Roofing Expertise = Digital Content (with Phil Risher)

The average Google search has 4 words. AI search has 347. So it's not just about likes and shares, it's about training large language models on your business so that way when someone asks a question, it knows that you're the subject matter expert.

You're listening to The Roofer Report, the ultimate podcast for roofing professionals, business owners, and entrepreneurs. Get insider access and hear about the highs, lows, and tales of triumphs from thriving business owners. Brought to you by Roofer, hosted by Pete McKendrick. Hey everybody, welcome back to The Roofer Report. I'm your host, Pete McKendrick, coming off of a trip to RoofCon here to kick off 2026. It's been really interesting to see how the industry is evolving and where the focus is right now as far as contractors in the industry and development as far as tech has been. That makes for a really great conversation today with Phil Risher. Phil is with Flash Consultant. We'll get a little backstory here on Phil and then we'll dive into it. Tell us a little bit about the business there, Phil.

Yeah, for sure. So when I came out of school, I was working I was working at Enterprise Rent-A-Car and I went through their management trainee program. I learned how to run a local service business. So I was running an Enterprise branch, about $3 million, getting paid off the bottom line. And I read "Rich Dad Poor Dad." He said, "You need to learn how to sell." So I went into the corporate office at Enterprise and I sold fleet management services to home service companies. So $10 million home service business, $100 million home service business, I was selling them fleet management services. At the same time, I started a blog about personal finance and I was featured on Forbes and Yahoo Finance, CNBC. I learned how to do SEO and websites and all this kind of stuff. One of my clients at fleet management was a $3 million home service business, and him and I hit it off really well. I ended up quitting my job at Enterprise and I actually bought a school bus and I traveled around the country and I was creating content and learning how to like make a brand, do SEO, get traffic to a website, convert it into leads. And when I got back from that trip, the client that was at $3 million, he said, hey, I need someone to come and help me grow my business. I've been stuck at $3 million for 3 years. I don't know what I'm doing. Can you come and help me grow? And when I went there, all my worlds collided. My experience of running a local service business, getting paid off the P&L, and digital marketing of getting people to my website, converting them into leads and subscribers. And his business went from $3 million to $4 million in 12 months, $300,000 and $900,000 in profit. And I was pushing so hard to grow. He was making $1 million a year and he's like, you know, EBITDA. And he's like, bro, leave me alone. You're fired. Go help other people do this and you can call your company Flash Consulting. So he named my company, got me a couple clients. He was my first client, and that's how I started the company 7 years ago.

Oh, nice. Very cool. Okay, I got to ask you, how cool was it traveling the country in a bus?

Yeah, it was sick. It was literally just me and my dog traveling around the country. I was out for a couple of months. You know, just doing hikes. And I would— so I was blogging, right? Creating content. I was like influencer before influencer, but I would go into different news stations and be like, hey, I'm coming in my big blue bus. Like, would y'all want to interview me? You know, get some press and stuff. So it was really fun. Great time. I think it actually prepared me a lot for business ownership, like being solo for months and having these like battles, you know, by yourself that us as business owners, we experience that. Sense of like no one understands what's going on. Living very frugally, right? Like, especially when you bootstrap a business and you don't have a lot of money. So I learned a lot of stuff from that trip. It was really fun, but there was a lot of things that was like tough about it as well.

So it was good.

Yeah.

Oh, I can imagine. Yeah. Especially completely alone. Right. Like I can imagine that you run into challenges every day when you're out there on the road. Yeah. We've actually talked about doing something like that. We always thought it would be super cool, you know, like Take the kids for a summer, load them in a bus and like, go travel, right? So that's pretty cool, man. I like that. So let's talk a little bit about Flash. Like, what do you guys do? Just give first people maybe that are listening that, you know, aren't familiar with you guys, haven't heard of you yet, who you cater to, like who your sweet spot is for business.

