RISE Conference Welcome - Troy Clymer

Thank you for coming to the RISE conference, everyone. We're glad that you're here. We want to get started right on time at 8 and keep things rolling. I want to do a little bit of housekeeping first for a few minutes and warm things up. I want to extend a heat huge thank you to our sponsors, the team from Owens Corning, if you're in the room, the team from Allied and Beacon. Thank you so much for all the work that you did helping with this event. A huge debt of gratitude. You do so much for the industry and we're very grateful to have you working with us. Thank you contractors who are in the room, friends and vendors for coming to the event. Grateful to have you here. The room will be filling in as people arrive. We've got a very full day so we do want to keep it on schedule. My name is Troy Clymer. I am the president of the Catalyst Group. We are a non profit organization of vendors in this industry that have come together to create an educational consortium with our clients. So who is the Catalyst Group? We've been in existence for about 10 months. We are a coalition of the best of breed vendors that are all servicing contractors in the space. We felt last year we all go to all these trade shows. Raise your hand if you've been to another trade show in the industry this quarter. Almost the whole room, right? So many good events. I know there's been a series of them. There's a wind show in Florida. We did the IMG event, the ire, the SVG event. There's some more throughout the year. What we realized last year is there was no organized group of vendors who were all speaking and teaching and sharing clients that was working together with our contractors to build solutions that were meaningful for the space and and working together as competition. So we all were sharing this vision and ideating about it. And we came together and decided let's form a vendor coalition with the mandate that we try to address every services niche in the space and request that there be two to three competitors at each niche. So Acculinx and Job Nimbus, raise your hand. Two of the leading CRMs in the space hanging out at the same table together back here, working closely together in polite competition to develop better solutions for you guys. That's what the Catalyst Group is about. We're about education and content. We're a non profit organization. We're a 501c6 which is a nonprofit educational organization. And we exist to learn with our clients and each other to advance the marketplace. So the Solutions are maturing together to better fit the needs of the contractors that we all serve. So these are all the brands that came together to found the Catalyst Group. So most of these brands are here. We are not an events throwing company. However, we have several events throwing organizations that are a part of the Catalyst Group. Contractor Coach Pro does a lot of events and I want to give a big round of applause to Jim and his team. Michelle Johnson, the Kenyans, thank you very much. We love you. Thank you. We really. It's funny and I see Heath Hicks over here. We've had a lot of contractors advising us on this from the jump. And that's what you're here to do. We're here to create a feedback loop. It feels like a family to us. Right. And that's what we're shooting for is contractors and vendors working together to advance the market space in a way that's educational and, and not salesy all the time, which is very challenging. There's a lot of sales people in this room. Right. So we'll skip some of that on film down there with Suzanne so we can all laugh at ourselves on a medley reel here in a week. Right. But this is the beginning of what we hope has long legs, the Catalyst Group as it matures. Our great sponsors, Allied Beacon, Owens, Corning, they do events all over the place. We want to come together with them in different markets where you all want to have learning events and provide the right content, the right brands for what your needs are. And that's what we're all about. So we'll be adding to this. You'll see the Catalyst Group grow this year. We'll be admitting new vendor members between April 20th and May 15th in year two, with the goal of providing a better content experience and more cohesive coalition of vendors so the contractors that we're all serving can get better solutions and have a better feedback loop. Because it's so important to be vertically integrated and make sure that all of the different solutions that you rely on to run your businesses, whether it's software or services or public adjusting or legal, that those people that own those companies and run them and your representatives there are working together in concert for you. And we felt like the industry didn't have that and that's what we're hoping to bring. Our purpose, other than working together to learn, is to try to eliminate some of the noise within the industry. Jake Dempsey from Job Nimbus does a really eloquent job better than me of describing the Catalyst Group and what we do. I have the joy of being the elected president of the board this year. So I get to talk first all the time. I'm not sure if that's good or bad, but we felt like contractors didn't have a business in a box. A do it Right alliance of vetted vendors that they were coming together not because one organization paid them to do, to come together with their own money. We put our money into the Catalyst Group and then there's criteria that the vendors have to meet to be a part of it. So we want to establish a best of breed vendors coalition. So contractors have a trusted place that they can go so events have a trusted place that they can go to get good speakers to touch all the content they need at their event. Right. To make it easier for contractors to choose trustworthy vendors and partners in the vein of doing it right. When we came together, we called it the do it Right alliance before we developed a brand, the Catalyst Group. And that's really in simple speak. What we're here to do is educate and advance the industry ethically. Right. And have a trusted resource for doing that. So this event is going to hit on the 10 core elements for contractors. Right. So all of the different content pieces, we tried to focus around these elements. Culture, leadership, recruiting. Very important. Who's recruiting right now for Storm season? Very important right now. Right. Sales. Those two feed right into each other. Jeremiah and I were having a nice discussion about that a moment ago. Marketing, operations, supplementing, and really claims handling. Supplementing is a generic term for all the things that you might need to do for those that are doing insurance work. Right. So there's public adjusters here, there's general adjusters, there's claims companies, there's lawyers. We have several competitors that overlap in the Catalyst group. The idea is to provide you the right resources across all these areas. Same thing with technology and compliance and finance. We feel that these 10 elements are critical for contractors operating their business today and that we could create an educational forum where we come together to address them with a feedback loop. It's very important that we're learning from each other and. And not just one, pushing out to the many. So with that, I think I'm pretty close to on time. Thank you for coming and let's make it a great day of learning. Thank you so much.