In this motivational address to home‑improvement contractors, Megan McGuire of All Weather Seal of West Michigan discusses the severe disruptions caused by the COVID‑19 pandemic—loss of in‑home access, dwindling leads, and stalled spring sales. She argues that motivation alone is insufficient and stresses the need for discipline, drawing personal inspiration from David Goggins’ book Can’t Hurt Me. McGuire frames the industry’s response as a binary choice: retreat (giving up) or adapt (embracing new methods). She shares her company’s immediate shift to digital sales, highlighting a pilot virtual roof‑inspection visit and urging peers to adopt similar virtual‑visit programs. She predicts that within three to five years virtual consultations will become standard, warning that failure to adapt will mirror the fates of Blockbuster and Yellow Cab. Throughout, she encourages collaboration, referencing the G4 Marketing Wealthy Contractor Podcast and offering personal assistance to anyone needing help navigating the transition.
Chapters
Greetings everybody out in home improvement land! Interesting times right now for us, isn't it? We are experiencing a number of challenges. My company, and I think pretty much every company out there right now, we're not able to get into people's houses, we're short on leads because of show season, there's a number of challenges that this COVID-19 pandemic has really, you know, sort of thrown a monkey wrench into a lot of our spring plans, right? And so I wanted to give a little bit of inspiration to people. I would say motivation, but I believe motivation is crap. You're not always going to be motivated, and that's why you have to be disciplined. But a little bit of inspiration. There's a book that I read last year called Can't Hurt Me. It's by David Goggins, Navy SEAL. He's incredibly mentally tough. He's an ultra marathon runner. I could go on for hours about this book and the lessons that, you know, I've, I've learned from it. However, one big thing that stuck out to me based on what I've seen with my clients and also with my company in the past couple of weeks is, you know, everyone in life is going to come to a point where they want to quit. Where they want to throw in all the cards. They want to, you know, lay down and die and go back to work for somebody else. And really, it's what you do in that moment, in that moment that you want to quit, in that moment where you're ready to give up, it's what you do in that moment that actually decides who you are. And so right now in our industry, what I've been seeing in the past couple of weeks is I have companies that are pretty much falling into one of two categories. And the first one is called retreat. So there's a lot of companies out there retreating and, you know, pretty much saying, what can I do? I can't get into houses, I can't pitch my product, don't know what to do, right? And then there are those of us that are in the other column, that is adapt. And those of us that are adapting to this change obviously see that, you know, we can't predict that this is going to be a 3-week endeavor, a 1-month endeavor, a 3-month endeavor. We really don't know when it's going to end, so we better get on our horse and start figuring out how we can do this thing digitally. So we are working on that right now. We have our first virtual visit tonight. We're going to be talking to a gentleman and his wife about a roof over our virtual visit program, and I'm excited to see how it goes. But I just wanted to give everybody some, some hope and some inspiration that you're not alone out there. But it's really what you do in the times of tribulation that, that show your true character. So you have to decide which, which side of the fence you want to be on—adapt or retreat. And if you want to adapt and you need some help, feel free to call me. I'm happy to help. Or reach out to somebody else in the industry. You know, Brian says it on the G4 Marketing Wealthy Contractor Podcast all the time that there's no reason to go at this alone. There's too many of us out here that are doing this day in and day out for anybody to feel alone in this. So I encourage everybody to stay active through April, the big campaign that G4 is doing right now, and I'm excited to see the innovation that's going to be born out of this because, you know, we have a choice to look at the positive or the negative, and the way I'm looking at it is there's a whole list of positives and only a couple negatives. And the biggest negative is that change is uncomfortable. Change isn't something that we all are super excited about, especially since we've been using the same sales process for the past 20 or 30 years. Right. So we really have to set aside the uncomfortability that comes with change and look at exactly where our industry is going to be in 3 to 5 years anyway. My prediction is in 3 to 5 years, everyone's going to be doing these virtual visits, and we have to decide if we want to be on the front end of that or the back end. Because if we're on the back end, what ends up happening is we end up like Yellow Cab, Blockbuster, Toys R Us, who refused to adapt and then went out of business. So for us, that's not an option, and I'm sure for many of you it's not. So I would just encourage everybody to stay disciplined and doing something for your business every single day. And, uh, if you need any help, reach out to me. Thanks.
