Scaling a home service business from 2.5m to 20m in 4.5 years with Randy Brothers

Welcome back to the show. I'm your host, Phil Risher. And on today's episode, we are diving into scaling a home service business from 2.5 million to 20 million in four and a half years with Randy Brothers. Thanks so much for joining us today.

Randy, man, I'm glad to be here, brother. Looking forward to it, my man. Thanks for having me.

Yeah, yeah, for sure. I was on Randy's podcast a couple days ago and it's just like I felt like we vibe so good and like I love the conversation that we had. So I'm excited for this one. So quick, quick bio. Randy's the founder and CEO of Elite Roofing and Solar, which scaled from two and a half million to 20 million in four and a half years. He now runs a consulting business called the Roofing Academy, helping contractors build sustainable companies. He's also an author of the best selling book Start It, Build It, Grow it, which is the contractor's guide to success. After navigating both explosive growth and difficult lean periods, he now dedicates 80% of his time to his passion of coaching and mentoring contractors to build businesses aligned with their core values. With all that being said, Randy, can you tell us this initial business. Two and a half million. How did you get to this point of owning this business? What was it? What did you do?

Oh man, Love it. So I want to say it was some intentionality, but there was also just, I was kind of forced into it because I had to survive, right. So I was blessed to get an opportunity to go to college, went to school, went to a business school. And, and through that I've always, you know, and people who know me like, you actually went to college. I'm not exactly like a studious type of guy. I don't love college or sitting still for five minutes, but went to school, studied business, you know, took as many entrepreneurship classes as I want. I always knew as a kid that I wanted to be an entrepreneur. I wanted to have my own business one way or another. And when I, during college is when, you know, you come to that, that, that point in life where you're like, I gotta like make a decision and decide like, what the heck am I gonna actually do? So at that point is when I really decided, you know what, I do wanna figure out how to run a business at some point. And I just, I'm a third generation contractor. I grew up kind of watching grandpa and dad and people kind of build things. And I've always just been drawn to construction and contracting. So I decided that that's what my path is gonna be. I was gonna figure out how to be a contractor. Originally, I wanted to be a custom home builder. And I thought that was kind of like the, you know, my ego driven way of being the top of the food chain when it comes to construction. Right? I'm going to be a custom home builder. And you know, back then, a lot of ego decisions, unfortunately, but that got me into it and I studied and I worked full time. While I was going to school, I went and interned for a construction company. I wanted to learn everything I possibly could about construction. So I spent years learning construction, learning design, learning to manage projects, learning how to build a house from the ground up, from the plan stage all the way to, you know, a certificate of occupancy, and learned a lot about that. And then school got out and I was working for a company and they had just bought a bunch of land and unfortunately they were kind of like, well, it's going to be a while before we have any projects for you to manage. I was a superintendent at the time, so. And I had built a lot of relationships along that journey. And I had a friend of mine call me, he's like. And he knew I kind of wanted to be, you know, at some point, go off my own. And he called me and he was like, hey, he did drywall and paint. So we had built a relationship. He did all my drywall and paint. So he's like, hey, man, why don't we kind of team up and, you know, we can start doing some basement finish remodel work. Like, you know me, I can handle all the drywall and paint. He's like, you can do the framing and the trim work and, and we can sub out all the trades and, and kind of start a little business off of it. And I spent about 48 seconds figuring out my decision, and here we go. So I went and somehow we bid the project and, and somehow landed my first one. And away my entrepreneurial construction career went.

Wow, very cool. So started with some remodels. Were you like, gcing residential stuff or was it commercial stuff?