So that business, we went from $3 million to $4 million. He was making $300,000 to $900,000, making $1 million. Like, dude, leave me alone. That whole story. So I then go to become a consultant and I still work with him and he goes from $4 million to $5 million the next year. And now he's making a bunch more money, but he's got all these headaches. And this was around 2019, 2020. So private equity is going crazy. So they're all knocking on his door and he's like, I'm not selling if it's not, you know, crazy multiple, whatever. So he finally got a good search fund guy who was interested in buying his company. We're really, really close. So he called me. He's like, hey, this guy reached out to me. Like, would you come to lunch with us and explain to him what we even do? So like, how did we grow this business? Like, what do we do? So I'm like, sure. So we go to this, uh, this was in Northern Virginia. We go to a restaurant called Lazy Dog. We sit down, it's a search fund guy, me, and then the owner of the company. And the search fund guy asked me 3 questions. He says, how do you get new customers? How do you convert them through your sales process from a lead to a sale? And then how do you retarget your past prospects and customers? These are the exact questions that he asked me of what we do. And I explained the processes that we do. So we have this thing called a flash customer journey where I took those systems and I turned them into a complete digital marketing framework. A lot of agencies that I experience, I would reach out to them, hey, we're slow, and it's like, spend more on ads, do more SEO, black magic and voodoo, fluffy stuff. So what we do is we do visibility. So we help people get new customers, and there's 4 ways to do that. We help them convert leads into sales, and there's 3 ways to do that. And then we help people retarget their past prospects and customers, and there's 2 ways to do that. And we build this entire system in their business. Our bread and butter is $1 million to $10 million home service businesses. Usually they're left behind by like big agencies and they're stuck in this middle ground of cookie cutter agencies that they have to try to piecemeal all the stuff together, return on ad spend, automations, all that. And then these high companies that focus on like $10 million+ agencies and we're like right in the middle spot.

Traditionally, right, in this industry, it is very tough for the smaller guys to find somebody to work with. That really invest the time in them because, you know, obviously they're small, right? So, and they probably have bigger customers. And then these guys get left kind of in limbo, a lot of them trying to figure it out on their own. Right. So it's cool. I like that you guys are focusing on that. I really like that you guys, you know, we talked about it just briefly here before we even started recording this, is that you guys are focusing on the data that they already have. Right. And I think that's something, like you said, when you talk to these bigger companies, a lot of times it's just like, okay, we can you know, we can attack with ad spend, we can attack with better SEO, but it's not like, okay, let's look at the data that you guys have and let's leverage that. And so you guys are really concentrating on that part of it.

It's literally the bread and butter of what we do. And we're going even further in that into AI. But, but basically I was at the home service business and I would say, hey, we have— we're shoulder season, we have no jobs on the book. I have 28 technicians. What are we doing here? And they— and every single time they say spend more on ads. And I'm like, well, don't you get commission when I spend more on ads? What's my return on ad spend data? How do I know that if I spend more on search ads, it's gonna work versus Yelp versus LSA? And they didn't have the numbers cuz they didn't use my CRM. So then I said, okay, I'm gonna build return on ad spend reporting in my CRM so that way I can make decisions. The problem is, is that businesses between $1 and $10 million, the owner's running around trying to do all this stuff and then they go to their marketing company, but they don't have the full picture and they just operate on gut feeling. If you have the data and you know what works, just do more of that. The other part to this, which is getting more involved with AI, is this, and this is a huge crux for a lot of businesses, me included when I was at the home service company, is that you have really smart people in your business, CSRs and salespeople saying really smart things. Then you have your marketing company that's using regurgitated ChatGPT junk over here with social media posts, blog posts, emails, right? And what you need is someone that takes all of your calls and transcripts and everything and builds a language model or some type of a platform where you take this information that's happening in your business and use it in your marketing collateral. And this is what we do. So it's not just data in your CRM, it's literally your business's whole ecosystem of data that's all fractured all over the place and use it for marketing stuff.

So you guys are actually feeding the marketing directly off of the message of the company itself.

Exactly. So like call scripts, transcript, take it, Turn it into a blog post that's optimized for AEO, answer engine optimization. Call strip, transcript, turn it into hooks for video content that we record with them. It's basically like, what are the real things that's happening that your customers and your smart people are saying? And use that. It sounds crazy when I say it, right? But it's like, we all know that your marketing company's going to ChatGPT saying, write a blog post about HVAC repair in the winter. Why should someone replace their roof in March? You know, it's like, this is not real, you know.

