Mobile Device Management for Roofers: What Is It and How Can It Help Your Business?

By providing great mobile device management, as your company grows, they can just assume that you're going to buy another iPhone, you're going to buy another iPad. They want this service to be low cost because they look at it as, that's what gets them more revenue today. Talking about mobile device management, I want to first catch you up on like, what is it? Right? So like, what is mdm, right? It stands for mobile device management. So you're probably going to have a lot of equipment, right, in your business, like mobile devices, right, that you would like to be able to manage and control because you own these devices. And so you know whether they're using them out in the field for installers, whether you have them for estimators, no matter what you have, even in your office, you can use this if you're using like, you know, a group of computers in your office. So you're going to have all this stuff out there, but you want to keep your data secure, right? And you also want to make sure there's certain restrictions because you might be paying for data and stuff like that. And you also have to routinely update those softwares to make sure that they're not getting hacked or making sure they can run the new versions of the apps, right? And this way you can manage the activity, you can find them if they're lost, right? It gives you security and also has the ability to lock down a device if it ends up in the wrong hands. Right? Or if you're an ex employee, keeps it and it's used to basically keep everything compliant and consistent and protected across your entire organization. So, so why is all this important? Right? Well, devices are vulnerable to theft, loss and damage, right? And so this is going to result in added costs for you as the company. So making it so that you can ultimately keep track of where something is means that people won't lose them as often. Right? Because the other problem is of course, if you buy it, right, they might not value it as much because you paid for it. It's also going to allow you to like your service agreements, right, that you're going to have with these people. When you have these devices under your management, you can also negotiate better prices, right? You also can at times get lines that are, you might have lines that go unused, right? And if you're not using these lines, you want to make sure you can turn them on and off. So it's good to have an inventory of what's out there. And then of course you don't want any data theft or leakage when Salespeople leave the company, right? They can. If you have all these text messages and all this data that's stored in the phone and then they leave, they still have that information, right? And then being able to like shut it off the minute you let them go or something like that, or if it's stolen, you can shut it off. Nobody else can get access to it. Because, you know, a lot of times your employees are not tech savvy, right? So you're trying to. I've been through this so many times. You go to a roofing company and you got to get people to download an app and they don't know their password, right? Like I haven't used there. They don't use the app store for much. They're older. This, this allows you to just put the apps right onto their phone. You can just add the app and it's a company provided app on the phone. You can also remove certain apps, right? And then if things get lost or stolen, right? Because they don't take care of their stuff, right? Or their truck gets broken into or anything like that, you can shut these devices off, right? And then we don't have a huge amount of this when we're talking about a lot of the clients that are probably in this room, but we have customers who are commercial contractors who built like Barack Obama's house, right? And these phones could ultimately be an access point to get into this stuff, right? If you're a federal contractor that is doing construction on military bases or navy facilities or engineering property that the government owns or like anything like that, you have to have mobile device management. You have to prove that you have controls for this kind of thing, right? You can also remotely disable and track these devices so you can know if it was stolen, you can help recover it. Right? And then you can also send notes and updates to the device as well, right? And if all the devices are configured the same way, you can say to people, when you swipe over on your screen, the HubSpot icon is in the top left, right? You can control the home screen. You can control everything about it. You can even control like the background and the lock screen. But then you can create a consistent experience across users so everybody's phone looks the same. So when you're training people, you don't have to say, go find this app. You can say it's the app on your home screen because you can move all the normal like say Apple iPhone apps. You can move that to the fourth screen and then you can make it easy to keep Those apps organized. And then you can also, if you're providing a phone for people, you can tell them, hey, you have to use these apps because people can't use that. I'm not using my phone for work excuse or why aren't you paying for my data? Or I ran out of data, right? Or they use their phone all night and then they don't plug it in. This becomes