What owning multiple businesses in the Roofing Industry has taught Adam Sand | with Dmitry Lipinskiy

You're just trying to numb the anxiety of what's going on in your work because you're trying to sit there and take care of your future self. Those guys, they're going to need to invest in marketing because the people who work for you, they're counting on you to create expansion.

What you about to see, guys, is instant classic at Roofing Insights. One of the best interviews I've done. Adam sand, absolutely love Adam. We've been friends for years. He's behind Roofing Insights, he's behind directory and you're gonna enjoy. But I wanted to give huge shout out to one of our sponsors, Hook Agency and Tim Brown. We wouldn't be here if not for our sponsors. It's hard to produce high quality content. We have a lot of expenses and we work with the brands that we know bring value to roofing industry, to roofers. If you're looking for good, solid partner, if you're looking for a company who you can trust in a website space at SEO, pay per click, anything Google, give Hook Agency a call. You will not be sorry. We don't give bad recommendations. Now let's go and enjoy Adam Sen's interview.

You look great. You've been working out. I see a lot. How are you doing?

Doing good. Been a lot of traveling.

I can tell. How's life?

Yeah, I mean I look at it as a blessing, everything that's going on, but never without challenges. Definitely being on the road, you know, Covid travel restrictions, things back home, things with clients bouncing all over. It's a bunch of really awesome new challenges. But it has lots of great things and lots of challenging things.

It's not new to you, You've been traveling before, but this year it looks like you're stepping it up.

Yeah, definitely this year, definitely stepping, stepping it up. The biggest thing is not going home in between, in between visits. Right. And just going from one to the next to the next to the next.

You became one of those famous Instagram marketers living Hawaiian life, enjoying high pay tickets, working from anywhere.

Yeah, yeah. They don't see the living in a van and sleeping on a mattress pad this thick and working 15 hours a day. They just see the three pictures I put on Instagram in a week. They don't see all the rest.

Do you call yourself a marketer?

You know, I don't really associate too much with that anymore. It's this thing that I'm known for, but it's not this thing that I guess necessarily try and associate myself with anymore. Couple reasons, One, a Lot of people in the industry don't really understand marketer. They think like marketer gets a bad rap mostly because of you. But it's, but it's, you know, it's something that I originally got on the scene for. A lot of people have heard the story. I had a roofing company, I seen this guy on. I seen this guy on YouTube talking about shingles. I went and did it on Facebook. Bunch of people found out that that was a good idea and I was kind of the first guy talking about it. So I did a bunch of Facebook ads for people. And you know, now I see Facebook and that marketing industry really evolving and changing. And in the process of doing that, I found out that a lot of people, you know, that I'm just a huge nerd and a lot of people didn't have really good systems and processes. That's the stuff that I really love and enjoy. That's what I'm traveling around doing. But it seems like my foot in the door is always the marketing story. You know, it's like always that title that I get put up, get, get stamped with and I have to take it as a blessing and a curse in some way. Ways.

If we would drop you anywhere in the United States or Canada, any major city, and you would have to stay there for three years, you would lose everything. Your job, all your clients, brand new. You pretty much have nothing. You lost it all for some weird reason. We drop you in a brand new city for three years, what would you do?

Like, where would I go? Where would I want to go?

Like, what would you choose for. How would you make money? How would you survive? What would you do for three years? Would you, you start a business, Would you work for someone? No.

That makes, that makes perfect sense. Like I'd be, hands down, I'd be a sales manager. I'd find a place to manage a sales department.

Sales manager.

Sales manager, absolutely. That is my, that is my first true love, right? Is sales. And it's the best, it's the best fucking job in any business you're ever going to go to is sales manager. From there I volley into everything else that I do, right? Sales management. There's a people element to it, but there's a process element to it. And when there's people and processes, you need systems, right? And that leads into everything that I feel like I'm good at. From a lifetime of just doing whatever it was that I wanted to do. The books that I've read, the hobbies that have taken up, the challenges that I've put myself in front of. You plot me anywhere, you plot me anywhere in the world. If I can speak the language, I'm going to try and find a way to be a sales manager and from there I know I'll be fine. And almost any product that I believe in, love it.

We get a lot of questions from our students in the school about how to find salespeople. As a sales manager, where would you look for salespeople? How do you recruit? Where? What's the good place to find good salespeople?