It's obviously much more targeted, right? It's much more pertinent that way than just being, you know, very, like you said, very kind of cookie cutter or general or something that came out of ChatGPT, right? And so this is obviously going to be much more focused. Let's touch on the AI piece, right? Because like I was just telling you, I'm fresh off of RoofCon. I've never seen a specific product flood the floor of a conference as fast as AI did. At RoofCon. I mean, no less than probably a dozen new vendors, literally shoulder to shoulder selling specifically AI around the top of lead funnel type of stuff. If you looked at the schedule of speakers, probably 8 or 10 sessions about AI, right? It's obviously top of mind for everybody. How do we leverage it? How does it make sense? Specifically, I think marketing is a huge piece of that puzzle, right? So how can we leverage it well You know, and then also like, what are kind of the myths of it? Like, what are some things that we should know about it?

Yeah, for sure. So in-home service, for us collectively, there's two types of AI. There's operational AI, right? Like answering services, AI automation inside of your workflows for all the different stuff. Proposals, estimate follow-up, AR collect, like all that stuff is AI. That's one part of it. The other part is AI search and AI systems that's happening, like ChatGPT search, AI mode Google, and it's completely two separate things. On my podcast, I interviewed Neil Patel, who's like the SEO OG. I have Marcus Sheridan on several times, and literally I drilled them on AI search and what do people need to do. And I think that there's a huge low-hanging fruit, like probably those speakers, a lot of them are AI processes and operations to tighten things. But most people are not talking about the change that's happening in search to AI search. And this is the big thing that people are going to get left behind because marketing agencies are dying. And what I mean by dying is they are going to be AI and automated out. And it's the home service businesses that's going to be left paying for junk because they're not using your real stuff. They don't know your return on ad spend stuff. They don't know your stuff. So all that to say, what can people do to prepare their business for AI search in particular is this. These AI platforms are built on large language models. Large language models learn based off of content that's out in the ecosystem. When I was in a home service business, and most people still think like this, is that content is just for likes and shares, and maybe someone that needs a new roof will click on something and turn into a lead. That's a very narrow way of thinking about this, because what I'm telling you is that it's not just about likes and shares and clicks. Last summer, 2025, Google now indexes all short-form content. If you were to type something in right at the top where it says pictures, videos, it has short-form content. So all content is now indexable on Google. So it's not just about likes and shares, it's about training large language models on your business. So that way when someone asks a question, it knows that you're the subject matter expert. So what we're doing as a company is we are positioning our clients as the experts by helping them leverage what they're saying on the day-to-day basis to create content in their business, whether that's video content, blog content or pages on their website, like a pricing guide, to be positioned for AI search. I think where a lot of people miss this is that they think it's the old Yellow Pages. I have the most Google reviews. If I just have more money to spend on Google Ads, I would be dominating. And that's the old way of search. The new way of search is shifting to AI search.

Hmm. Yeah, that's interesting, right? Even personally, like, I've essentially moved away from Google, right? If I have a question or I need to search something, I a lot of times go to, first thing I go to is ChatGPT, right? I'm going to ChatGPT, I'm asking it a question, letting it do the search for me, right? Because a lot of times I feel like it's bringing back a more thorough search, right?

Well, here's a crazy statistic. So the average Google search has 4 words, HVAC repair near me, roof repair near me. The average AI search has 347 words because it's a conversational type of search. Wow. Before people were searching HVAC repair near me and they're going through Google LSA, Google Search Ads, and they're trying to make the decision for themselves where now they're asking ChatGPT or AI mode, whatever, those qualifying questions. Well, who does it in this price? What happens if this thing goes bad? Who does this specific thing in my area? This is why we have to be educating these platforms on the business because it's not just searching through who has the most reviews or who's at the top. It's conversational in what you're saying. This is how people are shifting their searches.

Yeah, that's a super interesting stat. The thing about it too is that, like you said, if I go into Google and I put in roofers near me, or, you know, how much does my roof cost, it's going to kick me out that and that's it, right? And then I'm going to have to essentially figure out what the subsequent questions are, where ChatGPT is essentially going to lay them out. It's going to say, hey, do you want me to look at this next? And, you know, and then it becomes this like full-blown conversation, but it's feeding, almost like feeding me the next logical questions that I should be asking, right? So it's, you know, obviously it's leading me down the path, right? That I probably wouldn't go down if I just went straight to Google, you know?

