built hapily podcast | Season 1, Episode 5: Adam Sand

Our clients generated 850 million in revenue on our hubspots and systems that we've built. Number seven global partner of the year, Momentum award winner, our cam one new cam of the year. So there, there's like the brags, but again, I just look inside my business and I just see like constraints and problems. Yeah, I just stare at the. Stare into the abyss, eat glass and try and sand that other people can put together turn into business.

This is the Built Happily podcast where we dive into building apps, companies and relationships in the HubSpot ecosystem.

As HubSpot grows, so does the opportunity. And we put you in the room with the people making it all happen.

On today's episode of Bill Happily, we got the Sandman, Adam sand of Roofing Business Partners.

Adam takes it through his transition from starting in the roofing industry to building a profitable HubSpot solutions partner business. He talks about what it takes to survive as a HubSpot partner when you're focusing on a specific industry, what it looks like to hire and even build industry specific tech stacks. All on this episode of the built Happily podcast.

Mr. Sand, the Sandman himself. You've probably never been called that ever in your life. And Castle, just like I've never been called Urkel my entire life. Not one person has ever said that to me.

Highly.

Exactly. Adam saying, happy to have you. The Bill Hapley podcast man. I'm known you since early days of my HubSpot journey. You were already well into it. You got an interesting vertical, you got an interesting story. I need you to brag. I want you to come in and just start. You've done enough work, man. You told us about what you're going through right now, how you're moving the family around, trying to go in and out of the States, Hawaii, Canada, United States. What's going on right now, man? Tell us about rbp.

So we've been a hopstub partner for a little about two and a half years now. And what's really exciting now is we've really gone from a boutique consulting firm meant for like the rich roofers, where like basically our ideal customer avatar before was defined as someone where the marginal utility of money was having a decreasing rate of return on their happiness. They could back up a Brinks truck and unload a briefcase of cash to get what they wanted. Right. Like that was who we dealt with before. The problem is there's only 200 of those in the entire country. Like there's the top 200 goes from 17 million to 992 million in revenue. There are 60,000 roofers between 3 and 8 million. So we were that company before, and then I was having a baby. And so my wife said, you know, this whole you being a roofing company for a month at a time, being on the road for two years, she was traveling with me like we were in a UConn, traveling the country from country to city and we'd be there a month at a time. And she was building sumo quotes remotely while I was doing the on site consulting and rollouts of the CRMs. And when she got pregnant, she's like, well, you're a business consultant, figure it out. And so I spent six months with a crayon on my iPad coming up with something new to do. And so that six months kind of came to fruition in October. Rolled out the new go to market motions with the team. And then on November, we launched. And so far it's going good. I mean, we're not without problems. I don't like bragging, but like, if people want like stats or whatever, it's a little over 3 million revenue, 30 people now. We've grown since that year end, but we had less at that mark. But that 2023 revenue we did, our clients generated 850 million in revenue on our hubspots and systems that we've built. Number seven global partner of the year, Momentum award winner. Our cam One new cam of the year before they fired all the cams and changed the position. But you know, but so there, there's like the brags, but again, I just look inside my business and I just see like constraints and problems. Yeah, I just stare at the. Stare into the abyss, eat glass and try and sand that other people can put together and turn into business.

Man, I feel like you said that a couple times before. That was too poetic. Dude. It's just, I mean, I've known you since, you know, alchemist days, and you were again in the game well before, but tell us.

Yeah, we were doing all CRMs before that because again, we were just working with whatever people had. So we did Salesforce, HubSpot, you know, acculinx roofing, specific CRMs like Pipedrive Monday, you name it. We were just kind of like a technical resource for massive companies.

Adam, where did you get into the. Where. Where did the like, where did you get into the roofing industry? What's that origin story? Because it sounds like that came before HubSpot, right?

Yeah, basically I did all kinds of jobs. I was a bodyguard, I was in the military. I did sold vacuum Cleaners, door to door. I owned a tanning salon. I built a tanning salon.

Apple.

I sold cars. You know, I mean, I kind of did all these different things. And my buddy was a shingler, and he wasn't making any money, and he thought maybe I could start my own roofing company. So I loaned him some money, and then he lost his tools, got stolen or whatever. I loaned him some more money and slowly became like, I'm never gonna get my money back if I don't get involved. Plus, I was making great money at my job, and I kind of had that entrepreneurial buzz that I want to get back into it. And so I thought, what if we do this together? So I spent about a year just kind of helping him. And I figured out Facebook ads back in 2017 when people thought that was dumb for a home services business because there's no buy now button. They didn't even ads in the mobile app yet. And so we kind of figured that out early. I got a little Internet famous from that because back then all the podcasters were like, oh, a guy ran a thousand dollars worth of ads and sold $5,000 worth of weight loss ebooks. And it's like I was in these, you know, Facebook groups of people trying to figure out Facebook ads. Yeah, I ran $4,000 worth of ads and sold $420,000 worth of roofing. So that became like the clickbaity headline that all these podcasters started asking me. So I'd be like, 28 podcasts in a year. And so it was just in 2017-2019, if you looked up roofer and Facebook ad, it was just a wall of me being interviewed. And so all these roofers from the States started asking for help. And I. You know, as a Canadian, when an American asks you for help, it's like you're the little brother and your big brother just asked you to show them how to play pool or something. You're just like, oh, yeah, no problem. Let me show you. And so I started out, I thought, man, what if I could start a podcast and I can make a hundred grand? That'd be cool. And then. And then. So I started a podcast, and then I started an online course, and I made some money with that. And then these rich roofers started saying, listen, man, I'm not going to, like, learn to do this. Can you just, like, do it? You seem to be like the guy. I was like, sure, five grand a month. They're like, yeah. I was like, okay. Next guy said, 6. Next guy said, 7. 7 was about the market back then. The leads were nine bucks, so it was cheap. And eventually what happened? Like, I built our own custom CRM on this thing called Podio, which is this ugly old ERP style thing.

