The Insurance Claim Game with Troy Clymer

Hey everybody, it's Jim Johnson here, the head coach at Contractor Coach Pro and your host with Contractor Radio where we are here to help you develop the strategies, tactics, tools that you need to be successful out there as a contractor. We hope you find our show not only informational and educational, but also a little bit entertaining. We've got a great guest today. We're going to be talking about supplementing an insurance restoration and super excited to have that guy on board. We'll bring him on in just a few seconds. But before we do that, let's get a little message, pay the bills today. And I get a little message from one of our amazing sponsors.

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Atlas is amazing. We love those guys. They, they do put the contractor first and it's great having them on board. As one of our Sponsors here. Today we are going to talk about insurance restoration a little bit. We're going to talk about supplementing a little bit. We're going to talk about how to take advantage of third parties that are out there to help you out in this industry. And we have a special guest on today. He is one of my best friends. He supplementing, insurance restoration guru, one of my confidants that I truly trust. He's a great friend of mine. Troy Clymer. Welcome aboard to Contractor Radio. Man, good to have you.

Hey, Jim, thanks for having me. Good to see you virtually today.

Yeah, no problem. It's always good to wrap with you a little bit. You've got so much in that nugget of yours up there that's just so much information. And we never have a long enough show for what Troy knows about supplementing and the process. And just this game that gets played back and forth between insurance companies and supplement companies and homeowners and contractors. There's a lot going on there and hopefully today we're able to help a few people kind of see some of the strategies and tactics they can use to be successful in that particular part of our industry. But before we get there, tell us a little bit about how you got here. Like what were you doing before and then what got you into this and where have you guys gotten to at this point? It's been quite a few years now. What, seven, eight years?

Sure, yeah. We're in year six of Balance Claims. And you and I have been working closely together as alliance partners for really about seven and a half now, since 2013, I believe. So quick history on me and Balance. My name is Troy Clymer. My current role, I'm the co founder and managing member at Balance Claims. And in the business, I work as our CFO and coo. I have a few business partners that I co own the company with, all of which are also industry personalities. So many people know Eric Hepler, he's our CEO. Josh Roseboom is our executive vice president of production. And then John Dye, who's our director of marketing and business development. We founded this business actually in 2013. The company was originally called Solutions for Insurance Consulting, and it was founded out of a need to bring contractors and vendors together to do it right. You know, my mission and Eric's mission, and we had worked together, Eric and I, for about 15 years prior to becoming entrepreneurs. And the mission that him and I had kind of adopted as two people who work together in management, in conglomerated software for job boards. If You've ever heard of Monster.com, that's where Eric and I met was bringing people together to advance their lives. And I know that's why you and I got along so well from the beginning. But initially this company that's turned into balance, one of the most well known brands in the industry and certainly the niche leader when it comes to third party administration for contractors needing help with their estimates supplements the administration around their insurance claims or learning and training through our art of the supplement brand came out of a young man that I met in Indianapolis, which is where our corporate headquarters is most all of we have 40 W2 employees and 90% of them are here in Indianapolis. I met a young man, I was doing some adjunct professorship at Indiana University teaching a marketing class and a young man who was the son of a roofer was in my class and his brother Josh Roseboom founded the company with us and is now our executive vice president. Eric and I's business partner. His father Andy Roseboom owns a proprietor type business model general contractor here in Indianapolis. Had been struggling for years with the insurance claim process in having effective business process outsourcing to do that as a force multiplier. Because he was a proprietor, it was him, his wife and his two sons that worked at the company. And you see this business model a lot and you can speak to that and as the leading coaching authority in our space on the different business models and what different people need. So this young man was in my class and I'm a business guy and so I was working in corporate America at the time. I was the global director of sales for a job board called Beyond.com Big Job Board. It's now called Next. So this is Postmonster and Eric and I, Eric also worked there. He was one of our sales managers there. So Eric and I had worked together for a long time and this young man was in my class and he went through the class. He did very well. I'm at the gym, working out over lunch at my corporate job and my phone rings and it's this young man who had my phone number and he wants to get together with me to share a business idea that he has. This is 2012, so it's like the dawn of outsourced BPO business process outsourcing or supplementing to our industry. So I get together with this young man, he's got this whole business model flushed out. He's a good student, you know Jim and you and I do a lot of business modeling and planning together and I was very impressed, you know, full financials and everything about starting the large corporate version of a supplementing company. And that's what Balance Claims is. I know there's a lot of supplement companies out there and we're a steward to them. We look at our competitors as friends and Jim knows this. We work very closely with the niche and help advance it and interact with them. And most of them are smaller. Balance is like the Walmart of supplementing. So we're a bit of a larger ship. Fast forward now, that business idea was enough. After some due diligence that I left my corporate, my cushy corporate job that I had been in for almost 20 years and risked everything and almost down to my last dollar, we bootstrapped and founded this company. I had been wanting to be an entrepreneur and then I got about a year in actually about eight months and called my who had been my business partner as an entrepreneur, Eric Kepler, and convinced him and his wonderful wife that he should take this leap with me because I needed him. And what was sic blew up overnight and we were largely regional. This is 2012, 2013. We rebranded as Balance Authority, our holding company which holds Balance Claims, Art of the Supplement and American Contractor. At this point, three well known brands in the space. And now we're the national authority in estimating and supplementing. And then Jim, you and I work together to found the Catalyst Group which is the leading nonprofit educational corporation in the industry in 2016 and 2017 and we work alongside 32 other great brands there. But you know, Balance has become a very growth oriented small business. It's now a mid sized company that's given birth to some other brands and we're growing through acquisition. But primarily what we do at Balance Claims and you can find us on the web@ balanceclaims.com you need to email us at successalance successalance claims.com and we help contractors small to large. We've got about 800 clients with their administration of Xactimate and other styles of estimating and supplementing. So we're not adjusting claims. What we're doing is partnering with contractors on their dozens, hundreds or thousands of insurance claims to give them administrative services so they can focus on selling, building and billing and let our shared services admin teams which are corporate in our headquarters, our W2 staff estimators, our W2 staff supplementers and our executive management leadership teams and customer service teams take the burden of all the minutia admin that goes into the Xactimate estimating process, the submittal, the Administrative back and forth with the insurance carrier and the management of that admin in their systems off of them so they can focus on sales, building their business, managing client relationships and producing construction jobs. Whether it be in the roofing sector, the mitigation sector, fire and water remediation, or commercial and large loss. And here we are in 2021 in year six and a half of balance and really year eight of the business as a whole, if you count the SIC years. And we handle last year 9,840 supplements. So we're pretty good size at this point. A little over 30,000 total files that we've done the admin on since 2015.

