Adapt to change and reach your roofing business goals / Business Hats Podcast #10 with Adam Sand

We really just have found our way to help companies, you know, handle change and adopt new things like name a.

Company and one thing you learn from them. Like personally, in 2022, roofers need to.

Stop making content for other roofers, right?

What's a roofing business partner?

Today we're not upset because we don't have what we need. We're upset because someone else has more.

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Well, this has kind of become my annual routine at this point. We started working with Capilla Roofing, this company and it's been five years now of constantly reiterating on it, like on the system that we've built and the processes that we've kind of assumed coming here.

Five years.

Yeah, five years. We've come about seven times because there's two times that I came like halfway through and then we actually work with the client completely like with Brennan Monthly, right? Like we have like, we talk every, we have like a retainer with them. But the whole idea is that Brennan, you know, dreams big and then we iterate small. And we've just been making constant improvements. Like every level has a different devil. So we just keep making new stuff and it keeps getting bigger. So we just have to keep making stuff. And I find that change management is really a lot easier when you can come here, speak to people, relate to people, understand the stress of like learning a new system or Having to push buttons in a new place or taking on a new role. And I think it just. It makes it a lot easier when I can come out and actually, like, stand over their shoulders for a month and help, right? But at this point, it's a lot of me and Brennan just working on stuff. This particular visit, I haven't spent a whole lot of time here. It's basically being in a corner with Brennan on a whiteboard, coming up with stuff.

Love it. How did you guys meet?

Oh, so way back 20, when I first, like, you and me, before we even started talking, really, I had the Facebook ad thing, right? And Brennan download one of our, like, freebies that, you know, the lead magnet, right? And back then I would record a video for every single person that reached out. And so I record a video, and I was like, aloha. Because it was. I noticed that it was Hawaii, and I would do a little bit of background research on every person. We did like 586 videos in one month, right? Like, it was every single person. And so I said, aloha, and we had a quick little chat. We, like, touch base every few times. He followed us on. On Instagram and Facebook. And then I was out here for a wedding, and I just said, hey, you know, kind of what I would always do, I would go somewhere and I'd record a Facebook live. And I'd be like, hey, I'm going to be in Hawaii. If there's any roofers out there that want to hang out, like, I'd love to meet. And he was like, hey, my dad wants to take you golfing. I'm like, well, I'm terrible at golf, but I'd love to come say hi. And so I was on Maui, the other island. So I flew over here for. Just for the day, right? And came over and visit. And we were talking about marketing and stuff like that. And at the time, they were using a roofing specific CRM, and they had, like, folders and whiteboards and, you know, like, traditional way of running a roofing company. And I said like, well, what is the thing that keeps you up at night? And Brennan's father said, paying for silly mistakes, right? The really aren't our fault, but the customers don't understand. And I was like. And I was looking at some of the things they're doing. Like, I don't really think you have a lead problem. I think you have a system problem. And at that time, we had start working on systems because back then, Facebook ads are so easy that you could, like, bomb People with leads, because nobody was doing it. Like, now you can't throw a shingle off a roof without hitting three Facebook gurus in the head. But back then, it was like, everybody said, oh, Facebook ads, That's dumb. You're dumb. You're dumb. Referrals. So it was like, I was kind of in a market of one, actually. Joseph Hughes used to have an agency, and I had a school, and then I went to having an agency, and he went to having a school. Is going to. It was in that period. But I was like, we were starting to make systems for people because they were firing us for giving them too many leads. And I was like, who fires the marketer for getting them too many leads? And that led us to talking about a CRM. And so they were like, you know, they said I showed them, like, kind of what we were doing right, with it. And he was like, that's pretty cool, right? And I showed him, like, another client's CRM. And I was like, yeah, you can do this with it. And he was like, that's pretty cool. I was like, do you see this could help me? Said, yeah, let's talk about it. So we talked for about a month after I left, made a deal, flew back out here in December, right, And rolled out this new CRM. And I mean, I. At the time, I never had a client call me back, right? It was like, we would build it, and then they were good, you know, and he was the first person who was like, all of a sudden, seven months later, he's like, so I was wondering, like, what your plan is for coming back out again this year. I'm like, come back out. Like, it's not good. He's like, no, it's good. We just. We're like, doubled in size, and I need to. I need to do something with, like, getting a sales manager and getting, like, that built, because we need, like, I want to go focus on commercial more, right? But we need a sales manager. So then I was like, okay. So I flew out and I, like, built the system, changed it a bit to go around a sales manager. And they wanted some stuff with painting, and we made, like, all these little adjustments, and then that. That just became the routine. And then other customers started seeing that it could come out again, so they just did that too. And then all of a sudden, we stopped being a Facebook company. But that was kind of how we met.

Got it. Would you say that Capili is your best and perfect client?

I would say that Capilli is our highest performing client. Because of who the client is, right? Because the tool doesn't matter as much as the process. The process doesn't matter as much as getting adoption. And he just adopts it fully. I mean, the dude has a HubSpot tattoo on his leg. So he's like fully committed. He's committed.

Wow. What's a roofing business partner today?

You know, we have gone through a lot of iterations on that. And you know, because it started as just Adam, right, running around doing stuff with Facebook ads. And then it was me helping people with CRMs. And then it was like, okay, we're a consulting company. That really makes sense. And what we've really kind of come to the conclusion is, is that we are really high performing in change management and technology adoption. And we just happen to build on certain tools like Sumoquote and HubSpot. But we really just have found our way to help companies, you know, handle change and adopt new things. And so our mission statement is to make work more rewarding through engineering better customer experiences. Because we find that there's a lot of terrible jobs in roofing companies like scanning paperwork into a system all day or copy pasting stuff. And we just want to make the work of the employees of our clients more rewarding through engineering better customer experiences. We know what the owner wants. He wants to make more money, make more profit, work less, have a better life balance, know what's going on with this company. They all want the same thing, but we build for the employees and we build for the customers. And the owner just gets what he wants by osmosis.

Love it. Name the best roofing businesses you have been at. Who impressed you the most?

Well, I've been to Apex Roofing. They do some stuff that I would probably have red dots on me if I told everybody what they're doing. But Apex does some pretty impressive stuff. Capilli has probably been the most impressive from a pace of evolution and like revenue per capita and technology adoption, company culture, like there's a lot there. Apple Roofing, I mean, we all know about them. I worked with them, we're doing something with them right now.

What's impressive about Apple?

Yeah, well, that building is a palace. Dustin, right? Dustin is a really impressive guy. His ability to simplify is great. Marcus is like a very hard driven leader. I think that their ambition is also impressive. Like just seeing what they're trying to do, whether they accomplish it or not, just seeing that the private equity firm found them to be worthy and that they are pursuing this ambition, that's impressive. You know, we have a lot of the same likes. Like I've seen Eustace, right? They're awesome. So I mean everywhere I go we're, I find, you know, I wouldn't say every company, but there are some companies I go to and I'm like, wow, that's really impressive that you guys do that. I mean Monarch, right? There's another one. Like, I mean I basically follow you around and then I just go see them too. And I'm like, well that's impressive. But we found some pockets of some really, you know, really interesting individuals in different places. Like even true works, right? Like they're beautiful little fat, like I don't want to say little because it sounds demeaning, but family run operation and they're great people, you know what I mean? And some people, you know, they know who they are. They're not necessarily going for the billion, you know, but they know who they are and they know who their customer is and they know what they're doing it for. And they have their core values really set out and it's just, it's impressive in that way and that they're not participating in what you call like the pissing contest, right? Like they're, they're there to just build something that they can be proud of. And that to me is impressive.

