Contractor Radio - Quarter One Highlights

Foreign.

Do you think this is something that's going to change business forever? Let's just walk under the assumption that we solve the whole Covid thing and for whatever reason, it goes away, like some say, or where you get the vaccinations and all that stuff, and it's not a problem anymore. Is this what has happened for the last 12 months or so, going to affect businesses ongoing? Like, did they learn anything from it?

100%. I'm reading a book right now by Klaus Schwab. He's the director of the World Economic Forum, and it's called COVID 19, the Great Reset. And there's a whole economic plan to completely revamp the world economy based on people and planet. And in the book, I don't know if it's going to affect the United States so much. I know being in Canada, being in the British Commonwealth, we're kind of the guinea pigs for this great reset program that it talks about digitization. You know, basically, if you don't get digital and get online, you're going to go the way of Blockbuster Video. And this is the future contact free. You know, not just with COVID 19, but people's trust is also broken right now. People are scared. They're living in fear. And it's going to take a long time for that, for that people to get over that fear. Right. But this, the whole economic plan, I do believe that we are on like a cusp right now of a completely different economy, world economy. So it's totally going to affect how everybody does businesses across the board.

So here comes a fun question.

Okay.

Was it planned or just an opportunity that presented itself to allow us to go?

I have to be careful here. I have to be careful. Let me put my conspiracy tinfoil hat on. Yeah, well, they say, they. They say it wasn't planned. It actually kind of was planned. It's been planned for the past 20 years or so, and they, they've been kind of rolling it out with like, carbon taxes, and we've seen it kind of trickling up. And now that COVID 19 has hit, I don't believe COVID 19 was planned. Don't get me wrong. But since COVID 19 hit, it's become like that's like the catalyst for change, like a springboard. Okay? This hit, this is our opportunity to, you know, push this great reset agenda. I mean, Prince Charles from the royal family, he's. He's a big fan of this great reset and us being, you know, you guys got lucky back in 1776 and funny story segue. Okay. My family's actually Pennsylvania Dutch from Pittsburgh. And in 1776, they remained loyal to the Empire, the British Empire. They fled the United States for Canada as Empire loyalists.

So that's how. All right, we're done talking about. No, just.

I'm a. I'm a turncoat.

Oh, man. That's funny stuff. It's. So this thing called the Great Reset. It's interesting to me, number one, like, I never heard that term until this pandemic thing came on. And I see most of it being used more as a conspiracy, curatorial type thing than it is a. Like, hey, this is something that's been coming for a long time. And funny enough, I've been one of those people pushing this type of stuff for quite some time. I started building software for my business in 2000. In 2004, I started taking that and putting it onto a server that everybody could access. In 2006, I started putting it on the cloud. 2009, we started springboarding it out to contractors all over the nation and the world. And realizing that this is the way things are going to go, all you have to do is watch the Jetsons as a kid and go, hey, this is where things are going. With technology. You're going to be able to see people, like, in 2000, having this concept of you and I talking like, we are right now. You're in Canada, I'm in Texas, and we're on video. Like, we're sitting right next to each other. That was space age stuff.

Yeah. Like Dick Tracy talking into his watch. Right. I watched that back in the 80s and I was like, whoa, that's awesome. That'll never happen in my lifetime now. Here we are.

Yeah. Everybody with their Apple watches and Android watches and talking. I've got one of those in the house I don't use anymore because I got this other piece of technology.

Oh, Fitbit.

No. This thing is called a whoop. It's actually super cool. It's the first one of these fitness things that actually. It almost like is sitting there going, hey, you didn't work out. I noticed you didn't work out.

I don't. I don't want that. Yeah. I don't need somebody to remind me, I didn't work out.

It's not what you did, it's what you didn't do that's causing this need for you to go do this now.

Yeah, yeah.

It's been pretty cool. But that's the whole thing is this reset is going to happen organically anyway. This Idea of people using technology. I started to notice it really, when it really, really hit me is when somebody can buy a car online.

Yeah.

You go online and buy. I'm like, there is no way in the world I'm buying a car online. I gotta go drive that thing. I want to see if it clunks and has any, you know, ticks to it or anything like that. And you could just go buy a car online. But people were doing it. When I started saying, people are doing it, that's going to be something that becomes the way. Back in 2009, nobody wanted anything on the cloud. Like, what are you talking about? I'm not putting my stuff. I don't want a server. I want to protect it, you know, behind firewalls and all kinds of other stuff. Not behind a cloud or cloud powered. You're at a disadvantage.

Yeah.