How crazy does it drive you that you didn't hit 10,000?

Well, we'll hit it this year, I can tell you that. Here's an interesting point. Last year a lot is going on right now, right? So I know on this episode we want to focus on some things and expertise to give contractors tools to get better in their company at estimating supplementing and claims administration, or how to effectively use different models in house outsourcing hybrid. But there's a lot going on in the industry in 2021. And 2020 was a wild year, you know, and so people going through business planning typically over the end of Q4 into Q1, I know we do it balance. And you and I just collaborated together at the American Contractors Summit in January. And was it already a month ago last year we all kind of got thrown for a loop, you know, here you and I are, two business owners that have worked closely together really since I got into this space. I, you know, the story is I came from a complete outside industry into this industry and started a company and didn't know anyone. And one of my skill sets is biz dev and channel partnerships and relationships. So very quickly we got entwined in that. And I met you early on, I think it was 2013, 2014 maybe when it was still sic. So you know that era of our company and everything that went along with startup, right. But you know, you get to the point where you're poised coming into 2020 and then you have a global pandemic. And so one of the cool things and we can get at this is for contractors, relationships matter. And so you saw, you immediately got out in front of that at Contractor Coach Pro, got the Catalyst Group involved. We got involved at Balance and there became a really. You were pulling together all of the vendors into how are we going to work with contractors? And you got out in front with Contractor Coach Pro in educating contractors on how to transform their organization into having success. Virtually last year in February and early March, when this started to happen.

Every.

Day, well then it gave birth to the daily state of the industry show, which we both collaborated a lot on and John Dye. But at balance, we, you know, we didn't have global pandemic in the threat box of our SWOT analysis for 2020.

I don't think anybody did. I don't think anybody went, hey man, maybe there's a pandemic just shuts everything down from the way we normally operate business.

Well, you plan different now.

You should really think about that.

Right to the point where of the podcast right. Is you need to have options. So there was fear in the marketplace in the preheating of the season in 2020. And so if you're going to in house, supplementing that means resources. Resources as a business mean people, processes, systems, overhead. Okay? People cost money, systems cost money. And so we saw it a lot of growth now. We're growing pretty good every year. Just to give some perspective. In 2019 we were about 7,000 files. So we're up about 2,000 year over year. We expect a little bit more growth this year, but same kind of magnitude. Right. And so we saw a lot of contractors not wanting to invest in extra bodies at their company because of uncertainty in the marketplace. And that's why people outsource in general. Okay, So I use the term business process outsourcer or third party administrator to describe what we do. Third party administrator has a lot of connotations in this industry. So I try to stick with bpo, right. But in other industries that's the norm. Like here's a good example. At balance, we have 42 employees. We have people concerned with our IT in our company. Me as our COO, our controller. But we use a managed services firm to provide our tactical it. So I'm outsourcing that. Right. I have a branch engineer that's on site, certain amount of time per week, etc.