Well, the best salespeople, I always say, are, and this has gotten people in trouble. But your is military, police, people like that, like people who are used to that structure, that discipline, right? They follow a process and they work within a system. They lead up and down the chain of command. So they fall into the ranks really well, right? They're confident, I believe, ex business owners, because they come in and they're like, you're telling me that you paid for the chairs, the computers, the paper, the printer, the marketing, the advertising, the product, the office lady answer the phone and I got to come in here and just talk to people about a product that they want to buy. And you're going to be 25 or 5%, like you gotta pry them out of there with a fucking crowbar, right? Any ex business owner that goes to sales, they typically do really, really well at it, right? This is where I start getting in trouble.

How do you recruit them? How do you find those?

Well, I mean, you get ex business owners. Ex business owners, usually I would say they come to you, right? You just have to run good. You're gonna say the marketer thing, but you have to run good hiring ads. The other two are drug dealers and people who are good at the opposite sex. Ex drug dealers people are good at the opposite sex. Like military athletes, anybody who's in that team based organization. And ex business owners. You run ads, right? LinkedIn, whatever, you're gonna run ads.

Where would you run ads?

You know, it typically goes indeed, Kijiji, LinkedIn monster. Like all the job sites, I wanna run all of them. But I mean indeed seems to be the place that just gets the best volume. And then when it comes to if you're in the industry like then and you're trying to hire people within the industry, then you just gotta look like a business where there's places and there's things going on. So. So that's going to go into your content, your marketing, making your business look like it's a place Where. The place where action's happening. Because no one wants to go work somewhere where they can just. Someone's got to die before they move up. They want to go to a place where there's opportunity. So you have to create the ambiance and the appearance that opportunity is at your place. But other than that, sales management is just. You're always. You're hiring, train a team and sell stuff, and you're always hiring, always. You never stop hiring. You're constantly hiring. Because as a sales manager, if your business. If your business owner, like whoever is running that company, they're always going to try and fill the capacity of the sales. Right. Whatever they can sell, they'll go kill themselves trying to fill the capacity. Doesn't matter if it's selling cars, selling cell phones. Yeah. And I mean, I like people who. I don't really necessarily like hiring people within an industry. I like going outside, you know, like, you look at things like cell phone salespeople. They're amazing. You know what I mean? They sell something everybody already has. You know what I mean? So I really like cell phone salespeople. I find that they're really good at following process, doing good paperwork. They understand. They understand the product knowledge is a huge thing. They understand the general idea behind a contract and why it's important to dot all the I's and cross all the T's. And then they also have that innate sales ability to succeed selling something that kind of everybody already sort of has.

The most underrated app for Rofers.

The most underrated, underrated app for roofers.

Like, it's there and you're just surprised that not many people are using it.

Oh, well, there's one that I can't say because I'm about to make a big wave with it. So then I have to go to kind of second best. And I mean, that's. That's actually an incredibly tough. It's an incredibly tough question to answer. But I would say Slack. I would say that it is underutilized, right? And it doesn't have to necessarily be slack, but it has to be something like Slack. It's just a workplace chat app, right? When you're looking at a Groupme. Yeah, like Groupme. Right. Something like that. The reason I like these is because when you hire somebody and you put them in the team, they instantly like the unseen benefits. They instantly have the contact information of everybody within the company. There's preexisting channels of dialogue that it's like, okay, you have a lead channel, you have a Customer heat channel, you have a payroll questions channel, you have a receipts channel, you have certain conversations. They fall right into the culture, right? So then all of a sudden when people are posting memes or posting memes in the random channel, they get involved right away. They get to like a post. They get to instantly know how to get ahold of someone. So on top of just being able to deploy like the accountant instantly can deploy a message to everybody in the company. So I think something that allows you to communicate with the entire company is good, but the other reason it's great is workplace health. Something that not a lot of people talk about is the fact that our bosses text us and email us. Right? I don't have a boss, but I know that I text an email or I would text and email my staff. And I know that I can be overbearing and then I can create anxiety within my company. The great thing about Slack is that when Slack, when you hear that slack notification, like that sound, it's like, you know, it's a work message. And then I know that my people, when they're off, they can shut slack off and they're off. And that way their cell phone, when their wife calls or their girlfriend calls or their mom calls, they're not like, what? Because it's like they've answered that phone 38 times that day. And a lot of times it was work. Their text messages aren't annoying because they had 38 text message notifications before lunch at work. That dinging sound isn't annoying them. So they can leave the slack sound or whatever that group chat is to be that work related noise. And then they have, they can leave their personal life personal and they can shut off after work because you need your people to kind of come back rejuvenated. So if you have a brain fart, like you know how it is, right? One in the morning, something comes to your head and you got to write a novel and record a video and send out, you know, we're doing this now. You know the visionary thing that comes into your head? Well, that visionary needs to temper that a bit. And they need to also, I text.