I've heard of Podium.

Yeah, it's big in like real estate. And I built it on that. And after, like trying to get a CRM and hiring a company to make a CRM, and they sucked and I yelled at them, fired them, like, if that guy could do it, I could do it. So I figured out my own on Podio because it was 10 bucks a user. And so when these roofers started firing me for getting them too many leads, I was like, who fires the marketer for getting too many leads? And I said, how do you, like, how come you're firing? They say, oh, well, you know, we put the wrong color on Mary's house and John's not getting back to people and people are getting mad at us. We got a bad Google review. And, you know, when it rained, we had too many roofs. And so when we had to move all the jobs forward, not like calling people back, they thought we were coming and we did. And they got mad. And I was like, can you show me how you do it? Like, yeah. So we go into acculinx, which is like our CRM, and then we print off the lead sheet. We staple it to the front of a folder. Then we put a worksheet in there that they go to the house and inspect it. Then there's these contracts. They pull it off this pad and they push really hard so it writes on all three copies and they rip off the top, put that in their gift customer. Then they put on a wall and folder. Then the other guy takes it, makes material order, purchase order. Then he puts in another folder on the wall and another guy takes it out. And then he puts a post it note and he puts it on a whiteboard. And then there's a magnet and they slot. I'm like, that's how you do it? Yeah.

You were fighting against fax machines, man.

When you fight against fax fire me like, let me show you how to use your CRM. Just pay me for two months, I'll show you how to use it. And so then a bunch of our customers, like, grew really fast. So then we got a reputation. They kind of preceded us where it was like, oh, that Adam guy, he's really good at computers. And in the roofing space, there's like not a lot of people talking 2018, 2019. And so there's like two classes of roofer. There's like, everybody, and then there's like, the elite guys. And the elite guys, when they go to roofing conferences, their $2,000 ticket to sit in the VIP area is paid by the material supplier that they're buying $35 million worth of from. They say, hey, here's a VIP ticket to this conference. So they go there. Then at night, they send these outside sales reps, take them out for a fancy dinner, and go to topgolf and shit like that. And so then they'd all be talking and they'd be like, man, we did this thing. It's like, who's the guy? Like, I just wish my business would run the way I envision in my head. And like, oh, that's Adam Sand. So then I just go from, like. I just go. We became this, like, luxury of the rich, and we would just go from country club roofer to country club roofer making tech. But then the HubSpot part came when I tried to hire people, and I was like, okay, their accu links to set up like this, and their salesforce is set up like that. But then these guys have pipe driving instead of like this. And those guys do it this way. So they have this CRM and they go to Monday. And I'm like, I couldn't make any money. And so I thought, okay, I need to, like, pick a system. And I thought, all right, which CRM makes me say no the least often? Because when your reputations precedes you, you show up when you go to help them, they pay you, and you're like, oh, I can't do that. Like, why not? I was like, well, CRM doesn't allow it. Like, I thought you could do anything with them. They're computers. And I was like, well, anything it will allow, right? And then I was like, so saying no. The least often was my value, right? Which there and is my price. But then I was like, which CRM is easiest to train and get adoption? And I was like, HubSpot by a mile. So there's revenue and there's cost and there's profit, and profit creates room to hire people. And so I just said, okay. So I reached out to HubSpot and I was like, how do I make it so I can go into other people's portals really easily? And they said, well, have you ever heard of a partner program? And I was like, what's that? Like, well, it's basically, like, where we'll, like, give you a person named a Cam and a person named a channel consultant and then you get like a percentage of the revenue and then we'll like support you. We might even give you like leads from time to time. And well, you can like get access to this training and reasons. Like what? Yeah, I've been doing this for all these years. I didn't have that. So that was like 2020 now.

Yeah, yeah.

So in 2021 they did that and, and so I was like, okay everybody, if you're going to stay with me, you're going to HubSpot or otherwise we're going to stop talking in about six months. And so, so that became HubSpot partner.

What was that? So what was that trend? Did you transition customers that were on different systems that you were already working with? 2 HubSpot.

Yeah, that was about 16 months for the work.

Jeez.

I mean it was like doing open heart surgery on a football team while they're trying to win the Super Bowl.

Yeah, that had to have been tough. So like, so it was. You started with the roofing so like you, you had your niche picked out and then HubSpot ended up being the solution that ended up making it like easiest for you to kind of deploy that model. And you built that model, right?

Yeah.

Nice. So like what are the biggest like, I guess so in that situation, like I gotta be honest, like I spent a ton of time in sales at HubSpot. I'm not going to act like I saw lots of roofing companies. Right? Like what's your approach? Like are you going out and trying to find the roofing companies and then getting them on HubSpot versus how much are you saying, hey HubSpot, when you find roofing companies, I'm the best game in town. Like, what is that like mix?