their work phone. It's their job to keep it charged. And then you control the data usage on it. And then you can also prevent things from, like YouTube and TikTok from being downloaded so they're not chewing up all their data on their personal stuff and then saying they don't have any data for their work phone, right? And then when you update things, right, you can let them know that you've updated. Like they're going to see that update happen. So if you choose to add a new piece of technology later, you don't have to have a meeting where you tell everybody, hey, download this app to your phone and all this kind of stuff. You can just push it out to the phone. So who might need this, right? Well, if you have employees that are provided with a company owned service, right, if you provide these phones for them already, a lot of you are already doing this. I know I did. I was just like, I found it easier because I know how some people are. They have a phone that looks like this and their phones did not meet the minimum requirements for the tools that we were using and it just became a problem and it was easier to just provide the equipment. Right? And again, I decrease my variable costs by adding certain fixed costs, right? So I can say I pay less commission because I provide a truck, I provide a phone, I provide the data, I provide the iPad, I provide the apps. Like I provide this stuff so you can come and work here with minimal startup cost. And then I decrease the commission that I pay because I'm providing all the tools necessary to do the job right. And I can make sure those tools are good, right? They have fast data, they have lots of data. They have, you know, they're not just some old iPhone 8, you know what I mean, that has it. And then if you have employees that struggle managing their technology, and this goes for like desktop computers too, you can add a MacBook or a Mac Mini or there's Windows versions of this stuff too, where you can essentially control their device. And then you can also have services that will come in and fix the devices by logging in remotely. So you can have this kind of tech Support that makes it so that people that you can have an outside service ultimately maintain this as well. And then when you're looking at like when people drop off the phone after they're done and they have some stupid screen lock password on it, you can go into the mobile device management tool and unlock the phone. That used to drive me crazy because people let people go. They'd come in, they drop off their iPad and now we'd have to call them three days later or a month later. When someone went hand off that iPad to a new employee, I was like, ah, what's the screen code again? Right? You'd forget. You know, someone might tell you, you might put it on a post it note on the iPad. You know, they hand it to you when you're busy and then you forget to go in, unlock it and reset it. There's a process that you could put in place, right? Because again, the tool doesn't matter as much as the process and the process doesn't matter as much as adoption. So if you had a process and said, okay, when you are let go and you're no longer working with the company, you have to hand in your iPad. And then when they hand in their iPad, they give you the screen code and then you put it on the front of the box on a post it note. And then someone has to go in and push it, put in the code and then remove the need for a code so it kind of resets it. You could do that as part of your process, right? And as long as you adopt it, it happens. But I know what happens. Sometimes people handy in the iPad, you walk out of the office go, oh, I just said let go of Charlie. And oh, he cried and blah, blah, blah. All right, well then now all of a sudden you get back to your day, you get busy, you forget about the iPad, you throw it in a drawer and then now six months later you need it again. The other thing is now people lose devices all the time. It's especially when you pay for them. So it's great to have mobile device management because then you can find it again. Because the other thing is like most of these devices now require you to log to create some kind of device specific id, right? So then you end up creating Johnny roofing company at app@apple.com or something. It's some kind of weird email address that's only for the phone. They set the password once and then now every time you want to access the app store or use Find my iPhone, it's really hard and arduous and it's never fast when you need it, right? You set it up once when you get the phone and four months later the guy accidentally leaves the phone at a bar. And now you can't figure out where the hell the thing is, right? And then sometimes when people are using their devices, they're paying for cheaper data plans and stuff like that. Frequent with older people, right? Because they're paying for the. I get 1 gigabyte per month of data. I only use my device on WI fi and when I go over my gigabyte it slows down to 1996 Internet speeds. And now they're, they're trying to upload pictures to company cab and it's going at a slow rate. They're complaining and they're going, I hate this techy stuff, right? Oh, you just have a crap phone on a crap data plan and it doesn't work for the job that you chose to have as a career and you have to have these constant negotiations with employees. It's easier just to give the