People at 4 o' clock in the morning.

Yeah, I know, exactly. And then people wake up and then it could like that. We don't know what's on the other end of that, Right. They might be having a conversation with their girlfriend and then feel obligated to respond to this. And then it's like it creates this. They need to know that they need to be able to shut off work, and they need to know when they turn it on, they come back and they just see it. But it's not email, right? It needs to be something where you can break it into certain conversations and you can have certain subjects that there's a dialogue going on. So I think that that would probably be the most underrated app.

Let's talk about your favorite topic. Facebook marketing. What's in store for 2021. So many roofers tried and failed.

So many.

So many succeeded. Facebook is ever changing what's in store for us.

Well, I mean, I wouldn't call it my favorite topic, but I do think that it's something that I keep getting anchored to as an expert. And what I would say is that Facebook's gonna be harder than ever going forward. Tracking is gonna be changing a lot. Facebook's under constant heat about from the government, from its users. There's people out there. There's a huge group of people. Man, I'm so glad I don't have Facebook or, oh, I got a Facebook. Like, it's like a right of. It's like a badge of honor, as some people aware is not being on Facebook. And the other thing is that the environment has changed, and you're now looking at Facebook as being more like the highway, right? So you're in Minnesota, right? If I go like this. Guaranteed offer. Do you know who I'm talking about? Chris Lindell, right? This realtor who got 73 billboards, and they all same thing, Guaranteed offer. It's all he says. It's bullshit, right? You go read the terms and conditions. His offer is bullshit, right? And so what I see is that Facebook is becoming more like billboards and less like a community. Community chat room or a community billboard. It's more like the highway billboard now, where it's just big, bold message. Sheep don't eat complicated grass. It's way harder to connect with people. Organic reach and Facebook group, green groups and pages is gone, right? So you have to get paid reach. It's extremely expensive to get that, to get in front of people, right? And the message has to be simpler and simpler and simpler and simpler because you don't have the time. Like, you literally have to. What I'm seeing right now, I did kind of a look into what was out there, what was working. And what I'm seeing is stuff that I don't even necessarily agree with the ad copy. And. And it actually turned into a bit of a thing, But I just wanted to see what people thought of a certain ad that was Getting a lot of success. And it was very controversial because it's the advertising that was being used is fully roofs, fully paid for by insurance, right? And then a testimonial, and then, you know, a big offer, $97 a month for a new roof. Wholesale pricing, Wholesale pricing, you know, bunch of stuff. And then the very bottom where you have to click the. Read more. Read past the testimonial, read past the big offer, and then must pay for deductible paid for by homeowner. Right? It reminds me a lot of that car dealership ad where it's like, dodge Ram, Dodge Ram 4x4. And then it says like, $10,000 rebate, 0% financing, $104 bi weekly. And it shows the picture of that Laramie longhorn with all the bells and whistles. And then you go into the dealership and it's like, oh, yeah, well, that payment's over 96 months. You can't get the 0% over 96 months. That's actually on an SXT base model with cloth seats and a rubber floor. And you can't actually combine the $10,000 and the 0% you basically paid to.

But they got you in the door.

But they got you in the door, right? And that's where I see roofer marketing going, is the message is going in that direction. And yet we're out here thinking that it's some scab running through town saying, I'll pay for your deductible. I'll pay for your deductible. Well, when you look at a Facebook ad success, if you can get 5% of the people that were exposed to that ad to click on it, that's doing good. 5% click through rate is a high bar. So that means if you show an ad to 10,000 people, 500 people might click on it. That means 9,500 people who click on that paid advertisement saw the words roof fully paid for by insurance, put it into their sheep brain, and then six months later, when their house gets hit by a storm, they're thinking, yeah, roofs can get fully paid for by insurance, right? And they don't go and read the disclaimer at the bottom. And so we're creating, through simplified advertising, we're creating this, right? And then it takes this much time to explain why you shouldn't let a roofer pay your deductible. But it takes five words, roof fully paid for by insurance, to create this psychological seed that sits in people's heads. Because sheep don't eat complicated grass, right? So when you're in your sheep brain scrolling through Facebook, the ads you're not clicking on are affecting you. We're counting on it. That's what branding is about.

