#047: Adam Sand | Roofing Business Partner

I'm Matt Reynolds and this is my podcast.

I can do the job, but running the business is quite difficult. What a lot of tradesmen lack, and I was probably one of them, is business skills.

I don't mind making mistakes. You learn from your mistakes.

Information is all around you in the minds of people that work beside you.

Welcome back to the Trench Talk Podcast. I'm your host, Matt Reynolds and my guest for this episode is Adam Sand. Adam is an online marketer, unlike many who operate in the trade space, because he actually owns and assists in running a successful roofing company, Sargent's Roo Roofing, out of Edmonton, Alberta, Canada. The idea of these discussions, for those of you joining us for the first time, is to go into the trenches of achievement and talk not with people who are orchestrating from some lofty perspective, but to those high performers who are actually in the trenches honing their craft. That has included guests from the worlds of business, sport and entertainment, all of whom are on the front lines doing amazing things. After Adam applied and perfected the 15 plus years of experience, he gained marketing in a variety of industries, which included building and selling an app for the sunbed and tanning salon sector to his company, Sargent's Roofing. Adam has since began helping other roofing contractors automate their business and marketing processes. His main focus is now his current venture, roofing business partner, where he is, as I just said, helping other roofing contractors. It's fair to say the marketing landscape has changed for every business owner across every industry. As Adam explains, just a few short years ago, most businesses had only a few easy marketing decisions to make each year, the main one being what size is my ad in the yellow page is going to be along with a couple of other local options like a newspaper for example. Then came the Internet and virtually unlimited opportunity. Adam and I discussed a ton of practical business strategies during this chat, including the future of trade businesses, what has changed in the website space, and how to climb to the top of Google so your customers can find you Facebook ads and how he has used them to grow his own own business, how tradesmen and contractors should use Instagram, simplifying and automating trade businesses, and of course, much more. To find out more about Adam, head to roofingbusinesspartner.com or you can track him down on any of the social platforms. If you enjoy Trench Talk, head to xrm.comaupodcast and opt in for the newsletter. We'll make sure you're notified when every new episode of the show is released and if you're feeling super nice. Please leave a review for Trench Talk on itunes or wherever you listen to your podcasts. Enjoy my chat with Adam Sand. Adam, thanks for doing this.

Hey, bud. No problem. Glad to be here. Thank you so much for the invite.

Now I'm in my office, Melbourne, Australia, right now. Where are you situated for everybody tuning in?

Well, after an adventurous day, I'm sitting in a hotel room at the Luxor in Las Vegas.

Very nice part of the world.

Yes, it's a very cool event for sure.

Now, I wanted to start with your take on the future of, I know your specialty is obviously roofing, but of the trade space. As we start to adapt more and more technology into our lives and into our businesses, how do you see it sort of playing or maybe what have you seen over the last couple of years in the changes in this space and then how do you see it playing out in the next few years to come?

Well, I mean, we've seen very little technological disruption in construction so far. And seeing how, you know, the bookstores have got upended by Amazon, everybody knows that story. And then, you know, five years ago, if you were a taxi operator saying that's never going to affect us, well, you know, they were wrong. And the hotels, I mean, you know, they're all, they're all losing 30% of their business to Airbnb. Yet construction is a multitrillion dollar business worldwide. And really there's nobody out there that has quite yet figured out the Uber of, or Airbnb of the construction business. And there's a couple out there like Pulse, that have, that have started to break some ground in that area. And I think that going as it sits right now, if you're in the construction business and you're not establishing your own brand, if you're just, you know, subbing out to developers, other builders, other companies, you're going to end up having to move over to be a worker for the Home Advisor or Pulse or whoever figures out how to be the Uber of construction. So I think that you've just seen a lot of the big established names are looking back 20 years ago and think, you know, the only two decisions they had to make. And I mean, this is similar from Australia to Canada, where I'm normally based out of in the States, they'd had to make two decisions a year. It was do I want to be a full page ad in the yellow pages or am I going to sponsor the TV Guide? Am I going to do a bus benches or am I going to do a billboard on the side of the highway. And they made those decisions once, twice, maybe a couple times a year, and that was it. And now those companies, when they were told two, three years ago, that's like, okay, so now you need to have a blog for SEO and you have to do Facebook and you should probably maybe look at Instagram too. And then now we're hearing that, oh, you got to do YouTube. And you know those people with Snapchat, they're going to have credit cards soon. You know, they're like, you know, they're taken aback. And it's created this. In 2013, you saw this massive, massive shift where some of the old guard got taken out by new dynamic companies. And I believe that 2019, with everything that happened with Google and Facebook and the senate hearings and all this election crap in the states and the privacy stuff that went on with GDPR in Europe, and everything that happened with Facebook and privacy, they've made so many changes that I've picked up clients this year because they were, you know, number one, organic. They've had their website for 15 years. They lost 90% of their traffic in a week and never got it back. So you're seeing, you know, huge opportunities and huge challenges depending on where you are and what size of company you are.

So, so how does someone lose 90% of their traffic and by extension, I'm guessing 90% of their potential clients or leads coming in? How does that actually happen? Like, what's happening in the background for those that are, like myself, who are less technically minded?

Well, it's really quite simple. So a lot of what used to be considered good SEO. So SEO meaning search engine optimization. So things that you do to your website to make you show up higher in Google, to rank higher or show up on the first page, certain things that used to get you there used to be just you want to jam your site full of keywords and you want to have as many keywords as possible and you want to have. There was a certain way of indexing your site. So you would have roofing in Melbourne, roofing in Sydney, roofing in Bondi beach, roofing in. I only know so many Australian cities.

I was gonna say pretty good.

You know, you would have a different chunk of your website for each one of those. And then you'd have blog posts going dating back to 2012. And Google, when somebody searched something like how to plumb in a basement in a house with no. Like, that was pre1980s, or how to convert a cedar roof to asphalt shingles. Those things would often. Google would often index and show a website who had a blog post from 2012, right? Yep. So, first of all, what Google's doing now is they're now starting to punish pages that have way too much content because. And content that's out of date. So a lot of these companies lost on that front. Another one is you used to be able to have good domain authority, which is what Google, you know, ranks. Considers as a ranking to get you up higher on. On. On their listings just based on how long you've been around. And they would overlook certain things like not having a privacy policy, not having a terms and conditions policy at the bottom of your website. They used to look past that if you had a site around since, like 2012, because it was proof that you were around for a really long time. But what happened in the last few years is. And this is outside construction for the most part, but companies would sell their old websites and people would find their way to hack into these old sites and steal and filter and siphon off people's personal information. And so what happened was, as you saw in the last year or two, Google and Facebook and these other kind of social networks or main places where people go for information, they started getting tricked. Right. They started, you know, doing a quiz on Facebook that, you know, find out what your spirit animal is, and it would determine if your spirit animal is a deer or a duck or a rabbit. But what they're really doing is asking a bunch of questions about who and who you are under the guise of figuring out if you're a rabbit. But then they would sell that information to a company that was. Would then target you with specific political ads based on the questions you answered. If you said that you were more assertive or what, you know, whatever, stuff like that.

Yes.