damn device because when you buy six at a time, they're going to give you a one year old iPhone for free or for 100 bucks or something. And then now you've like this is the recycling ground for you know those people that buy the brand new device all the time and they use the trade in at Apple to go from the iPhone 14 to the iPhone 15 and they have a perfectly good phone. I have like an iPhone 13, I think they're on like 15 now, right. I don't trade my phone in until it breaks. I used to be that guy that always had to have the newest one. Where do you think your trading goes? They put a new screen on the front, a new cover on the back, put a brand in a box and they sell it to commercial buyers, right? So you get a refreshed one year old phone that it runs great and it looks brand new and you get it for cheap and that's where they take these phones, right? And then this also helps when you're talking to an employee who you want to say implement something like arriving or some kind of field service management. Well now they go, well I don't want you tracking me all the time, right? There's an arg. That's an argument that you get, oh well this thing knows where I am and well you can turn it off at night. I didn't, I don't turn my location services on and stuff like that, right? This is like, look, here's the tool that you use for your job, right? If you had to employ roofers, every roofer comes with them $500 tool budget, because you got to buy a gun, got to buy a harness, you got to buy a rope, got to buy a knife, got to buy some gloves every once in a while. Well, that's for the roofers, right? And the roofers are generating you $500 a day, $1000 a day in revenue, right? Yeah, about $1000 a day. So $325,000 a year. So, yeah, about $1000 a day per roofer, right? Your salespeople are selling you $20,000 a day in revenue. It only makes sense that you might have to get them some tools, right? So then you can say, look, when you're done at night, turn it off, plug it in. Now you're done. It's not tracking your location, right? Well, it just makes it so much easier because at the end of the day, they can just shut off the phone if they want, right? There's no, like, there's not this constant following them around everywhere they go. So you don't have to know they went to the strip club or whatever they're worried about, right? So what can mobile device management do, right? So you can remotely manage. You can log into a computer and you can say, okay, what apps do we need? What is your password? I forgot my password here, I will reset your password for you. Shit like that, right? You can brand your products, right? So then you can set the wallpapers and lock screens so they easily know this is my work phone. It makes them feel good, right? Because now they feel like they have this branded tool. It's no different than we get the logo truck, right? They take brand pride, right? The again, being able to deploy the essential apps to make sure they can do. Being able to remove the old apps, get rid of all those extra apps that they don't need, and control the layout. You can make it so it's easy for others to train, because when someone else grabs another person's phone to teach them, they're not mucking around in their personal text messages, accidentally swiping up and seeing that the last website they visited was a not so good website, I've done it all. I go and fly out to some roofing company in. In Texas, and I'm trying to show a guy how to use his phone, and I'm like, I don't know what I'm doing. Okay, give me your phone. I swipe up to change the apps, and. And next thing you know, I'M looking at nude pictures and I'm like, oh my gosh man, like, like, give me your phone calls, all your shit and then give me your phone back, right? This has happened to me more than once, right? So this makes it nice and easy to train other people how to use stuff, right? And you can also create different profiles for different users. So the minute you get a new field tech or a new site supervisor or a new field manager, right, you can just easily say, oh, that's this role and all the right apps load on it. So it's really fast for onboarding new employees. And then again you can track your devices when they're lost, update your devices when you need to, lock them and check on the health of the device, battery issues, stuff like that. Oh, my phone doesn't stay charged. You can just log into the tool and see, oh, your battery is a 60%. You take it in, you get it covered by warranty for Apple for free or whoever you buy your phone from, right? And then again all the easy sign ins for their emails and stuff like that. So you can make it just super simple. It's part of your onboarding process. And then you can also transfer, right? You can transfer things to the other devices. So how do you set it up? Right, first let's go into some of the tools. And so if you want to do this, where do you go? Right, two that I have used in the past, right? And I've had clients using is Ki, right. So Kanji is an app. Is Kanji IO, right? So this is a place where you can go to get, to get it started and you can see a demo of how they use it, right? As it's used obviously by lots of big famous companies, right? And then Apple also bought their own, so they bought one, right? And so like this one's actually a resource that's owned by Apple, right? It is a bit to set it up because phones have to