To that point. We talk about this all the time. Capacity, right? How do I create more capacity? And by what I mean by capacity is how do I create more time for myself to do the things that I'm really good at while allowing somebody to do something that I'm not so great at. For us, and unless you're an absolute expert in supplementing and claims administration and process and stuff like that, it's you do it when you can, right?

Some people are, we're a proponent of knowing how to do it and Doing some portion of it in your organization. So much so that we acquired Art of the Supplement about a year and a half ago and have an entire training company that's now blossomed and we scaled to teach contractors how to do it. But to your point, what we find is it's more complicated than most people think. And I will say a healthy relationship outsourcing wise for us is like a 40 60, especially if your organization's kind of scaled and you're already at that 3 million to 5 million or plus and getting larger. Usually they're not outsourcing all of their work to us. They're doing it as needed or in certain markets. But we need to be able as a business process outsourcer to meet them where they're at. Just like my CPA or CFA does with me. I have an accounting department at balance, it's four people because we're a 40 person company. Right. So there are some things our CPA and CFA is doing for us. Probably he needs to be doing more. And Jim's always getting on me about still doing too much bookkeeping. Right. This is the same thing. It's not that I can't mow my lawn better than my lawn mowing service. Okay. And I might enjoy mowing my lawn one out of the four weeks of the month, but what else could I do with that time? The other three weeks? Being that I don't have a lot of free time, it's time for me to spend with my wife, to see my aging parents, to get some rest. And so that's kind of where it is. What else can you do with that high value time? And while supplementing is a profit center, there's always this debate on, well, it's easy, you should do it yourself. The counterpoint to that is it's not that easy. It's time consuming. It's complex. And while you should know how to do it and potentially do some yourself and Balance and larger firms like us will send files back to you that you can't handle yourself. There are better things that your staff can be doing with that time to drive more revenue and more profit. And what we're really doing at Balance, at Balance Claims and some of the other top business process outsourcing, supplementing firms is taking administrative minutia off of your plate. So you're focused on things that bring revenue growth and client satisfaction into your business.

Yeah. It's why contractors will tend to bring this in house sometimes. As far as I know, we were the first contractor to ever do it this was back in 2006. No, before that. 2000. May go back in time 2002. In 2002 we took 2 of our sales reps who were amazing at getting great revenue on each job. They weren't the greatest salespeople. You know, they did okay, but they, but every job was like high value. They work it out with the insurance company. Boom. That would be great. So how about the two of you come inside, do that. We'll let all these sales guys go sell and you just handle that process for them. Insurance enough. It was great. It was so great. I went, man, this is actually a great business model. Why don't we do this for other people? Then I learned that I didn't really like all that administration stuff. So that wasn't the right thing for me. But a guy like you and a guy like Eric, that's your, that's your sweet spot. You guys love.

We run a services company and that what you just described is the reality. People should have a department in their house in their company that handles this. Really what it is is insurance billing. Okay. So I like to a lot of contractors, hey, I need a supplementing company or I got who's a great supplementer. That's not a good solution. One great supplementer. How long did those salespeople want to continue doing that job for you?

So my two supplement people loved it. I picked the right people. It was great. They did a great job the entire time. It was the same too always. So it worked out really well for us. But if one got sick, if one had a baby, if like whatever is you're down, you didn't have somebody to do that thing because there was nobody else to back them up. Where using a third party service, whether it's you guys or anybody else, any, anything else it doesn't like, we use the third party service to do a lot of our graphic work and, and some of our video work and stuff like that because they're great at it, number one. And I don't have to do it.

