Think Like an Investor! Stop Being an Operator and Grow Your Roofing Business.

So operators and investors ask very different questions. Operators are going to say, what do I need to get done today? Investors are going to say, what return am I getting for what I'm doing? That one shift, that one change from action to outcome is the entire core of this mindset. So think about your average work week. You guys probably put in a solid 50, 60 hours. How often do you step back and actually ask yourself of those hours, how many of them actually moved me forward, not just keeping things alive, but actually created value. Investors are obsessed with one thing, leverage. Not leverage in the financial sense, but in the efficiency sense. They're asking things like, where can I put $1 and get back 2, 5 or 10? Where can I spend one hour? That saves me 10 later. So you probably didn't start your business with an investor. Hat on, a lot of people in roofing start off as sales and they decide, you know what, I can sell roofs, I want to make the money myself. They start off as crew members. Like, I can install roofs and I just got to find some way to sell them, and then I get to make the money myself. You learn by doing. You're essentially doing part of the job. And you decide to take the whole thing on. And you end solving problems by brute force, which is entirely fine at first, but if you stay there forever, you will cap your growth. At some point, you're going to need to stop just doing it and start thinking like someone who owns it. And if you're not sure where you are most of the time, this next slide's for you. Take a look side by side, and I want you to ask yourself, what side do I recognize more in myself right now? Not where you want to be, but where you actually are most of the time. So we got our operator mindset. We're focusing on getting things done, tasks, checklists, inbox zero, all of those types of things. We're focusing on focusing on solving the immediate problems. What job do I need to go out and make sure is installed properly? We're avoiding risk. We're trying to prevent the loss, not create the value. And we're staying busy. Now, we're going to contrast that with the investor mindset here. We are focusing on outcomes. What did that effort actually produce? We're solving for root causes. We're building systems to avoid the same thing happening twice. We're measuring return. We're calculating risk. We're not afraid of it, we're calculating it. All we care about is that there's a good risk to reward ratio and we're staying strategic. We are working less often, but on smarter and more selective things. If you're always operating from the operator mindset, though, if you're always there, you're probably working harder than you need to and seeing less return than you could. So here's the question I want you to keep in mind for the rest of this. What would you be doing differently if you were thinking like an investor? So if you were thinking like you're in the right side column, what would you do differently? So here is the takeaway. Your business is a portfolio. It's not a list of tasks. It's not a job, not a series of fires. It is absolutely a portfolio of investments of your time, your money and your attention. Investors don't ask, did I work hard this week? They ask did my portfolio grow, did it generate return, and where should I reallocate? If something's not paying off, they cut it. If something's working, they double down and they review it all regularly. No emotion, just clear thinking. And in a lot of cases here you are one of the assets. You're making decisions that's going to determine whether it grows or flatlines. And it's not about how much time you are personally putting in. It's about how you allocate the resources you have. That's what thinking like an investor is really going to mean for you guys.