So this is super interesting stuff. And it's something contractors need to be aware of because our industry, if we're honest with ourselves, we tend to be a little dark ages.

Yeah.

And like Matt said, no begrudging that. But you need to be aware, you need to listen to the warnings, you see the early signs and start to learn what you can. Whether that's simply starting to use email, which is something that's important. But CRMs and automations and those type of things are going to help your business. And I've seen so much of a move forward in that over the last five years or so has really started to get legs underneath it. And then a pandemic comes along.

Yeah.

And that's the way I see it. Kind of like you do.

Yeah. It created that urgency. And a lot of contractors that I've talked to actually thrived last year because with people being at home, stuck at home on lockdown, oh, crap, my roof's leaking. They didn't notice before. Oh, my roof needs to be done. So more people were investing into their homes last year and making them more livable because they're there all the time. Right. So I talked to so many roofers that did. Fantastic. And the ones that didn't are the ones that didn't digitize their workflow. The ones that still wanted to do old pen and paper. Old school. Right. And. And a few companies here in Ontario actually went under because they couldn't keep up with the. The other companies that had already moved forward with the automation. And that's like. And for automation, it could be something as simple as ordering roof measurement reports. You know what I mean? Like that saves so much time and Energy and, and money depending on who you buy them from. I know a good company that has $10 roof measurement reports that you can order and you can get them back within a couple of hours and they're $10 and you get, you know, you get a full measurement report, but it saves you time, it saves you from driving to the job site, pulling out your ladder, climbing out on the roof, risking a slip and a fall. You know, then you got to buy your coffee on the way there, buy your lunch, gas money. So the cost savings are. And then it's time, right? You can punch in an address, order a roof measurement, have somebody else draw it up for you while you're on a sales call. So getting into stuff like this really, really helps and you don't have to jump in. Like a lot of people are scared of automation, like workflow digitization scares a lot of people. But it's. Once you learn, it's actually pretty easy. And people like me and, and yourself and you know, there's others out there, John Bros. And I got a bunch of friends that are in the industry that are there to help roofers stay relevant in the digital age.

And here's the cool thing about this. Change is scary, just is, right? Everybody has fear of change, but if you approach it with that type of mindset, it's going to pass you by. It just is one of those things. So I've always been pretty open minded about it, but I'm also pretty calculating about it. And whoever I'm working with as far as technology goes, I want to make sure that they're there to support me. And the good ones are, they're there to walk you through it, to teach it to you. It's in their own best interest if they do. If you get where you are using this as the way you do business, it's almost like a drug. Once you start using, you can't stop because it does make things quicker, it does make things faster, does make things more professional. And that's one of the biggest things I got a funny story for you. You may not know this. To the best of my knowledge, I was the first to start creating roof measurements for this industry back in 2006.

Wow.

We had to manually do it. But you could draw a roof on a screen, take one measurement, pop the whole thing, give you, scale it to you and all the whole bit. And the reason I was doing it was for my salespeople. I could see, hey, if we could do that, they could speed up, they could inspection process, they could speed up their estimating process. We could get to more people faster than the competition. The very first company that started really doing this, Eagle View came out and I went wow, they can automate that. That's what I'm trying to do is automate. Can I get their stuff into my software. And the API that was the first API for Eagle View was to send it into our software called Silver Lining. And that thing started to help our salespeople move faster.

Nice.

Helping other salespeople move faster by selling that. That thing became popular now as part of AccuLinx and Accu links. That's how I got started. I had the front end, they had the backing. We put the two together and we had a good tool for contractors to use those fairly simple. You mentioned something that was really important. Keep it simple. Start with the easy stuff. One of the best tools out there for this roof measurements like Roofer obviously. But company camp this tool that allows you to take pictures and share those pictures to your customer while you're actually up on the roof if you want to. I mean that's a simple thing. It takes five seconds to learn and it steps you above everybody else is not willing to take some of those moves like that. People can go out there and check out the catalyst group.org there's all kinds of vendors there that do it right. There are people you can trust that are going to follow through and not scam you on things.

Yeah.

You see a lot of in our industry.

Yeah. Hi, I'm Ricky Harmon with Balance Claims. I'm here in the Balance claims office to help answer one of the questions I hear all the time. Why use Balance Claims? Well, I have two of the account managers here, Travis Croft and Emily Caldwell to answer just that.

Contractors should use us because we have experts on site that are well versed in xactimate able to write our estimates and make sure that your claims have everything accounted for. Making sure that you're paid out correctly.

Contractors should use Balance Claims because we are hassle free. You have the time to focus on the homeowners and the sales for these roofs while we focus on the insurance claims for you. That is where time is money and we are here to help you.