Exactly. And I'll give you another mind-blowing one is this thing called Agentic Booking. So right now there is Agentic Booking option in Google Labs where you could turn this on and you could go to Google and say, find me an Italian restaurant for my wife and I to go to this Friday. When do they have available and what's the price points? It's going to go into OpenTable and it's going to find the pricing, you know, number of dollar signs and the availability at 5 PM whenever you told it that you want to go. And then it's going to come back to you and say, hey, here's a good restaurant here that has fettuccine Alfredo. That's what you asked for. And also they have an availability at 5 PM. Do you want me to book it for you? Imagine for home service businesses when it says, hey, I need to get my roof replaced. How much should I be paying for this thing? And who has availability to come to an estimate today. This is why you need a pricing guide on your website. You need online scheduling. Like all this stuff is shifting away from the user trying to figure out the stuff and just going straight to, I trust these platforms and give me the best solution for me.

Yeah, it's a, it's as if the day of the form fill out on the website is behind us, right? Like no one wants to go there, fill out a form and wait for you to call them back.

Yeah, exactly. Which this is, this leads more into the process side of things. So. The, the AI and automation process side of things is where these people are kind of picking up, hey, this is a big leak point in your lead nurture sequence, in your estimate nurture sequence. What I will tell you is maybe you don't want to implement a complete AI answering service of some sort, but here's a very low-hanging fruit opportunity. On the forms that someone fills out, set up a text and an email to go to them right away and ask a question, ask for a picture or something else. Like, even if you don't do any other AI or all this stuff, just have at least a text and email go out to them because you're probably not going to call them right away. Hopefully you do. But if it's midnight, you're not going to call them. And yes, the forms are going away, but right now it's— they're not just giving phone numbers. They're trying to make it easy to work with you. I think in the future it's just going to pull up your stuff right on the screen and it's not going to go to your website and make a decision. Also, it's going to try to centralize it into one hub.

Yeah, it's interesting, right? Because we see guys now trying to implement the AI answering service and things like that. So like Hey, if someone does call me at 10 o'clock at night and starts to ask questions, are they getting the answers that they need? And how far down that road? What's really interesting, I was talking to a contractor the other day who's working on something like this. And how far down the road do you go with that contractor, with that AI bot before you as a customer go, okay, I need to talk to a person. Like I'm not dropping, you know, $14 grand without having a conversation. Right. I mean, it is interesting. I think there is a time in the future where that we will get to a trust factor where we won't look for that human interaction before we just pull the trigger.

This is the biggest thing I can say about that. The known and trusted brands are going to thrive in this market, which is why content is not just likes and shares or an afterthought. It's truly how you build a known and trusted brand in your market and for these AI platforms, which is why you don't want just regurgitated ChatGPT junk. You want real stuff with real answers that your real people are saying, and you want to create video content that allows you to be the known and trusted brand that's indexed on the top. I used to be a numbers guy like a Neil Patel, like drive traffic to my site, convert the leads through. But time and time again, it's proving out that it's not just about that anymore. It's truly building a brand that people trust. So that way, I'm sure if you hop on a sales call, if you already seen a bunch of content from someone, it's much easier to be like, yeah, sounds good. I'll work with you guys. This is what you have to do in your sales process so that way they can spend $14,000 and they already know and trust you and it's much easier, less friction, and it's truly building the trust.

Yeah. I mean, I had a contractor on, Jeremy Simpson, and he was telling me that he had gone to a training where they were, they were talking some about something similar and they said 70% of the customers that come to your website today have already sold themselves before they pick up the phone and call you.

Exactly. All that they're looking for when they go to your website is they want to see that you don't have stock photos. You have real logoed up pictures. That is a legit company. They want to see maybe some reviews or something else, and they want to turn into a customer in under 10 seconds, like have some type of a call to action. But they've already done their research offline. They asked the Facebook group, they saw the reviews, they went to your Yelp, all that stuff. And then they're just saying, okay, let me just go check to make sure this thing's legit.

So if I'm someone who's listening to you today and I'm like, all right, I get it. I want to produce this content. I want to get, you know, I want to be the guy that they find when they go to ChatGPT and search. What type of content should I be producing?