And with and without. And basically these websites didn't have privacy policies that said how they were going to use your information so they couldn't be sued for basically taking your info and selling it to a political action committee. And so what Google has decided now everybody got mad at Google for this because they're like, well, how come you didn't protect us and Facebook? Same thing. How come you allowed this quiz on Facebook to then make me see ads for Trump or Hillary or whatever? Right. And so they would get mad at Facebook for this, and Facebook gets dragged into a Senate hearing. So what they decided collectively, and what I'm seeing with some of the bigger roofing companies is they're saying, oh, well, you don't have a privacy Policy. And if something stupid happens on your website, whether it's you or somebody who got access to your site or a previous employee or previous SEO company or some app you installed for something three years ago as a WordPress plugin for whatever reason, we're not going to take the fall again. We're not going to go and get dragged through another nine hours of Senate hearings and have all this extra work to do to prove to the government we're not evil. So then they have hit the reset switch on a lot of things that used to make you show up high up in the rankings. And so now these companies who have invested in writing blog posts once a week by some other writer for the last seven years, boom. No updated content, no privacy policy gone. And now they have to go back and update 600 blog posts and delete 80% of their content and then start following some of the new rules. Meanwhile, some other company that's been around for a year and a half and has been following the rules that came out in the last 12 months, they're shooting up to the top.

So that's where old companies are losing. And the new players that more savvy players I guess are coming in and taking that traffic. So if you're in business and maintain a website, then the privacy policy along with the terms and conditions, they're two of the key things that have to go in before anything else happens, right?

It's, it's the bare minimum to entry. It's like if you had a gym, right? Like I'd like go and work out at the health club center. Health center gym, yes. If you were to work now, if you walk into the gym, it's got a sign, it's got a, it's got a, usually it's got some kind of rules of the gym. It's got a business license posted behind the counter. There's things that make that gym official. Now if you go and drive your van outside of an ice cream shop because you know there's a lot of people there who are probably going to feel guilty about eating ice cream and want to lose weight and you start saying, hey, I know you're eating that ice cream and that's okay, but tomorrow you should go to the gym. Would you like to buy a one month membership? It's only $10. If you buy it for me here and now and you do it with a sticker on the side of your van, well then what happens is tomorrow that guy can peel that sticker off driveway and never be found again. And if you buy your gym membership, the little card he gives you when you walk into the actual gym and they say we've never heard of that, how do you go back and track down that van and what do you do with all that? When you gave them your name and your number and social insurance number and next of kin in case you drop a weight in your head and all these other things, all of a sudden all that personal data just went with this guy in a white van. You don't know where he's going to go, what he's going to do with it. Plus he took your money. So if you do any kind of like, if you're like, Google looks at it as a lot of websites have transactions happening on their site, right? I know in roofing and construction we typically don't, but Google doesn't care. All they care about is if you don't have a way for us to track you down. If someone says they got ripped off on this website like the white van and outside the ice cream shop, if there's no way to track you down, well then we're going to just delist you, push you down to the bottom because they don't care. Lots of roofers, lots of plumbers, lots of electricians want to get to the top of Google. If you're willing to play by the rules, they'll move you up fast. And there's no. I've never seen websites and my clients and my competitors clients. I've never seen the kind of drastic shifts that are happening right now. And like I keep saying now is the best opportunity to be in digital. Like how being a construction person in digital to get into digital marketing. This is the best time since 2013. I have not seen stuff like this.

Oh, is that right? Is there anything else that you need to look at in addition to those, those two items to. I mean I'm sure there's a lot in the back end, but conceptually is there anything else that you really need to think about from a website perspective?

Yes, there's a couple. A lot of times it's about not making the big screw ups. It's, you know, there's a lot of stuff that you can do when you're on page two to fight for page one. But the great thing about construction is that 90% of it out there is garbage. And there's so many people out there that are trying to service this industry that don't know exactly what they're doing. So it's not hard to go from page eight to page two, even page one. But when you're really starting to fight for it, that's when the really like nitty gritty stuff happens. But a lot of times you can just not look like a shady company and that'll get you right to page one in today's world. So HTTPs. So you know when you go to a website and it says secure on the top left of Google Chrome, you want that. A lot of times when you hire your marketing guy, your marketing guy will have a button on your site that says contact us or request an estimate. And then what they do is they set up a landing page through clickfunnels or leadpages or Instapage or one of the many other sites or Typeform. Now instead of them hosting that landing page on your website, what they do is they just host it on. So it comes up as mattreynoldsmarketing. Clickfunnels.com P1234.HTML. So what that means to Google and Facebook is that this user clicked a button on a very good trusted website and then they went to a dark room somewhere that could disappear tomorrow because you could shut that ClickFunnels account down tomorrow and that landing page disappears. And now everything that happened on that page is not quite connected. And so you need to make sure that if you or whoever's doing your marketing right as a, as a contractor, that they're hosting your landing pages on your site. So if you have privacy policy terms and conditions, a mobile responsive website, your, your all your forms are linked to your domain name. Right. And that your website is secure. HTTPs that alone I have seen companies just rocket up to the first page because the other nine people in their area don't are old website. No mobile landing pages are going to some other click funnel. Those are exact opposite of that. And 30 days, Google's just like, oh, this guy's actually following the rules right to the top.

Okay. So you've got to wait that sort of 30 and maybe even longer in some instances, I guess, depending on where you implement a lot of this stuff, for you to see the changes from a search engine perspective.

If I get that right. Absolutely. Yeah. Like if you're trying to get to the top of Google for the search term online marketing, you got to be a ninja. Like you gotta have a ninja with a slash of Jedi and a little bit of good luck on top of that.

Yeah.

But in. But when you're looking for electricians in Melbourne. Well that's, I mean if I Google that right now, I bet you the three pages in there on the top first, like the first page, I bet you three of them probably won't have a privacy policy. They probably won't have a terms and condition. It probably isn't secure. So that there, I mean that if I was going to try and find plumbers to move up on the rankings, I'd be looking up plumbers in Melbourne and I'd look at the three companies that aren't doing that. I go to page two and say, hey, you're not on page two. This is why you're not. This is why those guys can be easily delisted. The problem is I'll drown in a sea of guys from third world countries that are also sending those emails, but that they're not wrong a lot of these people that are sending those emails out.

So after you have these fundamentals, if you like, in place, is it still a situation where you do need to regularly update your website with new content following these rules? Or have we gone past that in terms of a ranking strategy?

No, absolutely. We're still very much still in the age of producing content, producing value, and in the construction space where the standards and the competition is not that high compared to some others, it's not quite as bad. But you do want to focus on being a little bit more nitpicky about what you're putting up. The new rule is quality over quantity. You don't just want a bunch of people just writing best roofs in Melbourne is to go to a roofer who is certified in Melbourne and has a business license for roofing in Melbourne because they're the best roofers in Melbourne for roofing. And like, you don't want that garbage, but you want something that actually answers a question. And so that's where hiring a professional who knows how to look and see what are the longer tail keywords? What are the longer form questions that people are asking? Because now, I mean, people are asking. People are used to the fact that Google can find you a lot more than just roofers in Melbourne. They start asking questions like, what are the best shingles to use in Melbourne? What is the best way to. How do I. They're going to ask questions that are more contextual to the problem they're trying to solve. You want to have content that's good for that. And if you have old content, if you have old blog posts, sometimes just changing a blog post says, what are the best shingles? You had a best shingles to use in Melbourne that you wrote back in 2014. Sometimes it's just a matter of updating the names, talking about the year, bringing that content back, changing the title to Best shingles to use in Melbourne in 2019 or new shingles for Melbourne Best that are best for the Melbourne Australian climate in 2019, updating that content and deleting 80% of it. So that Google knows which page or which blog post is answering a specific question. It doesn't have to try and figure it out. Because if Your page has 170 blog posts and someone else has 35 blog posts, but they're really well written and they are specific in answering questions, that other guy is going to win.

Does the interaction in terms of the amount of people that interact with a page now, has that become significant now like it has in some of the algorithms in social media? I mean, because we don't see all of our friends Facebook posts anymore or all of our friends Instagram posts anymore, we see what they think is the most relevant. Is it important to have these pages then interacted with to help you in your rankings?

