risks, which it isn't for everybody. But it can be easy to put in more hours and skip the time in the gym or taking care of yourself or eating fast food. When I got started in the business, from that point, fast forward three years, I gained 30 pounds. And those 30 pounds came for a variety of reasons. Low sleep, I stopped working out. I drank every single night and I ate like garbage because I was living out of my truck. That is all preventable when you know what the temptation is. I didn't figure it out till it was too late. Which brings me to the last one, which is the temptations of drugs and alcohol. Sadly, this industry is plus plagued with a very high rate of substance abuse and alcohol abuse. And I was one of those people. My drinking got way worse progressively through my roofing career. I would drink to celebrate my highs and victories. It was so exciting to get the biggest commission check of my life and go out and party and then at the same time I'd have a horrible day and a homeowner's yelling at me and deals that should have gone through, not go through. And then I would drink because I was pissed at the day and it was my way to decompress and I would justify it. Every single way. Celebrating savings, sadness and then it was to manage my stress and then I justified it that I was drinking just to sleep because it was the only way I could sleep and keep my mind quiet. And it just got worse and worse and worse. Proudly now I am sober and it's been coming on six years without a drink and I wish I had stopped six years ago. In fact, I wish I had stopped when I was 19 years old when I originally wanted to stop drinking alcohol and I started to realize it was a problem for me. But the point is this industry does pose its challenges and its temptations. But if you can mitigate the ugly by getting with the right company, getting control of yourself and discipline to take care of your wellness and you're not tempted by drugs and alcohol, you can be in a great place. And if you can mitigate the bad by understanding what you're getting into and focus on the good and staying healthy than this industry can absolutely change your life. It did for me and it's done for many thousands of others and I hope it does the same for you. To support you on your continued journey, jump into my free training center right now. There's no catch. I got a bunch of binge worthy content in there for you and I've hand selected this video for you if you are new on how to make your very first sale in the business so you can jumpstart your career. Thanks for joining me on this video and I can't wait to see you on the next one.