It gives me another good example is payroll. Most people are using a full intuit, full services payroll or paychecks or ADP or QuickBooks payroll to do that. And you know, to your point, it's not always scalable. It balances a services company. It takes people to do what we do. Now we're large enough that we do attack it with people processes and systems. And that's very important. And we're always looking for more automation because we want to delight our customers, be Able to do what we do better and faster and provide good customer service. But it takes bodies. So the reality is when you're handling 10,000 ish files a year, like we are across, you know, 800 and some odd clients, 250 to 300 are active at any one time and there's some seasonality, don't get me wrong. But it requires humans to do it. No matter what type of automation and improvement in the workflow and the throughput in our systems that we're doing, which is constantly evolving. We're a customer services company and you're dealing with an administrative back and forth with insurance carriers. And we're, we're operational in all 50 states. Last year we had active supplements in 42 states. All of these states have different regulations and compliance. We have a team of lawyers, many of which Jim knows that help support. Karen was just here last week, right? We went out to dinner with her Friday. It's complicated billing administration. I liken it to something most people can relate to is the medical billing third party administrator. Most doctor's offices at scale, it's the same thing. They have to bill your insurance company to pay for the surgery, the preventative care visit, the what, what have you. And there's a discussion about that bill and the doctor's office third party administrator, the value there is, that's all they do all day is provide those estimates and the administrative back and forth with the healthcare insurance carrier so they're able to get the pricing where it needs to be. So the customer, in this case the human that has a healthcare issue is happy with their medical provider and they get a win a savings. It's the same thing we're doing at Balance, essentially making sure that all the I's are dotted, t's are crossed and the file is moving at the business understanding that your contractor that you need with your time value of money and it's different for every contract and we can talk a little bit about that like when you.

Let's come back to that. I want to talk to you about a couple of things. I want to talk to you about the time savings administratively, what that really means, this supplement versus administrative and then also want to talk to you about compliance. But we, we got to pay the bills. So we're going to, we're going to bring in one of our amazing sponsors and we'll be right back. All right.

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Another great couple commercials from our sponsors. Sign, post and get the referral. Both really great tools for contractors. Troy, we're talking about this concept of administration and supplement. You said something really interesting to me. You said if you're looking for a supplement company, you're looking for the wrong thing. And so there's, there's this idea that this supplement company, their whole job is to see if they get you more money, right? And so then you run into this compliance thing. Are you starting to act like an adjuster versus a, versus a administrator? So can you kind of dig into that a little bit what those differences might be and what those, what those look like?

This is a great question. And contractors need to really be aware of this and understand what the Home Improvement Contractors act, what's called HICAA regulations, may be in their state because usually your third party administrator is going to be indemnified and it's on you, the contractor. And there's some buzz terms that are out in the marketplace, especially in the last few years. Many contractors are familiar with the terms UPPA and UPPL stands for the unauthorized practice of public adjusting and the unauthorized practice of law. Public adjusters, lawyers have to be licensed in the states they practice in, very much like a doctor or a pharmacist would need to be. And there's regulations around who can perform adjustment or talk policy with insurance claims. You hear me when I speak about supplementing. Choose my words carefully. Balance is a larger organization in this niche. We're not adjusting insurance claims. We're providing administrative services to contractors, general contractors, primarily in the roofing, water remediation and fire remediation. Sectors and the commercial and large loss sectors where they're outsourcing administrative services to us. You need to be cautious on how you're representing that if you're going to be in house estimating and supplementing department. And we see a lot of contractors get in trouble for this. So we could do a whole show just on this. I will tell you, Balance is very compliant and you can rest assured we're going to stay compliant, especially in some of the trickier states. And I'll just put them out there. Texas, Florida, Montana, Indiana are just a few of these states. And you need to be careful on how you're representing, what you're doing on your website, on your contract paperwork. You should have an attorney in your state who understands these regulations. If I could recommend one on this podcast, I would recommend Karen Ensley. You can find her quickly on Facebook. Ensley Benitez, Law so you need to understand what these regulations are, what you can and can't talk about related to policy, someone's property owner, insurance policy, what, what type of advisement you can and can't give, what words you can use, especially smaller supplementers, freelancers out there. This is an issue and it brings a lot of bad. Now, listen, some of the insurance carriers just want to not be nice as well. So there's two sides to this, right? And there's bad actors everywhere. We're very involved at Balance and we're founding board advisors of the American Policyholder Association. We take it very seriously. We are not here to just gouge the insurance carrier for as much as money as we can get out of a claim and adjust your claim for you. It's not what we do. If a claim needs adjusting, we will be, we will notice that we're going to be providing administration for you. And what you need to be mindful of is what are some actual very tactical things you can do in your business as a contractor, whether you're supplementing in house using a business process outsourcer like Balance claims, or have a hybrid model to give yourself the best success in this part of your business. Because most insurance claim projects at the property and casualty level do need to be supplemented. We do see a lot of contractors out there. They're not the right client for Balance. Typically they just want to stick it to the insurance carrier. Carrier. We're not looking to get into that. Okay. We're looking to provide ethical, compliant administrative services in the area of construction project, estimating in the language that the insurance carrier speaks, and then customer service to a contractor under their brand. Just like the insurance carrier might use a BPO in communicating and explaining the construction principles of that project and justifying the costs to the insurance carrier so that project can be billed out accurately in all parties made whole. Okay, so that's what supplementing is. The most important thing you can do as a contractor is make sure that you are managing your property owner about this process on the front end. That's very important. People ask me, hey, what's the best. The first thing I need to do, you need to be explaining in your sales process and making sure your team of salespeople, project managers and office staff are properly trained in the states you're active in and understand the importance of assisting the homeowner with their understanding of what the supplement process is, why an xactimate estimate is produced or a simsol or a symbility estimate, whatever estimating you're using for an insurance project and that what items may be missed or what the certain costs and things that need to be supplemented for and why. So they understand that they, the property owner, the policyholder, are the only ones, other than like a licensed public adjuster or lawyer that they would have to hire who are allowed to discuss that policy and have the power of the policy on their side to talk about it with the insurance carrier. So they are your best ally.