Yeah, so there's a really good book on this from Marcus Sheridan called They Ask, You Answer, and he boils it down to 5 different categories, which is you need to have your cost one. So like, how much does it cost to get a shingle roof? How much does it cost to get a cedar shake or whatever? You know, like explain the stuff. Then you have this versus that. Does it make sense to get a metal roof or, you know, a different type of roof, whatever. Then you have like, hey, this top of the line thing versus this top of the line thing, like a product review. Then you have a customer testimonial, then you have best in class. And then the last one is elephant in the room, which is like, you shouldn't get your roof replaced in the middle of December when there's ice on your stuff, you know, or like things that's like elephant in the room that we got to address this big thing. So there are some themes there. We actually created a document of 52 content topics to help you rank in AI search. I can share it with you. So if you want to put in the show notes, you can. But essentially you want to be the subject matter expert and the authority in your space. So what we do as a company is we take the call recordings that happen. If you use call tracking numbers, which we do, we take those call transcripts and we run them to ChatGPT to ask the questions that our customers are asking. So take the call transcripts, turn them into hooks or content topics. Then we get on a call. We actually use Riverside and we get on a call like this and we feed them the hooks and then we work them through recording content and then we take it and then we cut it down into Shorts. But it's basically like you asked me about like what they should do. It's take your customers' questions and turn that into content. And if you don't know your customer questions because maybe you're running a business, ask your salesperson and your CS— CSR to write down a question they get every single day and send it to you, and then you'll have content topics forever.

I love that. Yeah. And I think that's a piece that's super overlooked, right? Like you're literally got content every day. Your customers are feeding you content. Take advantage of it, right?

This is the thing is that like us as, you know, home service, it's like we have technicians out in the field, we have CSRs in the office, we have the owner who's running around trying to do all this stuff, we have salespeople over here and all this stuff is happening, but it's disjointed. But then over here you have your marketing stuff and you need it all to work to your marketing stuff because that's the real stuff. You need to like pull it all together. I'll give you one other cherry on top for AI stuff, which I talked to Marcus about this too. And this is what we're doing as a business is that We talked about this known and trusted brand and people going to your website. I believe that in 2026, there will be AI avatars of businesses that are interacting with their customers, but also on their website. So hear me out on this. An AI avatar on your website that pops up as me, that has my knowledge base that you can interact with and talk with. So we already have this for my business where our team members can ask me, Phil AI Avatar, any question that they want based off of any podcast that I've ever done, based off any social media content that I've ever produced. So at any given time, they can get a real answer that also cites where it's from. So they can click on a video and watch it or click on SOP and look at it. We already— there's— this is already possible out here. The problem is, is that most businesses don't have the backlog of content because it's all in their brain. Or all happening disjointed. So what we're doing as a company is we're building the language model. We use a tool called NotebookLM with Google, and it's free. You could set it up yourself. We're pulling everything into a knowledge base. So then we have an AI avatar knowledge base that we can deploy in different areas. And when I talk about this, a lot of business owners are like, well, yeah, that makes sense. Imagine if I didn't have to answer a million questions and they could just ask my avatar thing and it would tell them the answer, you know? But they don't have the content to funnel into it. That's the biggest issue. And they're gonna get left behind if they don't have that.

That's actually super smart. That would actually be pretty cool. The catalog of content doesn't exist, right? So you've got to load that up first, right? Kind of download everything you have in your head.

Exactly. And this is what I'm saying, that it's not just content is not just for likes and shares. It's to train the large language models. It's to build this backlog of content for your business so that you can deploy it in the future, which is there's, there's no way that this is not happening. Like it's already in the rumbles of happening. And like, I mean, we're already doing it. A lot of businesses are already doing it, but home service businesses, they're going to get left behind and then they're going to catch up and they're going to see these other companies. And I believe that there's a huge, huge land grab with the big behemoth guys that have unlimited Google budgets that are just dominating Google. It's like Yellow Pages. They still believe that I don't need any content, I don't need to build any, you know, I'm just going to sit here and rank number one on Google for the rest of my life. It's not going to be that way. We're in a unique time where this is going to change.

I don't even really go to Google as much as I used to, right? Like to find something out anymore. So It's like the, you know, being ranked on Google may not be the best thing for you because that's not where people are searching for you anymore.

