Adam Sand Roofing Business Partner: "Facebook ads got me in jail"

Welcome back everyone to roofing Insights. I'm sitting here today with Adam sand, founder of Surgeons roofing and roofing business partner. Man, thank you so much for flying all the way back from Canada.

Pleasure to be here, man.

My first question to you, man, is you don't look like a roofer at all. How did you end up being roofing business partner and owning a roofing business? What's behind it?

I get that all the time, especially in a lot of our videos that I do in both companies. And it's true, I'm not a roofer. I had two other businesses I started, but my best friend, he, you know, my life was like up and down and around businesses, jobs, making money, losing money. And his job was really steady. Eddie, he worked at a roofing company and the company that he worked for did really well. And he had two owners, Matt and Russ, and they sold the company for a large sum of money. And the guy who bought it wasn't a roofer either. He was that satellite owner. And Joe recognized really early that he was just the intellectual property sold at the company. I was like, you need to start your own company, get your own jobs. And he was like, I don't know, taxes and payroll and insurance and this, it's too much. I was like, I know how to do it. How much did that company sell me for? And he told me, I was like, I like that exit strategy.

So how long does it take to build solid brand like, and what I would say, like solid brand, like recognizable brand where everybody knows about like brand that starts dominated local market?

Minimum, minimum two years before you even can even attempt to say you're that. Because you need to get through one year just to prove that you've actually stuck around two years to show wasn't just lucky, right? So minimum two looking at and then three is really where you get to say you've handled it, right?

How many hours per week you work right now in that business?

So with sergeants roofing, I would say I maybe work now about 10 hours a week. I look for opportunities for marketing, right? So if I hear about a certain estimate, see a certain kind of house, hear a certain kind of concern, I watch our company cam feed and see what kind of pictures and sites they're on and I just look for marketing opportunities. I go out there and do that now. It wasn't always the case. I was at one point in time, one hour a week or like a couple hours at night just doing the Facebook ads when we first started. And then I quit My job went and bought a whole bunch of a truck and a dump trailer and I was like driving and visiting sites and we really blew up that year because I was just so in it. Plus I just quit my career to basically do that. And then roofing business partner, that has trickled up and up and up. And because I'm in Canada, it's go, go, go for seven months and it takes a fair amount of my attention, even if it's not so much of my time. And then roofing business partner really ramps up in the winter when our roofing season shuts down. And roofing business partner probably takes about 40 hours a week in my time.

How did you get into marketing? What's behind there? And also how different is. You said that you come from completely different businesses. How different roofing from anything else you've.

Done From a marketing perspective, it really is I find very much the same. Right. Consumers buy things for very similar reasons. Right. They buy from people they like and trust. They need to feel empowered to make a good decision. They have similar reasons that they value something operating the business very different. Sometimes roofers can be a little rough around the edges and you're dealing with.

A lumber like best dam roofer, like.

Best M roofer, big game. And so you're dealing with a lot of those different things. But as far as like processes, systems, standards and expectations, good people, good leadership, those basic fundamentals of business are I think universal.

What's behind roofing business partner?

We had a SEO Google agency that, that we hired and I learned about the power of Facebook a long time in the past. When I got in some trouble, I actually did a Facebook marketing for a totally different industry and got so much attention I ended up getting arrested. I own a tanning salon. It was tough business. Summer's rough times like August, mid August, I was like, you know, I really need to do a big marketing campaign. And so I thought, you know what I'm going to include? I'm going to create a lotion membership where you include the lotion and the tanning in the same membership. You got unlimited and so people didn't have to bring the bottle every day. So my idea to promote it was to put all these boxes throughout the mall. We have West Edmonton mall, like Mall of America here. And it was like a special gift to Tanner's and it was like this one year membership and this is before iPhones had Facebook. Like it was you. So take a picture and upload it. So I created a scavenger hunt. Whoever could find the most boxes would win this prize worth a thousand bucks. And it was worse because mid August, I said, In 30 days. In 30 days turned out to be September 11th. So then halfway through the contest, I'm like, okay, on September 11th is the prize. Now I know we're all thinking, I'm from Canada, it's a little different. So then what ended up happening is now all these picture people are taking pictures. And this because you had to upload pictures with digital cameras. Nobody took. Like there wasn't the constant picture flow there is today. It was still like, dimitri is sad today, you know. And so all these pictures of all these boxes hidden around one of our biggest tourist attractions. And a spot special prize was being announced on September 11. Some like friends and family members from the States were like, hello, he's gonna blow up your mall, right? And so I ended up getting arrested. So I learned very early that Facebook was powerful.

