Top 3 Recruiting Fears & 1 Massive Opportunity Most Roofers Overlook

I was surrounded by 66 value aligned roofing company owners and managers in one room. It was a recruiting roundtable where we shared our biggest fears and we're converting those into our biggest opportunity. What you see in the board behind me are the top three recruiting fears of these 66 companies. And although this might be a small sample size, when it comes to all roofing companies in America, what I do believe it reveals is very common fears that you probably have as well. The purpose of making this video is to help you one, feel not alone. Two, convert these fears into your biggest opportunity so you can then, number three, bring in more of the right people, set them up for success so you can grow even bigger, serve even more people and make even more money. Hey, my name is Adam Bensman and I help great roofing companies make an even bigger impact together. I do this inside an application only network and yes, we do kick people out. We've denied entry so we can share our winning secrets and help each other get ahead. It's a community unlike anything else that I've experienced or our members have shared the same thing that they've experienced. And what I'm gonna share with you is some insights from our live in person annual event called the Room. My name is Adam Bensman again and listen this session and this information I am really excited to like bring out because there's one thing I know about the roofing industry, it can feel very isolating running our businesses on our own. I know that sometimes our spouses either don't care, don't know, they can only take so much of us venting and they often don't have all the answers. And the most expensive advice you can get is the wrong advice which I see being thrown around in Facebook groups that are unfiltered and unqualified people sharing their opinions quite strongly in fact. So I hope that this video really does help. Let's get started, shall we? 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, just quick background on this session. This session was ran alongside a gentleman named Jonathan Wissman. If you don't know Jonathan Wissman, let me tell you about him because he runs a company called Whohire who uses this technology that was actually originally developed for Mercedes Benz, their sales team to analyze their top performing salespeople and on how many cars they sold and how long they stuck around. Now they had such wild success with Mercedes Benz and Jonathan Wisman once He acquired this technology, said hey, how do I apply this in a different industry? And what he did was was he targeted home services. He worked with Tommy Mello with A1 Garage and is now a fellow honorary mentor inside the Roofing and Solar Reform alliance and working with roofing companies. So the insights he's had into the data that that AI can pull out, which is by the way far deeper and more accurate from a lot of the profile tests that are out there in the Myers Briggs and all that jazz. So anyway, here's how this worked. How do we get to this list with 66 people in a room? We all had a round table with different companies at it and we all documented our biggest fears. We then shared those fears and we created these big lists on sticky notes that were plastered all over the walls. And then we got up and we voted for on the top three together. So this is like the real world results of a live survey in person. And here's what they are, these three which I want you to analyze these fears because I'm going to break them down and turn them into your biggest opportunity in just a moment. First is the time invested. Second is the cost of hiring. And the third is lack of systems. So you might be wondering, hey, I want more systems, repeatable processes, sop, things like that. Okay, so lack of system. So I want you to look at this and we analyze the theme. What do you see consistently here? Do you see one problem, two problems or three problems? And what you're probably seeing is that this really boils down to one problem and that is a lack of systems. Switch colors here so we can identify that it's really boils down a lack of systems. So I want to digest these problems a little bit. Again, I told you in beginnings to help you make sure feel that you're not alone in this. Convert your fears, your biggest opportunity and help you bring in more the right people, set them up to succeed. So you grow your business, make more sales, make more profit. So the the time invested, you are either paying someone to do this or it is your time. So if you're an owner that's wearing all the hats, you need to calculate how much time is invested. By the way, I'm getting into the cost because these are directly related the time invested, let's just call it around 15 hours. 2. Do what? By the way, if you're like no, that's not realistic. Let me just challenge you on that. You had to write the ad, you had to set up an indeed account. If you didn't already have one. You had to set up the ad in indeed, you had to run the ad. You had to sort through all the applicants. You had to decide which applicants were worth reaching out to. You had to reach out to those applicants. Then once they responded, you had to get them into an interview. You had a ton of people no show for the interview, which is why group interviews can, when done appropriately, be the right move. Then you had to sell the candidate working for you. The ones that say yes sometimes don't even show up. And then the ones that do. Now you hire. So all that front end time, you can figure out that number for you. But I'm just going to give you a one that we came up with is about 15 hours per person that's brought