So glad for you. So like me and HubSpot didn't have much of a relationship. Like I wasn't sitting there like looking at my tier points and all this kind of stuff, my pdm. Because when I, when they switched off the cam and channel consultant thing and they went to a partner development manager, I got my cam got taken away and they gave me this new partner development manager and she said, so they're looking at our stats, right? And so when she gets assigned all these accounts, she looks through them from like a graph or something and she said, do you want more leads from HubSpot? Because she don't know who we are, what we do. And I was like, not like, I was like, what do you mean? She's like, well, you know Would you consider, like, we have like, lots of leads we could give you. Your churn is zero. Your usage stats are really high. I can't show you those because we're not reeling that up public yet. But it shows that 95% of your deals are like, brings the ones that you bring to HubSpot. You know, we can send you deals, right? And I was like, yeah, but we only deal with roofing companies, so we don't get a lot from HubSpot really. But like, when we do, it's usually like, hey, so we got this lead from a roofer. They mentioned you on the call, so we thought we'd pull you into this deal. Right. Because we do a lot of content about what we do. And so we go out and find the roofing companies and we show them what HubSpot can do.

Got it. And then they go to HubSpot. And then HubSpot goes, oh, yeah. And then after, oh, you have no.

Idea how many times I gotta talk to some cam or direct rep that thinks that they're doing me favor by bringing me in the deal. And I'm like, oh, hey, Charlie. Yeah, how's it going? We've identified that the appropriate thing for this is marketing Hub Pro. And this deal could close in three days. So I want to get it done because I'm trying to hit quota. I'm like, look, this is not how we're going to do this.

Yeah.

And so sometimes, yeah, it creates some like, deal registration, lead registration, you know, politics stuff that we have to deal with. Because a lot of the stuff they bring me is really stuff I generated anyway. But HubSpot is a billion dollar marketing budget and has a really good conversion rate optimization in everything they do. So my clients accidentally stumble into trials. I have no idea what to do. Reach out to customer support. Direct rep gets involved and they're like, oh, so Adam, we found this lead that would be perfect for you. And I'm like, yeah, he was on my podcast like three days ago.

I gotta give you an affiliate link, man. That's.

Well, yeah, I mean, we have all kinds of ways we're trying to do it, but it's funny how that goes.

So talk to me about niche. Right? You are, I would say that you're the epitome of verticalized solution. You know, the sales forces of the world, they live off of that. If you are a pharmaceutical company, here is your salesforce. This is what it looks like, this is what you do. We got 15 bajillion of these all around. The world. How do you. Or how do you, I would say, what's your suggestion for people looking to double down into a niche? Like, granted, like finding a niche. Good luck. You better know it. You better have grown up in it or have, you know, fallen into it like you did. But once you figure that niche, I want to sell HubSpot to skateboarding companies. How do you like to double down within that niche? What was your kind of mentality, mindset of how do I make it so that I am this niche?

I, I. So I, I get asked this question a lot lately. Like, this is, like, a thing that keeps popping up. Like, people keep asking me about this because nobody asked me about this two years ago when they ask about it a lot now. So I don't know what's happening out there in the world or what HubSpot's trying to do. So for me, I just looked at it as I work with all these big companies, and they would teach me, like. Like, essentially what I liked about it was I owned a roofing company. So when this, like, $30 million company asked me for help, essentially, I had to do business process model notations and all this kind of stuff to, like, build the wiring diagram of how their CRM is going to be built. But the process of that was essentially, they gave me a crash course on what it take to run a $30 million roofing company that did this and this. And so I was able to, like, kind of bring some of this stuff back. So that's why I liked it. But the byproduct of it was that suddenly I knew a lot about all the subtle variances of what made roofing companies successful. And when I go to market now, it's not like, hey, I'm here to sell you HubSpot. I think that what works for us is we actually rebranded to RBP Consulting from roofing business partners, because, I mean, they both say the same thing. But what I really want to be able to tell customers at this point is that we're a consulting firm that brings the best operating frameworks of running a roofing company to you, and then we use technology to operationalize it by building infrastructure in your business. Because, like, the tool doesn't matter as much as the process, and the process doesn't matter as much as adoption, but the tool matters. So we have to think about it through the lens of what is the operating framework we want. Then build the tool so that it pulls your customers through the process and pulls your employees through the process. And we, and I Would say that when we communicate in a sales kind of dialog, we made it where our mission statement, we had to think about this, like, what is, why are we doing this? Because I eventually had to exit the roofing company because this was doing better than that from like my own personal life. And I had to say, okay, well, if we're going to make a real thing of this rather than a side hustle, what is my mission statement? And I came to the conclusion that I wanted to make work more rewarding through engineering better customer experiences. Because I'm talking these owners, they don't use a CRM, right? Like, yeah, I know what they want. Legacy, a nicer boat, a prettier wife, a bigger house. You know, company that grows, right? They want to exit someday, they want to pass it to their son someday, like some variance, some continuum of materialistic and altruistic desires, right? But to get that for them, I have to make it so that the people using the technology enjoy it and they find that it's more rewarding for them to do their job because of what the technology enables them to do. And we have to engineer a better customer experience that is duplicatable built in the software. Because I think about it, Gary Vee used to say, oh, you gotta be a marketing company that sells Tupperware. You gotta be a marketing company that sells software. And then I thought, we have to help our customers become tech companies that roof. Because this is a high volume. Yeah, right. So I was like, how do we tech enable roofing companies to duplicate a better engineered process? Like, kind of like, how do you just be. Allow them to be a disruptor in an industry that's 100 years old? And so if anybody was like wanting to, you know, do the niche thing, then I would like. What you said at the beginning was like, a lot of people say, well, how do I get into a niche? I was like, well, I mean, it sure helps if you know something, right? Like if you actually leave the house.