That's a. That's a key point, Troy. Like, I try to get this across to contractors all the time. The only people that can legally argue about their policy is the policyholder, the homeowner, or a PA or an attorney. That's the only people that can argue about your coverage. Now we can discuss scope like, hey, this is what it's going to take for me to do the work.

Principles of the job, right?

Hey, this is what I need to do the work according to this project and everything that goes along with it. But we can't argue that you have to cover it because of whatever reason.

Trust us, folks, there are insurance carriers out there in certain states that are always going to try to like, say you're doing. We get letters from them all the time, right? And we just refer them to our attorney and have everything documented and recorded and we train our people. But. But Jim is right. Many people don't read their homeowners. I just got my homeowners insurance policy renewal last night in the mail. Okay. Now I knew it was coming. So it's our renewal time and we use Erie, my insurance, my property and cash with the insurance through Erie. I happen to love Erie. Some people don't. Whatever. We have great property insurance, my wife and I and I understand the policy as the property ownership. Right. A lot of people don't. You have to be very careful as the contractor and we've seen a lot of contractors get into hot water on this because they are representing themselves in their marketing or on their contracts or in their sales approach as insurance claim experts and that they are going to handle the insurance claim process for you.

In many states, if they use the word advocate, be your advocate with the insurance company. You can't have that stuff on your.

Be a. No, no. Yeah, we could spend a whole call on that. First thing you need to do is help your customer understand your role and the process and what supplementing is and why you do it. And that it's an administrative function of making sure the construction billing is done accurately so their property per code roof system warranty pre damage conditions is returned to like kind and quality the way it was. Okay. Second thing you need to do this tactical you can implement right now in your process is have a system for effectively documenting and collecting the evidence with photo or video and then drill that system into your team, whatever model you have. If you're a smaller company, you might be where Jim's at, where you are still doing this yourself and it's sitting on the responsibility of your sales team members. Then as you grow you might transition as Jim described, to selecting some of those better individuals or hiring an individual specialist, a supplementer or administrator who sits in your office and your shared services front or back office and does all the paper shuffling of your estimating and supplementing. So you they're fluent in xactimate or a few people are. And so your salespeople are selling. We see a troublesome model where customers don't transition and it's hard to work with an outsourcer if your outsourcer has to try to keep your five salespeople who are managing all of the supplements on their files like up to speed on what's going on with them. Especially if you don't have like a CRM like an ACCU Links or a job Nimbus for example. Right. So effective documentation, photographic evidence. You should be using a tool like Company Cam, right. Which allows you to have an app on your phone that your project manager, your salesperson, whoever's doing that damage assessment can easily and quickly document the damage to the house or the commercial property. It's organized up into a cloud. Your third party administrator BPO like balance claims or your in office staff immediately have access to that so they can quickly have what they need to start drafting an xactimate estimate, which is the common language most insurance carriers are going to speak. Right. And a lot of what we do at balance, I'll tell you, 1500 or more of our files every year, estimate only, where we're just doing the estimate and we're supporting other people that might be a general adjuster, a public adjuster, an attorney. Because again, we're not adjusting claims, we're doing admin. Right. For them. And if it does require public adjusting, we're going to refer you maybe to somebody who can do that compliantly in the state you can get your property owner in touch with.

Yeah. So you're administering, in other words, you're pushing the paperwork through, following a process and a flow that I don't have to do as a contractor. But you're also, you're also keeping an eye on it too. Like you're seeing what's coming in and.

Keeping them in the loop and you're.

Noting like, hey, that's a thing that should be done according to the construction of that particular home. Like maybe they missed open in cornices or something like that. Right. Or gable in cornices. Do you guys catch things like that?