Absolutely. And I mean, I'm not even an SEO guy. I mean I do a lot. I hire people that I know are good at it. So if I pick up a client, I have a few people that I bring in who are on my team that do the SEO. I specialize in the Facebook ads. And that's why I've really recognized the shift coming in Google's and SEO is that three years ago I wasn't talking about SEO like I am now. But yes, you're right. The engagement, what people are doing on your site. At the end of the day, if a person comes to your site and clicks around to a couple different things and spends a few minutes on your page, that's the gold standard in relevance in Google's eyes. That's why if you look at my Sargent's roofing website, the old way for a roofing website was oh, you want to have like your name and your phone number right at the top because you want people to Google Roofing in Edmonton click on your go to your website and click on the phone number or dial your phone number. And that was how you're supposed to design a webpage. I deliberately make my phone number a little bit more difficult to find. But instead I have a giant video at the top of our page because that's going to get people to stop and watch and learn who we are as a brand. And that was for really two reasons. One, it was for the obvious benefits for time on site and engagement. And clicking around on the site. But second, I don't want people just to call me and say, hey, I got a broken pool queue outside my house. I got four roofers coming by. We're all going to see who bleeds out the most and gets the job. That's not the customer I want. The customer I want is one who learns about my company, learns about my brand, and takes the time to see if I'm the right company for them. I would rather get nine customers who wanted. Who want me to do the roof and just wonder if they can afford it, then have a bunch of roofers and they're just wanting to see what I charge for a roof because that's more in line with everything else that we shop for in a retail mindset. We walk in, you know, your wife goes into the store and goes, oh, that's a beautiful dress. I wonder if I can afford it. She doesn't walk in and say, oh, I like the price tag on this dress. I wonder what it looks like.

Yeah, so true. I wrote about this just recently, actually. You really want to weed out those people early on, right? Because if you allow them to come through your system or however you do it and become customer, you can bet your bottom dollar that you're going to have a lot of trouble down the road. Would that be a fair comment?

Yeah, I absolutely agree, and I wish I got a chance to read your post on it, but in there, would you have said that typically you want people to learn about your company first before they try and get out in front of them, before they're necessarily shopping, but to have them have an awareness of who you are as a company beforehand, that kind of what you were talking about?

Pretty much. That's exactly right. My point was that you want to ask the hard questions up front so you don't have to deal with them later when they become problems. Right. So, I mean, for example, if someone calls you and questions you about the price, they might want to know about the price, and that's totally fair. But if you get that person who calls you and then tries to negotiate before you've come out, then you can bet you're going to have problems, as I said, down the line to deal with that person. So I think it's just really important to know who you want to service and then not bend, you know, or be talked into doing something that you really don't want to do. And having said that, it's still true. We all get caught from time to time, as I'm sure that you have. But if you take that mentality rather than just take anything, I think you actually give your company a chance to be successful.

I. That's exactly where I was kind of going with that. See, I want to kind of maybe see if I could share this with you. But it was what happened with us at Sargent's Roofing and how this whole thing came to be, where now I'm doing an interview in Australia, is when I first start Sergeant's roofing with my best friend. I didn't know anything about roofing. He was the roofer. I had run and owned a business. I sold a business. I built an app. I sold the app. Like, I did a lot of businessy stuff and online stuff. And he had a baby on the way. His. The company he's worked for sold for 8 million bucks to another guy. And he hated his new boss because that other guy knew nothing about roofing and kept putting him in bad positions all the time. You know, renting an indoor lift for an. Obviously an outdoor job. It's roofing. And that was like just stuff you wouldn't believe. Yeah. And so he was unhappy and I was like, well, geez, your old boss has sold their company for 8 million bucks. You should just start your own roofing company. And he did, but he was just subcontracting. So it was like he'd put all this blood, sweat and tears. He'd hire a guy or two and go do a job, and then some other guy goes and sticks his lawn sign in the ground and it says urban contracting instead of Joe's company. And I was like, no, man. I mean, start a business. Don't just own a job. And he's like, well, I don't know about taxes and this and advertising. Like, well, I do. Let's do it together. And so we did. And I knew at the time, I was like, man, everybody's on Facebook. Like, this is back when everybody called Facebook, like face crack and you know, Facebook so addicting. This is like 2012, 2013. And I was like, you know, I know this Facebook stuff. There should be something. Like, we should be advertising on Facebook somehow. And back then there was no such thing as that. Like, it only had the ads on the. On the right hand side. And it was all just like weight loss and like dog toys and anything that had a buy now button. Right? Like, you know, you download my free weight loss guide and then you buy online personal training or here's 10 tips on how to make your dog not pee in the house. And Then here's a dog toy or dog leash or something. That was Facebook marketing back then. And I was trying to find someone. I was searched. I searched and I searched and I searched. Nobody. Nobody was doing it. And it drove me nuts. And so I tried to find a class where I could learn how to do it, you know, like, because I was trying to hire someone at first. And then I tried finding a class to see if someone could teach me, because I'm like, I built an app. I'm pretty sure I can figure out how I can do ads on Facebook. Nobody was talking about construction local services. Nobody was even showing how to how you can get a cleaning lady a job on Facebook. I was like, what the heck? And I got in a big argument with this guy who was selling a course for like $3,000 at the time to learn how to do Facebook ads. And I was like, you're all a bunch of hacks. You don't know what you're doing. You're just selling people on how to, you know, you're not selling ads on how to run a real business. You're just selling how to run ads for, like, online stores and personal trainers. And he challenged me and he said, listen, Facebook ads is about testing. It's about trying a hypothesis and then testing that how results were learning, knowing what to look for in your testing and then making adjustments. So he said, if you want to sit here and be a smartass, then fine. But if you want to learn, I love to teach you. And I was like, okay, fine. And this is like 10 minutes before the cart closed on this course. So I took his course and I learned how to test. There's no nobody. Like, nowadays, you can't throw a stick in a room without hitting four guys who are promising to sell leads to construction guys. But back then, there was nobody to even ask for. And so I learned how to do this and it started to work. And we grew our business 40% in the first year with Facebook, like Facebook ads, then 149% the second year. Well, then the guy who taught me invite me on his podcast. And what we discussed was that I took the same stuff that everybody else is doing. The dentist that offers the free tooth whitening in exchange for the long term customer value of a dental plan, or the personal trainer who offers the diet in exchange for trying to get online training, or the dog tips in exchange for the dog toy. And I figured out that all those things were giving some kind of value upfront for free. And I recognized after doing some Estimates. And learning how the roofing game went is like, everybody, all the homeowners started asking the same questions during the estimate. What is underlayment? What is drip edge? And it doesn't matter what trade you're in. If it's plumbing, people are going to ask certain questions all the time. If you're doing flooring, people are going to ask the same questions all the time. Paintings, same thing. And they would want to know what's your process. They want to know what upgrades are actually valuable, what aren't. They want to know what are the things that the other contractor could cheap out on that I could regret? You know, what are the tricks that they could, you know, they could pull to cut corners that I won't know? Those are really what all the questions are based in. And so I started creating infographics. I paid a designer in 99 designs to design an infographic saying what drip edge was. Because I noticed every customer said, well, what is drip edge? Why am I paying for drip edge? And Joe would have to do this whole demonstration with his hand to try and show how water dripped off. And I said, man, it'd be nice if we could just answer that question up front. And so we did. And we would show people this infographic, and anybody who clicked on it or engaged with us, we would use an ad to retarget them and say, hey, we're doing free drip edge on any estimates this month. And later, we used that same philosophy with video. We used that. We created an ebook by combining all our infographics into one book. And as Facebook started release things like video view ads where you could retarget someone who watched half a video, that's when the roof blew off. And I just had a bunch of roofers ask me for help. And at the time and when it started, I was really flattered. I was like, man, this is neat. Like, people from Dallas, Texas, are messaging me on Facebook or submitting a fake lead on our website. And when I call them, they're like, no, I'm just a roofer in Dallas. I heard you on some podcast and I was just wondering how you Facebook ads could you help me? And I was so flattered. I helped them. And eventually I realized that, hey, there's a business here. And so now that's what I do is I help roofers, and I help roofers with systems and processes and marketing.