in. Okay? Now the cost of hiring is the 15 hours times whatever your hourly rate is. If you're an owner of a company wearing all the hats, your time's probably worth hundreds of dollars per hour. And if you're not doing it, you're paying one, two, three or more people to do this for you. So the time invested in the cost of hiring can result depending. And by the way, this was a number that ranged at the event from about 10,000 to. To $15,000. Most people don't even calculate this. 10k to 15k is the cost of hiring. Now, the reason for that is a lack of a system. So we look at recruiting and recruiting we often do seasonally. And one of the things we're really working on in our community is getting people not to think like a roofer, but to think like a business owner that just so happens to do roofing. So roofer think is turn my ads on, turn my ads off, turn my ads on, turn my ads off. Where a business owner is thinking, keep my ads and my recruiting funnel running all the time on autopilot because I can bring in the right people. It may not be the right time, but that's okay. You can make timing work. It may not be ideal for them, it may not be ideal for you. Yes, even if you're in the northern markets over winter. What if you find the perfect person and they're not in a spot to switch careers yet? Maybe they're, like, kicking the tires they're not happy with. They are. And he's like, hey, jump on board in two months or three months or. Or we'll get you started now on training. We'll ramp you up for when the busy season happens. I remember I ran into someone, by the way, that I ended up hiring and I had met them six months prior. They were in a position, not looking for another job and I wanted to hire them. I didn't have the role quite yet, nor did I have was it the right time for them. Six months later it was. They jumped on board. We had a two year great run together and they were an incredible salesperson on the team. So your recruiting should be going year round. Okay, now I want you to think of a recruiting funnel very similar to a marketing funnel. Okay, so in a marketing funnel we are. I'm just going to write the word win. That means they're on board in a marketing funnel. Right. We're getting a lot of reach. We get people to raise interest, to reach out, fill out a web form, et cetera, talk to our team, convert to an appointment, go to a sales appointment, and then we win the deal. Recruiting is getting the ad out there, having a compelling title on your ad that gets people to want to click, to read the ad, to apply to show up for an interview, to get hired. So that recruiting funnel, most people are doing manually, right? They're bringing people in and they have to send a text message or email and jump on a phone call and coordinate a time and do all this, figure out if they're a good fit. So using a program like whohire, for example, which by the way, plug for whohire, they have one of the most innovative customer service platforms where you can just like go to whohire.com and literally jump into a live meeting room with their team, ask questions or get a demo booked. It's really sharp. So that recruiting system could be run using their system or you could create your own using automation. By the way, if you want to learn more about this AI thing and the AI revolution, I recently did a video on it because I was in the room hearing directly from Zach Kass, who is one of the three authors that literally created ChatGPT and brought it to market sharing. Where we're at now, we're much further along than most people realize. And where we're going and how roofing companies can prepare. The other system that's lacking is onboarding. Onboarding is getting your team members set up, even down to the nitty gritty, like, what paperwork do we need? And if you're like the many roofing companies that are reacting in the right way to the recent law change in March 11th of 2024 with FLSA, the Fair Labor Standards act, converting to employees, you're thinking about payroll and what forms do I need and who's Processing payroll, which by the way is very common discussion in our community. That onboarding system can actually be streamline. I'm not associated with gusto. We use gusto. A lot of our members use gusto. But that can help on your onboarding process and then training a training system. And it is amazing how many people reach out to us or members that join because one of the things they struggle with is a repeatable system and process for training. We have members that are just getting started to portfolios that are doing over $150 million a year. We have companies in Los Angeles to Connecticut to, to Minneapolis market, Dallas market Florida. And I know I just mixed states and cities but you get the idea all over the place, retail only, storm only, hybrid companies. And the beauty of being surrounded by value aligned people and not like minded because like minded creates a cult in an echo chamber is you get different perspectives and perspective is valuable. So you can grab the golden nuggets of what works. Not only will you get access to my sales training system but other ways that other people have done things because they train on different orders. Maybe your sales role responsibilities are different. You can learn a lot from folks. Folks like Carl and Mark have literally shared their training manuals. By the way. It's one of the beauties of us of this like crowdsourced idea of sharing our winning secrets to help each other get ahead. So that training, getting this in place, what I see here again is your biggest opportunity. So we see one very cohesive problem with different symptoms. So I want you to think like a more holistic doctor. The time