Adam Sand explains why roofing companies should target a specific customer avatar instead of chasing everyone. His ideal customer, "Bob and Betty," is a 40-55-year-old professional or business owner (often a veteran) with teenage kids, a dog, and a two-story home with a complex roof over 2,600 square feet. These customers value reliability and understand liability, making them far more profitable than younger couples or elderly widows.
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In roofing, you're selling the same stuff installed by the same kind of people, the same way. You can't decide to put the shingles on upside down because you feel like it. They're using the same tools, they're doing it more or less the same amount of time. Like nobody's taking 10 times as long or 1/10 as long to do a roof. It's a hard question to ask and I piss roofers off when I say it. But it's a real question to ask is like, why is it that your company deserves to exist? You have to know who your ideal customer avatar is. So when I owned my roofing business in Canada, my ideal customer avatar, our roofing business was we named them as Bob and Ben, Betty, even my competitors. There's a guy who owns a roofing company called Iron Shield Roofing in Edmonton and he said, I don't want any Bob and Betty's, I want this. We talked so much about our ideal customer avatar that he knew our competitor, knew who our ideal customer avatar was. And Bob and Betty were a professional or a military service police officer person or a business owner. They were between 40 and 55 years old. They had teenage children living in the home and a dog. They lived in a two story house with a complex roof that was 2,600 square feet or bigger. They had a fenced yard with nice landscaping. Now every single one of those pieces was important to us and it was based on data that tells us who our customer is not. A 68 year old widow is not our ideal customer avatar. Would we still sell a roof to them? Yes. But it wasn't who we were targeting in our Marketing is a 22 year old and a 25 year old couple who is pregnant with their first child living in a 1800 square foot townhome and in a row of houses. Is that our ideal customer avatar? No. Would we still sell a roof to them? Sure. But it wasn't who our marketing was directed towards. The reason that Bob and Betty had to be a professional or a, what we called a hero or a business owner was because if you're a mechanic, a mechanic will go to work every day and he will look at the shop bill that is charged to their customer. Right. So they're fixing the transmission on a Nissan Murano and they're getting paid $45 an hour. But, but they know that when that invoice goes to that customer, the shop rate is $140 an hour. And they're like, well, I'm losing you know, this $95 an hour that the shop is charging me out at. And they in their head don't think about the liability insurance, they don't think about the $50,000 lift that's in the floor. They don't think about the $20,000 for the tools and the $10,000 toolboxes. He's just thinking they're charging me out at $140 an hour and they're paying me 45. And so on the weekends, what is he doing? His friends are asking, hey man, can you fix my car? And then on the weekends he charges them like $65 an hour. He knows he's saving them, you know, $75 an hour from going to the shop that he works at and he's providing the same skill set and he's got his own tools and he's got jacks in his car and he's got to do it in a different environment. But he goes, man, I got to do it in a different environment, but I'm making 50% more money. So what does that tell us about the mechanic? When they're shopping for a roof, part of them will at least entertain the idea of, of instead of dealing with this company, the dealership, is there a way that I could find the guy and the guy would do it for less. So that wasn't my ideal customer avatar, but a person who is a professional. So doctor, dentist, right, cfo. Those people understand risk, they understand business, they understand what they're getting from the tertiary benefits. Not just the roofers themselves, the heroes. Well, we gave them a discount because our company name was Sergeants Roofing is because I was in the military and my partner's last name was Sergeant. So it made sense. We really wanted to give back to Hero. So we had a discount for anybody who is an ambulance, emt, police officer, firefighter, or a military service member or veteran. We had a kind of a program that made us a good fit for them and then they got a discount on our regularly high priced services. The business owner was again, for similar reasons as the professional. They tend to appreciate a business that's run right. And we focused on having the best customer experience, the best technology, the best kind of more integrated experience. Our emails came out as if your last name was Owen. It was like, operation Owen is a go. Our teams will be deployed to your sector at 0800 on Friday morning. We're going to build your new weather defense system. Over and out. You know, and they would be like, Roger, you know, they had fun dealing with our business. So we tried to make sure that other business owners would look at that and say, man, our business should go to that degree.