So you transitioned out of your Sargent's Roofing, which is the company that you tested and tried and tested all this in and made sure it worked. And now you're got the roofing business partner and doing it for other companies.

Yeah, I still own Sargent's Roofing, and I still do the marketing for Sergeants Roofing. I don't take quite as active a role in it, but it's still my baby. I still love it, but it's. That's Joe's, I guess, his legacy. My thing was, you know, when this roofing business partner came in. Yeah, it was just Cheryl at first. It all started. I said, hey, you know, I'm answering a lot of questions for free, and I'm running out of time here. You know, would you guys be interested in paying a couple hundred bucks and, like, I'll create a private Facebook group and you guys could just be in it and ask the questions and you guys can just leave when you stop wanting to pay me? Does that sound fair? And they said, yes. And then I took on. Then I took on a client and did it for him. And then I started a class because I found that a lot of people couldn't. A lot of guys couldn't afford to pay me what it really took to invest the time and energy into doing it for them. So then I kind of just recorded screenshots of everything I did and put it into, like, a course that people could download. And then that was really a hit. So I kind of kept doing that. And then as the marketing. As I really started to figure out the marketing and did it in different countries and different states, I started to actually get myself fired. I would get all these leads coming in, and, you know, these are contractors that kind of thought, okay, well, every problem in business can be solved by getting more business. But what happened was they started getting like, say, for example, bad reviews because people would submit a lead and these guys would never call them back. So then they would get a bad review saying, oh, I called. These guys. Never called me. And so then they would call me and say, hey, you know, we got to cut our services with you, because we've got. We're booked out 50 days. You know, we're not getting to all our leads. Like, we got to turn it down. And I realized I was getting myself fired. So I had those problems in my business, you know, years back, and I had to solve them. So I was like, what's the problem? They say, oh, we're not getting back to customers. Well, why not? Well, you know, we're just writing them down in this. It's in a spreadsheet, or they're all in our email. And I'm like, oh, I know how to fix that problem. I made an app, I can solve that. So then I fixed that and then now that's my big thing for the last year has been actually, like, building out their CRMs and helping them map out their processes, just so I wouldn't get fired.

Yeah, no, I get it. So traditionally, the construction industry has done that mapping out of processes very badly, haven't we?

Terribly.

And I think that it's certainly the case in Australia that because there is generally a shortage of tradesmen, it's one of those situations where you just don't have to. Right. Because if you don't call person A, B and C back, then person D is still going to call. And when the dynamics are sort of set up that way, it doesn't really force you into a very efficient process because you just, you know, you keep getting work thrown at you. But I can see why, and I think this is what's happened, particularly in the us, that the people that are figuring out how to manage that problem actually deal with it properly are growing really, really fast. So can you maybe talk a little bit about the main problems you see from a CRM and a management of process perspective in the clients that you deal with and then how you've sort of gone about solving those?

Absolutely. So that's a great question. And I mean, something that the industry across the board needs to get fixed. So the first thing is roofers are getting leads from a number of places. Do you guys have HomeAdvisor in Australia?

It's not big. I've heard of HomeAdvisor from the US, but not in Australia. It's not big. No.

So a lead aggregator like that, like a main big site, they'll have a directory that gets leads and then they sell them off to roofers. Well, those will come in by like, say, an email responder. And then Angie's List will have an online chat system and then, you know, they'll get leads from their website and then they'll have people phoning me or phoning them, sorry. And they get all these leads from different place and then they're communicating with clients in email, in a chat, in a text message. The first problem that they all make in the construction industry is they have to get a clear process for what happens when someone requests an estimate. And what are the six questions that we ask every time? I will not, like, I will not let anybody in my roofing company even do an estimate if the customer won't give us an email address, we'll just say, listen, our process is heavily dependent on making sure we keep you in the loop and communicate with you regularly from the start to the finish of your project and let you know all the stages. We do that through an automated system that uses email. So if we aren't able to get Your email address, Mr. Smith, the problem that's going to happen is we're going to think you've been notified about a certain step and you're not going to be notified because you didn't give us your email. And then that could be an opportunity for you to have a bad experience and for me to have an unhappy customer. I can't afford an unhappy customer. So if we can't have your email, I'd rather just say that maybe you need to find yourself a different company to work with. We absolutely value your business, and that's why we don't want to put ourselves in the position to do you a disservice. And they go, okay, well, we'll give your email because we have walked through that script. But that's because we've looked at every. The six things that everybody needs to get on every single call or every single text or every single chat lead or every single email and make sure we get that information. And it has to go into the CRM right away. If you don't put in the CRM right away, I will cut your hands off. So we train. We train that right away. That's the first break that everybody has. The second one is that they don't map out a good process for when they're estimating to make sure that the job goes well. There's always a disconnect between sales and marketing and installations and production. So the sales guy comes out and does everything he needs in his realm to do a good job selling the roof or the project. But then he doesn't necessarily do a good job of planning out the job because he either doesn't know, doesn't care, or he hasn't been trained. So we have to make sure that every salesman knows what goes on with a project. We have to make sure that they care enough to help the other people in the company have a win in their position, too. So it's not a blame game back and forth. And three, we have to make sure that we've trained them on how to do it. So one of the first things we do when we set up a roofer's CRM is make it so that all they do is hit one button that marks the customer in the estimating status of their buyer's journey. And almost every roofer has some kind of spreadsheet that they hold dear Excel or Google Sheets or something. And that spreadsheet is where they do their measurements and calculate their quantities. And they'll like some guys are doing it, they're measuring at site using a piece of pen and paper and they're going back to the office, which is just terrible. Some are opening up a laptop and going file, open spreadsheets, save, make a copy, save as Mr. Johnson. And then they're entering their stuff in. We want to make it so they click one button and that spreadsheet is created. We want to create a portal for their photos, for the job to be taken and to be able to make it easy to put notes on those photos. Because then the install guy has a win. He can see the spreadsheet that determines what your measurements were. He can see the photos that you took to plan out the job. And all the customer's information is pulled out of the CRM and put on that. So it's all easily searchable. And so we've done this job. Nimbus, Accu Links, Podio, Copper. Like all these different CRMs, we've created these automations so that you can do better work and give a better experience with less effort by just using the power of something like Zapier. So that's the second one is that making sure there's a clear connection between sales and production. So the customer, when the customer's promised something by the salesman, the production team actually makes sure that happens. Because if you, you can eliminate so many negative reviews by setting the proper expectations in your presentation and making sure that the expectations were set are also able to be seen by the production teams. But they see, oh, the sales guy said that we want to put a vent right here in the roof. And there's a little yellow error. And it's easy enough that a 46 year old with no technological experience can make that arrow on that picture so that it's easy for the sales guys to know or the install guys to know where that is. And the third major problem is follow up. You get a lead, you submit an estimate and then now you're waiting for that customer to say yes, they're getting the other guys in and they don't have a clear process in their sales department as to when we submit an estimate. What do we do 24 hours later? What do we do 48 hours later? What do we do seven days later? Who calls? What do they say? Why do we let, why are like what do we tell the customer is the reason for us following up? What is the word tracks that we use? Because you don't want to just call and say, hey, just want to know if you got the money ready yet. I want the job. You know, you can't say that. It has to be along the lines of hey, I just want to make sure you had all the information you needed to make a decision. Did everything look in line with your estimate? Oh, you know, we got another estimate, there are eleven hundred dollars higher. Oh, and then you can address those objections and say, oh, hey, you know what, did they provide you with the job photos? Did they, you know, plan out the job ahead of time? Did they have these things for you to make? Oh, you know what they didn't? Well, in a month when they come do the job, are you sure they're going to remember to put your satellite dish back or might it end up in a garbage can? And they go, you know what, that's true. And then you can use the step two, right, the planning out and the job notes. You can use those as closing tools. But you have to know, when does the manager phone? If there's multiple salespeople, when does the sales manager phone and what does he say? Does he phone after four days, after seven days? What are the standards and expectations? And so it's really important for you, for anybody in the construction industry to walk themselves through their customers buyer's journey and find out just how many times their whole experience for their customer is just 10% or 30% different every single time because they've never mapped out what is an ideal customer journey and how they're going to, what they're going to use to keep that deal on the train tracks. And they're going to get knocked off left or right, but they have to know when they're knocked off and how to get back on track. And that's by mapping out your process. And those are the three key phases. What happens when leads come in? How do we make sure that there's a good setting of expectations between sales and production? And finally, what do we do for follow up? There's a hundred other things that need to happen, but if you nail down those three, you're going to notice 20 to 30% gain in your business in like two weeks.