investment and the cost of hiring these might be symptoms but, but the real like source issue here is a lack of systems recruiting, onboarding training. So your biggest opportunity which I'm going to highlight in green because green we all associate with money. This is our biggest opportunity is developing a system for all of this. If you are not riding the wave of technology and AI again go watch that video. Leveraging the tools that can do this but also humanizing the experience to attract the right people. Because I want to give you a few other golden nuggets that that came up in this session. What I'm about to break down are the reasons people should want to work for you. The hiring ad and then your onboarding process. So let's begin at why should people work for you? I want you to answer the question why would I want to work for you if I'm a candidate like scrolling indeed. Why would I want to work for you if you don't have a crystal clear answer of why your answer benefits me, helps be further along my life, then that right there is like the definition that you don't have a culture. If you're churning through people and you just want people to help create come into your organization to help you achieve your dreams. It doesn't work like that. If you haven't read the book who not how by dan Sullivan and Dr. Benjamin Hardy. You do that because your job is to be the who, the hero for the candidate. So you need to define why someone should want to work for you. What are you going to do for them? Next is the hiring ad. The hiring ad which Jonathan Wissman and I ran a session for our community called the Hiring Ad Live Critique. Our members literally copy pasted it into the chat. We pulled it up on a screen share. There were a number of roofing company owners and managers on our roundtable and we dissected the ad, the different elements that were needed. We've literally put it in this program called hemingwayapp.com you should use it because your goal is to simplify your writing to a third to fifth grade reading level and then put in the right formula of what goes in your ad. We have all this on the recording by the way, but I'll share some highlights with you right now. And then there's your ad. Okay, once we have that ad, which I'll give you a few of the pointers. One, a compelling headline that stands out. If everybody has the same ad outside sales or roofing sales, like just add a little bit of flair like searching for an energetic roofing salesperson. Searching for an enthusiastic. Just some of these words that supercharge your ad and stand out from the rest and get the right person to say hey, that's me. Okay, so that little thing in the sea of all the same ads which by the way we shared my screen on indeed and I typed in roofing sales and I wanted to see all the ads. You could see how it's just like a sea of the same things. And then a few other elements were to call out the exact person a negative statement who this is not a good fit for teasing them with like the future ideal self what dreams they could aspire to accomplish by being part of your organization. And then one thing that I have to give full credit to Jonathan Wisman wasn't you could make, you must make X dollars or you won't work for us. Because when you have the right onboarding and training system in place place if they follow that system, then they Must earn that amount of money. That's quota. And if they don't, then they're no longer with you. So that creates a sense of security for these people. Not like earning potential is 250,000. Like you must earn at least $100,000 a year. You won't work with us. Okay, then the application instructions. And then what happens next? There's just a few of those elements there, by the way. Jonathan Wisman. After we did this, we posted the sample hiring ad. We got it down to a fifth grade level this weekend. I was with Jonathan Whitzman. He told me he's learning from me, I'm learning from him. And he simplified an ad. He ran his ad against this other contractor's ad that was running from another recruiting company and it performed three times more, so it brought in three times more applicants. Okay, all right, now there's your hiring ad. And then again, setting your team up for success when you know what to train them on and in what order and to hold them accountable. You're creating the framework that breeds success as opposed to what most roofing companies have, which is a framework that hopes and prays that people are successful by just like getting them in there and saying, hey, go figure it out. Because I did too. We had some members inside our community run a training and peel back the curtains on their entire accountability structure. What days, the theme days of what they train on and how they run, just incredible. People through their organization have wildly high retention and accountability. So there you have it, top three fears. Your biggest opportunity is to systematically approach your recruiting, which will help you bring in more people and set you up for success. Now, if the idea of being surrounded by value aligned people excites you and you feel like you found your people, then this might be for you. But if it is not, if you're like, I don't believe in sharing and I don't want to share my secrets, please don't apply. We don't want folks like that inside. There's a link in the description below. It is application only. We'll walk you through that process, jump on a quick call, go through everything with you, and then you can decide if you'd like to join us in in the trenches. That's all for this video. Thanks for joining me. And if you didn't jump into my AI video on the AI revolution, watch this one next. I'll see you soon.