Love it. Can you name few lessons that you have learned from these companies? Like name a company and one thing you learn from them like personally in 2022.

Oh, in 2022 I would say that, I mean, well, I'll say that Apex Roofing probably had the biggest eye opening moment of the year going there and seeing how they look at the insurance industry differently and how they, what, what do you do at 150 million is very, very different from what you do at 50 or 5.

Like how big is epic?

150. So.

And what, how do they look at the insurance?

I would probably end up in a ditch if I said too much because it's like there's not like an NDA but honor system, but they just, they approach the insurance industry very, very differently. And they have some MBA finance, you know, Wall street type people working there who just looked at the industry and saw it like through a different lens and that was really cool. I would say that this year, 2023, Brennan and myself, we started looking at low code and no code options to bridging the gap between what, like an ERP system is like a very complicated accounting production, like very like, you know, $200,000 accounting software versus with the limitations of CRM. And there seems to be this massive chasm that you have to cross to get to erp. And Brennan started looking at when we went to Inbound, which is like the HubSpot conference, He found this tool called Trey IO and he invited me into all the calls, but he made the decision to join with them, started learning to code, and then he kind of learned it and showed me the low code, no code stuff. And that taught me where the future, I think of business is going. And now I'm fully adopted. And that's kind of like the projects that we're working on now is trying to find these unique approaches to features of work in the back end operations of a company. And I couldn't have done it without him.

Love it. We talk a lot about success and, you know, we just. I interview Brandon, very impressive owner and many, many others. One common personal trade that most business owners who are successful, like you're millionaires in the roofing industry, they have is they are decisive, they make decisions quick. I consider myself being very decisive. I don't think twice, like, if I see opportunity, if I see something, it's just here and now, boom, go. But I know a lot of people who are listening to this podcast are on other end of decisiveness. And I want to talk about it. I want to talk about the roofers who are in all of these groups, Facebook groups, asking all of the questions, because to be honest with you, I'm getting tired of the same questions over and over and over again from the same people oftentimes. So if you study Facebook groups and you look at all of those business owners, who's doing 1, 2, 3 million dollars, the questions are always the same. How much do you pay your salespeople? And when I look, I mean, it's okay to ask that question once in your lifetime, but I see, I'm like, dude, you've been in this group for like three years. You've seen answer to this question 10 years. Like, do you pay 10% or split? I mean, like, are you serious? Like, you still did not decide what are you gonna do in your company? And it goes across the board. Where do you find leads? Where do you recruit people? How much do you pay guys? And the same questions over and over. And what I see is we have a huge number of business owners out there who are not decisive, who are always learning, but never could actually implement the crap. So I call them Facebook owners. You know, they should invest in Facebook because they own Facebook. They, I think they own more of Facebook than they own of their companies sometimes. And I don't get it. Like, what do you say to someone who seen it all, seen every podcast, heard every answer to their question and still in the same place where he was three years ago?

I tell them to go get a job. I, I, I can, I'll never put them on the blast, but I know some names that we both know who are in that position and I look at them and I go, dude, like.

What else you don't know?

Yeah, like, I'm like, go get a job. Like, you would be a dream employee for some of the people that I work with. You would be fantastic. Like, and you would make six figure jobs.

You think they're not capable to run a business?

Thousand percent, 80% of roofing business owners.

People who asking all the questions all the time and not doing them.

Like they don't, their employees do.

What's the test of, you know, I'm cut for this or I'm cut for this between business owner and employee for business owner.

That'S really tough. I think that a business owner lives in four areas, right? Leadership development, business development, innovative campaigns and systems and processes. And your ability to stay within those four quadrants is immensely important. You said decisiveness. I agree with that completely. The ability to say I'm going to do something and then do it. You know, it's weird that you just posted this because I literally just on Facebook made a post that said, like, all my wins have come from action to the power of urgency and attachment to the outcome, to the power of patience. And all my losses have always come from action being delayed and attachment to the outcome being very immediate. And I think that that is the problem, right, is that they're always looking for an answer in the group or a tool or technology or a button or employee that's going to change their life. And it's just doing the boring, hard, boring work consistently for an uncon unconventional amount of time without tricking yourself into thinking you're too smart.

I think business owners will always figure it out. I mean, I love consultants. I hire people, you know, like if I suck at sales, hire someone in sales. If you don't know how to make presentation, hire someone to make a presentation. If you don't know CRM, hire someone to build CRM. But, but there's so many things that you have to do yourself. No one gonna do it for you. So when a business owner tells me, you know, marketing is not my thing or accounting is not my thing, I'm like, no, you're the business owner. Everything is your thing. Marketing is your thing. Accounting is your thing, your process, your CRM, your everything is your thing. You cannot tell anyone. Like, you should be jack of all trades within your business. I mean, you don't have to be an expert, but you have to be dangerous enough to make a decision about that, otherwise how are you going to make those? And people, you know, they do it all the time. Like, who makes the best CRM?

Well, it's. It's a cycle every year, right? So it's. We're recording this in January, right? So in two months, everybody's going to be, what's the best leads? Who's the best marketer who does Facebook ads, right? Then they're going to get a bunch of leads and go, holy shit, we're not selling enough. So then they're going to go, who's the best salespeople? And everybody's going to Chuck Thoke and Adam Bensman and Ronnie Webb and all this kind of stuff, right? And it's going, how do I sell? And then they're going to go, okay, we're selling a bunch of stuff, but, gosh, we're losing track of stuff. We're getting customer complaints. What's the best CRM out there? And they think that switching from jobnimbus to Acculinx or vice versa is going to change their life, and it won't. And then, I mean, I'm at the point now where I have snippets in my HubSpot keyboard that are just long blocks of text. And I just answer the question with the same answers now, because it's the same questions that have been asked for the last four years. Get to the end of the year and they go, oh, that was hard. What do people do? Systems and processes. Until then, everybody starts hiring Riva. You know, like, it's the same cycle over and over. And like, for the industry, vendors that serve the industry. So the, the use, the me's, the Tim Hooks, the. The sales guys, the marketing guys, the schools, the SEO schools, the CRM companies, the conferences, they all function around these cycles. And the problem is, is that some people are in this business, I think, for the camaraderie and the sense of community. And that's okay. If you want to do 3 million a year and you want to stay there, that's fine. There's nothing wrong with it. But you should have what you want clearly mapped out in a vision. And you have to understand that if your vision doesn't expand to Fill the capacity of your employees vision. You will constantly be hiring and training because you can't develop the leader past a certain point. You are now in the way. And so you have to just know what kind of business you're going to be and then accept the facts and the realities of being that kind of business. Right. Just like if you want to be the billion, there's a 99% chance you're going to screw it up and not make it. And you have to be okay with that.