It's a really good point because when we think about solving problems within our business, we often think about us and our own problems. Right? It takes just that one degree of separation to look from that customer's perspective about how they interact with your business. I think as a. Generally speaking, we're getting better at doing that. But it's really interesting how much time you spend trying to solve your own problems, which one the customer probably doesn't know about. And they don't really care about either. Right. It's their interaction with your business that they care about. And that being looked after and taken through that buyer's journey, as you call it, that's the important part. Right. The internal operations, they never see. So it's like the customer's perspective should take precedence over our own problems. Does that make sense?

Absolutely. That's a really great way of summarizing, is that if you take care of the customers and everything is designed to take care of the customers, all the internal stuff will take care of itself. Because you can ask everybody in the company, are you doing what it takes to take the best care of our customers possible? And it's either you have a people problem or a process problem. If you have a people problem, well, you either have to change your people or you have to change your people, get new ones. If it's a process problem, is it because they don't know, don't care and haven't been trained or haven't been trained. And then you. First, you make sure they know they're having a problem. Second, you make sure that they care. And if they care, then you make sure they're trained. And then after that, it's just a matter of improving your process over time with the real time feedback from your customers. If your customers. A good example is in roofing is I had a company who does a lot of solar, right? Their market just blew up with solar a few years back. And one problem that always happened was they had to subcontract the solar removal because you need an electrician. And they would do good job notes and they would know. They would tell the company, yeah, there's 13 solar panels coming off. We need to come off on Friday and we're gonna do the job over the weekend. They can go back on Wednesday. And the problem was is that the solar guys never knew where to put the panels. And so we used a tool called CompanyCam to make sure that. And we created a process where the salesman has to take a picture of where the customer was told the solar panels would go. So they take a picture of a shed and goes to the left of the shed and they put a little arrow and like just say solar panels go here and that. They put that link to that Company cam job project file is like a website, right? So then they just. That link is automatically saved in their CRM. And so when they want to send the purchase order through for the solar panels to get removed, well, they just push a button, send solar details to solar Tech, you know, and that company would get that notice and it would contain that website link which showed the picture that said where the solar panels go. And now there's no longer any confusion or any upset customers because the solar panels were put against the side of the house or blocking this or the dog. They weren't able to go through their fence gate because sometimes people put the blinders on and don't think about how's this customer's life going to be for the next week with these solar panels in the way. And so this is something that they were able to do. And it was really quite simple because we already had companycam in place for. For their job project. We already had the project link being saved in their CRM. All we had to do was say, hey, sales guys, you need to address where you're going to put the panels and take a picture where the panels are going to go. Once I made the button to send the solar details to the solar removal company, all I had to do was make that button. All the rest of the stuff was there. Now they could quickly and easily share that information with the solar company. No more customer complaints, no more bad reviews, and a way better experience for everybody. Because then even in the sales process, when four other companies came by and my client is going through on their iPad and saying, yeah, this is where we're going to put this. We're going to do this kind of valley here. These are the kind of shingles we're going to use. This is where we're going to put. With this, we're going to put our garbage bin here, or we're going to put your solar panels beside this shed. Does that work for you? Perfect. Okay. Now, the next guy that comes along, he just shows up with a yellow piece of carbon copy paper and says, yep, this is the shingles we're going to use, and that's how much it costs. Well, then, now, if you're $1,800 higher on a $10,000 job, which company looks like they've planned things out? Which company looks like they're going to do it? Right, the company that showed a plan, for sure.

Yeah, it actually, you can charge a higher price because you've put in the effort to think about these things.

And then, you know, A lot of the people in the construction industry, they say, ah, I don't need marketing, word of mouth, just do a good job. When you get word of mouth right. And the problem is you can't control what people say, when they say it, who they say it to, how often they say it. You don't want somebody to run around saying, oh yeah, these guys are the cheapest guys in town. I need my roof done. They came four days later and did it. Well, that's the word of mouth that's running around town. It's that you're cheap and you have any. And you have an open schedule. So the minute you don't want to be cheap and you're booked out more than a week, all your referrals are saying the wrong stuff. But if you can build process that delivers a better customer experience, that takes less work to do because you take advantage of these wonderful things, this wonderful technology that we have these days, if you can build that out, well then people are going to say, oh man, they were awesome. They thought of everything. Yeah, they were a little bit higher priced but we knew they were going to do a good job. And then all you have to do after that is do a good job. The difference between those two guys, the guy who says, ah, referrals or the guy who plans the process, they're both doing a good job. The only difference is how are they presenting themselves, how are they maximizing technology? And the great thing is with technology and process you can scale a big.

Challenge as you start to grow. This button that you talked about that pushes this information around that sits inside. You mentioned podio before. Does that sit inside the CRM that you're using?

Yeah, so one of my favorite ones to use is podio because yeah, I can kind of make it do anything. A lot of the other tradesman specific stuff like jobber and invoice to go and you know, contractors, cloud, stuff like that, they're all great systems. I've worked with them all. But I like ones that, yeah, where I can make a button that'll do anything they want. Like I call my million dollar button is for a lot of my clients when we get them busy. They got 30, 45 days, they're booked out. Well, if it rains and sets them back one day, well then every install date that they've promised a customer is now not achievable. So they can usually handle the next four or five days. But if it rains three times, well now their whole schedule's off by three days. We made a Rainy day button that allows them to just do one quick little action, confirm it and everybody who's in install booked material ordered or install confirmed status. We'll get an email and a text saying, hey, it rained today. We're moving your installation date one day forward. This is just to keep you in loop. It's not exact, but just stay in touch. We just want to let you know so that you're aware that because it rained today, all of our jobs are going forward one day. That used to be either a customer service nightmare or a logistical nightmare of trying to get your admin staff to call, say, hey, it rained today, to fly 45 different people, or 190 people, depending on the size of the company, letting them know that their job was delayed. Because what ends up happening is if it rains 3, 6, 8 times over the course of the month, eventually you start getting people going, are you guys coming today? Right. I can certain CRMs, I can make them do anything I want. And that's why, yes, we want everything to live inside the CRM because like we said at the beginning, every customer goes in the CRM or we're going to chop your hands off. We tell those people that put leads in and if it isn't in the CRM, it never happened. If you tell me you called someone to follow up and it's not in the CRM, I don't care. It never happened. You're not following the process. It's because you don't know, don't care, haven't been trained, you know, you're not, you're always supposed to do it. Do you care? You do care. Well, how come you didn't do it? Because you know how. So start doing it, you know, so.