I see market changing though. I see other industries. You have carpet cleaning ad for years for 29.99 for entire house which is usually will end up with average ticket for or $350. Oil changes used to be 20 bucks. Now what's oil change? $49. So I see the dealership learned it. You know, carpet guys learn it because people hated direct mail. You know, you get those mails, what do we do with them? We throw them away. So the offer have to be a real offer. Would you agree that we can sell on the Facebook if the offer is actually reasonable and good or you think that people will not buy it like we used to sell? And this is controversial topic now in our channel because I teach people that you can sell, you know, $99 roof inspection, you can sell $650 emergency roof tarp. You know, on Facebook, people don't believe in it because you compete with free. But I do you think you can compete with free on Facebook and win for sure.

We're doing it right. Like my company back in Edmonton and I, I'm only half owner there, right? But one of the things that we RAN Right is $159 roof inspection. We just had this. We all learned in one day what the word winter squall meant in Edmonton. Nobody knew what it meant. And all of a sudden one day everybody knew what it meant. And it's basically a windstorm that's got snow behind it. So it just blew all this roof shingles off.

Well, Texas just learned that.

Yes, Texas learned with snow. Looks like this week. So they're all learning to cross country ski to school. And so we, we got 1,000 phone calls in four days because of the storm. Like it was insane. One day it was a call every two and a half minutes and we charged $159 for that inspection. And we advertise that $159 inspection. We make it a checkbox that they have to click off and agree to before they do it. So if you're honest with your ad, it can work. But it's about the volume, right? What is the volume? You catch more when you've got an unreasonable crazy offer. The $97 metal roof ad that Erie metal roofing ran like that was a hit and now everybody uses it. And it's good because if people go new, new roof, $97 a month. It gets the click and then if you got a simple, super simple landing page, it might get the information. And then now your salesman has to do the job. And it used to be that social media or Facebook specifically allowed us to really nurture a lead. And I still think you can, but it's more expensive than ever to do that, to build a brand to get. Like if when I did Facebook and I was trying to hire an agency to help me with Facebook ads in 2015, everybody said you're dumb. Like what you like you need a buy now button. Like Facebook ads are for dog toys and like weight loss ads. And today if you want to get that disproportionate level of success from a social media platform, you're going to have to go somewhere where people say you're dumb. You know, I don't know if it's TikTok, Clubhouse, Snapchat, I don't know what it is, right? And it's going to be one of them. Someone's going to but you but the to be successful to a disproportionately high level, to get attention for a drastically under priced point, you gotta go where someone thinks you're dumb to be there. So there's gonna be some roofer in a year or two that's gonna be talking about how he got shitloads of leads because of TikTok or Clubhouse or Parlor or something, right? And everybody's gonna go. I knew that was gonna be a big thing and but they didn't do it. They gotta do it when they get no audience, when they get no leads. But then all of a sudden, as that critical mass hits that social media platform, then all of a sudden they look like the genius. And that was all I really benefit from. It was just that when everybody thought it was dumb, I was there. Then Facebook put ads in the newsfeed, then they did video view ads, then they put ad, then they got the mobile app having ads. And then all of a sudden it was like, well, we were already there and so then we blew up. I posted my results and then all these podcasters wanted to interview me because it made it look them look good because they got to have a local roofer spends $4,000 on Facebook ads, sells 420,000. It was a super clickbaity headline. So the next thing you know, between 2017 and 2019, if you looked up roofer Facebook ads, it was just Adams all the way down. And I was just a beneficiary of looking like a dumbass earlier than anybody else. And I think that that's what you're going to have. If people want to get that result where it's like they get to have no marketing, spend, cheap leads, all that kind of stuff, they got to go someplace where they're going to look kind of silly at first.

Is the place TikTok now, you know.