We will be back to podcast in a minute but first I wanted to invite all our listeners to a roofing process conference. If you're in the roofing industry, a roofing process conference is a must attend eventually. We are no party conference. We are no sales fast conference. We are very, very different and proud of it. It's our fourth year doing a conference and we're doubling size every year. We have the best people come and we have one record that we're very proud of. No jerks ever attended. Zero jerks record. Dustin Bigler came to me last year and he told me this. He said, dimitri, I don't know where you're finding these guys, but they are so nice. I did not know that so many nice roofers were actually in this industry. I would say this aggressive salespeople attract aggressive salespeople. Scumbags attract scumbags. And successful hard working people will attract successful hard working people. You can book your tickets@arroofconference.com it's very simple. Aroofconference.com use a promo code. Dimitri. 25 for 25 off at a checkout. That's Facebook. What about TikTok and destruction that that brings? Because I see so many roofers are being distracted on TikTok. And when I see roofer posting 10, 15 stories that are downloads from TikToks, I'm like, you guys have a problem. You're. You're addicted to this thing. I mean I got myself being distracted way too much to tik tok. I mean it is, it is like a drug and you have to get off it. But I see roofers getting on it and then the cycle changes. So now you have a Facebook and then you have like it's entertainment, entertainment, entertainment. And they justify it by, I don't know, it's good for the business. Is it good for the business to pick a dancing trend?

No, it's good. It's good for TJ McCormick to tell people to go on TikTok because TJ McCormick is the authority. Right. Of TikTok and Good Hustle. You know, it got him the roofer thing, right? Because he was the TikTok guy. But you have to have a business plan behind using it, and you have to give some kind of value. And the problem is, is that most of these roofers are making content for each other. I bet. Like, I do a podcast in, like, 2017, it says, stop making. Like, roofers need to stop making content for other roofers. Right? And that's what a lot of them are doing, is they're doing it for clout. They're doing it to be like the. You know, to be like the coolest guy in the roofing insights group, right? But they're not necessarily doing it to actually develop audience or be right. And I mean, and the problem is it comes with so much distraction. It takes time. Like you said, hire consultants. I hire consultants. I have a person who records the videos, edits them, sends them to me, one a day, and I just go in, like, all the platforms and post it. And I do it because. But I try and like. But I write things down and I record all those videos in, like, two hours, and then I post them. I'm not out there 14 times a day whipping out my phone, trying to catch dance trends. Like, I'm just saying, okay, I write everything down on Twitter, right? Then when I hear something smart, read a book or hear somebody say something smart, put it on Twitter. And I got this from Alex Armosi. I didn't invent this, but I love him. Oh, he's the best. Yeah.

I've heard exactly the same thing, how he does it. Like, all his ideas. He was on Twitter and then, see?

And then, yeah, yeah. So I do the same. So I'm like, I'm just going to take what he does. But then, you know, when it comes to our sales, I only know how to sell when it's me. Right? But when I hired a salesperson, I was like, why do his sales suck? And I tell him what to say, and it doesn't work. I went, oh, right. He doesn't have the equity of, like, answering 2,000 questions on the. On the Facebook groups and doing 2,000 videos and being on stages, and he doesn't have that equity. And so I had to hire a consultant to teach my sales guy how to sell. Even though I think I'm fairly good at sales. I couldn't. Even though I'm a fairly good sales manager, But I can't teach him how to sell when he's not me. So I had to Hire someone. And so if these people want to, like, if these guys want to try and girls want to try and build this social media thing, I think they need to have a plan for what they're trying to do, because it's. They spend more time now scrolling and looking and trying to look for inspiration and catch trends. And it's like, who's watching your business?

Like, it's like one of the best billboards. I. I don't know who manages it. I guess got. They come up with the freaking funniest, coolest billboards ideas ever. And one of them in Minneapolis right now says, if you're a texting, who's driving? So if you scroll it, who's running your business? Yeah, because if you. You know, Everybody hates this 9 to 5 business life, right? Like, oh, you know, 9 to 5 is slaving. Here's what I'm here to tell you. You can run a business from 9 to 5, and if you actually work from 9 to 5, you'll build amazing business. But what so many people are doing, they're scrolling from nine to five. Literally scrolling. And I used to go to restaurants around Minneapolis for lunch. Just drop in every time you go during the day, like, random places like Mexican place or like smaller restaurants. And you see people at the bar, always contractors, day drinking, like, three, four contractors. And it was one place. I had a job there. And I would. Mexican place was like, most convenient place to eat. And three days in a row, I. I stopped there to eat. In three days in a row, I see three contractors at the bar. Every single day, different contractors and talking to each other. They're like, they're there every day. And they would have, like, three, four beers, and they would go on with their things. I'm talking about, like, builders and remodelers and stuff. I'm like, what are you guys doing? Like, I mean, it's a lifestyle. And scrolling becomes a lifestyle. And being in Facebook groups asking all these questions during the day, it's a lifestyle. Nate Schweppe, yesterday, or they before yesterday posted that Facebook sent him a message that, hey, buddy, you've been too much on Facebook. Take a break. Or set a reminder when Facebook is telling you spending too much on Facebook, you have a problem. And I guarantee you it did not happen after hours or first thing. And it's like. And it's an art, you know, I want to share one thing. I know who's watching, who needs to hear this, but if you ever caught yourself being on your phone scrolling at the gym you need a different gym. One of the reasons I'm addicted to CrossFit is because I cannot be in my phone there. Like I can't because it's a class, there's 20 people around you and there is workout that you have to do and people watching and you cannot quit. So you come in, there's 20, 20 minute wad. So you have to warm up. Like I don't have enough discipline to motivate myself. If I go by myself to Lifetime Fitness, I'm not gonna stretch. You know, we have actual first workout is a stretching workout. It'll be like six, seven minutes, you know, 10 air squats, you know, inch worms, you know, scalp pull ups just to warm up your body for the. I don't do that. It's boring. I'm too cool to do the warm up. Like at CrossFit they make you do that and then the second one and then guess what? It's the best one hour. It's the most convenient, it's the most. It's the fastest way to get fit because you don't waste a minute. Stay focused. Someone plan the workout. Your phone is on the side, you can't touch it. That's why I do freaking CrossFit because it helps me to stay focused on my fitness. And we need CrossFit strategy. In everything in business, you need to come to work and someone would make you work. Here's what I see that most business owners in the roofing space who have never been truly successful, I'm talking about a couple million dollars. It's not truly successful, it's mediocre. Right? They only work at their full capacity when there are bills to pay and when they're behind the rest of the time, I would say 80% of the time they are in complacent mode. I would say they work 30, 40% of their capacity. If they have enough money for Friday payroll, if they have enough money for themselves to live their lifestyle, there is no urgency to sell more. There is no urgency to advertise to do something out. Like that's why you're scrolling, because your bills are paid. Because it's easy to be complacent in this industry because you sell one or two jobs and those couple jobs will pay your bills. But, but what about double? What about living on half of your income? It's not that hard to, to do that. Like most leave paycheck to paycheck, but you can double your income, but you have to think outside the box and you have to work a Little bit harder. They're not willing to do it. Would you agree?

Yeah, I would agree with everything you just said. Yeah, It's. I think that the world. I used to watch that movie Wall street, and it's like greed. Greed is good, right? And I don't think. I can't remember who said. I think it was Charlie Munger. He said that the world isn't driven by greed. It's driven by envy. And that's why, even though today we have more comfort than we've ever had the advancement in 100 years prior, we get air conditioning, cars, Internet, computers, telecommunications, travel. You know, we were kept at a constant steady temperature of 72 degrees, 24 hours a day. We can order food to our house. Even spite of all of that, we're actually more unhappy as a society than we were because we're not motivated by greed. We're motivated by envy. We're not upset because we don't have what we need. We're upset because we. Someone else has more. And so I think that as people accomplish what they think is good, right? Good enough, then they're more about trying to create envy in others. And so then they try and put that out there. And I don't think that at that point, they're driven by. Driven by any. Any. I don't think they're driven by a plan, right? And I don't think that. I think they lack vision. I think that 80% of roofing business owners and probably other businesses, But I think 80% of roofing business owners don't belong to be in business, right? I think that it's just. It's. I think it's a business that is easy to get into, right?