If I ever meet a roofer without hands, I know what's happened.

Yeah, he worked for us and he followed the post.

Is there any downside to using these buttons? And what I'm thinking is that if you've ordered a maybe it might be a $20,000 roof or a $40,000 roof. And some are a lot more expensive than that. Just getting a text or email and taking that personal touch out of the equation, if you like, is there any downside to doing that?

I find that as long as, if you've done the right things up to that point. So in your sales process, you go say, you know, Mr. Mrs. Smith, so we have a very, we have an automated system that helps us make sure that your project is always as you're always kept in the loop as to the status of your project, but if you ever have any questions, let us know. And so I like to work with CRMs that allow texting in two ways. So texting in and out. Because then customers, if you send a quick text saying, hey, it rained today, your jobs moved forward a day. If you have any questions, let us know. This is just keep you in the loop. Thanks, Adam. Sergeant's Rufin. That's a very quick message. And we send a little bit more of a detailed email to accompany that. But most often they say, you know, they'll be like, kate, thanks, awesome. And then, like, the third time, they'll go, okay, so what is my day now? And you say, hey, you know what? Weather permitting, it's not exact, but you're looking like you're going to be the third week of March. And they go, okay, no problem. Or sometimes they say, oh, well, just so you know, my daughter's birthday is in the third week of March, and we have a bouncy castle coming to the house, and last thing we need is 20,000 nails on our backyard, on our driveway, or, you know, whatever, something like that. When customers do have a question, because we keep everything in the CRM and because we teach these roofing companies how to run this process and I guess back up a second. Everything that we do when we develop a CRM in my company or for anybody else's company, is we take your current process and we map it out and we actually walk through the buyer's journey. In your current CRM, we time it. We use a key logger to track how many keys are clicked and mouse buttons are clicked. Then when we design the new system, our goal is for every button we make you click in the new system, we remove at least two somewhere else. So they have seen the average workload drop. 30 minutes per lead, an hour, and 10 minutes per sold customer. The clicks cut in half, cut to a third. So when you do that, automate some of the repetitive stuff, then you can have more time to address things on a personal level. Because if you're dropping the ball everywhere, then, yes, you're touching your clients and you're keeping in contact with them. But usually as crisis management. Yeah, no, I know we said we're coming today, but because of the rain back then, you know, we're like this. Oh, you know, we ordered the material, but we did this and did that. Instead of responding to crisis, you can be proactive. And because everybody's texting you in and out of the CRM directly, you're not missing Messages. You're not getting a text while you're driving going, I gotta remember to answer Mr. Smith later. No, it's just, it happens in the CRM before you go home for the day. You make sure all your stuff's tight or clean or whatever, like it's all good and then you go home and you can sleep at night. There's no to do lists, there's no thing in the back of your head that you forgot because you just, it's just all handled in there. And we've eliminated 50 to 60, 70% of the old stuff. So now you have more time to actually focus on client communication that matters.

Yeah. So often overlooked, right? And unless it's put to you in those terms, sometimes this digital transformation, I know it's a bit of a buzzword, but taking your company through that process, you can lose sight very quickly of seeing it of where you really want to be. But if you understand that you're actually making things quicker so you can go deeper on those, those problems or to really serve your customers in a more personal way. I think that's a very important sort of mindset to have as you go through this process.

Oh, absolutely. And it's not to say things don't fall off the rails. I mean, I've had like, you know, we set up things like automatic appointment reminders. So you book an appointment in, the system sends a picture of the estimator that's coming to your house. Matt was created because my business partner is a six foot six black guy. And sometimes people would just be a little bit like, who's this guy on my doorstep? And so, you know, it's like, so when you send a picture, it just made everybody feel a little more comfortable with whoever was coming to the door. But it also sent an appointment reminder and it sent a reminder the same day. And yeah, like a lot of times it actually saves people from forgetting to be home for the roofers. But then you're right, sometimes the guy, the appointment setter, accidentally sets it for 10:30pm and now the customer is getting a notification at 9:00 clock at night saying your roofer's on his way. Data entry errors become a problem. So I always say, slow down to speed up. We've eliminated 70% of the clicks and mouse button clicks and the typing, we've eliminated 70% of that work. Take a breath, slow down, enter things properly and the system will take care of you. But when you're, when you put yourself in a position to rush and then you do things you know, in a rush manner, then it messes you up. So, biggest part of our. That's why, like, whenever I do this with clients, I actually go out to their roofing company and I stay with them for 10, 20 days to train them. And then we have what we call 60 days of hell, because you have to. I support them for 60 days. And it's, it's not an easy process going through the digital transformation. If you just. In a lot of cases, if they do it themselves, they do get messed up. I know, I did it myself. And so it's really important to plan it out and to try and get whoever you're going to for your technology solution, whatever software company, that they have a really in depth onboarding process and that you commit to it. Because the other problem is that you'll end up having one foot in one pool and one foot in the other pool. And then you've got this really Dr. Jekyll and Hyde kind of mishmash hybrid of your old system and your new system. And you never quite leap. But sometimes you have to take that one step backwards to take two steps forward. And that is why it's so important to map out the process. Because at least you can always go back to a document, right, and say, oh, you know what, let's, let's just actually look at the process and say, okay, this is what we need to do from start to finish. And where are we at in the process?

So do you recommend for the companies that you go to personally and help, do you go the advertising route first or do you start with the CRM now? Sounds like you'd want to start with CRM and get that right first.

Well, you know, it's hard to put a band aid on a bullet hole that hasn't come yet. You know, it's sometimes. So it's hard to convince people always to do that. I do, but typically the rate that things go is I help them with marketing. They get swamped, they realize there's a problem. They think that they should be yelling at their salespeople or something like, they usually think the problem is not what the problem actually is. And so that's when we go back and say, okay, no, let's map out your process. Okay, this is where the failures are happening. You either have to admit that you're this size company or we have to solve these problems. However, as this has started to happen and I started to talk a bit about it my podcast and I have like a thing that you can. A form that you can fill out that'll automatically write your. Write out a process manual just by filling in the blanks. It says, like, how often do you call people back to follow up? What is your expected lead response time? Because the other way around, dealing it with. Dealing with it when it's already a problem. It's like performing open heart surgery on a football team while they're trying to win a championship.

Yeah, yeah, I understand. So in addition to the Facebook ads that you do, I mean, I know they're linked now, but do you look at Instagram as well? Is that something that we should, as tradesmen and women be going down that path?

