Adam Sand walks through how roofing contractors build loyal customers through storytelling and video. He uses John Hogan's story of a botched job that sparked Blue Now's obsession with permits and professionalism, then shows a six-video framework (people, product, process, thought-reversal, caught-doing-it-right, giving pledge) and tactics like responding to every comment and sending automated gifts to turn customers into true fans.
Chapters
How do you become a remarkable roofer? How do you stand out? Because I like you have to do the same thing every other business owner does, which is try and find out a way to stand out in the sea of sameness. One way to do it is to tell a story that nobody else can tell. There's a unique story about your business. The first best story that I ever heard was this client of ours from way back in the day, John Hogan from Blue now, he learned about the importance of professional construction at an early age. In middle school, the garage of his mother's house was. Was turned into this beautiful suite for his grandmother, who's battling cancer. It was actually the grandmother's house. They invited John and his mother to live in the main house, and the grandmother moved into this, like, converted garage suite. And when grandmother passed, it was time to sell the home. This garage apartment ended up being the reason that their house sale fell through, because it turns out that the grandmother hired a contractor who never obtained the necessary permits to build this in law suite. And so as a result, John's mom had to spend a bunch more money turning this beautiful living space back into a garage. So not only did she recently lose her mother to cancer, but she's also dealing with all the money issues because of this contractor's oversight. Ultimately, the value of the home dropped, and it took months to sell the house and find a new buyer. And this story is just one of many over the years that John's heard. And too often, homeowners are taken advantage by contractors offering shoddy work or logistically poorly executed work, such as the no permits thing. And so, since John grew up in the construction industry, John understands these dirty tricks, and they're often pulled to save money on the job site. And his mission is to protect homeowners and help families avoid the pain and expense that comes from negligence, poor workmanship, and contractor shortcuts. So he has this strong commitment to quality and leads this team through this thing, but it's through the cause. So from consultation to their install completion, customers expect the highest levels of professionalism from him because of this story. So it's not that if he was just to say, hey, you know what, we pull permits on every job and we do quality work and we have professional in our dealings and we want to get you a good return on your investment from your home, that wouldn't mean anything without the story. And I told him, never delete that story from your website. And he never has. He's moved it around. His website's gotten Bigger. But that used to be the story on his homepage of his website when we first met. And it was one of the best stories that I had heard early in my roofing kind of consulting journey. And so how do you tell a story? Well, you can do it through video. This is a screenshot of some videos that I did. And again, most of the videos that I put out don't get a lot of views. Of these 15, only five of them go over 10,000 views. And 10,000 views is not a lot of views. You know, people get hundreds of thousands, millions of views on videos. And these are not fancy videos. These are all just Facebook lives, but 10,000, a lot of people when you sell a few hundred groups a year. So videos are very great way to tell a compelling story. And we should all know at this point why companies should be implementing video. But the problem for you is usually who does the video, how do we make good videos, and what do we talk about? And so we have this six video matrix. So these are the six types of videos that you should be recording in a roofing business. It's people videos. And so people videos are videos about the people. There's product videos about the products that you sell, process videos, which is about the processes that you have in your business, thought reversal videos. So taking a common misconception, turning it on its head, and then positioning a question to the viewer, asking if they would still do it the old way, caught doing it right videos, which is when something goes wrong, you document how you fixed it, and a giving pledge, you then start to leverage a try. And so to do that, you have to get your first 10 true fans, and then your first hundred true fans, and then your first thousand true fans. And the way you do that is you respond to every comment. You create customer and subcontractor appreciation. You build a tribe around everybody, your customers, your subcontractors. You have to get true fans of your business. The way you can do that is through local Facebook group creation. And so these local buy sell groups and these local community groups, these are great ways to start developing a tribe around you in house labor. If you have in house labor, they become your tribe. They literally wear your logo on their back to work, right? They wear your logo on their back to the barbecue after work. It's hard to beat the community impact of employing 20, 30, 100 or 200 people that support their families from your brand. And you can also get your vendors involved and declare your goals and share progress with everyone you know. So who are your first 10 fans that you can start with today. A way to build that is to build an emotional connection with them. You can get by giving. There's a really good book called the Go Giver by Bob Berg and John David Mann. It's about the power of giving. It represents the idea that true success in business and life comes from unselfish willingness to give more than you receive. And there's ways to systematically do it as well. Dope marketing allows you to automate it from your CRM to send a box of cookies to your customer after they buy a roof with a handwritten thank you card that's printed by a robot handwriter. There's other tools that integrate with HubSpot like ReachDesk and Postal IO. So you can just buy from a marketplace and you can send that gift to a customer automated right out of your CRM. Lots of ways to build that emotional connection through gift giving. Now we talked about building scarcity. There's some brands that you know are really good at this. Louis Vuitton builds scarcity in that it's very expensive and they put their stuff on celebrities because it creates an environment of scarcity. When you're looking to try and build scarcity in your business, look at exclusive material supplier relationships, look at complicated installation capabilities. This goes beyond the, you know, platinum preferred, you know, master elite contractor. This goes to the point where you have the relationship, not the sticker, the relationship. And then there's also labor relationships to meet demands in surge markets of storm or small towns. So what I mean by that is I've seen roofing companies that have had success because they maintain deep long term relationships with labor contractors and then they're able to pull labor to the market when and needed because those people will pick up and move at the drop of a hat to come work for people. So then you just become one of the people that in a scarce market you have the ability to do the work. The other thing is innovation. How can you innovate in your business? This is another way to stand out. I have a lot of customers who do this innovative process, right? The inside, outside sales. They have a rivi, they have this like app that gives the Uber like experience and they mention it. Nowhere in their marketing, like nowhere in their marketing are you talking about company cap, Nowhere in your marketing. You talking about equipters or you talk about catch? Are you talking about this kind of stuff? These are things you want to talk about because you're innovating your business and this can happen in your shopping experience, your buying experience, your installation experience, and even your payment experience. Talk about it online. Just talk about your process so you stand out. You want to be remarkable, which means you want to give something that people might remark upon by you want to tell a story, something that's unique to you. You want to leverage building a tribe. Do so by developing an emotional connection through giving gifts. Trying to create that emotional connection with people. Driving scarcity. Creating scarcity but not false scarcity, but true scarcity in your and then innovate and do all of them, and that will help you be remarkable.