That's right. There was a recent report that came out from BrightLocal and it used demographics to see where people search for local things. And boomers were like 80% still use Google search. Then it was like Gen X is 70% Google search, millennials 65%, but then Gen Z was only 40% use Google search for local things. Right now they're looking for bars and restaurants, whatever, but they're— 26% of their local is from social media. They're on social media looking for local things and they are the next round of homeowners and boomers are going to be dying off. And this is the shift that's happening in the next 5 years and it's coming and people are going to get left behind because search is shifting.

Yeah. So you mentioned short form. Is it— is short form the key?

What I found is that to go and have someone do a full-on long-form content, you gotta have it like scripted out. You know, if you ever watch any YouTube videos, you don't want someone just sitting around saying crazy things. Like you're not gonna sit there and watch it for so long. So if you do a short form, you can do quick bursts of 10 to 30 seconds as if you're at a bar with someone and I asked you, Pete, hey, you know, what should I be doing for this? And you're just like, eh, da, da, da, da, da, da, da. And it's like pretty tight and succinct. So we found that short form is the easiest way to get the knowledge base out and also articulate in a manner that makes sense for people. The other thing that a lot of people are sleeping on is actual content on your website, because I'm not saying people are going to go to your website and read all this content. We already established that that's not necessarily the case, but all the content is being indexed on these platforms and you can take the actual words that your CSRs are saying and turn it into blog content. So we have some clients that they're like, bro, I'm not being on video. Like you're, you're silly. I'm not going to record anything. And so it was like, no worries. We can take, you can, you can say the stuff and then we will turn it into a blog post or some other type of asset. But the most important thing is that it's unique to your business. It's not something that has already been said. So it allows you to stand out as the expert. That's the biggest thing here.

So you talked about call to action, right? Once I get them to my website, right? Maybe they've. Search me up, maybe they use ChatGPT, my content comes up, they end up on my website. They essentially want to become a customer in 10 seconds, right? So what is the best types of call to actions to use? Like we talked about the form fill out really not cutting it anymore. What could we potentially replace that with? If you guys are familiar with Roofer, we'd have an instant estimator, right? The get a quote in 30 seconds. And the idea of that is essentially that like I'm profiling the customer, I'm getting their information in. It's feeding the top of my funnel for my CRM, but it also allows me to gain a bunch of information about that customer. So when I do finally pick up the phone or shoot a text or whatever it is, it's much more educated than it would've been if I just cold call someone who filled out a form.

Yeah, for sure. I just put out a video on this. So we had a client that they were generating 170 leads per month, and we added a couple things to their website and they generated 83 additional leads. And what you're talking about, like an instant estimate calculator, is one of them that by far you should have that on your website. Because when people go to your website, they want to know two things: how much is it going to cost and when can you do it? So if you have like online scheduling and some type of estimate calculator, like you're already ahead of the curve. I'll give you a couple other like secret sauce ones. So one is definitely have a chat widget on your website because people, one reason that they go to your website is they've done their research. They're like, how much does it cost? When can you do it? But Do you do this specific thing or do you do it in this specific area? And they're not going to dig through your website to try to find if you do this or whatever. They just want to ask a quick question to see if you do it. And you could turn that chat widget into a text as well. So it's not, you don't have to sit there and try to chat back with them, have them put in their information and text them, and then you can text back with them. So that's one that we see converts, but I'll give you the secret sauce one. And that is a lot of people hide promos. Off their site or inside of their copy. So if you did a promo for like $500 off a new roof or something, you need that to be a pop-up promo on your site. Imagine if you go to an e-commerce website and they have like, put in your email and get 10% off your first order. You need to have a pop-up with a promo. This works the best for most home service businesses because you're putting the promo offer right in front of them and taking their phone number and email right away. And we've seen that this impacts the businesses the most for sure.

Yeah, that's super smart. I mean, that most retail sites, right? If you go to their site, that's one of the first things that does mailing list, get 10% off, whatever it is, just put your email in here.

Traditional marketing companies will tell you don't do a popup because it's going to kill your load speed, which then you're going to rank less. And if you put a popup, your load, your page load speed is going to go and you're going to rank less. But here's the big caveat, which we already established was that people are already doing their research offline, then they're going to your website to work with you. They're not just clicking on the first one and your page load speed and your rankings. They're already making their decision and then going to your website. You need to give them a reason to give you their contact information. And that's the biggest change in that. It's not just like, oh, my page load speed's low, so then I'm not gonna rank as high. It's no, you gotta make it simple for them to contact you. Yeah. And I had Neil Patel on my show, the OG SEO, and I asked him this exact thing. He said, no, popups crush. We use popups on all of our sites, so you should do it.