What were you doing? When I went off my own, it was primary res, primarily residential. So I did. I got into a lot of basement finish in the area of country I was at. And you know, there was a lot of homes that got built over the previous handful of years, and a lot of them got built without basement. So it was a big market opportunity and a lot of basement finish remodeling, um, some bathroom remodels, some Kitchen stuff, but mostly there's a lot of basement finish. So I did. I started kind of focusing on that quite a bit for the first couple years. And. And the. The goal was to get to building custom homes, but, you know, I wasn't quite financially ready to be able to go there. Yeah, but that entire vision, the entire goal got closed real quick because that was right during the. If there's any of the. Any. Some. Any old dogs listening to this pod here, you know, this. I started in 2006. So, you know, fast forward two years to middle of 2008. You know, bank stopped lending, the market crashed, and people just overnight, the entire business model, everything I was trying to do just disappeared. Nobody was wanting to do any more. More remodeling work. They couldn't even get funding to do remodel work. And I was in a. I was in an area of the country where at the time they had the highest foreclosure rate in the country. So they had overbuilt, but way too many homes that overbuilt that market, that area. And it was a lot of oil in the area. So it was kind of all the, you know, the. All the rocks began to kind of fall down and the whole thing kind of the bottom dropped out of that whole industry, the whole market. So I had to kind of. I had to completely reset everything. Wow.

And so did you reset into roofing from there, like, or how did you get over to roofing and solar?

Well, so I kind of. Again, I stumbled into roofing. Roofing kind of found me. And I talk about this a lot when I'm on stages and doing things and coaching. It's like, I didn't choose roofing. Roofing chose me. Roofing found me. And at that time. So again, here's the takeaway for anybody listening to this. No matter what you're doing. I mean, even when I worked at Kentucky Fried Chicken, I made friends. I connected with my audience. I connected with the people that came in there and built a network. Like, you can never do enough networking and connecting with people. Right. So throughout this whole journey, I just connected with people, made friends, and got to know people, got to build trust with people, got to connect. So I seem like every time I hit a major roadblock, something would happen or I'd connect with somebody or reconnect with somebody that I knew in the past and, like, a new idea would happen. So through that journey, I was able to land a job as a superintendent for a fire and water restoration company. Okay. So that was kind of my first and only like real job post post college. And so, so I, they handed me a ton of projects. I was doing a bunch of superintendent, you know, project management, you know, doing fire and water restoration stuff. And through that though, is how I got connected with. They had an internal kind of supplementing department there. So, you know, it's two guys in there, good old boys just always talking about the good old days when they were traveling, working, working hurricanes and working. They were used to. They both ex adjusters that came on and start working for the construction company. So I learned a lot about that and, and through. And then by this time, what I, what I failed to mention is building my business. I leveraged everything personally, all my finances and put everything in my credit and tried to build this business. And when the bottom dropped out, I was left with a lot of debt and a lot of challenges, you know, so trying to build a business, you know, with, I mean, I didn't have silver spoon. I couldn't just call somebody and say, hey, give me money. It was you figured out or you don't, you know, and I had to figure it out. So I ended up having to go bankruptcy. I ended up going bankrupt throughout this whole process. But leading up to that, I took a job as a, as a fire and water restoration kind of superintendent. But it was not enough. I mean, I was making pennies compared to what I needed to get myself out of the hole. So I worked my way and I, you know, learned about what insurance adjusting was. And I was like, all right, that's it. I can, I can travel for a couple years. I'll go be an insurance adjuster. I'll make enough money to kind of get, climb myself out of this, this, this hole I dug myself into. And, and that was a good idea. So I upped and I moved to Texas and got a license as an adjuster and traveled around doing that a little bit. I did it just long enough to learn a lot, but also realize that, man, that lifestyle was not for me. I'm from Colorado. I love Colorado and my family. So I'm a major family guy. Like, I just, I needed to be around my people and, and, and traveling and being told what to do. Like, hey, you get 48 hours. You gotta be in this random town in this random state in 48 hours. And who knows how long you're there. Sounded appealing when you're desperate, right? But when I really thought about quality of life, I was like, wait a minute, whoa. What did I sign up for? So, yeah, that last the whole.