have mobile device management turned on. You have to create like it's. It takes a little bit to set it up, but they do have support, right? We also have done it for people, right? And then so you go to jamf J A M f dot com. Don't ask me why they come up with these wacky names. Probably because it's. You have to be. You'd probably specifically be looking for it. But these are the two that I would go to, right, to set yours up. And again, this works with computers, it works with iPhones, it works with iPad, stuff like that. And I know this Stuff exists for Chrome and stuff like that as well. I find that Apple is the most friendly to, to work with. I just prefer it. But again, that's like Ford versus Chevy. You do what you want. I just find that if I'm trying to make employees use stuff, Apple seems to be the most quote unquote dummy proof. So this is where you go to set it up. I'll get back to the slides. So it can be challenging with software. It could be easy or extremely difficult to manage, right? It's there's there. You can also do it without these tools that I showed you. But then it's really hard because then it's like this whole ugly control panel. Do not try and do it that way unless you're really good with computers. You can work with your cellular carrier or an IT company. We have set it up for other people there. Sometimes the cellular provider actually provides you with it. I think Verizon for sure has one so you can work with them. But essentially once you do it right, once you do get it set up, then you're going to get your cell phones right? And these have to be. You can add cell phones that you've bought outside of a program. You can add them. So you could go buy, you know, a used phone, right? A one year old iPhone and connect it so you don't have to buy the phone through the plan. But the cool thing is that a lot of these tools actually allow you to buy new ones that come pre connected then. And so then literally the phone shows up and it's preloaded and you can even send the phone or send the iPad to the employee's address. Really great for once you start to expand because if you're opening up a satellite office two and a half hours from where you are, literally ship a laptop, a phone, iPad, whatever to them and have it already be set up so they don't have to drive into the office just to get their phone set up. So it's pretty cool. And then if you have a tech person in house that could run this right, if they get trained on how to do it, then that's part of the jobs that you create in the company. Which means you don't have to pay for an outside service. So at first you might pay for an outside service and then you'll eventually migrate this in house as you grow. And most of these tools function on couple dollars to $20 per device. You can pay more. It just depends on how many devices and stuff like that you're working with. So you Go check out the different tools that are out there. But this is considered to be an ecosystem retention tool. So what do I mean by ecosystem retention? So if you decide that you're going to go Apple, right, like I do, well then you're going to say, all right, like how Apple looks at this is by providing great mobile device management, as your company grows, they can just assume that you're going to buy another iPhone, you're going to buy another iPad, right? And then they want this service to be low cost because they look at it as, that's what gets them more revenue. So that's why this works. Same thing if you use one of the cellular provided ones like Verizon's or whatever, they look at it as you're going to now buy your devices from them and you're probably going to stay on their network. So because it's a retention device, it actually is a fairly low cost, even though it's incredibly powerful. Because for them. Think about when we talk about the tech stack audit, right? One of the Cs of the SaaS business is Cost of switching, right? They want to increase the cost of switching. In a way this increases the cost of switching. Because if you're going to switch your entire company from Apple to Android or from Verizon to T Mobile, resetting up all your mobile device management becomes a cost of switching, right? They have that collateral and so you, for them, it's a retention thing. So just a really powerful way to leverage the fact that you are a business to decrease your costs. Now, employees, they don't know that you're getting phones for cheaper. They don't know that you're getting plans for cheaper. They don't know that you're getting that ultimately you're getting to manage this for less. So the perceived value in the eye of the employee is like, wow, I get all this stuff. For me, it creates this great onboarding experience. And then on top of that, you're, you're getting like they're getting this device and they're getting it updated and they're getting it maintained, all at no cost to them, no cell phone data cost. So then they value their employee, their employment more because now they have to leave. If you choose to give them X amount of data and you do allow them to have Spotify and YouTube on there, well then maybe they think, oh, wow, like I get this company phone and I get enough data that I can listen to my music, right? I can listen to my whatever. And there's just ways for you to use this as a retention tool for your employees. So, mobile device management, that's it in a nutshell.