The Scary Future of Recruiting in Roofing Sales (it’s starting NOW)

If you thought hiring roofing sales reps right now was Tough, fast forward 12 months because the game is going to change. And I'm making this video to prepare you for this change so you can have a first mover advantage. In fact, everything that I'm doing now on my channel, you're going to be seeing. I am reinventing myself. And it started with this deep desire to know what's going to happen in roofing, what do we need to do to build a defensible business that is future proof? Starting today, I'm witnessing the changes. In fact, it wasn't about a year ago and I said autonomous agents are here and they're coming very soon. They're in development. Just wait for it because the game's about to change. And guess what? ChatGPT 5.0 just got announced within the last 48 hours and everything I was sharing is coming, is going to be here. They just announced it. So I decided I'm going to go all in on researching the economy, home improvement statistics, statistics from arma, which is the manufacturer statistics. I'm having conversations with technology companies, with people who are sitting behind closed doors at the table with the top insurance companies, navigating policy change and looking at the trailing 36 months in the future. 36 months. What I have in front of me here, and by the way, we're in RSRA's new mobile HQ is to share with you these findings about the changing landscape in hiring for salespeople. Because what I'm doing in RSRA is positioning RSRA and my members with the first mover advantage. They'll hear it first, share it first and do it first because we are building profitable companies together. If you're interested in joining us, click the link in the description below. So now I'm going to share some of my findings with you so you can see how, how we're doing things now will quickly become obsolete. And it's going to become obsolete faster and faster as time progresses because we're on this adoption curve with technology and we're reaching this point where there's going to be exponential growth. So the old ways of doing things were hiring largely based on or solely on commission, commission only. And again, 1099. Now I know that the FLSA, the Fair Labor Standards act, that went into effect under the last administration March 11 of last year, which I did a video on to keep everybody in the loop. Now that changed the landscape for many that went from hiring 1099 to W2. But here's, here's what's interesting. When we project where the job market's going to be, there is an expectation. I'm going to scroll up because this is. There's copious amounts of notes of notes. They're expecting an additional half million 500,000 construction workers needed to keep up with demand. The problem is the labor force of people who are actually capable of doing the work and want to work is dwindling. And I'm hearing this and I want to know are you hearing this? Are you experiencing that? It is harder to find people, it's harder to get people to apply, it's harder to get people to show up and it's harder to get people to stick than ever before. It was already hard for us and it's getting even more difficult. And one of the reasons for that. Well, there's a lot. We've got Gen Z coming in with different expectations. We have a distressed economy coming in. We have a whole new workforce and people want this like work life, balance and stability. The days of commission only are dwindling and dying. Roofing competition is heavier than ever before because everyone I talked to that runs a really successful company in their market had five, three, four, five people leave, they start their own company, they bring everyone with them. And now the competition in a marketplace is exploding. And if you're in Dallas, Texas in search roofing company near me, you will see there are literally thousands of roofing companies in Dallas. At my last count it was around 12,000 and that's probably grown since now. So we have immense competition. So being 100% commission only will put you at a disadvantage as the job market gets more and more competitive and companies are willing to offer a base pay and more stability. Now imagine that the new people coming into our workforce that are looking for a job they may have left a salary at 40, 50, 60, 70,000 a year. Maybe they left a six figure job and they're looking for a new one. But what people want right now are stability and predictability which means a viable path that they can visualize to six figures. And if you don't provide that, your ad will get blurred into a sea of similar opportunities. And by the way we've done in RSRA live hiring ad critiques in our session members post the raz. We have templates and processes that by the way Jonathan Wissman who runs who Hire, he's helping Tommy or has helped Tommy Mello with all of his recruiting efforts. And Jonathan is a recruiting powerhouse. He has data from thousands of ads being run that we know what Works and what doesn't. In fact, one of our members that came out to our members Only retreat at his office literally wrote an ad based on what Jonathan and I taught and said that he had a phone call from indeed saying it was one of the best hiring ads they've seen. So if your ad needs to speak to predictability and a viable path to six figures, consistency instability, and if people are browsing ads and they see, hey, this one's offering a 50,000 or $40,000 base and a path to 100, 120, 150,000. And this one just says commission only. Who are they going? Who's going to apply where? So as competition increases, you need to expect to be offering a base pay plus commission. Now, again, in your market, it may be working. I'm just telling you what's coming. But here's the deal. Private equity groups who have deeper pockets than you do, most likely. Well, I shouldn't say most likely they do because they can make capital calls. Now, these organizations are going to lean in to create competitive places to work. The earning potential may be less, but the stability may be higher. Now this opens up opportunities and threats for you and I just want to spell those out. The threats are if you don't have a standardized training program in a process that's sticky paired with and most importantly the ability to spot the right talent before you bring them on, you'll hemorrhage cash, you will bleed money because you'll be bringing people on, paying them for us, paying them a salary, having, let's say a four, six, eight week ramp up period. And then they quit. And now you've got eight weeks of salary with nothing to show for it. So as competition in our marketplace increases, the expectation of salary plus commission increases, but so does the financial viability. So where's your opportunities? Your opportunities are create a culture that people actually want to work for and stick around. Your opportunities are to create a training program that, that darn near guarantees success if you bring in the right person. And your opportunity is to become a world class recruiter, which you can do. We're helping our members do that right now. That's learning how to spot the right talent. And by the way, I've evolved my thinking and I look at two things. Are they a culture fit and are they coachable? Those are the only two things that I'm concerned about, culture and coachability. And if they are a culture fit and show that they're coachable, I can take anyone, whether they have experience or not, and make them successful in sales. And with this is a standardized training program and certification program. Now, in order to enable your sales team to be as effective, it is very important that you have technology enablement. Now what do I mean by that? The research is showing that within about three years I think it'll be faster and our members believe It'll be about 12 months that drone inspections will become standard with AI and imaging and all of this becoming rapidly developed, more available and more cost effective. There's really no reason for people to get on roofs. And what that means is if you can enable your team with technology like drone inspections, quicker estimating platforms and removing the need to train these things and reducing the amount of time that people are required to spend at or with a customer, this puts you in a position to squeeze out more sales per rep. So with these systems in place, if you used to need let's say 10 salespeople, you might be able to do the same sales volume with five salespeople, which who wouldn't want to have less salespeople in the same output. Now all of this enablement again makes appointments shorters, allows higher volume per rep, less sales reps at your company. And if they're not getting on roofs, you're also looking at lower workers comp. So even though for many the risk goes up because you have to offer or soon will have to offer a base pay and be mindful, you gotta be very, very smart with financial education to know what can you afford for your base, how much commission should you pay, what's too much, what's too little, what are the factors you need to consider? Some of those are if leads are provided or they're self generated, are they offered a vehicle or not? Are they offered a whole bunch of technology okay or not? Is there inside sales support? What's their role? Responsibility? Do they have benefits? All of these things need to be factored in for financial considerations so you don't find yourself building a company that you thought was going to be profitable and ends up losing money. So your opportunity is to look at the future in the future is becoming a well oiled machine. A true company owner, someone who has a culture where people want to go to work, someone who has a training program where you're going to be setting people up for success and have the ability to spot the right talent. Because the days of throwing mud at the wall and saying hey, we'll try it out and see what sticks, those are over. If you want help, click the link in the description and apply to join this is what we're doing inside our sra. Now, if you want help on your hiring efforts, jump into this very next video. I'm going to teach you how to spot the perfect talent right away so you don't have people oversell themselves and under deliver. It's happened to me, but it won't happen to you anymore. I'll see you in the next video.