And well, we're always learning too. I mean that's a two way street, you know, and so we're not know it alls over at balance. We're good at what we do. We've been doing it for a long time and we have a lot of experience, no doubt. But we're learning from every customer. And every customer has a certain way that they install roofs with the crews that they use in their geography. They have relationships of nuance with the field adjusters or the desk adjusters that they have to interact with time and time again. And it's very important for us as a third party administrator, as a business process outsourcer to understand that. Right. So we're able to represent their brand because everything we're doing, we're doing as an agent to them. I mean we're an outsourced administrative services company. Almost no different than like if you're hiring a staff augmentation resource to come work in your office to do any other admin for you. So we get educated. And here's the takeaway on this to what Jim's saying is in many of these states we've worked hundreds and thousands of files over the course of years. Right. So we're able to bring that intelligence to bear. Well, we're not crossing over people's confidential information that experience to bear on recognizing. And we also know typically at a supplementing level that is without it getting escalated to a public adjuster, an appraisal situation or an attorney, what most insurance carriers are going to approve construction principle wise in a certain amount of time. And we talked about the time value of money. It's very important for us to understand where you are because I use the lawn mowing analogy. When I mow my lawn once every month, I might do it perfect because I'm doing it for like enjoyment. It's, I'm not doing, I'm out in the sun, I'm hanging out, I'm having a coke or a beer or something, you know, and I'm, you know, doing that. So it's immaculate. But I might take five hours to do it, you know, versus someone else doing it. My resource for that, who does a great job, does it an hour and a half and, and it's excellent. No one would notice any difference.

So. But he's got the experience, he's got the tools, he's got the know how and it might not be lootly perfect, but it's so close it's worth the time you get back.

Yes. So is it worth drawing your, your residential thirty thousand dollar roof and some siding repair job out for an extra three weeks for just to get you an extra 600 bucks? No. Right. Sell another job and move on. Okay. And so we have a lot of clients who get that and they outsource everything to us. I'm not going to get into naming our client base here, but some of the largest contractors in the nation at different areas of their growth curve and we have others that we see spikes of their workload at different times of the season and we have to be able to adapt to that. Each one of them needs something different. We have account managers at balance. So like at a larger BPO like us, it's not that like I'm not doing your supplements. Okay. That's important. No, I own the business and I'm striving to learn from more and more every day and work on my business, not in it. Now there's some of that, don't get me wrong, I own the company, I care about it. Right. But my job is to make sure our estimators, our supplementers, our account managers who are talking to our clients all day and relaying that information in our systems and theirs are doing what our customer wants done or telling them. Oh no, maybe you should think about it this way and trying to delight them. And we send a lot of files back that might not justify our cost. We're a business, not a charity, so we charge money for what we do at balance and we're the premium provider in the space, so we're not the least expensive option for you, but we are the most compliant option and the most ethical option. And the thing to note is we want to learn your dance steps and work with you inside of your systems. And if your systems or processes need improvement or you need coaching, we're vertically integrated with the other leading vendors in the space. Whether it's Contractor Coach Pro or, or Sumoquote or some of the other sponsors. We're going to make recommendations on tools that can improve your business so you can grow. Right? But we have to understand what you're trying to accomplish and where you're at and your needs are going to evolve. As a contractor. When you're just starting out and you're a solopreneur and you're in that sub million dollar to maybe 1.5 million dollar range and it's like just you and you don't have any W2 employees yet or one and it's your relative, you need to focus on sales and production and collections.

I tell those guys the third party, this part of it all day long and your brand.

But then we have a lot of these clients all around the country who have been with our clients for years and they go through these cycles. We're not not ignorant at balance. We want to, we train people how to mow their own lawn with our Art of the supplement brand. We know that they're not going to want to mow their lawn all the time. Okay, that's part of it for sure. We're running a business, but by helping them know how to do it, they can hold us accountable. They know what we're doing better. And as they grow, as that company then is at $3 million and has three W2 staff, so you've got the owner, an administrator, a sales manager and you still have some 1099s and you're outsourcing production, then you can start. You should maybe be bringing some portion of this in house. You might have us estimating everything because you don't have a skilled xactimate estimator. But some of the supplementing can be done on your own and you might say you might increase your profit center and your acumen there and then you'll grow again and you get into year three and four and you're in that five to seven to ten million dollar range and you're getting into multiple markets. Maybe you go chase a storm and you're also headquartered in like Kansas City and you don't know that new market that stretches you out. Then you're doing 30% of this in house, 70% of it's getting outsourced. We need to be able to do it the same way you're doing it. And it needs to kind of meet in the middle in the same systems. And then you grow again and you're in year five and six. We have some of these clients been with us the whole time. Now. They're $20 million companies, some of the largest in the nation.