So you heard it from our ams. There are multiple reasons why you need to be working with Balance Claims. If you want to reach out to us, our email is successful success balanced claims.com or you can reach out to me directly. Ricky Harmon at 317360-0903. Talk to you soon.

There's A couple things on my mind. Number one, what's, what's the. You, you said listen to the bull, right? Is that how I say it?

Right. Listen to this bull.

Listen to this bull. And then you said all this crap that they say. So we're going to talk about the bull crap that we hear all the time. What's the top three bull crap things that you hear from an insurance company that we go, we should go. No, that's not right.

Well, there's three statements that we all hear all the time. There's. We only offer direct physical loss. I think that's the biggest bull that they purport because it's just playing on people's assumptions.

And as soon as they see that, as soon as they say that contractor can't like argue that.

Right?

They can't. Are they able to argue that? Does that now go up PA attorney, whatever. It's just out of my hands because now I'm arguing legalities.

I think that you do have to get a public adjuster or a attorney involved for that argument because you are arguing policy and case law.

Okay, so let's get to 2 and 3 and we're going to come back to that one.

The second thing that they always seem to say is our position stands. If they say our position stands no matter what position it is that they're standing on, they're basically saying that they're not open to any more information. And if you are a contractor and let's say it's a repairability issue and you're saying it's not repairable and that insurance adjuster is saying it is repairable, our position stands. Who do you think has better credentials to say whether something's repairable or not? A contractor or an adjuster. You have more power there than the adjuster does. You have more power there than a public adjuster does or an attorney, we.

Should know what we're doing. I would think.

I would hope so. That's.

That's my argument about this whole thing is like, what is a public adjuster know about when I need to do this project, really, the only thing it comes down to is that thing damaged or not. If it is, then this is what we need to do the work. Okay, so that's two. What's number three?

Every claim is based on its own merits. How many times have you heard that?

A billion.

A billion times.

I hate that one.

They say that for a reason. They say that to eliminate any precedent that they've set in the past for the same merits on A different claim. So if they say that to you, it gives them the out that you can't go back and say, well, you did this on this one, this one, this one, and now you're segregating against my client by not doing the same thing for this client who has the same policy as all these other people do with the same claim fact. So by, by feeding you that crap, you're less apt to provide them with documentation from other claims where they did something differently.

We actually used to track that. To the best of my knowledge, we were the first contractor that had what we called a claim specialist. It was a person that would take the documentation from a salesperson in the field, put it all together, write the exact mate, make all the phone calls back and forth, and literally get it worked out with the insurance company. And we said, hey, since we only have two people doing this, instead of 100 people doing this, how about those two people start tracking everything? And so if it was a State Farm claim or any insurance company just using them as an example that paid a drip edge, for example, on a claim, whenever we would have another claim that they were saying, no, we don't pay for drip edge, we'd say, well, what about this one over here and this one and this one? And so that's where that came about is like, hey, we can't have that happen anymore. So we're going to do it on its own merits. So my question to that always back to them, is, so this customer that you're talking about now merits less than that customer you have. That would be an interesting conversation to have with those two customers. Now, I can't say stuff like that, right? But it always bothers me that that game is played in this. And that's where you guys come in. What legal standing do you have above and beyond a contractor that gives you the ability to solve those problems that a contractor can't?

A public adjuster, again, depending on the state you're in, there are a few states that don't license public adjusters, and there are a few states that do license public adjusters, but they're treated very differently. So for the vast majority of states, a public adjuster represents the insured that are legally representing the insured on their claim, which means they basically become the insured. So a contractor can't legally represent uninsured on an insurance plan. Anytime a contractor says something to the insurance carrier, the insurance carrier has the ability to completely ignore it. They don't have to respond. They have a certain amount of time to respond to an insured in many states and if the representative of the insured says something to them or provides them with information, then in those states they have the same amount of time to respond to the public adjuster. They don't have to do that for the contract. Whether that's fair or not is not really in question. Obviously it's not fair. If you are helping the insured out, then they should be responding to you as well. And sometimes they do until they get to the point that they don't have to anymore. So then they just try to intimidate you and ask you, are you a public adjuster? Are you a public adjuster? You can't be asking that. And it's intimidation tactics.

