Adam Sand applied the Savannah Bananas' entertainment model to his roofing company, Sergeant's Roofing, creating military ranks for crew members and hero discounts for first responders. He built a communication playbook that replaced radio silence with status updates and mapped every customer touchpoint using AI, turning the roofing job into a memorable experience that generates referrals instead of relying on expensive marketing.
In 2017, 2019, 2020, I was paying $250 a sale as opposed to $1,000. Yeah. Now guys close to 50%, like they walked in and people wanted to buy from us. They would come in and be like, Adam, they really want you to record a video at their house.
Our major problem is that our customer experience is shit and we don't get a lot of referrals. So the only way we get customers is through marketing. And I hate that. It's bugged me for 20 years. Now that we have systems like Arrivi, we now we now have a way to improve that, and we have improved it, but it's still not great. So we're working really hard to fix that. And it's like, customer experience has to be just as important as putting the roof on. And I think a lot of our production staff and subs just think they're there to put a roof on. But if the customer experience isn't great, then all that can be for nothing with one or two complaints at the end. So we're working really hard to fix that. But in addition to that, I would like to do stuff like the Savannah Bananas in roofing with the military theme. Did you do that with Sergeant's Roofing?
You bet your I did. I heard of the Savannah Bananas like when it was like kind of a new thing. Seth Godin talked a lot about them, right? He said that like you want to get people to remark upon you, you have to be remarkable. And so we did that at Sarge's Roofing and it made the sales guys' jobs easy. Okay, so I want to give you like the 5-minute rundown of what we did and then I want to build this with you because with the AI we could do this so much faster than I do back in the day. Just like Savannah Bananas, thinking about all of the touchpoints, think about when does a customer interact with us? Every touchpoint, trying to inject their own cultural DNA into it. And like, you'll have to tune it up. But what we did was we made everything military-themed. Everything. Our installers, we called them like, you were a master sergeant when you were the foreman of a roofing crew. You were a sergeant when you were like a lead shingler. You were a master corporal when you were a shingler. You were a corporal when you were like an experienced laborer. And you were a private when you were brand new. We had pay ranks and we called them pay ranks, not pay levels or compensate, call them pay ranks. Our ring shank nail was called like a bunker buster. We gave the products white label names that were military themed. Everything was like military themed. So if we were working with you, we'd be like, attention, Operation Venture, like Trey Venture. Operation Venture is a go. Crews are en route deployed to your sector to install your weather defense system. And it would be like radio static over and out. And people would be like, write emails back like, roger that. That, like, they were engaged on that military theme. We had a hero's discount. So hero's discount was for like EMT, police, military. People bought from us because there was a natural affinity to what we did. They felt like they belonged to something. If you were the military, you wanted to buy from Sergeant's Roofing because it felt like something that you would tell your friends about. We're gonna do it together. This is the coolest thing that we could have had come up on a day like today. With the million token context window of Gemini, that's the perfect place for us to go. So we're gonna use the goal, context, action, output format. Goal: I want to build a customer touchpoint and communication rubric. Okay, so now we're gonna go and use the DeepThink. Now this is gonna take a minute. See what it came up with. Okay, so Sverre has disrupted baseball by asking what is boring and stressful about this game and doing the opposite. For roofing, the stress points are noise, mess, anxiety, and lack of communication. The vibe: Toy Story Green Army meets Top Gun. Disciplined, highly competent, undeniably American, but warm, pun-heavy, and fun. The experience. We replace radio silence with status reports. We replace nails with bunker busters. We replace anxiety with entertainment. So the dictionary: the homeowner, the general, the base commander, the home, the base or sector, the roof, the Iron Dome or top cover, the project, the mission, the operation, sales rep, recon specialist or scout, inside sales, mission control, comms officer, production manager, ops chief, site supervisor, unit commander, cleanup, leave no trace protocol. I like that. Now again, I can feel the room get uncomfortable. And I just want to remind you that the same game that Babe Ruth played, like, do you think that they got uncomfortable when they said, we're going to get a banana man to come out with ripped abs and dance on the field? Do you think that people were uncomfortable? Okay, when they got baseball players to do the cha-cha, do you think that these baseball players said, I'm not doing that, that's stupid, I'm a legitimate professional athlete, that's ridiculous? Like, get comfortable with being uncomfortable if you want to do this. I did it in my own roofing company. Felt weird. And then you just found people who thought it was cool, and then you built a company around those people.