I want to bring up a few things like this is one of the things that reasons I wanted to have you on is you have some unique things about you that make you one of those things is your account specialist. You have these account managers that they're not supplementors, they're not estimators, they're people there to communicate and take care of that client and service that client. And most of the people you deal with in this space, it's direct one to one that they're your supplement or they're your estimator, they're your accounts, but they're all of it wrapped up into one and they don't have time to do all of those things. And so for you to, to be wise enough to go, hey, our clients need some special handholding and that allows you to learn about your client. Because one of the things you said earlier that really like clicked and I hope people didn't let it pass them by. Would you get to know your clients? And some of those clients have some really strong relationships with those adjusters out in the field, the insurance companies that they may do work through and with, through their agents and those type of things.

Again, you don't want to piss these people off. You don't want to make enemies of them if they don't need to be made enemies of.

Yeah, if you're out there savaging the insurance company to get every last little dime you can out of them and spread it out over another four, six, eight weeks to try and get 500 bucks, all you're doing is number one, your time and money value quotient is not good. You're losing money, you're not making money on that. And the other side of it is you're making somebody very angry that the next time that you meet them they might just go, you know what, that's borderline.

Or they Flag you in their CRM.

Yeah. And for sure this is very important.

And this is the difference between us and some other. We're not the right fit for everybody. And I have some great friends that are competitors and we collaborate with them. I have quarterly calls with several of them. We work together. We understand balance is the Walmart of supplementing. Right. So it we have our way and we invest in significant overhead. We have 42 W2s is not in it. Okay. And we have. Jim, you've been to our office, right. And we have what, 17,000 square feet of office space. Now we have two other companies and American Contractor are the supplement. But the takeaway is we chose to organize our business in a corporate structure that's departmentalized but centralized. That's the background Eric Kepler and I come from. Okay. That's what we knew. And we came into this market to solve a problem of giving contractors adequate access to national best in class shared business process services that we saw were not available to them. But the other side of the fence, the insurance carriers had. Okay, so there's a lot of independent adjusting firms and third party administrators that service insurance carriers and they do very similar things to what we do in 2011, 2012, 2013 that did not exist for contractors. There were a few supplementing firms out there at that time. Two of them that we're close friends with are still around. My good friend Kevin K. And my good friend Greg Marthaler. SFY and Scope and Scope pros. Right. Are a little bit different business model than us. We want to provide customer service and account management. So we do have a sales team in a hunter and farmer model that has five people in it in addition to owners. A management structure that these folks are just working with our customers, whether they're new in implementation or long term clients all day in a B2B relationship. We've got a seven person in house, what we call shared services team. Now. They're administrative professionals that are the real value in what we're doing is taking the administrative workload off of your company so you can focus on construction. I don't know how to put a roof on a house. Now I understand about it because I work in this space, but you don't want to see Troy Clymer out there trying to put shingles on, tear shingles off, or figure out how to repair anything because I'm not good at that. You put me in front of nine monitors and some spreadsheets and some processes. I'm good at that. Right. But what we're Good at is doing all the admin in your systems for you. You work with balance. You go and you sell a job. You in your sales process, explain to your customer the process of what you're estimating a supplementing team does. You document it effectively. You tag us in your CRM, we take it from there. We come up into your CRM, we're in your ACCU links with you. We extract all the information, the measurements, the original insurance paperwork, the photographs, the damage assessment, your notes on the job. We beg you for what's missing. We take all of that, produce an xactimate estimate if that's the type of estimating required, and manage it back to you right in your system. All while you're out working on selling more jobs or building roofs or doing water remediation in Texas. Right. And you approve that estimate. We handle the administration of submitting it properly to the insurance carrier, following through to make sure they got it and then doing the annoying customer service back and forth in email and phone calls of making sure they get it because it's a pain in the butt. I mean our supplementers are like just supplementing. They're not estimating, they're calling into insurance companies 800 numbers or whatever. The team is at State Farm, team 66 and this at Allstate we have ones that are great at working with Allstate and Safeco and usaa and we have intelligence around that and we communicate with it doesn't mean outsource. Like I need to forget about it means somebody else is doing the annoying stuff all day that I don't need to be doing. So I'm not trying to like argue or discuss something on the side of the road in my truck outside of my next appointment that's frustrating me. Your supplement department just handles that for you at balance and communicates it back to you. Does it mean that we always do it perfectly? No. We have humans that work for us just like humans that work for you. And it is a body shop type atmosphere. What, what we are going to do is do our best to provide good customer service to you and right our wrongs. I want people to understand that we bring on a lot of new clients and you see a lot of stuff on Facebook these days about supplementing and everybody's the greatest supplementer all the time and never makes mistakes. I'm here to tell you, like we make a lot of mistakes all the time and we're in the business of customer service.

