How to Find Ideal Customer For Your Roofing Business

So this is the ideal customer avatar guide. This is the point that we wanna talk about. Define who you should say yes to and who you should say no to. This is a big part of setting that avatar. There are people that you are great for and people who you are not great for. You might be really, really, really good at metal roofing and you should probably only serve metal roofing customers. And there are markets where that works, where people only sell metal roofs. And then you have to define how do you be the best place for someone to buy a metal roof. What makes the best metal roofer the best metal roofer? Probably having access to a variety of financing programs, because a metal roof is kind of like a one-way door decision. It's a lifetime decision. You should probably make sure you have the best financing plan. And so you should have people in your company who are better trained on financing than the average guy who is an asphalt shingle roofer who also sells some metal and just maybe has a financing program that they deal with once a month and they don't really know a lot about it. You will be the best, best built built to serve the metal roof buyer because you understand it better. There's different things that make you who you're best built to serve. Then you can focus and align all your teams on a common goal of saying, we want to make sure that we know why we're best built to serve that person. Then you direct your resources from a marketing perspective towards doing that so that you can guide the right strategies and messaging. So if you're that— to use that metal roofing example, right? The metal roofing example. If you know that the thing that makes you best built to serve the metal roof buyer is the financing, then You should have content talking about the application process, the people in your company that help through the application process, the different types of financing programs for metal roof, and why you would pick a 0% for 12 months over a 9.99% for 24 years, and what the differences in those are, and which customers, because you understand the unique variety of the financing customer. We identified at my roofing company that we were best built to serve what we called Bob and Betty. Bob and Betty were a suburban couple that had teenagers living in the home. They had pets. They lived in a suburban house that was a 6/12 pitch that was considered to be complicated. And our best version of that had no fence and nice landscaping. So there's pieces that break this down. We also knew that they were a professional or a hero or an entrepreneur. A professional was like doctor, dentist, lawyer, engineer, architect. A hero was firefighter, police officer, EMT, or military veteran or active duty. And an entrepreneur is a business owner. Mm-hmm. Right, and the reason for all of this, so lemme walk you through the whys and the what we do about it. Why Bob and Betty, the suburban couple with teenagers living in the home? That's considered like socioeconomic or demographic data. So we knew who we were best built to serve was homeowners who wanted or were going to be the primary beneficiary of the quality work that we were gonna do. We wanted homeowners when they bought a roof, it wasn't for the next homeowner, it was for them. They were buying their roof, not the next person's roof. Who stays in their home typically for a long time? Well, parents with teenagers typically don't wanna uproot their children children. So parents with teenagers have this like obligation to try and keep like a sense of foundational security in their kids' lives. So they're going to live in that house for a long period of time. So that means the roof that you're buying is for you. So you're probably going to make a decision about hiring a roofer that's based around, I want to make sure this is for me, because everybody who bought a roof would rather bought a boat. They don't want to do this. They have to do this. And if they have to do this, they want to do it right. Why the certain professions, Bob and Betty doing either professional, business owner, or heroes? So the professionals was because if you're a mechanic and you go to work every day for $40 an hour and you look at the rate sheet that the dealership charges for your work when people come through, the shop rate is $140 an hour. And you're sitting there going, huh, I do all the work, I have all the expertise, I'm the one who solves the customer's problem, I'm the one who gets dirty, I'm the one who gets the oil on my face, I'm the one with bruised knuckles, and they're charging 2.5 times more than they're paying me to fix the customer's problem. Because if the customer just knew me, I could still fix their problem and I could charge $60 an hour, I would make 50% more, and I also wouldn't have to use my stupid clock-in clock-out thing and ask for a lunch break. I'm gonna go start my own business. So when they go shopping for a roof, there's a piece of them that has that in their head where they're like, if I could just know the me version of roofer, I could not pay the business markup because I don't see value in it. Because people inherently own value the contribution that they make to the world more than the contribution that others make. They don't see the fact that the dealer had to buy a plot of land, put a $20 million building there, buy $8 million worth of inventory, pay for salespeople, sales managers, finance managers, computers, desks, chairs, lunchroom, accountants, build an oil change bay, get the service people to work, the hazardous materials disposal systems, build the shop, buy the tools, put the $50,000 lifts in the ground, do the marketing, put the sign out on the road, and then the mechanic comes and gets a job. They don't see any of that shit. There's like, you charge $140 an hour and I'm getting paid $40 of it, you bastard. So they're gonna try and find a guy that's gonna do it for a case of beer. I don't want that customer. The professionals, they understand liability and risk, right? They want to hire a professional 'cause they understand. They see people suing people. They're architects. They see how construction goes wrong. They're engineers. They know that things have been done. They want to hire a professional. So they're gonna value the way that we present ourselves. Then heroes. Why heroes? Well, heroes, we like those people because we were called Sergeant's Roofing. I was in the military. We had a hero's discount. So we had something of value value to make it so that maybe people who weren't, you know, that weren't like making the money that a doctor or lawyer were making could get a sergeant's roof for less because we valued the contribution of heroes and we had specific programs to help them save money. Then why