You.

You want to start a yogurt shop, right? Sell yogurt, $7 a time. Well, you got to spend 100 grand on a lease. You got to do the tenant improvements. You got to put the yogurt in the black glass thing. Got to get a point of sale system for 50 grand. You got to hire and train people, get a food permit, get a freezer, you know, get out of the inventory there, do your marketing. Pay $5,000 for a little lit can't can sign on out front, right? And then day one, you open your door and your first customer walks in and spends $7. You know what I mean? And it's like roofing. You get a $3,000 Capital One credit card. You can, you know, like Matt for Marty from Riva, from Omar Roofing says, you know, he drove around his car parked up the block has a $3,000 credit card. He can get a sub to, you know, he can take his old boss's piece of contract, put his logo in the top corner, and now he's got a credit card, $3,000 worth of material, get a sub, go to a job, get paid, make $4,000 profit, pay the sub, pay the credit card, start again. Right? So easy. And because it's easy, we don't get a high class of entrepreneur.

Love it. Let's talk about decisiveness one more time. As a consultant, how do you pick a client? So let's say someone comes to you and say, Adam, build me CRM. And you see that he is the type. He is not decisive one. Would you work with him? And how do you work with non decisive people?

We don't. We do. We. It's like.

Is that how you filter people?

Yeah, I mean, we. Well, I mean, the price helps, right? So the price does some filtering automatically. And the price is there because we have to do a lot of change management for them. We have to do a lot of adoption for them. We have to a lot of training. We can only service so many people at a time. And you know, we kind of say that our ideal customer is someone where the marginal rate of return on money is. Or, sorry, the. There's a diminishing rate of return. Right. The money in their bank account, right. The marginal utility of it is gone. They're not any more happy with another car. So for them, the vision is they just wish their business would run the way they always knew it could or should, and they didn't. And when we talk about what we can do, they quickly get the, like, oh, like that. That's what I need. Right. And they're at the point now where they would, where they, they want that so badly that they'll do anything to get it. And they're just looking for someone to help unlock the few barriers that they don't understand. And those people tend to be very decision, you know, fast decision makers, right. They're highly decisive and they take action really quickly. I mean, the first year that me. And like you said, CrossFit, right. When I've come to clients like we work a ton, like the employees here at Capilli, they know around Christmas Adam's showing up and they start mentally preparing, they start clearing their plates, they start trying to get a head start because the employees here know that when I come, it's going to be a big deal, right? And so, you know, it's like, it is that highly focused time because we're making a big change and we need to make a big impact. So I have to, I've learned to try and read the customers to know who those business owners are that are going to be highly intense in the process. Because sometimes think some people just treat me like we're there to build a thing for them and they don't get involved. We've shed a lot of them. I've seen some in the last 12 months and I was like, I was like, oh, I didn't listen to myself on this one. I knew better. I knew this would end up like this.

Love it. Yeah. I filter like crazy because we do a lot of YouTube deals. So when I come in, I train people. Everybody wants to have YouTube following and get customers from, you know, viral videos and stuff. And there's only so much I can, I can show you everything I do. I can do 10 videos for you, but then you have to start making your own. Like, they know now how, but they wouldn't do it. And it makes me look bad and it also makes me very disappointed later because I've done videos for some clients. You know, I'll do five videos and now people know who you are and they will not do video number six. It's hard. What's your take on Chat GPT?

Oh, yeah. So I, I love AI and I love ChatGPT. The problem with me is I publish a lot of my experiments with stuff like AI or like whatever is new. I'm just the nerd that's always doing something new. And I learned in the last two weeks that, you know, with great, I don't want to say great power because that sounds arrogant, but I just realized that my Facebook, sometimes when I publish my experiments, people think that's like a how to manual and so they will start doing it immediately. I'm like, whoa. Like you could seriously damage your SEO. So, like, this is out there for all of you. Like, no, you can't just feed one sentence in a chatgpt and expect for a perfect, you know, SEO written blog to come out the other side. It's going to repeat words too much. It's not going to have good sentence structure. But the people who use these kinds of things right are going to be more effective than the people who don't. So ChatGPT is just an engine, right? But you have to have a car built around an engine. So I'll give you a good example. So there's a chrome extension now, right, that you can use to when you look at an email and you see like, hey, I want to, like, let's say you send them a marketing email and you're like, hey, you should join the roofer school. Would you like to talk about it? And they're like, ugh, I don't have time to give this the attention it deserves, but I want to. You can go into that email, use this Chrome extension to say, write a friendly email back letting them know I'd like to talk to them more, but don't have time right now. And it'll write like a nice, nice response, Right? That's a weak example, but it basically allows you to give things the attention they deserve without necessarily putting in all the effort of just putting in the words. Because for me, I'm a fairly fast typer, but I know lots of people aren't, right? And that will actually help them give a dignified response because they're like, more like, you know, maybe typing with their thumbs or they're not that fast. And this allows them to do that. That's probably the most simple version of what there is. But I mean, there's also a thing using ChatGPT, Chat GPT now that allows you to basically remember everything you've browsed. And then like you, it's a Chrome extension. And for those of you wondering, you can use incognito windows to hide what you've been browsing. But for everything else, you can have your normal Chrome browser window open. It'll remember everything you did, even transcribe the videos you watch. And if you go and somebody said something about greed and envy, what was that? You could type like greed and envy and it would pop up. If you watch this as a YouTube video, it would pop that up. And so it's basically like a history of everything you've been searching and you can create that to like, have better memory, right? So what happens when you go like, can't remember, but I can remember a couple of words and go, greed, envy. And it was like, oh, in the last week you saw this and you can go back and find that. So it's about the engines that are going to be built on Top of chat GPT, OpenAI all these other things, right? And the way that they combine them right into multiple things, that's going to be the value arbitrage on top of it. So it's just like having an engine sitting on an engine mount, feed gas into it and have it spin. It doesn't go anywhere. But when the minute you put a transmission, a drivetrain, A car around. Now you have something that can take you places, right?

I just hope I have controversial opinion on it because I see my heart goes to business owners who are taken advantage by marketers and tools like chat. GPT gives more opportunities for shady marketers to scam business owners. Because I already seen so many bad deals where you know, business owners pays 2,500 bucks a month for someone to manage their website. And then if you dig deep like and ask investigate how much work the company is doing, you know, two, three hours a week a month. Right. So like would you Pay your lawyer 2,500 bucks, $5,000 a month on for a couple hours of work? Probably wouldn't. But now we're giving those marketers tool that can be like I'll write five blogs from you and you know, they put sentence in and spits out blog and then business owner gets the result, gets the article. But you know, doesn't get it's. It's a cheating code for a shady person. And I think business owners can learn something like chatgpt and freaking fire the marketer. That's what I think should happen. Like you know, something like writing blog for your website. Any creative task, any creative stuff for your business, just learn how to use and abuse the system so you don't have to go to someone else. Pretty much it takes away all the, you know, creative stuff. I mean it's so crazy and so powerful. They're doing research right now and people who are testing and go to like this rabbit hole. I mean you can, you can do something like hey, write an episode of you know, Friends sitcom with where Ross is doing this and it will write it really good. Right? I mean you have to give really good direction what to do. But if you're the business owner, you can say like write my story based on this, this and this and this style and that's going to do for you. I mean it's freaking amazing. I did a, I tried it, right? I went and I said give me reasons why anyone should attend roofing process process conference. Dude, I was shockingly impressed. Is like 10 reasons to attend roofing process conference. It was like network and this and this and learn from the best speakers. I'm like, and it took three seconds. Yeah. So but the same time, you know, I could be taken advantage of by some marketer because if I, let's say I paid someone 500 bucks for this article and it would take them 3 seconds to do that. This, like how do you prove that they didn't do It, But I, I guarantee you there's more people going to be taken advantage of in this way where they can learn how to do it themselves.