I have a really hard time with it. The algorithm is set in such a way that they want to help you go viral really fast. Like, they want to make it so you get one video go viral so that you'll be hooked, right? They. Yes. Yeah, they want it. They want. The consumption end is absolutely. They got that figured out. And the. And then from the distribution side, they've really figured out that if they help you get viral, if you make any kind of content that even gets slight, it's like if you get 3% better than average and the very first initial hit of like you're posting, if you're just 3% better than average, they're like, this guy's 3% better than average. Show it to everybody. And then, boom, you get 50,000 views. And it's like, man, I'm going, I'm TikTok famous. They figured it out. People don't go to social media to share and connect. They go to social media to try and get. To try and get viral, to try and get famous, to try and get an unfair advantage. And TikTok figured out that that's the crack cocaine of social media platforms at their initiation, at their inception. It's somebody trying to go there to get famous, and they help you with that. And so I don't know if that has legs to run out long term right now. It's entertaining, it's comedy, it's. It's music, it's dancing. But there's also people giving advice. There's financial brokers on there, there's realtors on there, there's. There's, you know, BDRs on there. Now there's a new guy I found called like scrub something and he's like the new bdr, right? And I'm like, holy crap.

Like, I've seen carpenters. What I love about TikTok the most is this. Carpenters are genius. Like, people, I've seen videos where guys, because I study it, I search it in our industry and we all ask a question, how to motivate new generation to work with their hands. You know, I see guys now on TikTok shown how to make money remodeling showers. Like, don't Buy shower pan, do this, like tile work and look sexy. Looks cool. Looks easy. Maybe easier than it should be, like for the video. So it's not true tutorial, but. But it's inspiring, man, this looks cool. I want to try that.

And if they can do that, that's going to be huge for them because you're looking at like, the number was staggering. It was like 31. It was like 31 million people in the trades are going to be retired in the next 10 years.

For every five retires, there's only one entering the space. It's insane. I mean, in a couple years, we're not going to have nearly enough people to remodel all the homes.

Bezos is going to have to pay a paying diamonds to get his bathroom toilet fixed.

He's probably paying in diamonds right now. What's your take on Facebook deleting Trump's account?

I don't like it because of the fact that he created a reason to go online. Right. Love him or hate him. I think America, as a Canadian, you look at American news and you have a different set of skepticism towards it. And I think that. I think that it wasn't right for them to try and censor a president. I think you create more argument and more division by trying to control the message. So I think that you're gonna see more backlash come from that yet. And I think it's just not healthy. But I don't believe in censorship. Being Canadian, we don't have free speech in Canada like you do in America. It's basically America and Finland are the last two countries with real, true free speech, and it's under assault. And I don't believe in it. I believe that if. I don't care if your ideas are like, there's people. I hate the words that come out of their mouth, but I don't believe they should be silenced. So I think that Facebook shot themselves in the foot because every other country now is being like, whoa, whoa. Now if you try and shut down my, like, now the people who are in power in other countries are like, if you try and shut me up, then we're going to charge you money. So that whole thing with Australia charging them whatever it is, like 2 million bucks or 200,000. I can't remember the number. It's a huge number. If they censor political posts, I think it's backfiring for Facebook a little bit. I still think that. I mean, Facebook has the money and they have the audience and they have the viewership and they have the Revenue, but they're definitely evolving as a platform and it's going to be much more like a highway. It's going to be controlled, it's going to be censored, it's going to. And then people are going to go there to connect, they're going to go there to keep updated. It's like it'll be more like a new Twitter, you know, where Twitter wasn't a place we went to connect with people, it was just a place we went to see what the hell somebody just said.

How much marketing should reala cost?