I definitely think if you're in the interiors space, you should be the problem. When they're doing their marketing on Instagram and Facebook still, they're speaking to other people in the trade, but especially on Instagram, like they're making friends with other roofers, they're talking to other roofers. All their videos are talking as if they're speaking to a roofer. But the advantage to Instagram is that Instagram is a place where people go to look at pictures. There's nothing sexy about a roof. I know that us in the roofing industry will be like, man, that's a good looking roof. But otherwise homeowners don't give a damn. And whereas a painter or a person who's remodeling kitchens and bathrooms, well, using a feature like, you know, company cam's before after thing and posting those pictures to Instagram, doing a video showing your process, those are really good things to put on Instagram. And Instagram ads do work and you can use the carousel feature to show like the project from kind of start to finish. So Instagram ads definitely have a place, but I believe that the audience and why they're there lends itself more to interiors and make trades that make things prettier. You know, nobody cares about an air conditioning unit looking good on the outside of the house. No one cares. They just want the house to be cold. Right. But if you renovate a bathroom, Instagram is definitely a place to be. And for everybody who isn't in that, you use Instagram as a way to give a behind the scenes look at you as a company so that people can see that you're real people. That way, if someone does happen to run across your business on Instagram, it's more so that they will see you and like you and see you as someone that. I'd want that guy to work on my profile. He seems like a good that Seems like a good company. I like their values. That's what Instagram's for. Facebook way more about long form content, videos way stronger with ads. It's. I would say that if you're gonna spend thousand dollars a month or something like that on ads, which is a low budget, I would say 10% of your effort goes into Instagram, 90% Facebook. If you're dealing with a $15,000 a month budget, well then yeah, put 30% into Instagram. Especially if you're an interiors or anything that makes things prettier. Like landscaping would be an exteriors or siding would be an exteriors. But new windows, not so much. People don't really notice new windows as much as they notice, say new siding or nice landscaping. Yeah.

It's so important that language used. Right. On Instagram because I had a conversation with another plumber the other day actually, and you're so right. Most companies do talk to other companies and other companies as a plumbing company, we don't need another plumbing company as a customer.

Right.

We need people who are actually going to pay us and real customers. So you need to be sharing your work using language that they can understand.

And feels so good to hear someone else see it. Yeah.

Not get kind of sucked into communicating with other tradesmen. Not that there's anything obviously wrong with that, but you need to know why you're running the account. But I like what you said, that if you're not making a home look well, for Instagram in particular, if you're not making a home or business or whatever look pretty, then you need to be sharing what you're doing in a way that the ordinary person can understand and showcase your work. I think that's a really good way to think about it.

Absolutely. And Instagram is a great. Because people go through and skip through the stories. Right. They look through the stories and they're looking for something that's in the moment because stories delete in 24 hours. So it's about them saying what you're up to today. And it's a really great tool for establishing and holding your relationship with your previous customers. Right. Because if a customer happens to see you doing a story about you working on their project, they're going to become a fan and they're going to watch your story while you're on their project and they're going to enjoy sharing it. But then they're going to kind of keep tabs on you. And if you can always show that you're kind of doing stuff and that you're you know, in whatever way. There's a guy bowdrey roofing in Canada, and he is a character, like tattoos down to his fingernails, super animated character. Like, some people might be afraid to have this guy on their roof. But he's such a good human, and he's really. He's just a salt of the earth, like, classic human being. He'd probably make. He'd probably look really at home in Australia. From my. My. I guess made my stereotype of what I think Australians are like, because he's just a. Just a free spirit, spirit man. Like, he's just a. But he is the kind of guy that if you like that, if you. If you look at that, and I love the guy, but some people might not. But if you like that and you appreciate that craftsman that, that. That just salt of the earth, you know, kind of guy, well, every single person is like, oh, you have to use my roofer, Justin Baldry. He's awesome. You just. You're just gonna really want to use him, right? Then there's other people who just focus on, you know, who have a totally different brand, totally different personality behind their company. Like another guy, John. John Hogan out in New Jersey. His thing is, like, his mother had a house that her grandmother owned. They built the garage into a suite for the grandmother. Then when the grandmother passed, they were going to sell the home. And because they never pulled a permit to turn the garage into like a grandma suite, right? For like a second living space, they had to completely turn the garage back into a garage. And they lost all their equity and put themselves in a huge cash flow crisis for that. So his whole brand, his whole message, his whole personality is around making sure that all your I's are dotted, all your t's are crossed, and that they do everything properly and that everything's done by the book. And so they're going to identify with a totally different customer engineer who's really nitpicky and sees his job is so much more complicated than these. Other than these roofer types, they're going to really identify with John Hogan from Blue Nail. They might not look. They might look at Beaudry and be like, I don't need a rock star on my roof, right? But then a guy who works on the rigs in the oil field, he wants to meet a guy just like him. You know what I mean? He wants to see a guy just like him and who takes pride in his work and who ain't afraid of a hard day. And he's going to. He's MacGyver he's going to get her done. Right. Well, then BoJo may align with that more. And maybe blue nail seems a little bit too uppity and, you know, maybe a little bit too stuffy or something. Right. So Instagram's a great way to display your personality and your brand, whereas Facebook is a lot less behind the scenes and a lot more about. It's a little bit more of, like, being the commercial. Right?

Yeah. And I think the advantage with Instagram, too, is that once you have that connection through being authentic, as we hear so often in social media and telling your story, is that the customers that come through that channel are buyers. Right. They know what you like, they're ready to spend money. It just helps everything down the line go a little smoother.

Like I said at the beginning, instead of calling and saying, hey, we need a roof. How much do you charge? It's, hey, we need a roof. Done. Can we afford you? Right. I love that dress. I wonder if I can afford or justify that price. They want Justin Beaudry to do his roof. They want Sergeant's Roofing to do their roof, but they just hope that the price is affordable. And if it's a little more, they go, you know what? I just have a good feeling about this guy. And a good feeling about this guy is better than any brochure you can show up with on site. Having them having a good feeling of who you are. That's the power of social media. And it takes time and it takes a little bit of strategy. And if you can tie in some of the benefits of Instagram ads, Facebook ads, video views, retargeting custom audiences, a little bit of the magic of pulling the knobs and the switches behind the curtain. God, it's powerful, right? Like, this year, my company, we increased revenue per bundle, installed 61%. We regularly are told that our prices are 30% higher. My competitors call like, how do you get away with this? And it's just like, man, we just. We just focus on providing immense value upfront. People already have all their questions answered. We show up, and after all the videos we've done, you know, Joe shows up, and they're like, oh, it's the movie star. Right? When you do that, you know you're doing something right, because then people like you and trust you before you show up.

Yeah, absolutely. And people start wanting to buy that experience. Right. Rather than just a solution. So, so, so valuable.

Yeah. And they want to see you succeed.

Absolutely. Yeah. Just a few more questions, Adam, and then we'll. We'll wrap up because I'm mindful of your time. But is it your plan to continue, continue to grow the roofing partner business being your main focus?

Yeah. So sergeants, roofing takes care of itself. I mean, it isn't without its challenges. It grows. But that's Joe's baby. My dream with roofing business partner is to I guess the big hairy, audacious goal is to end subcontracting. I believe that more guys out there who are just doing work for other companies are only doing so because they don't know how to build a business and they don't know how to market themselves. And the only reason some of these big companies that can just market, send a sales guy and then sub the work out to whatever random guy. They only exist because these other guys don't know how to solve those problems so they have access to unlimited labor. I want to empower the people who are smaller companies into becoming bigger companies and the bigger companies who are already creating employment and careers for people and creating a brand. I like to help those on the one, on one basis. The smaller guys I typically help as students. So that's my main focus is I want to empower the small contractor and reward the good contractors who don't subcontract. I don't honestly don't work with that many companies who primarily subcontract their work because my systems don't work and they can't deliver the kind of experiences that I build for companies and enable them to do so. That's my big goal. And so I guess that's the long answer to your question is yes, I love roofing business partner. I love the rewarding feeling of taking a guy who was previously kind of struggling a bit and couldn't really, you know, he was just always kind of, you know, he was apprehensive about spending $1,500 a month on ads because he'd like to, you know, maybe use that for a boat payment. And turning him into the kind of guy who spends $5,000 a month and knows that the return on that ad spend is going to pay for the boat in cash. And when they get to that point where they do something cool with their money and they're, they're happy and their salesmen are like, man, I'm selling 20% more and I'm making more money, I tripled or I got like 30% more income this year. And this install guys are sticking around because they like it and they're acquiring new people, like new staff, like new People want to come work at the company because they see this stuff on Facebook and like, man, it's exciting. I want to go work at a place like that. And so they're acquiring more good talent. When I see that, that's the most rewarding feeling in the world, because these guys work their asses off. They're such hard workers, and they deserve it. They're working way harder than the guys on Wall street, to use the. The American analogy or whatever you guys have down there. They're working way harder. They deserve, maybe not to be billionaires, but they deserve to have a business that can give them a legacy, that they maybe have an exit strategy where they can eventually sell the company or pass it on to an employee or to a family member, a son. And they can have the things that they're working hard to get. They can provide a life for their kids, and they can look at themselves in the mirror and be proud of what they're doing because they're not just some hammer swinger, they're a business owner. And that. That's the best feeling in the world.