You'Ll discover something that you like.

You were just if you've gone from like crypto bro to NFT bro to go high level bro to AI bro and landed at, you know, niche consulting firm. You, like, you better have learned something about something along the way. Because the reason that I think we're able to do what we do is because of the content that we produce. So we do six webinars a week, right? Hour long. We do three live Q&As a week. We put out, we turn, I speak it, I've gotten to the position now where you become a thought leader. So then podcasts ask you to be on them, then people ask you to speak at breakout sessions, then people ask you to speak on stages, and then you document that whole journey in video. Turn all that into reels then. And, you know, our videos don't. I'm not getting millions of views. Like, I'm not a cooler YouTube channel, but I'm a million, baby. Come on. You need the right.

See the right eyes.

Yeah, exactly. You have the right eyes looking at our stuff and our latest. So that. So the content production that comes from just being able to put out free value, and you just sell. You give away all the ideas and you sell the implementation. None of this is groundbreaking stuff. Like, all the smart influencer guys are all saying the same thing. I just. I'm just listening and doing what they've said. And so when people ask me, I'm like, well, go listen to what the smart people say and just do it. I think it's what.

One of the things that I always tell all my friends that have companies in whatever niche is what happens if the electricity goes out? What happens if you don't have Internet? What happens if the people that want to buy from you don't have the Internet? That means business goes out. Then you have a software company. Technically, you can sell hats. You could be selling shoes. It's a software company. If you're using a website, using a CRM, you better act like you have a software company. You better act like you have a tech stack, because you do. All these companies that I sell bridesmaid.

Dresses, I sell this, I sell that.

I sell the third. It's all on the website. The website goes down, you're not selling nothing. So therefore you are a software company. I think that's really, like, you know, powerful for people to hear. In a roofing industry, in the, you know, in the plumbing industry, in the landscaping industry, if you want to build a company that lasts, if you want to build something that's scalable, that won't have you breaking your back, that is software and enabling, that is kind of key for a lot of that.

Yeah. I think the other thing about, like, one of the big reasons, too, I wanted to talk to you about the niche stuff is like, I for a while have kind of noticed where it's like, there's, you know, there's more and more HubSpot partners every single day. Right. And the market is getting, you know, pretty saturated, but, like, the demand's there, because if you look at HubSpot, like, they want to do all their services through partners, right? Like, they want to completely shift it off to partners. And, you know, in such a saturated market of HubSpot partners, like, the thing that I've been saying is, like, man, like, I think finding a niche is a really smart idea, because, you know, when. If you think of it like, Adam, you know the physics of inbound, right? You know that it's not industry specific. It's just the art and science of attracting, engaging, and delighting human beings, right? And, like, no matter what industry you're in, you sell to human beings. So, like, you're someone who understands that, like, any company can do inbound because, like, humans work at these companies. However, clients and customers don't understand that nuance, right? And so the interesting thing that I always saw, like, when I was, you know, working at sales at HubSpot, or even, you know, when I was an implementation specialist and talking to customers and recommending partners, they'd always say, oh, do you know someone who, like, is there someone who works in our industry? Right? And I think that's a really interesting thing for partners to do, to say, hey, like, hey, we are the HubSpot partner for X industry. And I think it's, like, a great way to, like, differentiate yourself versus being, like, more of a generous. Right? It's. Which is why I love you guys. Like, you. Because you guys are. You're living it. It's like, we know HubSpot, but we know the industry and we know how to combine those two things, right? And even though, you know, the physics. Physics is pretty similar, right? It's the comfort that the customer gets from having someone who has that industry knowledge and can take this HubSpot thing they don't know about, right? And weave it into the intricacies of that industry. I think puts like, you know, you're that much more likely to land that business when, you know, when they know that, like, your industry is something that you specialize in, right?

Yeah. If we're speaking honestly and if someone's listening to this and going, oh, I got to get a niche, right? But I don't know anything. You know what I mean? Like, I don't know about any businesses. Well, then you have to do it the way that most, like, ad agencies start out, which is where you got to try and find some customers who will trust you, get them to teach everything, to teach you everything about their business, work your ass off to solve those problems for no money, because you're working to Learn not to earn and learn more than you earn means that you will get access to more to more lessons and then stack that. Right. Like you have to learn something about something in that business. Marketing is the, the one that's too saturated. But operationally, you know, CRM and service and delivery in various industries would be good. So if you say, okay, well I'm going to go and be the HubSpot person for truck drivers, like I see transportation and logistics to be this huge Covid taught us how busted and broken it was. So yeah, like if I wasn't doing roofing, I'd be going to figure out transportation and logistics, right?

Yep, yep.

So it's like okay, well then you got to find a small trucking company who needs to figure out how they get dispatch, how do they get their drivers to know where they're supposed to be picking up loads, how do they make it so that they safely tie down those loads and then how do they mark when they've delivered those loads and how do they mark how many hours they spent driving? Like that's an operational problem. But then you could connect HubSpot to the relevant field service management tool and then ultimately you're getting reporting back from you know, delivery to revenue, to deals, to marketing and then you could get the full, all the hubs firing.