That's a good one. I've never heard that one before. Makes perfect sense. I know scheduling, obviously now a big one, right? Like having the ability to allow the person the flexibility to schedule themself as opposed to being able to have to call and talk to someone in the office and do all of that. What's the best way to handle that? Like, as far as getting them the ability to just, maybe you have some products you could suggest or what's the best setup for that?

Yeah. So what I would say, like, if you're doing some type of remodeling, like you got to go on site, there's tools out there, LiveSwitch, for example, where you can do, you can do an estimate of some sort where it's like you don't have to fully go on site. There's other tools. Basically what it gets at is like, do you want to put a Calendly link up there where someone can schedule on your calendar to go out on site, or do you want to make it where they can schedule a time for you to do a virtual estimate is what it comes down to. So what I would recommend doing is if you want to do virtual estimate versus onsite, set up Calendly and then have all your virtual estimates and just like back to back to back to back, people can just schedule virtual estimates. Obviously there's, I would say Calendly is the easiest one when we talk about remodeling. There's other, some CRMs have integrated scheduling, but for bigger projects, virtual estimates crush and then onsite estimates as another option if people want. That would probably be my best take on it.

Let's talk about this because this is definitely something that I think strays from the traditional way of doing things in the roofing space specifically, is this idea of a virtual estimate and being able to get in. You mentioned LiveSwitch. Like we've had James on the show, this idea of being able to quote a job or at least give a general idea, get a general idea of the scope of the project without having to set foot, right? Like being able to potentially do the work. I talked to a guy just at RoofCon who does virtual adjusting. He literally uses, like, he Zoom calls in to walk the roof and then makes his determination based off of that, right? Like, he has the roofer literally Zoom call him, they walk the roof together, he can do all of his adjustments via the call, and he doesn't have to actually go to the property. So he's virtually adjusting, right? And so this idea that we have of obviously with roofing, it's different, right? If I'm an electrician, I got a problem with my hot water heater. It's very easy for me as the homeowner to stand there with my phone and show you those products. The first thing a roofer is going to tell you is no homeowner is getting up on their roof. And so how can we work around that? How does that work if I'm a homeowner, right? And maybe I do want to do a virtual adjustment. Maybe that's much more flexible for me. How does that make sense? How could we potentially implement that on the roofing side?

For sure. One thing that I would say is that it doesn't have to be the end-all be-all, right? It doesn't have to be like, I'm getting all this virtual estimate and then I'm going to produce an estimate right after this. I think that it's a nice step in the one differentiation process, right? Like someone fills out a form, it's like, hey, can we just hop on this quick call real quick? Maybe you could show me what it is. They don't have to know that you have to go on their roof and do all this stuff. It's a nice step in the right direction. Maybe they could go out there and zoom in on their thing and show you something. But at the end of the day, it's an opportunity for you to get face time with the client, right? They see your logo, they see, wow, this is different. No one else asked me to get on a virtual call, whatever that means. It also allows you to take the transcript of what's actually happening and feed it to your salesperson that's going to go out. It allows you to vet the client a little bit harder. You get a form that comes in, right? You talk to the person like, okay, is this going to go through insurance? What, where, what step of the process are you at with this? All of those things. It's much more natural on a virtual call and it's easier to talk to someone and it stands out initially. So I guess what I'm getting at is that I'm not saying you got to do this and then give them an estimate. It's a nice way to build a relationship with someone inside of your sales process to then tee up your sales guy when they go out there.

