YouTube interview (Adam Sand with William Pauley) explaining five practical advantages larger roofing businesses have over smaller owner-operator firms — purchasing discounts, stronger recruiting/training/benefits, shared best practices, better technology/infrastructure, and larger specialized departments (HR, IT, sales, finance) that improve margins and growth.
What can a bigger roofing business do that smaller ones simply can't? From purchasing power to pro level recruiting, there are serious advantages to scale. I'm Adam San, CEO of the roofing Business partner. Today William Pauley, founder and managing director of Marcon Advisors, reveals how larger companies unlock deeper margins, elite talent and smarter systems. This is what scaling really looks like.
What can you do as a bigger business that you can't do as a smaller business? So what are some benefits they can get from size? 1? Purchasing discounts. A business that you know is buying an extra $50 million a year of supplies from these supply houses can get things cheaper. Getting things cheaper they can use as a competitive advantage to keep their same margins and be just as competitive on or more competitive on pricing with customers. Or they can just make more money and reinvest that money into the cash flow. They can generate or reinvest that money into marketing to fuel more growth. So purchasing discounts is one another one, the ability to recruit, train and retain better staff. You're an individual roofing business that is a kind of an owner operator. You might have an HR person, but likely that's a pretty decent sized hat that the owner of that business wears well. Now you're six roofing businesses. You might have a dedicated HR team. Let's say they own six brands. Each one of those brands is probably responsible for their own hiring. They don't have to bear that responsibility. They can probably call their HR staff at corporate and say, hey, I need this kind of candidate. And they say, great, we'll do it. So then they go out there, they recruit them, and they have people showing up as candidates for interviews and then the brand makes a final decision on what to do. Also because they're larger, they may have higher quality benefits. They may have other little incentives and perks they use to retain better staff. They might see the real value of having higher skilled employees and be willing to pay more or provide better compensation to retain better staff. You know, you're paying people their value so they don't have a reason to leave. Shared best practices. We have six businesses. Some are better at certain characteristics, but so they focus on sharing those best practices with the group. It might be lead generation, it might be digital marketing, it might be production workflow. Anything they can do to make each other better, they're all going to benefit from that because usually they're all incented and aligned. Everyone will do better if the entire business does better. These best practices could be technology best practices. There are any number of things that could be shared that help make other organizations better. Better infrastructure. This is kind of tech stack stuff. They might be large enough, have their own IT department which is those people will be more equipped to and implement better technology infrastructure. Also the private equ firm probably has relationships with advisors that can help do those things as well. They understand that if we can implement this thing six months faster, that's worth something. We can step on the gas and accelerate our growth because we've implemented this infrastructure faster. So they understand getting things done with speed helps them and they're willing to invest in doing that. Last one, look. Essentially every department is larger and more specialized to support the business. The sales organization probably has a much more focused and dedicated view of how to train people. The sales process they use to go out and do those things, they probably better oversight for them and are tracking the metrics better so they can analyze and make decisions better. There's probably an HR department that is larger and more capable. There's the IT department we talked about, the production department, all these groups. The finance department is probably a team of finance professionals instead of, you know, somebody or outsourced and they use that to their advantage to make the business overall stronger.
