This YouTube conversation (host Speaker A and Adam Sand) argues that roofing has shifted from a simple post-storm service into an experience-driven business focused on building homeowner relationships. The opening positions companies that treat roofing as an ongoing customer experience as more likely to win and outlines that the video will explain how to adapt and thrive.
Picture. Most people think roofers are just the guys who slap shingles on after a storm, right? Wrong. What if I told you that roofing today is less about swinging hammers and more about building unforgettable homeowner experiences? Here's the harsh if you're still treating roofing like it's just a service call, you're already losing to companies who treat every roof like it's the start of a relationship. So let's dig in. Today I'm breaking down how roofing evolved.
From a back of the truck trade.
Into an experience driven business. And exactly what you need to do to not just survive, but actually stand out and thrive with the new breed of customer. Ready, let's get into it.
A great roofing business is really thinking about transforming neighborhoods into thriving assets for their business. And to have an asset with a homeowner, you need to turn them into a relationship. I want to make roofers respected at the bar and the bank. The whole thing is like if you're a roofer, like you're the tradesman and you go to the bar dressed up well and you walk up to a girl and you say you're a roofer, they're just like, oh, you're not a banker? Like, I'm not interested. And the same thing with like when you go to the bank. I've employed roofers in my roofing company and they would go to the bank and want to apply for a mortgage. And I know what happens, they take the application, they walk down the hall to photocopy it and they see a co worker and they're like, roofer, you know, like they don't assume that they're going to get approved. Like, we want to bring respect back to this trade. I just got this report the other day. The number one business by volume that got purchased in 2024 was roofing companies. Roofing is now an equity market. Roofing is now an investable ass asset. And it's because we're living in a different era. In the 70s, roofing was just a service. You wanted shingles, they were black, brown or gray, like which one do you want? But then in the 90s, it turned into services and products. Customers started to care about this. And then the 2010s, it became customer centric. All of a sudden you needed a CRM, you needed a Facebook page. Can you imagine a roofer that was open in the 90s and basically made two marketing decisions a year? It's like, am I going to do a full page yellow pages ad or am I going to do three billboards? Am I going to run bus bench ads? Or am I going to do something on the TV guide? And now you tell them he needs a Facebook page and a blog. The roofing industry became customer centric, and today it's experience centric. You know the jig is up. You're selling the same shingles installed the same way by the same people, using the same tools, more or less the same amount of time, for more or less the same price. The only thing separating you is your experience. And in this new era, there will be winners and losers. And businesses with less than 20 employees are actually 335.6% more likely to fail because the invisible hand of capitalism seeks efficiency. And smaller businesses are are inefficient for the market. They might be highly profitable for you in the short term, but for the market, they're inefficient because the Colorado does not need 300 roofers with a 4.7 or better star rating on Google. And all 300 roofers are all paying $5,000 a month minimum for a production manager, $5,000 a month minimum For a marketing guy, $3,600 a month for a bookkeeper. The thing is, we don't hear a lot about the small businesses failing. And that's because the news doesn't show up to document the airline's landing safely. They only talk about when the big companies fail. But there's a literal graveyar of small businesses. That's how many businesses failed that were under 20 employees in 2023. 3,348,726 families that watched their parents go out of business, watch their husbands lose their life's work. This is incredibly risky running a business. We just don't see it a lot. And in growing a business, there's very predictable actions and breakpoints tied to revenue. So this is like 0 to 3, 3 to 8, 8, 15, 15 to 25, 25 to 45, 45 to 75, 125 and up. And there's the problems that you have to solve and the solutions that solve them and the success rate. We paid $200,000 for this study. So this is all me trying to understand the roofing industry, so I understand where RBP fit inside of it. And the lesson that I learned is that we're dealing with the greatest wealth transfer in human history. We're turning from a nation of owners into a nation of renters. And you can see that in our consumer buying behavior. If you look at all of this. What is the common thread? If you told people 20 years ago that you were going to get into some stranger's car and then you're going to r to some stranger's house where you were going to pay them money to sleep in their basement, people would have said you were insane. Facebook took out all the major news publishers and created this huge content aggregation platform. And everybody, if I ask them if you could go back 20 years and tell yourself one thing, the answer is always the same. There's going to be this thing called bitcoin and you should buy 10 of them. Who would have thought about Netflix, right? And this guy's trying to change everything. So your customer is buying things differently. You're no different. And now homeowners expect this buying experience. They want immediate communication. They're aware of the market values of things. They want personalized updates. They're looking for digital options in the way that they purchase. And they want these things anywhere, anytime. So the old way doesn't work where you just take a pack of money, you throw it at a couple of platforms, A bunch of people reach out, you go to their houses, you dump them into your sales process. Paperwork spits out the other end, and they have a bunch of people, and you get a dollar left over for the 10 bucks you put in. It's not that easy anymore. That's why we talk about the RBP system. And this is going to make sense when it comes to the data model. Because this new era is changing everything about our industry. Pricing has gone from per square. Now we have to value engineer our prices. We've gone from marketing just being advertising, where we camouflage spending as advertising. And it's now becoming how do we create a brand experience? This is why everybody's getting a dog or some kind of weird character that's attached to their logo. It's because they're trying to create brand experience. We've gone from selling products to solving problems. Not just building roofs. We're building relationships with homeowners. Production managers in the 90s did not have to be people people. Now they have to be customer service representatives more than they have to be production managers in some ways. Finance. We were just trying to fight for gross profits before. Now it's all about net profits. Everything is being whittled away. And the culture has gone from closing deals to serving entire neighborhoods. And this is what's winning the game.