Yeah. And I mean I think it's also, you know, people don't have to like start an agency and then say I need to know the niche right away. I think like you give yourself time to experiment, right, and see what works, see what industries you enjoy working in, see what industries your particular set of skills translate into and it's something you can figure out over time. It's not like something you have to have at the beginning. Right now one thing I want to ask you about, like you know, having you know, a HubSpot solutions partner business in a specific industry. How does that like change your calculus like around hiring? And if it's not this way, tell me. But like are you hiring for like HubSpot first and then I can teach you the industry or are you hiring for industry first and I can teach you the tech behind it? Like how? Like, like, like since you're, you're niched into this area, like what do you look for? More industry knowledge, tech stack knowledge? Like what's that balance you try to find?

It has to be, it has to be both because you have to have the cross pollination of ideas and institutional depth of knowledge in the company. So we have technologists who are very Good with technology. Right. Like you guys have had them on your podcast. Chad, right?

Yeah.

And then we, you know, he brought a little bit of understanding construction with him, which is probably why he's one of our best, if not the best, in the technology field. But the other people, we bring them in and then we teach them roofing. And then, because our business is really wrapped around helping them operate better, we have consultants and customer success. People who have owned a roofing company, being a senior leader in a roofing company, and the whole concept of like the tech layoffs that happened after the COVID money stopped and the remote work concept, that was really attractive to people. We were able to take really talented people who were interested in moving and living where they wanted to live, but taking their skills from roofing and apply in an industry that allowed remote work. And then when all the tech layoffs happened, we just gobbled up a bunch of people that we're leaving tech because we kind of said, hey, so I have this industry, it's 100 years old. If you look up, you're probably going to see a roof. If your kids are probably going to school, they're under a roof. It's kind of. It's pretty boring. But, you know, we don't lay off, right. Like, we, we resist the pandemic, we resist recession. You know, so it's a good business. Right. And like, there's lots of businesses that are. That are like that. You know, Christmas lights is a busy business. Landscaping is a busy business. You know, government, medical, health care, transportation, school buses. You know, like, there's lots health, like daycares. That's going to be massive because daycare is like one of the only industries, childcare, that is not recovered. So there's going to be a massive opportunity in there for tech. And so we just saw that tech needed a place to land when they. When interest rates go up and Covid money dries up, they had to, you know, rebalance. And so my matrix for hiring is to try and find experts in either category and then force them to work together to solve problems. So then they both level up.

Yeah. Now, on the. Continuing the thread here on hiring, not only have you been hiring people, but, you know, I've had conversations with Chad and he's told me about the tech stack that you guys have hired and you recommend and you kind of put together as sort of like your ideal sort of like package that makes sense for the way you work, the way you deploy your services, and like, what you think these companies should be using. What do you think is valuable to share with folks who are also putting together that recommended tech stack? Because it's not just HubSpot, right? It's HubSpot and then some industry specific solutions I'd imagine, and some other stuff that might be some more general. Like when you guys are putting together, like here's our starting lineup, right? And you know, we got some stuff on the bench, but like we're always deploying these X products for folks because you know, it helps us do xyz. Like what makes you, what makes it more efficient to have that specific stack versus telling the customer, oh, we'll, we'll deploy kind of whatever you want. Like back when you were using like different CRMs and stuff like that, where, you know, what do people need to know about how you kind of formulate that stack together?

So everything, everything has to go back to core values, right? Make work more rewarding through engineering, better customer experiences. So we're looking at problem sets in the business. So a big part of our onboarding for a client is a solution extraction, we call it. And it's essentially we know what the owner wants. What we want to know is what do the people want? So these are 20 very specific questions, like if you could wave a magic wand and automate one thing in your job, what would it be? What keeps you up at night? What takes the most time per day, per week? What's an example of the way that the technologies let you down? What's your favorite technology you're using? What is the.

Man, I hope these people are stealing these questions because these are like, I.

Want to dig in on this piece too. This is really interesting.

Yeah, we asked like, there's like a 20 question survey and then that, you know, now we get to use AI to kind of try and digest this because when you take this in from a hundred employees, it's a lot, you know. So we digest that and then we don't share the answers with the owner. Like we make it a blind test for the owner because otherwise people would skew their answers. Because we're even asking like, what's an example of where another employee's day to day activities cause you more problems, right? So we're trying to say like, so then we say, then we have a problem set. Then you start to establish what are the solutions for that? Can we make HubSpot do it? That's always the first question. Can we solve this problem with, you know, the entity relationship diagram the objects, certain, you know, automations like can we solve this inside HubSpot. And that answers become, yes, more and more as HubSpot grows. But then we have to say, well, what is the tool that we need to plug into? And then we analyze tools through, like, can whatever happens inside this tool send the data back to HubSpot? So we have a single source of truth. Because we don't want. We never want people to do a thing and then check a box saying they did a thing. So then the Design philosophy is 80% reduction in duplicate data entry, where actions taken equals. Equals report, not actions taken plus checking a box equals report. And so the date, it has to fit into the data model. So then. So when we're picking our tools, we're trying to pick our tools around that, and then we try and build good relationships with those tools to say, hey, like, we have a customer base that we would like to explore this tool. And then generally, they work with us to adapt it, you know, as we go. And that wasn't always the case. And still we don't get enough help. But, you know, we're getting more and more influence as we grow. But showing up with that ideal tech stack means that the solution that you show up with doesn't always, like, half solve a problem.