Colin, how did they arrest you?

So a special officer from the Canadian embassy reported to the RCMP who had to get basically CIA of Canada. And so then like 10 people came to my tanning salon. They had a robot unload the box, prove that it was nothing but plastic bags and empty lotion bottles in it. Then I had to move all the, all the boxes into like this big pyramid out front my store in the hallway of the mall. So I learned about the power of social media when we started the Sergeants roofing. And I was like, you know, we gotta like find a way to take advantage Facebook. I couldn't get an agency to do it. I couldn't hire anyone right now you can't throw a shingle off a roof without hitting 10 guys who are like, I do Facebook ads for roofers. Nobody was teaching like construction Facebook ads. And everybody told me it was a dumb idea. It's like, no, you use that to sell like personal training and dog toys and stuff. I was like, no, but it's like, everybody's on here. They call it Crackbook. And so I ended up taking a course just on how Facebook ads worked. And the premise of it was testing, testing, testing, testing. Everything is testing, right? And then ultimately, lead magnet and retargeting, right? It wasn't ever about trying to win on the first opportunity, but build an audience and then retarget. So we experimented a bunch. And I was taking money from my personal job essentially being like, okay, I know Joe, you have a three month baby and a two year old baby and you're, you know, you're working 17 hours a day. I'm going to take 50 grand of my personal money, blow it and waste on Facebook ads. By the way, you owe me half that back. And thank God he believed in me enough that I went down that experiment. And then after about wasting $50,000, we figured out what worked. And then it was 40% one year, 147% the next year and it just kept going.

Is Facebook is number one lead generation for you?

Facebook's number one for us.

How many businesses you work with right now on the Facebook ads?

I do five at a time. Right. I generally per year.

So you guys know Adam. He's not your regular agency. He doesn't take clients. He's not looking for clients. He pretty much comes to business picks the business, does agents like almost agency work for them. But he only works with the five businesses per year because a lot of.

It'S about the video coaching. Right. And I find that there's Facebook ads and then there's coaching on how to build a real audience and a brand.

And Facebook ads is number one lead generation for all your businesses?

We attempt to get there. Right. I mean we don't always win over everything else because sometimes they're spending 10 times the amount on Google or other things leased funnels.

But overall it's really good strategy for most businesses.

Everybody's always very happy. And the thing is, even if it's the number one source of leads, quite often it's the lowest cost per sale and the happiest customers like things that turn into great Google reviews and referrals.

How easy it is to make million dollars in the roofing business now say I'm brand new to the business. I want to make million dollar a year. How long will it take me if I'm willing to learn and scale and grow and whatever. How long does it take and how easy it is in the roofing business to make million bucks a year?

It's incredibly easy in my opinion.

Is it?

I mean, roofing industry is hard, right? I shouldn't say it as far as if you do the right things, generating enough business to earn a million dollars in retail. Retail business roofing in most markets is not hard.

I agree.

It really just comes down to having a strategy and knowing what your ideal customer is and then trying to approach things strategically to bring people down kind of a little psychological path where they kind of fall in and believe that your business is the best business and they're empowered to make that decision.

Awesome. What's your end goal? Are you gonna keep growing the roofing business for the rest of your life. You want to sell it or you want to be more on the agency side and grow your social media?

I guess my big path, what I've really realized is what my unique value is, is that I like partnering with other trades people. So my end goal is I want to help people get through level 2, level 3, level 4 problems as easily and with as little input or cost as possible. I really like the idea of finding more partners. I like the equity partnership model that I have with Joe and I'd like to do that more. But you know, that's a long, like you said, that's an end game. That's a long term thing. I like to own a number of construction companies with great tradespeople who are fantastic at what they do. Maybe just don't have the marketing and business acumen and realize that you could be stronger together than apart as competitors. Right?

We have a lot of brand new roofers in the room. Give one advice to somebody who's just getting started.

Marketing doesn't matter before you take care of your customers, right? And the number one way to take care of your customers is to have a clearly mapped out process for everything that you're going to do. You have to make it so that it's repetitive. It's something you've heard a million times about McDonald's and stuff like that, but it really is. The more predictability in systems and processes that you can create in your business with standards and expectations tied to them, the better you're going to be able to scale and grow and the less stress you're going to have. Because this business is something where you work very hard and you build. You know, you're trying to build something your family and you deserve the success you want. But if you don't have a process, you're going to constantly be on the selling and implementing, selling and implementing treadmill and you're never going to get out of that kind of rat race, in my opinion.

Thank you so much for your time today. Cannot wait for your keynote. Let's get it.