entrepreneurs? Entrepreneurs typically look at every business they deal with and look for ideas and judge them, you know what I mean, through the lens of how they run their business. So the way that we ran our business, we tried to be overly innovative and try to be like best in class. We learned things from hotels, from Uber, from moving companies, from other industries, realtors, right? Like, we did video walkarounds on the roof when Loom didn't exist, and we had to pay $500 a month to use BombBomb, you know what I mean? This video tool called BombBomb to record videos on the roof. Like, it was a podcast from 2018, talk about it. When Loom came out and it was $10 a month, I was like, felt like an asshole for having paid BombBomb $500. But we took that from realtors. So entrepreneurs tended to see what we were doing as cool and innovative and different, and we gave them an experience that tickled that little part of them that wanted to do cooler, newer, innovative things. And we knew that that would be an exciting experience for them. So why dogs? We knew the cleanup mattered to them, right? They didn't want to get a nail in the dog's foot. I have a dog. If I get a— if a contractor causes my dog to be hurt, I would be mad. Then we even had a policy around fences, right? This is more into the what-to-dos about it, but let's keep moving. Now, no fence and nice landscaping. There was a period of time where we'd put a bunch of CompanyCam tags on projects, and then we were able to take those tags and our gross profits and say, where do we tend to make the most money? And we all these different tags that we had, right, to try and say like, what are the circumstances that existed? And we did this study and we lived off this study for years, and I tell people about it. And what we found was the person had no fence, it didn't make much of a difference. If people had nice landscaping, it didn't make much of a difference. But if they had both, it made a big difference in what we charged. And we talked to the customers, and what we found was that if you have no fence, you live in community with your neighbors, right? Your shit is your neighbor's Your neighbor's shit is your shit. So they care about the way their property looks. Their neighbors tend to care about the way the property looks, and they live in community with their neighbors. So therefore, the decisions that they make in a contractor like a roofer, which is going to impact the neighbor, they want— they're not just wanting you to be good to them, they want you to be good to the neighbor. So they care. They'll pay a little bit extra to make sure that you'd be willing to go check the neighbor's property, that you're going to keep the stuff from blowing into your neighbor's yard, because they have to have conversations with Jimmy about the dog pooping. And the last thing they want is Jerry walking over in the morning to complain about roofers that you hired. And so those two things matter. So those are the why we dos, all those things. Then there's the what to do about it. In our marketing, we showed pictures that looked like Bob and Betty, what Bob and Betty typically looked like, professionals with teenagers living there. We had pictures that our infographics showed people that looked like Bob and Betty. The houses looked like houses for Bob and Betty. When we recorded videos, we recorded videos on houses that looked like they were the ones that Bob and Betty lived in. We talked in our videos about issues like the dog and how we keep the fence closed and we would tell a story about how one time a dog got out of the fence because a little like 10-year-old girl or whatever came in with her friend. Her friend didn't close the back door fast enough. The dog got out, the dog ran out the fence and we spent 3 hours chasing down this dog. And so now we have a policy of keeping the fences closed because we don't want the dogs to get away. Most roofers don't talk about what you're gonna do with the fence when you notice that there's dog poo and dog toys in the back. You're usually just gonna say, and please click, click, pick up the dog poop before we come 'cause we don't want it on our tarps. That's as far as you go when you recognize seeing a dog. We would say, if you don't mind, we understand we're dog people and we're gonna make sure your dog stays safe. We're gonna keep the fence closed so that way the dog doesn't get out. But if at all possible, if you could clean up the doggy bombs before we come, it'd be great. Keep it off the tarps. The guys gotta get on their hands and knees and roll them up. Be fantastic. When we did our site setup videos and our roof prep videos and our how we clean up after the end of the day videos, everything about those videos was talking to Bob and Betty. And so the what to dos about it impacted our sales presentation. Our sales presentation was written for Bob and Betty. When we talked about what we annotated in our photos. It was the stuff that we knew was important for Bob and Betty. We didn't just follow the checklist. We followed the checklist and looked for stuff that we knew Bob and Betty might care about because we didn't just memorize a checklist, but we sought to understand our customer. So everything from how you set up your marketing, the campaigns that you run, the specials that you decide to do, like the hero discount that we did, the causes that you choose to align with, the videos that you make, the infographics that you make, the landing pages that you design, the Facebook ads that you run, the targeting in those Facebook ads, the sales presentation, the CompanyCam photos that you annotate, and everything about the experience that you give them just before, during, and just after the job. Our customers were techie people, they were innovative people, so we had more things like making sure they got the CompanyCam link. That was really innovative in 2017. In fact, you're one of the CompanyCam OGs. You're one of the first like 2,000 people using it, or companies using it. You remember, you used to have to go create timeline link, you'd have to create it and then copy it. And Jeff Valder was the business development manager, and I was like, can you guys just make it so that it automatically generates a link every time so I can zap it into Podio, my old CRM, and they can automatically send it by email and text message to every single customer. And then they made that feature for me because I wouldn't let up on it. And then we had it and then we did. That was innovative in 2017. It's standard operating procedure today. But when that was innovative, that meant that our customers would pay invoices online. So we had to have ways to get invoices paid online back then. So we had to have a clickable link, you know. So these are things that you can then design your business around.