Yeah.

And so I have. The problem that we have with this is we have to be very good at sales. Because you're basically saying, okay, so this problem you have, it's really rooted in another thing that you're doing. Like, you're. The best way to explain it I found, is like, okay, you, as a business owner, you drove. You have this river of money flowing through your life. You pull over on the road one day because you see someone flailing their arms in the river. That's a problem. So you jump in the river, you swim to shore, and you get them back to life. But then you turn your back. Now there's two people. So then you have to jump into the water and pull two people back to shore, and you start doing CPR on them. And they say that somebody threw them in the river up there. So then you pull somebody over on the road, and they're like, hey, there's people that's hiring. So then you throw people at your problem. So you start hiring people to help you swim up to shore. And then some people come in and say, oh, I have the solution for that. We tie a rope from a tree over there to a tree over here, and you can use that rope to help make it easier to pull these people out of the river. And I come in and Say, actually, you've got three people throwing people into the river. We need to build solutions to stop those three people. We need to build a whole fence along this whole river that stops people from throwing people in. These are the upstream problems that. That you're seeing downstream. But that requires a holistic view of your entire business operation and tech stack. And that's going to be $200,000 or that's going to be $30,000. And that is sometimes more than. That's asking people to bite off more than they can chew. We had to make sure it wasn't biting off more than we could chew. And so that was like, we had to really figure out recruiting and talent, talent acquisition and onboarding and training and development to make sure that we were never biting off more. We can chew. And we've had varying degrees of success in that. Like, sometimes we fail miserably, but, you know, but by and large, we don't. We've only had one customer, two customers that we've ever taken a dollar from in HubSpot builds that have not doubled the revenue in 12 to 18 months. Those two. One is their fault, one is our fault. And so, you know, it's. We've won more than we've lost, is what I'm trying to say. But, you know, we've had to take a lot of daggers and bumps and scrapes along the way, but that. So that tech stack problem is really trying to make it so that when you give RBP money, your business will grow, the people you work with will find the work more rewarding, and your customers will report that they have a better experience. So sales then becomes the problem because you're trying to get people to spend more money than they initially thought when they came to you with a problem.

Yeah. And I think if I could synthesize, like, my kind of takeaway from that is it almost sounds like you have all these tools in your tool belt you could use that, you know, are tried and true to solve specific problems that you had. But the problem is, like, you can't figure out what those problems are if you're not going a layer past just listening to what leadership or the owners want.

Right.

Like, you guys are doing a lot of the groundwork to understand, like, okay, you know, leadership or owners. I understand you have these, like, goals you want to hit, but we're not going to hit those goals if we don't actually go listen to the people that are actually doing the work and having the problems and are going to be affected by these different tools that we're going and actually seeing what their feedback is so we understand what the problem statements are, then we know which tools that we trust to pull out of the tool belt to then deploy. Right. Because it's not a situation where you're going to use every single product that we have just in the stack. And it's a static thing and that's it. It's more. So we're going to go in and listen to what the actual problems are, boots on the ground, talk to those folks, and then pull out the tools that actually make sense to help them. But we have our trusted set. Is that kind of the.

That. That is it. And it's. So it's a matter of saying tool, process adoption, right? If we get the people involved in the company, this. The problem is, like, leadership's always up in their ivory tower saying they got these great ideas, and then they say, hey, this is our great idea. Do it. But if we don't get the people involved in the, like in the process of making it. What you want is you want the people to look at their part of this Porsche, right? And they. If it's their part of their Porsche, they're going to wax it, buff it, change the oil, grease it, clean it, right? So then they become the champions of the tool and the adoption. So when new people come into the company, as it invariably grows, they're the ones that enforce process compliance. It's not just something that we have a dashboard that don't be on it. Dashboard where you didn't fill out the playbook. It's like, listen, Mike, if you don't fill the playbook, you're going to screw up the person that takes all of our stuff. And then if they're spending time effing around with your mess, that means they're not taking care of my customer. So I need you to do your job so that my customers also get a good experience. So then they. You get this internal enforcement that you don't get 100% of those people. You always get people who plant their flag and I don't want to do this island. But then you have to, you know, coach a leader to be willing to let go of some people sometimes. And so, yeah, it happens.

Yeah, your terminology game is so strong. Like, yeah, the don't do it dashboard or whatever, all that.

Can I ask. I don't hate me. I need to ask. I want to ask just one more question before you round it out. Just because we're going down this like.

This, I'm here for you, baby. Come on.

So what, so you said you do a lot of this stuff to get this like internal feedback and really try to understand the day to day of the employees and like what they're going through. So you can weigh that against the goals of the business and ownership, leadership, things like that. What do you do when there's a clash there between what leadership wants, what leadership expects, what their goals are versus like the day to day needs of like the employees? Like, how do you kind of say, like, hey, well, you know, you're not accomplishing this because we found this big problem over here, or we can't do this because of some stuff your employees were like, you know, saying needs to get done first. Like, how do you kind of like, how do you handle like conflicts there?