No, I'm not. Response. No, I'm not. All right, so that's the whole, the whole thing is a bit frustrating in most of cases. And here's the reason why. For large loss stuff, I actually understand it. I get it. I mean, it's more complicated. There's more to it there. You know, there's, it's just a more complicated situation, especially when you're dealing with commercial, where you're dealing with some high end products and things like that on a residential version. So I do know that there are public adjusters out there that work with residential claims and they don't set a limit on it, but the vast majority don't. They say, nah, we don't do anything under like 50,000. They have some kind of arbitrary number that they just throw out. And they say, eh, that's too small. It's not worth my time for what I'm gonna get paid on this. And so they say, no. An attorney goes absolutely not and not even close to my fee. And so this homeowner is caught in the middle. It's the consumer I'm worried about, it's not the contractor. I'd love for the contractor to get the work. But this consumer that's caught in the middle of this whole dichotomy that's going on in our industry. You got any bright ideas of how we can solve some of that?

I have a few, but I'm not the first at the table with some of the ideas. Let me say this, and this might not be the most popular opinion. The idea that we're going to leave all of these people alone in a situation if UPPA ever becomes fully enforced is a temporary issue. There's not enough PAs to handle all the claims. Right now that is 100% true, but that would be a short Term problem. The market always shifts and always adapts to meet these needs. If that ever actually occurred, PAS would get licensed left and right. There would be a ton of new public adjusters available or some kind of technology would come out that would help things out. There are a few different companies that are trying to fill that gap right now using technology. There's the virtual public adjuster. Have you heard of that?

I have.

Bulldog Gestures out of Florida has something very interesting there. There are a lot of legality concerns and questions that a lot of people have on it, but they have some good attorneys involved in it. If that ends up working out and taking off, that could fit all of the needs. It's just like doing a, a virtual assist with a, with a ladder assist on the roof. You've got the adjuster on the phone and the ladder assist is showing the adjuster around and giving them their opinion. The same thing is going on for them with the contractor holding up a public adjuster on the phone to the adjuster saying here's the public adjuster on the claim. They can have that argument. So the public adjusters have to be there on site, which allows them to be at a lot more overhead to be low enough that they could, could justify being involved in volume small claim. I did volume small claims for a long time. For years we were handling a ton of claims. Our biggest year, we had 3,125 claims in one year. It was insane. I don't know if I could do that again. It was way too many claims. I think I was on, I think my best day, I was on 14 roofs in one day. It was a rough day, but I was averaging more than nine roofs a day. And so that's, that's initial inspection, the adjustments, meeting an adjuster out a second time if necessary. It became an issue. The harder things get with the carriers, the more times you have to beat on site, the less likely it is a public adjuster get involved. My point in all this is there's, there is a need for a public adjuster on the small claims. We all see it. Contractor doesn't have to fill that need. There can just be more PAs as a possibility. And if laws keep getting stricter the way they are, regardless of who creates them or who's pushing them, it's the situation that we're in. I think that there will be more PAs. I think that there's market will shift and adapt to it. Either it's going to be through some kind of AI technology, something like the virtual assist kind of a deal with the public adjuster. Something along those lines, something will fill that gap. It's just a matter of time.

Yeah, I don't, I actually don't think it's a bad idea. I mean it's, it's really like, hey, a guy holding a video camera running around the video camera letting you do your job so you don't have to be there. Like you said, same as some of this latter assist stuff that we see. Still doesn't excite me, to be honest with you. I wish the homeowner had the power that they should have as the owner of that contract and the risk of that the insurance company owns the risk. The homeowner is the responsible party that should receive the benefit. And really it's between the two of them. And now we get these other three people involved, a contractor, a PA and an attorney, which makes everything get really squirrely. And you know, I, I'm in agreement with you. I think there's going to be more. There already is. There's a man. There's 50 times the number of PAs in the last two years than there was before that. It's amazing how many of them are, are popping up out there. I almost think that they're going to be more like what a roofing salesman would be than as they are roofing salesman at some point. Unless, unless a log has changed. Unless something happens where a contractor can handle, we're good. Like, we'll deal with you and we'll get back to you and we'll follow with you. But I don't know when that's going to happen. I just know that something's got to happen. Whenever you have this kind of friction in a situation, something's going to happen. APA is doing a good job of kind of bringing that to bear. I'm a big believer in those guys. I know you are as well.

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One of the things that kind of tripped my trigger about what you guys do too is this is a question I maybe should have asked you before. So hopefully I don't throw you off guard, but I got a list, I got a list of all these people I have, I got them all segmented out and who they are. Can I start there with you? Can I literally, like, hey, I want to start this campaign now. And that starts driving people to my website that start doing the chat and now this whole circle of traffic starts happening where most of them, they have the chat tool, they have the reputation management, stuff like that, but they're not doing anything to drive traffic to my website. I'm doing all that with whatever marketing I'm doing.