And they deserve it. They truly do, because it's laziness. ChatGPT got to a million users faster than any platform ever in the history of humanity. And, and, and it's laziness. So the minute this happened, me and Brennan, like, we've been chatting about it as it's been coming. And like, we were like, as soon as we got here, we've been like tweaking out on this till four in the morning some days. And we found a way to like, we were like, how do we, like, like, what's coming out of this thing sucks, right? And so then we kept working and trying to figure it out. So at first it was like, feed a prompt in and it would spit out a blog post, but it would be rough text. You have to format it. They were like, how do we make this better? So then he has a, like a kind of another automations guy that works here with the company. We're like, okay, we want to make, like, make an automation that spits it in zapier and spits out five paragraphs, outline it. So it's like, because it's all prompt engineering, right? Like this will be a field of study, prompt engineering. Like, how do you prompt the AI to do something? That'll be the skill. And so then we figured out how to make it make paragraphs. And then we're like, okay, now let's spit that into like surfer SEO and see what it actually gets. And gets like a score of 20, which is terrible. So then we're like, okay, how do we write faster? So you can take the outline from that, feed it into Jasper, right? And then ask it to expand upon these topics and then it can write more. And then you feed that into surfer SEO, and then you get like a score of 60. And then you do a couple other things like breakout, put some headlines, put some formatting in, and then it gets a score of 74. And now you're good. That process took 90 minutes. Knowing how to prompt it, how to break it into an outline, then knowing what tool to feed it into, feed it there, check the score, be accountable to the result, come back, expand, check the score. That's what they're going to pay for. But if you're paying 500 bucks for a guy to spit out articles and you're not, you don't know how to qualify his work outcome, then you deserve to be Taken advantage of. You have to know, right? But that's the problem is it will, I mean if you go on YouTube right now and type in AI, it's like how to make thousands of dollars a month with AI. And it's basically just, yeah, you can do this and spit it out and charge people $500 for it. And yeah, people will get taken advantage of for sure. Right. But it's not going to get them the intended outcome anyway. And those people who are scamming people, they'll be found out. They're not good business owners either. They're basically shady fly by night roofers that, you know, surface nail shingles to a roof after a repair or after a rainstorm caused a leak. They'll just go up there and put, you know, the wrong color shingle on a face, nail it. You know, they're the equivalent of that. You know, they're like, oh, you're looking for SEO, I can solve your SEO problems. And then they'll come up there and face nail it by feeding one sentence in a GPT, spitting out five paragraphs and do it. I'm watching this happen and, and I'm just like, if you're not going to take the time to invest in learning the thing or you're not going to take the time to qualify someone who can be your guide, that's it, then you deserve to get taken advantage of.

You interview them just like you interview anyone else. Would you hire a roofer to put shingles on your roof, on your job without interviewing, talking about his experience? Why are you giving someone a couple grand a month without investigating? Is he. Would you hire a lawyer, a doctor like that? But you paying lawyers and doctors money for marketing to 18 year old kid based on what?

Yeah, because they're able to wow you, right? Like, and truthfully, if you understood the complexity of what it takes to actually take the raw idea of something like AI or ChatGPT and actually turn it into a product. Right now it's still a ways off, but it's going so fast, right. In a matter of the, of two weeks we went from, you know, Dolly to seeing Mid Journey come out and being like great art. And then now Google launched Muse, which can basically live transform images, which means we're not far away from movies, right from video. And then there's. You can now go, I can't remember it, Spike. It's like I can't remember the name of the website. I'm sorry. But you can now record your voice, put it in, it'll Synthesize your voice. So you put an hour of video or voice into it and it'll. You can then write scripts and it'll synthesize your voice. You can use synthesia, take pictures of yourself from all angles, and it will synthesize you.

It's insane. Like, the amount of technology is coming up right now. This will never be the same.

Yeah. And so you can now use those two things. And then you could prompt write this, do this, then take it. This, make a B roll of it. Find or find a B roll of it. Like, the world's gonna be drastically different in 12 months. And most people just aren't prepared. And most. The roofing industry will be very, very slow to adopt this.

Right.

The great thing and the worst thing about the roofing industry is that it takes forever for us to adopt anything.

Why is that? What do you think the future holds for roofing industry? Do you see more, bigger players rising up? Or do you see, you know, domination of small businesses? Because every year is happening after almost any storm, you know, big player splits into 50 smaller companies, and then those 50 smaller companies with a horrible management splits another 20 companies. And do you see more Apple roofings, you know, or bigger, bigger players in each market?

I believe so, because the unit economics of running a roofing company at the small level are terrible. It's very hard to. I mean, it's too expensive. There's too much froth. Right. And the industry, we're not. And they don't look through it, as Brennan says, through how do you scale human capital? Right. Like, how do you make it so that people aren't doing these BS jobs? And when we're building these things, that's what we're looking for is what is the revenue per capita that we can create in the company, the revenue per person who's not putting nails through shingles. And eventually, I think that there's going to be some roofing business owners that are going to look at it through the lens of how much, how can I provide roofs for less money? Whereas everybody else is trying to, like, I'm the most expensive in my market. How can we make the cost 5% less? Right. Like, how can we do that? And so, you know, if we want to, like, teleport to the future. Right. And think of, like, what. I think that if you're looking at something like AI and technology and what the roofing industry is going to look like in the future, we have to think, like, what technology or what features do we need to be available and how can be we be ready for when it's there? It's not skating to the puck, it's not even skating where the puck is going. It's skating where the puck is going to go after the goalie deflects it. And you get your second chance because you've already missed the first wave of AI. So I think the future is going to look like very well capitalized, very well organized companies that are just going to make the process of roofing less expensive. And the ways they're going to do that is now let's just use some readily available technology today and combine it with a few things that could be done right. And I'd love to find a way to be the person that makes it. But you know, if not someone else can make it. But how do you make it so that after a hailstorm you have an autonomous driving vehicle that doesn't require a person drive out there. Tailgate opens on your Tesla roof examiner roof hawk flies out, scans it. You put that into scale. AI image processing determine if there's damage. Factories are doing this now to determine if things are damaged by the factory when they're spitting out clothes. It's going to be just a matter of time before you can use image processing to do that, right? Do the image processing on the, on the, on the roof. Determine if there's damage. You've got an NFT smart contract with your insurance company. The most successful insurance companies will be the ones who only pay out damage when there is damage and don't pay out damage when there isn't. Because they use NFT smart contracts that are based on a pre designed algorithm that says what is damage and what is not damage and what do we have to pay. So then you eliminate the public adjusters and the in the appraisers and you don't need to go to court all the time. And then because you don't have to supplement it can examine you just spit into document AI. It reads your policy, it reads the outcome of the damage assessment and it says this is the building code. And therefore this is what has to be on here. Automatically supplements it. And that's what this contract is worth. And it happens in four minutes after the drone flies over the house.