I think that when you, when you know you're right, then you have to know how to communicate it. And you have to show people, like there's a really good explanation that takes like we're trying to explain how inside, outside sales, this is a common one. Inside sales doesn't exist in most roofing companies. They just have outside sales. Those people do everything from set their appointments, do their estimates, climb on roofs, take pictures, drive around. And they're not operationally efficient. If you split it into inside outside sales, just climbs over, takes pictures and then presents inside sales, takes calls, books appointments, does the follow up, closes the deal, gets it in production. So now you have to create this new role, but the customer doesn't want to increase what they're paying, so you have to take some commission away from the outside rep. And the outside reps goes like, well, why am I losing my commission? Well, because this guy's doing all the, that you suck at. And then you have to be able to explain to them that if you could work together as a team, you'll both make more money. And you have to find ways to make that easy to understand. Another common one is like Jim Rohn's ham story, right? So yeah, when you're trying to talk to people in a company trying to settle this dispute, it usually is for a source around, that's not the way we do it, and this is the way we should. And you have to break the mindset of that's not the way we do it, that's not the way we've done it, that we're already successful. Why are we going to do it this new way? And Jim Rohn has a story about his wife making a ham and he says, honey, why are you cutting the Ends off. And he goes, like, that would be so much more meat. Everybody's gonna come over, Christmas dinner, and now you're gonna have this ham. And these two pieces are gone. I wish I could eat those pieces. Well, it makes it taste better. He says, well, how? And she says, I don't know. It's just the way my mom taught me. So then he calls up her mom. He goes, carmen, I can't wait to see a Christmas dinner. But Mary's cutting the ends off the ham. And, you know, she says, it makes it taste better, but I don't know how that makes sense. Like, is it because the flavor gets into it more? And she's like, no, that's not the right reason. We do it because it cooks more evenly. And Jim says, well, how does it cook more evenly? Because, like, does it because the exposed ends are not the skin? Like, is that what makes it work? And she goes, I'm not sure. That's just the way my mom taught me. So then he goes, elizabeth, how come you do the ham? He cut off the ends. Mary says, it because it tastes better. Carmen says, because it cooks better. Well, she says, no, it's because when I was a girl, the oven was only this big, and so we had to put the oven. The ham wouldn't fit in the oven unless we cut the ends off. And so. But yet there's people in companies today, and there's like, an equally relevant story about PBS and. And some other television network that a similar problem. And it's like, sometimes you have to break these mindsets. And so you. You have to be a good communicator. You have to be able to demonstrate not just like, you can't stand in your ivory tower of expertise. You have to be able to break down these things and make it so that people understand why it will work. Because. And. And of course, you have to have their. You have to have their concerns at heart. Like, you have to want their job to be more rewarding, whether that's more commissions or less angry customers or a day where they don't have to worry about stuff when they go home because they're able to see their tasks are done or whatever, but you have to have best intentions towards doing what they need to have a more rewarding day at work. Because it's really. What you're doing is you're just giving them a tool to do their job. Like, this is just what they do for work. So how can I make your day more rewarding? Okay, well, if you don't do that anymore, then Mary won't deal with this. So. But because now we're also making Tom do that. So now you don't have to deal with this. So you have to be able to have these conversations. So solution extraction, I think, is what informs your future conversations.

Yeah, it's so much more than setting up a CRM, right? Like that. The thing that I always, you know, would tell people is, like, there's some things that just aren't solved by technology. They're people issues. Right. And I think the other thing that is, like, so important too, about, you know, commanding a, you know, industry expertise like you do, you know, yeah, sure, you can be a HubSpot partner, but if you have the industry knowledge, you. You're almost coming from a place where it's like, hey, listen, I have the credibility and the knowledge and expertise to kind of explain why this is a problem. Right? Because I understand the industry. I'm not just the HubSpot person. Right. Like, and I think that's another thing that really helps because there's so many issues that I think sometimes disguise themselves as a CRM or a technology issue when they're not. Right. And oftentimes people aren't going to listen to the CRM person. Right. When they spot, oh, this is actually a people issue, right. You know, they're going to be like, just try to fix it with buttons and apps and whatever it may be. And that can't always be done. So, Jackson, let you take it away.

Number one, Adam, you know, you're smart. You know, you got it going on. Like, the way that you're. The way you're explaining things is like, you've been there before. Wisdom is what they call it now that you have a child. You're going to be endowed with ridiculous amount of wisdom that you never had, never thought you would ever have. And things you screaming out, things you never thought you'd scream at people. So I really appreciate you having you on just the. The people that are listening need to understand that when you are so enveloped and so deep and so, like, personally invested in, I wouldn't say a niche, but in a process, because what you outline is very clean processes. We do this, we do that. Here's why you need to do this, because it affects other people. Like you sitting at your computer does not. You're not in a vacuum. Everything you do affects the people around you, which affects the ecosystem. Everything is a world, right? So I think that what people could really take away from is understanding kind of the process and Trusting the process. And don't go in things willy nilly. Learn the process. You talked about learning and learning the niche and understanding the niche. Then understand that there's a process behind it and how you can affect other people. By have leveraging technology, you mean you brought up the. The trucking logistics. That is all this stuff is just open season daycares. How can you. Where are they faltering? Is anybody thinking about that? Is anybody even paying attention to that or trying to solve it with technology, affordable technology? Because daycares are not. There's not rich daycares. Well, there are, but not the ones that really trying to grow. So the idea here is like, I really appreciate you coming on. Appreciate the hot takes. I always ask people three questions before I let them go. Number one. What's your favorite place to eat in Canada?