Yeah.

Does it work that way?

Yeah. Most of the businesses we work with, they're not brand new businesses, right? So they have an objective in mind with respect to like, hey, I've got this list, right? And we do an assessment of, you know, have you, have you been following up with all homeowners to get those reviews online? Like, first and foremost, like, we've got to do that to drive new traffic to your site to ensure that you're showing up in a local search and you're among those choices that a homeowner is going to consider when they have a need. But also, like, I think that, you know, I mentioned before, like, there is this long tail, there is this longer relationship that contractors want to build with homeowners and yet they don't invest in this part of the process. It's much easier to sell a customer you've worked with before than one that is brand new.

Right?

Words of wisdom right there. And it's so funny, we always chase that new customer, but the one I've already talked to, even if they haven't bought from me yet, they know you. At least they know who you are. You've established a relationship. Hopefully they know you and like you and you're trying to get them to trust you. And if you don't follow up with them, you don't do what you say you're gonna do, they tend to go by the wayside. But if you did, we found it takes about five contacts for somebody to actually, truly engage with you. Five genuine contacts. Not just like, hey, I got an email, but five genuine contacts before they actually say, yeah, let's talk about buying, right? Everybody talks about this one call close thing, which it does happen. But the reality is in most cases it's, hey, come back for whatever reason. That's pipeline management. And it sounds like signpost does a pretty decent job of that.

Well, we, we provide the tools that help with that. Right. And you know, it's really it's up to the contractor to determine, you know, how they want to use it. Right. Everyone's process is slightly different. You know, we help with the automation, the review generation, you know, connecting the tools on the front of the process too. But it is a mix of yes, like it's gotta be a core value of the company too that you know, we're gonna incorporate, you know, the human follow up along with the tools to get at least those five impressions right.

Right.

They've got to keep driving that home each and every time because like, yeah, no one's going to remember that name of the contractor after the first time unless something, you know, truly remarkable was relayed. And I do hope that is the case when an exceptional experience is provided. Right.

Yeah. Be rememberable. Right? Yeah, that's right.

Yeah. I mean think about like, have you ever talked with someone who has bought a car on Carvana?

I have not, but I've seen it. It was like this thing that went, okay, they're buying cars online now. That means that somebody's willing to spend 30, 40, $50,000 and more on something that they haven't even driven yet or tested yet. They're going to start buying roofs online.

Yeah. So think about that. So what Carvana is for those people who don't know, it's just an easier way to buy a pre owned car. And you know, this market of course has been around for a long time but the experience has been the same. Right. You go to a lot of, you might test drive it, you might take it to a shop, make sure it's in good working order and you know, work out the transaction. And of course like listings have gone online and you can first find out about the car online. But there's usually some in person experience we've seen with ebay, motors and other platforms like this has gone virtual over time. People are now more likely to buy or likelier to buy sites unseen than they were in the past. But with Carvana, like they, they've really taken the customer experience up a few notches and made it seamless like through from the technology experience on their platform all the way to the delivery. And oh, by the way, if you don't like the car, they make it super easy to exchange or return within a matter of time as well. That actually happened with one of my colleagues. He accidentally bought either a front or rear wheel drive car, which we can't really have in Colorado. You need all wheel drive. He said they made it seamless, no problem. This is great. They Brought it right to his place.

Wow.

Not just a Covid thing. This is something that's going to endure. Post Pandemic, we figured out ways to deliver an awesome experience with low touch but high quality. And now customers, consumers are becoming used to that and demanding that. And that is spreading out to the local services economy as well.

Well, no sales guy wants to hear this, but the truth of the matter is that homeowner doesn't want you in their house. I'm a homeowner. I don't want to go meet my fencing guy and go through all the fencing stuff, have him come sit down at my table and go through his whole pitch deck and you know, the same dog and pony show that we've always gone through. Why don't you just give me the details, right, Like I'll give you the measurements. I'm going to lay it out even on Google Earth. You give me what the different kinds are and how much they are per foot and we'll come to an agreement. Like, I'm in. I think more and more people are moving towards that and that's going to be that customer experience.

Yep.

You're not using Hell Trace. It's definitely worth the money. That money invested was one sale was already bought. We've got from deny or declined 2x of being bought just because of Hell Trace and the storm reports that they give us. Not only do I know where the storm's at, sometimes as they're happening and I can already head right there to the storm, but also after the fact, when I'm out knocking on doors, I can show homeowners the map and what kind of hail was in their area. We've seen a huge return on our investment and I have no doubt that you will too.