Give it 10 years.

Give it, I think two.

Love it. Can you name few tools that no one needs anymore but a lot of people still use?

I would say like the, the one of the biggest ones is like review generation, right. There used to be a time when there was just no way to share the Link and Google saw like that these companies could come out and charge 500amonth to basically make it.

So yeah, Bird eye, I used to.

Be a big lover of it. I used it, I paid for it. Right? But you don't need that anymore because Google business, I, yeah, I believe so. Because I mean there's a lot of idiots still in business. So I mean as long as there's idiots in business, you're gonna have that. The whole SaaS business model is built on the dream that came with commerce and cloud computing. Right. It just made it so that I'm going to build a good enough product for a winner take most market and I'm going to make it $50 a month and then everybody's going to use it and then I'm going to build the feature sets to the minimum or to the maximum audience. Right? And this is how all the SaaS companies are built. They don't pay for customer success because it's too expensive at $50 a user. They don't pay for customizing it because it's too expensive. That's how we've managed to build value arbitrage on top of like sumoquote, right? Sumoquote, 200 bucks a month or whatever like that. You get it. 50% of our customers have had Sumoquote for a year and they're not using it. Sumoquote's making their money. Right? But, and I love that and like I love Sumoquote and I know their business model is what makes sense for a SaaS company, but it doesn't make, they can't provide the service to customize or build on it at $50 a month. Like you can't, like what are you gonna do? That's two hours at $25 an hour and the company $0. Like you can't invest the 30 hours that it takes. And so I think that the industry is, it's, it's almost like it's predatory, right? The, the SaaS industry preys on people with like, here's a really well written copy page with a bunch of really cool videos. I mean we fell for it with one of the low code apps that we're looking for. It's like, oh yeah, build a custom app in four minutes. We jumped in, definitely not four minutes. Right. And we realized that this, because we don't know how to do SQL queries and some coding stuff that we haven't learned yet and we're like, holy crap, there's still some more to this. And, and, but this kind of Thing happens to the entire roofing industry. The only industry, the only app I think that actually delivers on it is like company camp, right? Because it is truly just a camera that puts it into a nice folder structure. But I mean I think that like review generation is probably one that can get tossed in the garbage.

What about the one that sends messages to the customers and stuff? There's a lot of text message driven, like your CRM should be able to send text messages. There's a lot of like follow ups and stuff like that. We need that.

I think that finding ways, because here's the thing, most human beings, their follow up is like don't hesitate if you have any questions or concerns. Like if you have any questions or concerns, you know, don't hesitate. I know you're hesitating but don't hesitate to call. You know, like it's the same old shit, right? I think there's an opportunity to use things like ChatGPT to like make things more relevant or I think if you were to plan out your automated follow up, it's going to be a lot more relevant. Create urgency, scarcity, opportunity for the customer. But if it's just like, hey, are you ready to give me your money yet? Hey, you ready to give me your money yet? You might as well automate it because that follow up is pretty boring and it kind of sucks. And the problem is is that most like especially in our industry, the follow up is so bloody terrible that even doing that will move the needle because so many people just kind of like one call close. That's the way that insert sales coach here taught me to do it. And then they're just like, oh, they didn't buy, they don't deserve us and then they just walk away. But meanwhile the most, the most sales happen after the fact. So here like I don't know if they can see it on camera but they're all like a double screen monitor around here. And the field techs, the people actually go out, they don't sell, they don't even try to sell, they don't even give a proposal. They just go out there, make them like them, make them like the company, make them like the process, document the site conditions, establish the wants and needs of the customer. Then the customer success manager phones the person, finds out, you know, how they like the experience, then gets all the information up to the estimator, builds a sumo quote, sends it those guys who are selling 3, 4, 5, I think the highest is like 5.6 million and never sat at a kitchen Table once. Never met, never sat with a customer and pitched them once.

So the, like they don't have zoom on their cameras. By the way. I wanted to ask you about it, why there's no zoom? Because I asked them like, do you want, do you have zone? They're like, no, we just, you know, over the phone and then we send them summaquote. We would like to have cameras in our.

I think, I think that they like, I think that the company would invest in it. Like they've all got wireless headsets, standing leveling up and down desks, they've got, you know, Mac Max and some like, they, they invest in it. But I think that just the demographic here, right. This is like the second oldest state in the country.

Sure.

So I mean TV still kills it here because most people are actually watching tv. So I think that that is why. What I think is the market demographics shift, you'll see that they'll be doing more zoom.

Love it. What's Your prediction for 2023 for Roofing Industry? Are we going to go into recession, do you think? And similar question to recession, are we recession proof? Industry?

The industry is recession proof. Every individual company is not. I think that you're going to see an abundance of really good opportunity come in. Really good talent come in. I think that we're not necessarily in a recession. I think new construction will take a hit. Right. I think that maybe some commercial building investment might take a hit if like, you know, we start seeing some leases and some defaults. So I think you could see prices get suppressed a bit. Right. You can see it become more competitive. And that's where we talk about like improving the unit economics. Like what would Happen if your $30 million company went to 20? Right. Like have you stress test that? Have you looked at the difference when. And again, I can't take credit for learning all this stuff but like have you looked at your fixed costs and your variable costs and seen where like if it goes down, is the variable cost taking the risk or are you really loaded on fixed? So these kinds of things. And so as this kind of recession type stuff looms, you're going to see a lot of roofing companies fail and that's okay. Right. The invisible hand of capitalism is great and it, it does what's right for the market, in my opinion. Right. In the long picture, in the short picture. Yeah. There's some people who get really hurt by this and it's sad and sometimes it was their own doing and sometimes that's just the way the Cookie crumbles. But I think that the smart companies are going to start seeing that there's a lot of underpriced talent because the, the 2008 financial crisis was a lot of the mortgage broker type people where they were selling people houses they couldn't afford. Right. In 2021, 2020, like with the COVID thing, it was the recruiters who were selling companies people they couldn't afford. And they were actually like working back and forth and being like, I can get this guy $20,000 raise. So now they're $20,000 raise. They get, you know, they get promoted, they get a better title then that that recruiter has a friend who calls him and gets them moved over here because now he's a VP or a manager or lead whatever at this. And so a lot of guys are now $160,000 a year guys. They're not $100,000 a year guys. And now they've had three jobs in three years and they're going to come back and they're going to go, their late tech industry is doing layoffs and they're going to be like, yeah, you were getting paid 160k a year, but you're not $100,000 guy. And I know what you did because now it's all starting to make sense. The recruiters made tons of money. People were working two and three jobs, in some cases working 20 hours a week, saying that they were working 40 hours a week, sole employment through this one person. And they actually had three jobs working remote from home, and they're putting 20 hours in at each. And companies were scared to fire because they're just trying to stay alive. And this is all coming to light now. And so now people are starting to. The leadership in business is now the power is. The pendulum is swinging back into the power of the business owner. So if you understand where your power lies, then I think that you're going to have the chance to acquire good quality talent at a better price than you've ever been able to. And you can start making moves on initiatives that might improve your business and the ability for it to scale. Right. Which is such an overused word. Right? To scale. To scale. To scale. But the actual definition of scale, where your income outpaces your expenses.