There's a place called Donna's Eatery. It's like five minutes from where I used to live. It's right across from Tim Hortons, which is like Canada's favorite breakfast. But this place is right across street gets. Nobody knows about it, but it's just like that. It's got the kind of that greasy diner thing. But they have the best. Like when you go in there, they talk to you like they're making you breakfast because they're family.

Yeah, it's Donna. Yeah, it's Donna.

Ironically, it's run by a Lebanese family that nobody there is named Donna. But still great, great American breakfast made by a Lebanese family where there's no Donna. But man, they embody the. What would probably have been the vision for Donna's when it was. When there was probably a Donna there.

Yeah. So when you joined this call, we were goofing around about Urkel.

Yeah.

You made a halfway set that 70s Joe 70s show reference with Donna kinda. What was your favorite cartoon growing up?

Gargoyles.

Wow, I forgot about gargoyles. Dude. Oh my God. I love gargoyles, dude.

Wow. All right, well, my day is pretty much sad. I can go to sleep now.

I'm gonna have to watch gargoyles after this.

Man, he hit me heavy. Last one I'll leave you with is furthest. Furthest you've ever driven. Like how long you drive around the country all the time. How. When's the longest drive you've made?

The. The one that felt the longest was going from like. Because again, we drove all around the country, but for two years straight. But Texas amazes me because it's the only state where you can go 90 miles an hour drive for 12 hours and still be in Texas. It's true.

It's true.

Dax. You know that life.

Yeah, I live. I mean, I live here now. I don't know if you knew, Adam. I live in. I live.

Oh, no way. Well, yeah, I know it's lit. Texas is incredible. Love the state. Holy. Are you big.

Yeah, big dude. I can. I don't have to go anywhere. It was like I traveled around the world.

Now anywhere. You can't go anywhere unless you get on a plane. Where you go in Texas, you're still in Texas unless you bunking.

Yeah, yeah.

You got. It's a lot of. There's a lot of whole exploration to do. So I'm trying to take over, bring it back. So where can people find you at, man? Where. What's next for you? I want to leave you with that. What's next.

Building the sandcastle shows on YouTube or just go to roofingbusinesspartner.com but we're making a YouTube show. We find all like the famous awesome people, the Alex Ramosis and the Grant Cardones and the Tony Robbins. They always start making content once they've made it. And we decided that we were going to invest some money. We have not made it like a 3 million dollar company. We are not huge. And we wanted to make content showing the real life of an entrepreneur, you know, having a baby, navigating into a foreign country, trying to grow a company, the real life of it. And it's unfiltered. Like my wife yelling at me, crying in the shower with not shower on. We're just going to the bathroom, closing the door on me, going in there, her yelling at me or something small that's felt like a world at the time. And just showing people that, you know, they too like. Because what I want is if I ever make it and if I believe I'm going to make it, I want to create the content I wish I could see which is what was it like when they were small? Did they. Were they like me? And I want to put that content out not for now, but for like 10 years from now. If people get mad because they don't pay enough federal taxes, I'd be like, look, I went through a lot to get here.

There you go.

So building on my YouTube channel, RBP Consulting, there's a series on there called Building Sandcastle. If anybody want give me a view and a link that will help me out.

Also, I'm seeing a lot of you on Tick Tock too. You got like, you're doing those. You're producing those. You know, the shorts very well too. So you have an official TikTok channel, right?

Yeah, yeah. Shout out to Bettina. She's doing a hell of a job and taking all of our content, putting on Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, you LinkedIn. It's everywhere.

Yeah. The other cool thing I just want to talk about, like, with the building sandcastle stuff that you were mentioning, like, you know, we haven't made it yet, but we're trying to, like, show people, you know, the process of getting there. I think you mentioned Gary Vaynerchuk at some point in the beginning of this call. One thing that I pulled from Gary when he sold to him a lot a while back is that when you don't know what content to make, just document what's going on around you. Right. Because, like, if you're in the act of building something that is inherently very interesting, and I say this a lot on Hub Heroes, you got to remember they made crab fishing interesting. Right. You building, whatever the thing is that you're building is interesting. There's a story behind it. There's stuff people can learn behind it. And it's just like, if you don't need to come up with insanely creative, like, mind blowing ideas, just document the process. Document what you're building. There's this story happening all around you and you're just choosing not to share it with folks, right?

Yeah, like, and then post it. That's the hard part. Yeah. Process. And people are going to see like, we are. We did a birth at home. We posted that. Like, we.

Oh, damn.

Yeah, it's all part of the story, man. Like, that's part of his story, man.

You'Ve been talking about. This is your first child. It's a big deal and you did it at the house.

So especially when you're building a business, that's a whole different dynamic. Like, you know, going to. Becoming a fox. Is that your first child?

Yeah.

Yeah. First time fatherhood while building a bit. That is a.

No one's ever told you. No one's not told you. When the baby asleep, take your ass to sleep. Don't even stop playing. It doesn't matter what time to go to sleep.

Yeah.

Things to do. Yeah.

Cool. Adam, hey, thank you so much for the time, man. I know you are incredibly busy and, you know, we're super stoked to be partnering with you guys and working with you guys and all the happily stuff. So I'm sure we got a lot of good times ahead and a lot of fun stuff that we're gonna do together, but, dude, appreciate you, man.

Thank you so much for letting me. Come on and share my story with me. It's fun to talk. You guys are great interviewers, so it was a blast.

Awesome.

Appreciate you.

Thank you.