It's funny, we always stress at Roofr the speed to lead, right? It's a big— always been a big topic of conversation in the roofing space is like, how fast are you getting to leads? And one of the things that James talked about when we had him on was race to face, right? How quickly can I put my face in front of that customer to where now I'm already building that trust, right? I'm already developing that relationship. It might be a 2.5-minute phone call. There may be some nuggets of information in there that become crucial to the way my salesman approaches that appointment when he gets there. Like, I can tell you, I did it with James, right? Like, we, we played around with LiveSwitch. He sent me the text. I got on like I was the homeowner. And just in the natural conversation, he found out, you know, like the scope of the job. He got to see my property. Now, you know, if there's issues with access to the property, you know that we were hit with a hailstorm because I mentioned it in the call, like all of these things that, like you said, now we can feed all that into our AI. We can feed all of that into our sales guy potentially. Now we know whether we're— what we're looking at as far as like financing. These are things that we would have to probably ask multiple questions you know, over the course of maybe multiple texts or emails that now we're getting in a few minutes of a phone call. Right. And on top of that, like you said, now we're developing that relationship that we probably wouldn't have developed just by shooting a text or sending an automated email or something like that. It's serving multiple purposes. But I agree with you, you know, for a roofer, you know, the kickback obviously would be like, well, the roofer, he's not getting up there on the roof, so I really don't know what's going on. Yes, very true. You're still going to have to go out there. You're still going to have to do your own inspection. You're not going to take the homeowner's word for it. I get it. But there's obviously a very specific purpose to it. And I think like what you mentioned there can really set you up for a lot more conversions. I think if anything, it's only going to help bolster your conversion rate to have that established relationship. Thanks for all the information. I'm going to hand this off to my sales guy. He'll be there Tuesday because you scheduled, you already scheduled it as the homeowner. I'm going to feed him all this information and then he'll know exactly what to do when he gets there. Right. And it's obviously a much more smooth transition to the salesman. So yeah, I like it.

Yeah. And I'll give you one other thing. If price objections are, you know, things that come up for people, then the number one thing that you can do is establish why it costs more so people can justify it. Of course it costs more. They do virtual estimates. Of course it costs more. They do X, Y, and Z. Of course they cost more. And the more prongs that you can get in of building a brand that people trust, that's high quality, then you have less objections in the sales process. And this is one of those things.

I remember going to visit a contractor one time in Pennsylvania and he said, we're one of the most expensive in our market. And we're also one of the largest. And he said, you know why? Because we don't drop our price. We own it. Exactly. We own our price. He says, we go in there and we tell the customer. We are the most expensive and these are the reasons why we're the most expensive. And this is why you want to work with us. Price is not an issue. You're going to get the best quality work out of us because, right? And that's why we're more expensive.

Exactly. Our goal is not to be the cheapest, it's to be the best. So which one do you want?

If someone wanted to get ahold of you and see what you guys are about and talk to you a little bit about the company and, and see how you guys could potentially help them out, how do they get in touch with you?

Yeah, for sure. FlashConsulting.com. It's P-H-L-A-S-H-Consulting.com. There's about 7 levers inside of a business that we found that unlock growth for them. And, you know, set up a call with us. We can walk you through what those levers look like. If you're $1 to $10 million, like we're literally built for those types of people. Home service, $1 to $10 million. We have over 100 5-star reviews of people saying really nice things about us. We help people. It's what we're about and love the opportunity if we could help you out.

Yeah, absolutely, man. I love it. I love that you guys are leveraging the data, right? Because we Obviously being a CRM, right? We love the data. We love, we want everybody to load that data in there. And like we always say, you get out what you put in, right? So you want to make sure that your team is loading everything into that CRM. And this is a perfect example of why this can, it can really change the way you market if you really have a good handle on that data. So, man, it's been awesome. I appreciate you jumping on with us today, Phil. This has been fantastic information, I think, and the timing of it is great. I love Thanks for diving into the AI stuff a little bit. Top of mind for everybody right now. I can't wait to see IREs next week, International Roofing Expo. I can only imagine what the, what the floor will look like there with AI tools. So I'm interested to see that. But yeah, man, I appreciate you jumping on.

Yeah, appreciate you, Pete. Thanks for having me.

Reach out to Phil, Flash Consulting. Be sure to check him out. We deal with a lot of $1 to $10 million businesses here at Roofers. So for those guys that are listening, here's an opportunity to get some help with your marketing and get some guidance and get that content going, right guys? Thank you guys for listening, and we will see you next time on The Roofer Report. Thanks everybody. Hey everybody, thank you for listening. Check us out next time on The Roofer Podcast, but until then, be sure to like us, subscribe to us, and check out all our other episodes on YouTube and Spotify.