Love it. I want to talk briefly about politics, how politics affect the business here from Canada, I'm Russian. We have Ukrainian war. How does it affect not only the industry, but business in general? I have Raymond Win the Little on the podcast and he said something that many Many people did not agree, actually messaged me privately saying, dimitri, love that guy. But there's one thing I don't agree with him. What he said was if he goes in house and he sees, you know, that they're a Trump supporter, they're like, oh, you voted for Trump, love Trump. And if it goes Biden, like, oh, Biden, love Biden. So pretty much he's a chameleon and he will not confront or like be in confrontation about anything politic. Right? Like, doesn't matter who you voted for. You know, I'm with you. I do see a lot of people in the industry on the right side, like, you know, they're like, you know, with Trump, with this and this. And even when Ukraine war started, there are a lot of people jump on Ben Vegan, like saying, oh, there's no war. And there's like, it's just a lot of stupid stuff. Give advice to someone on politics. You're from Canada, I know you don't agree with your government a lot, but you don't openly criticize where best damn roofer. It's all he does. He goes on rallies and stuff. So where is, is it where, where's the truth? Is it the place where moderation is good or is it the place where, where do we stand as a business owners?

I think that you. So like in regards to your sales guy, right, the sales guy, he's there to maximize the time that he's spending. And so if he's using it to try and build rapport, I mean, is it super like ethical to lie? No. But is it harmless then to agree with them politically? I'm sure that if they truly looked at themselves, they probably would agree with some left policies and some right policies. Now, now when we get talking to like the macro, like what do you do as a business owner, right, A person who maybe is like a personality like yourself. I think that you have to decide if you're willing to lose the employment for your people and your employees. And if you're willing to have like, maybe you're like, you know, if you have like a paid in full contract or something with a client and your decline is counting on you to be in business and that liability on your balance sheet, you want to make sure you make good on that. Are you willing to risk all that for a political opinion? And you have to make a decision about that because what can you do to make an impact on it? So you just have to know what your appetite for risk is. Right. And so as I've Grown and my business has acquired more employees. I felt less of a need or more fear around publicly rallying behind certain things that maybe I personally believe in because I'm just like, ugh, the world is such a cancel crazy place. I can't risk, you know, I can't risk things for my wife and my team and my clients who've like, some of them paid in full for projects that take months to deliver. And if I go and get myself canceled or get myself in trouble over this kind of thing, you know, how would that affect my people? And I think that that's a bad world that we live in, that you have to be afraid to be. To be like that. But I think that the. I think the world is shifting back towards that, you know. But I believe that if you feel strongly about certain things and you should talk about it and just right now, there's nothing that I feel super strongly about that I feel like I need to try and weigh in on publicly. But the minute it does, I absolutely do. So you just see less of it from me than maybe a few years ago. But yeah, it's a very tough place because I just don't like the fact that business owners are afraid to post their opinion because look what happened to best ham roofer, right? He had his. Basically his entire reputation. He takes it to a whole other level where it's like, dude, what do you think was going to happen? But I mean, he had his business basically. He had his roofing company basically run off because he was supporting the truckers or whatever in Ontario. And so he got like down to the point of having like.2 stars on Google had no bearing on his roof. Yeah, so he.

I did not know that.

So his business was completely torn down. So then he went out. Now he's working with a girl and he's basically working with them and his business is off Google because he got so many bad business reviews that bigger, like, go Google, bigger roofing. It's gone. Or at least it was a few months ago and I don't think it's back. But he basically, he'll come over like.

He got his YouTube channel deleted few times, build a YouTube channel of 40,000 subs and then get deleted and then publish again. I mean, he accomplished a lot. He came back many times. Here's my counter argument to that to employees. As you were talking, I was thinking what I've noticed personally, because I was very controversial in the roofing industry and I called out a lot of people and I don't. I Don't consider myself being too political. I don't talk about, you know, policies and stuff, but I do know what's right, what's wrong, and I'm not afraid to call it out. What's usually happening when you are outspoken about your belief system, you will actually attract the right people. So for example, you know, think about like Chick Fil A. So Chick Fil A would make a statement about, you know, gay marriage, right. And it's controversial and they will have by quotes and stuff. But does it affect Chick Fil A? You know, will they lose some of their employees or will attract more employees working for them who believes in their mission. And I feel like as a business we, it's more important to attract more, more people like minded than trying to please everyone. Because what's going to happen if, if you try to please everyone and you're gonna have organization where there's so many beliefs where no matter what you do, you're gonna piss someone off. But when you are outspoken, like think about like Joe Rogan, like everybody believes what Joe Rogan stands for, right? And you don't have to agree with everybody. If you, you know, work for him, you probably in his on his side politically and right, versus if you randomly got a job at Joe Rogan and or Patrick Bad David and then he says something on the show, you're like screw it, I quit. Right. Like I think it's more important to be true to yourself. And I mean you should never do anything when it comes to race. Like I don't agree with Kanye west. Right. You know what the whole thing about Judaism, like stop and apologize.

And I think that's where, where I, I guess wisdom begins at the definition of terms like how far you exactly you, you take it. Because there, there are certain things where absolutely I think yeah, you need to be outspoken about your certain beliefs. And I am like people know that I'm very like right side, right? I'm not, definitely not like a. No, like I'm definitely not like on the liberal side. But I think on the long enough time horizon there are certain policies on the other side that I can agree with. But I just think the world needs to adapt to get it. Like a quick example, right? This whole debate about universal healthcare. I just personally believe that science, right. We right now can delete from our genome the six most common and most expensive health effects like osteoporosis, down syndrome, like we can actually selectively remove that from our genes. Right. And I think that eventually there will be like some, there's a movie about this. I can't remember what it was called, but there. But basically where you're going to improve things. And now we're going to have this clash of, like, that's playing God and this kind of thing. But eventually it's going to be like, well, if. If you want, you know, universal healthcare for everybody, but you want everybody else to pay for it, right? That's kind of like a common left, right argument, then we need to have some ground rules as to what level of risk that you're going to take with reproducing, right? With like, collect. Like, we're all stuck on this rock floating through space together. You know, what type of risk are you taking with having kids? And you should probably, like, make sure that you do things to make it so your kids don't have these six things that are very expensive. And so I think that that's like, one thing where the world might change. You know, at one point in time it was like, you can't tell me to wear a bicycle helmet. You can't tell me where to see a belt. Like, now it's just a thing that you can get in trouble for, right? Eventually be telling me, like, you know, it's like you decided to have your kids the old way, like the spray and pray on an egg. Like, don't you think that, like, you should be like, what if your kid gets this or that? Like, you're not going to get health care. So I think that, like, the healthcare costs will come down because eventually we're going to find new and not just like changing our genes, but other ways to improve health. And so that's nothing that really is to any particular political side. It's like, politics doesn't solve problems. It never has. Science and technology solves problems. Politics would have said, oh, if we keep using horses, at the rate we're using horses, there'll be 50ft of horseshit piled up to the ceiling. And then they would have put taxes on horses and they would have put Levies on horseshit. And they would have had social programs to make prison inmates go clean up horseshit and all this kind of stuff. And it's like, no. Some guy says, hey, I got an idea. It's a different kind of horse, eats a different kind of food, it puts out a different kind of shit. But it's a hell of a lot better than the thing we have right now. It's called a car, right? And another guy, right, homie Elon, comes along and says, hey, I got a Whole new kind of horse. It's one that consumes a plug in battery and it spits out nothing. But we have to go mine some shit to make the batteries, so. But it's a hell of a lot better than the alternative we got. Like we're as human beings, we don't go back in the past and like go to the old way. Like if the ice melts and the water goes up, they won't change our ways. We'll just build concrete sea walls. Like, you know, I mean like they won't, we won't go backwards.