So I think everybody gets what we do. Now I got three more Questions for you that I want to ask you in just a second. I got one more. We got to pay the bills and all that other good stuff. Amazing sponsor. I think you might know who this sponsor is. I want to go ahead and queue that up right now. And we will be right back with those three, like really key questions about.

Troy Climber 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 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 successalanced claims.com or you can reach out to me directly. Ricky Harmon at 317360-0903. Talk to you soon.

So I figured we had to, we had to bring Ricky in here and have him do a little talk. Save you guys for last. We really appreciate you sponsoring us by the way. It's a good mutual relationship that we have. And that's really kind of what I'm hearing from this is you are the relationship king. Your biz dev background, all this. So you like connect with everybody instantly. Like you said, you came into this industry and you got to know everybody like right away. It was really, really fast, fastest I've ever seen and you continue to do so. But I see that bleed into your company. Like the reason you have account managers, the reason you have a sales team, the reason why you've segmented out people to do what they're great at is because you want to keep those relationships, you want to build on those relationships and I think you've done a great job of it. So I got three questions for you that has nothing at all to do with claims or anything like that. So question number one, what is your greatest achievement other than getting married to amazing Becca?

Well, that I would say that. And man, no family.

So no family stuff. Just your greatest personal achievement.

No family stuff. Right. You know, I would say and this is something I'm very proud of, it's not easy and very few people, I'm not young and I'm not too old. Right. Middle age. But very few people come out of business ownership what I would say unscathed. Right. And my relationship with my business partners and my staff and our vendor partners I'm incredibly proud of. It's something that comes natural to me and for me it's very important because I'm a good person. Right. And I want to help people and please people. And so, you know, I've got like five primary partners. Eric Kepler and I've been working together for like 20 years and if you know us, we're like polar opposites, you know, and we're still friends, very good friends, you know, and trust me, we debate things with the best of them. Right. And so we're running a multi million dollar eight figure organization now and it's stressful. Right. In a complicated industry. But I'm very proud of that. Right. The ability to still have genuine friendships and a good culture. And I think it balance one of the things that we do exude and I'm very proud that it survived last year digitally because I'm in my home office today and we're just segging, we're in Indiana. So it's like there's still an executive order around how many people we can have in our office space. You know, we want to get back in the office. But it's right now I'm in the office Wednesday through Friday and I'm at home Monday and Tuesday. And we have people on around Robin and it's not easy to be friends with everybody that you work with and business is business, so. Right. But I do still consider Eric Kepler, Josh Roseboom, John Dye, Zach Mannering his my primary business partners at Balance to be some of the best friends that I have. Right. I know their families. We genuinely like each other. We might argue and debate things like brothers and sisters, but we're not like personally mad at each other afterwards. And there's a division of labor there and the same thing with our culture. So if I have to keep it in the business realm, that's something that I'm incredibly blessed to have and proud to of it.

That's an amazing achievement because it's not easy. I've had partners before, some of those good situations, some of those not so great situations. So to be able to say that this far into it, that's, that's pretty awesome. All right. Question number two. What's the greatest single piece of advice you've ever gotten from a mentor that you use to this day?

That's a tough one, You know, And I've got some good mentors. I really do. You're one of them. The greatest single piece. This sounds so cliched, but if you know me, you'll know that I struggle with this. And I do. I get this a lot, right? Because I tend to kind of move fast through things, but it's slow down to speed up. Jim, you say that to me a lot. And you have slow down to speed up, you know, I think. And I'd put in there, like, trust and delegate more. This is very hard for people who are founders and owners who do still have to work in the business. Right. Like, I of the ownership group, at balance, I'm the one who works on the business the most. But we're 40 people, so it's not like we're some huge company. Right. I mean, I still work in the business. I mean, we're launching a new ERP CRM now we're leaving one we've been in for a long time, seven years. And so there's a lot of data and processes, and so it's not easy. And, yeah, I've got to trust other people because we're at the point now where it doesn't matter if it works for Troy. It matters if it works for our new hire that starts three, two. And the person who's worked for us for six months, you know.

Yeah, the whole. The whole slowdown to move fast. It's a hard concept, especially for a type personalities, founders, high energy folks, especially right now.

And you do. There's a lot going on in the industry right now. And there is this. You and I are very involved industry personalities. Right. We kept this about BPO and supplementing, but the industry, like, it almost. It was. It was kind of nice. My business boomed last year. We had a lot of success, but from, like, March through October, there was no outside distractions. Like, the industry was on pause. Okay. And now there's this, like, spaz going on of everybody trying to make up for, like, lost time. And it's the art.