Yeah, that's.

That.

That's awesome. I love that. I. I think a lot along the same lines. I mean, if you're going to spend your life on a roof, right, Then you want to have something to show for it, and it should be decent what you have to show. So I couldn't agree with you more on that. Your. Can you talk about the number of.

Podcasts that you're doing and the amount of. The amount of content that you're putting out and the value that you're putting out there in the world? Like, I got so much respect for. For you because you're making it happen for a lot of the people who are listening to you. They're taking away this guidance and they're learning stuff. And that's why I wanted to come and do this interview so badly, is because I can see that you're helping guys make it happen.

I hope so. I hope so. The feedback that I get certainly suggests that from time to time. So it's a nice job to be able to do the app that you sold. Can you talk about that really quickly or not?

I can. It's actually nothing related. I used to own Solarium tanning salons. Like you used to own those.

Yes.

And I built an app way back when that allowed people to book appointments online. I sold that to a franchise, and then now there's an app. Now there's an app that does that for all the different Health and beauty and massage and kind. There's like one big company that does it all, but that was the app that I built and sold. And yeah, nothing related to the trades industry just gave me the skill sets to make automations happen. Yeah.

Awesome. A question that I ask everybody, Adam, if you could have one law changed or implemented, what would that be?

Oh, that's a good question. Well, kind of. This is like, we're like, we're talking global here. So I don't know exactly what. I don't know exactly what challenges face your industry, and maybe this won't be totally relevant. But in the roofing industry, you know something that I see that in the roofing industry, there's a lot of stuff that goes around. Deductibles over storm damage and stuff like that. Every state has different laws. But one thing that's really kind of true across the board is that homeowners don't like paying a deductible for insurance. And what ends up happening is, for example, in a state like Texas, where you have a 1 or 2 or sometimes 5% deductible. Well, if you have a $500,000 house and hail comes and destroys your roof, and you have a 2% deductible, right. Well, then now your deductible costs you so much that there's tradesmen that run around and say, oh, we'll do it for, you know, without doing the deductible, or we'll eat the deductible. And what they really do is instead of you paying your 5 or $8,000 deductible, right, you. They cover it, but what they're doing is they're just putting on a substandard roof. And I think that this whole issue of deductibles being so high is really hurting the homeowner, it's hurting the insurance company, because then the roof that they're now insuring is a worse roof, and it's hurting the roofing industry because the companies that want to advertise on something like Facebook, they can't say, delete your deductible, but the door knockers can, because there's no recordings. There's no public, you know, there's no digital trace. There's nothing. So. So I would say that if I could change it, and this seems like quite, maybe not quite the greatest answer in the world, but I would say I'd like to see the deductible, the penalties for eating deductibles to be way, way higher. I'd like it to be a way more enforceable thing. Because I see a lot of people that can't get success in certain markets with things like Facebook ads because they can't make some of the false or illegal claims, such as we'll cover your deductible. They can't do that online. And so they've got an arm tied behind their back with regards to competitiveness.

That's.

I mean, that's a big question. I could say stuff will fall arrest. I could say stuff about so many things, but that's about the best thing I can come up with on the spot.

No, that's awesome. So a deductible for listeners in Australia, we'd call an excess. So it's the. If you make an insurance claim, it's the first payment you need to make right before the claim is accepted. So you might have a new roof, but you need to cover the first five or $10,000 or whatever it is.

Yeah.

So that's what we're talking about. The sort of, the. The legalities around working with those payments, which I think is why we're starting to see insurance companies get a lot more involved in managing the trades that work on the properties that they're insuring. Because I have no doubt that they know it all this goes on. It's just a matter of how they police it. Right. And the best way to sort of get around it, because at the end of the day, they're a business and they want to make money and they'll make the moves that they think will allow them to do that with the least pain, I would have thought.

Yeah. I mean, I wish I had a more noble thing. I mean, as you're talking, I think maybe like stuff around permanent roofs to make. Make it so that there's more of an incentive to put. Install permanent roofs. But then, I mean, I can piss off a whole lot of contractors and with that one, because asphalt shingles are the bread and butter of the industry. So it's tough to manage that because I don't want to. I don't really want to isolate myself from a bunch of my clients, but I think that the industry tends to grow and adapt by itself. But I would like to see an even playing field for honesty and integrity with the legalities around what homeowners are getting from their insurance companies. I just feel like that's a pain point for a lot of people that I work with is that they're dealing with these shady contractors. Anything that gets more of the shady fly by night, you know, Chuck, in a truck types to not have such an unfair advantage in the short term, because in the long term, good business is good business and you'll do well. But there's a lot of guys who have to, you know, not cut corners and not take the easy money and not do things that have to choose to do things the right way to their own detriment. And some guys don't ever get to the big time because of all these other problems that we've talked about today. But, you know, if there was at least a level playing field, they wouldn't be competing against these, you know, shady operators that circumvent the rules.

The more shady operators that we get rid of, the better. I think that all legitimate companies would absolutely agree with that. So if this sounds like a bit of a daunting transformation to take on by yourself, Adam, and someone wants to get in contact with you, what's the best way to go about doing that?

The easiest way to get a hold of me directly is to go to my Facebook page and hit me up on messenger or same thing with Instagram. That's the best place to get in touch with me. Or just go to roofingbusinesspartner.com I've got a lot of free tools and free guides and stuff like that to help people get started. I want to help people get past their level one and level two problems so that I can get them to the point where they can afford to pay me to solve their level 3, 4, and 5 problems. So, you know, get ahold of me on Facebook messenger, or just come and download my free stuff and help yourself and get the education you need, because that's how you get rid of the shady guys is you teach them how to run a good business.

Is there anything you want to add before we wrap up, Adam?

You know, Matt, I can't really think of anything. I just. I thank you for what you're doing for the industry. So I really appreciate that. And I thank you for inviting me on the show and making the time to get me out here, and I hope some of your listeners might find their way over to me and we can change the industry together.

Awesome. That sounds like a plan. Well, thank you for carving a little bit out of your very late day here at now. You must be right. What have you got as a time there?

10:50Pm well, there you go.

There's a dedicated person right there still on the line at this time of night or that time of night, I should say. Say. So thank you for doing this and I'm sure this is not the last time that we're going to talk, so I look forward to seeing what you do in the future.

Awesome. Thanks so much, Matt.

Hey everybody, it's Matt again. Thanks for listening. Just a couple of things before you guys clock off. You can get all Trench Talk episodes@xrm.com podcast. You can also sign up for other goodies at the same site. Just plonk your email in there and you are covered. That's X for X ray R for Romeo, M for mike.comau podcast. If you really like what I'm bringing you, please head to itunes, subscribe to this show and leave a review right there. And lastly, if you want to contact me directly, type the symbol followed by Mr. Matt Reynolds into your search bar and you'll find all the social links. Goodbye.