You're the expert on CRMs. I do see a lot of people using awkward CRMs like out of industry, anything from Trello to Zoho. And I also see a lot of bigger players building custom CRMs. Talk to me about the sizes of a roofing business and best solutions when it comes to CRM. Obviously when you just getting started, if someone who started a roofing company in 2023, I don't think you would recommend going to HubSpot and build custom CRM. Right? But what's the perfect solution for first year then? How does it transfer from years of user experience? When do you build your custom and do you need to build custom?

So there's 5 million dollar companies that are building custom CRMs and there's $150 million companies that are using Active and they're spending almost a million dollars a year on it. And so there is no exact formula.

Right?

Just know that, that you, when you're paying for something that you're paying 50, $70 a user for, they're making a product for the mass market, right? And that means that you don't have a custom tailored solution which means you're kind of boxed in. You can customize it, you can customize it, but you can't customize the user inter interface and you can't fix things that are broken. So like the fact that when you email out, it sends this like weird looking email and then when you respond it doesn't go back to the contact record like, or like, you know, you can't fix the fact that acculinx got in a fight with Company Cam and never built an integration with Company Camp. But I personally think Accurinks is one of the best first CRMs you can get because it boxes you into a process that's better than the shit you're going to come up with. And the customizations that I see people doing in their CRMs is like all wrong. Right? Like they're they're putting things in, they're building things that aren't good and they're inefficient and they create data problems. And so eventually. So here's a, here's my take on it, right? If you're going to go start a roofing company right now, right, you know, you're probably, your better solutions are going to depend on how you look at the world. If you like the Macintosh way of life where it's very closed, you only use their app store, you're probably going to like acculate, right? And then if you're open, right, you're like an Android person, you're probably like Job Nimbus because it's more open, more integrated, you can customize it a lot more. And then there's some newer comers or like smaller entrants to the market that are going to be like, I would think like Job Progress is like the lesser Job Nimbus. And I look at like Rooflink as the lesser or more newcomer to Accu Links, like more of an all in one system. And then you see the industry agnostic ones like the jobbers and the joists and stuff like that, that all kind of lie out in the end there. And then you start having all these endpoint solutions, you start plugging in like company cams and sumo quotes and sales rabbits and stuff like that. And eventually you get to a point where all your data is like siloed in all these different CRMs. And depending on your vision for the company, like what do you actually want to do? It might make sense for you to do a custom CRM, but only if you can clearly communicate your vision and what your unique approach is to the market that you can't get out of your current CRM. So even when we're looking at HubSpot, we look at other endpoint solutions. Like we wanted field service management, we wanted like we found that Sumo Quote was still the better configure price quote solution even though HubSpot has a CPQ. But we knew that that need to be better. And so I would say that it's not for everybody.

What about Zoho?

So Zoho, right, is we actually spent like some money building a Zoho once and I'm very, I'm very familiar with the tool, right? And it used to be this like 30 different apps and it was designed to be like an, like an ERP almost, right? And in the industry we kind of like elevate ERP to be better when it doesn't mean Anything. It's just kind of like it just erp just means it has a lot of modules to. It doesn't mean that it's great or well designed or easy to use or fast or anything. And Zoho eventually realized that they made. So I had all these different teams building all the different apps and then they realized that they were going in this like spread out direction and they collapsed it all into this like Zoho one and then you could just buy them all for a certain dollar amount. And, and I would say that when you're using it, it feels like you're working in something different when you go to the different modules, like the user interface changes and all of them feel like driving an Alfa Romeo or a Fiat. It's like, yes, it has the stuff, but it feels like the buttons are in the wrong place. Like almost like it was made for a left hand drive car and then a right hand drive car. Now they made a left hand drive and now it feels like things are in the wrong spot. And it's because they have a huge development team off Offshore. Right. And I just think that it's when you get in it, you feel like it just doesn't feel like it's right. And I think that that's a big part of what technology revolutions are, is like the user interface has to feel very natural and almost fun to use. Right. And I find that that's a headwind that you get with Zoho. And I've seen a few people build them and if you don't have a really good team, right, building it, that's where the problems happen. Because I see like a lot of people approach making a CRM for them is like, yeah, just pay us like $1,500 a month. And then two years later it's like, still not done.

That's what I hate. We have these consultants, I don't know how to even call them. So they're not like Zoho representatives or, you know, they're not like truly experts. They just, they have experience with it. Like, I don't want to, I want to recommend Job Nimbus, but I don't want to sell Job Nimbus and build Job Nimbus. I don't want to charge someone 2,500 bucks a month to build Job Nimbus for them. Like, I can teach it, I've used it, I love it. But I see people selling Zoho or selling, you know, like this weird CRMs and I'm like, do you really understand this Business. And do you really understand that business? Do you think you really will build something that will scale them? I don't know.

It's not going to be the magic button. It's the coming in and getting really.

But the marketing promises that, of course.

Because that's how they do it. But really all the secret sauce comes in and comes into actually spending an intense amount of time doing a strong change management plan where you get clear stakeholders and you build it for the employees, not the owner. Right. And you actually put together a plan as to how are we going to roll this out and make this for the people it comes more from. I know how to make Zoho buttons do things, or I know how to make HubSpot or job Nimbus buttons do things. But what is it that you actually can't do in your CRM that is part of your unique value proposition for the market that you need made? And then I can usually make that in my thing. Right? You could do that with a lot of software. And truth is, most roofing companies are selling the same shingles for the same price and solve by the same people in the same amount of time using the same tools, using the same labor. Like, it's the same, same, same, same, same. And you can do a lot with like sumoquote to create a unique value proposition. But if they don't have a unique approach to the market or unique approach to their operation that they can't clearly codify, then it doesn't make sense to get a custom CRM. A lot of people buy it just because they think it's gonna be a magic tool. It's magic button. They think that, oh, I need an erp, I need an erp, right? Like, that's like the thing that's like sweeping through the industry right now is like, there's some people out there be like, it's not a CRM, it's an erp. As if it's like automatically better because it's called that. And it's like, great, but how do you train the people how to use it? What happens when they make it? You make a thing and it doesn't actually follow their process because you made it to your process and how are you gonna fix that? Do you have a customer success team? Like any business, it's like you get what you pay for, right? And I think that it's very important to have a clear. Like, this is what we're using today. Then we do the implementation, data migration, roll out the new system, and now we're on the new system and we're not paying to be in both systems for two years while we build it. You know what I mean?

Love it. Traditionally last question is if someone started brand new business in 2023 in our space, your advice to them?

Try and find a way to keep you. Try and find a way to build the business in as automated a way as possible. It's better to me to try and find a way to build a 1.5 million dollar roofing company, 2 million dollar roofing company that you can give a a level 10 Disney World customer experience with less people and iterate from there.

Love it. Thank you so much. That was awesome.

Thank you.