Well, that's a challenging question for people to answer. It really comes down to using your CRM to know what is your cost per sale. Right. A lot of the people in the roofing industry, they've just got like their five deal stages in accu links or something like that. And, and I think that with all the different types of marketing that are happening now, you have to determine in your CRM the difference between a lead and then a marketing qualified lead and a sales qualified lead because you're, and then what your cost per sale is. And you've talked about this. It's not just figuring out what your cost per lead is, but what is your actual cost per sold roof. Because you can spend a ton of money on marketing and get amazing results from a lead perspective, but you're not getting a lot of sales. Right. And it's too hard and too broad of a question to ask. When just how much should marketing cost? I mean I believe that you have to spend around 5% as an average number. But I think that say an Apple roofing only has to spend two or three. I believe that if you're a small company trying to grow, you can between 11. Our first year we spent 17%, you know what I mean? So you might be 11, 17% as a new company growing. And then it's all about what when you look at that marketing line in your year end taxes, I mean are you designing infographics at 300 bucks a piece that you're going to put into an ebook? Like that's what we did. We spent $300 a piece on those infographics that we made, those infographics that eventually got redesigned into a 21 page ebook and then eventually we turned those 21 infographics into 21 animated videos that cost 3,000 a piece. But now that money that cost us 17% of our revenue in our first year and 11% of our revenue second year, I'm still using that, I guess digital property that design, we're still using that content years later, right? And so, you know, if I was hiring somebody to do that, like, I had an agency tell me that I should do that, I could call them out because we didn't get great results. The first year, I spent $50,000 on Facebook ads. Didn't get a single lead. My first lead cost $3,000. My second lead cost me $900. If I was hiring an agency for that, I mean, they would win the Waxman award. But as a. As a, you know, but as a business owner that was interested in doing it myself, I wanted to figure it out, right? And I'm not saying that every roofer should try and be their own marketer, because it usually doesn't work out too well. But you got to know that if you're investing in something, are you spending a certain amount of money to learn the system, to map out how it's going to work? And so it's really broad. It's a really broad answer to that question. How much should marketing spend? You can say 2,500 bucks a month, 5% of revenue. You can say it all kinds of ways, but what are you really getting from it? You know, I've had clients that have said, you know, our Facebook ads are not a huge portion of our leads. They're not. They're by. They're 5% of our total leads. But we like you because you meet with us every week, right? And I have an ads manager, an account manager that's working for them. We've got a copywriter that's doing their copy. We've got a designer doing their designer. I'm only showing up for that one hour call a week. And I review the ads throughout the week. I get questions asked of me, but I do that one hour call every week. And that one hour call every week gets them focused on videos, make sure they're paying attention, make sure they're asking questions of their website. That, and that, to me, is the only reason I like the marketing, is because I get involved in their systems and processes. I figure out what is. How are they actually, what effort are they applying towards client acquisition? And then we, I mean, because for me, marketing is the free water bottle that you put in the office or the free water machine, right? The marketing, we price ourselves so low and we focus on a very consultative basis. We don't even really talk about lead generation. Because my whole goal is doing those CRMs, right? Because that's where I think the businesses really stand to grow, is improving the experience their customers have, right? The fact that we're spend, we get a better experience buying a $12 sandwich than we do buying a $20,000 roof. A lot of it has to do with your CRM and your sales enablement, right? How are you deploying your production and that's where you can spend 50, 60. Well, I've done it. You know, you spend 50 to $100,000 on your CRM and sales enablement, your income goes up four times and your Google reviews start pouring in. There you go, there's your marketing. Improve your business, right? And so much of that today is rooted in technology and the experience we give our customers. That's marketing, not whatever, whatever, you know, whatever the color of the images on Facebook or whatever the whether you put roofs, guaranteed or guaranteed roofs before or after and split testing that, that's marketing nerdery. Right. And it can help. It's certainly a part of it. But as a business owner you need to stand back and look at your whole business as everything is marketing and advertising and how are you invest in your marketing so that you can pull the money back out of that forever. That's why I don't think any of these marketers that run your marketing on their website, on their platform, on like, you know what I mean? Like they, it's like you, because they.

Want to control you, right?

They want to control. It's like I believe you should always own your shit. You should be able to fire me. And like there you go, it's your stuff, right? And everything that we did is yours. The pixel traffic is yours, the analytics account is yours, the custom audiences are yours, the ad account's yours, even the landing page is yours because get someone to run it better, you know what I mean? That's okay.

What do you think limit is for someone who don't Want to spend $1 in marketing? You know, want to rely on word of mouth referrals like just there's a lot of people out there, they don't believe in marketing. What a true limit because amount of roofers doubled in the last five years. You know, almost most busy cities like roofers keep coming up. You have to compete. What's the limit? Million dollars, two million. What's the biggest companies you've seen who don't advertise?

I mean I don't think I get exposed to a ton of companies that don't advertise because it's like that's kind of the gate to talk to me is are you going to spend money on Advertising. But I would say that in a way, there is no limit because some companies do a lot on the experience side. And there's some really innovative companies out there making relationships. You know, there's commercial roofing, right? There's networking, there's getting in touch with insurance people, realtors. So I don't believe there is a limit to what you can do without advertising. But what is advertising or marketing other than just getting out into your market and trying to acquire market share?

Well, what I'm referring to, I see a lot of guys who says, well, you know, I have work and I don't need to advertise. And those guys usually do half a million, 2 million. I mean, they'll do 100 roofs a year for sure.

But they're not creating. They're not creating an opportunity for themselves. They're not. They're not building a business that they can sell. They're not building a business they can give to their kids. They just don't want a job. Right. And there's nothing wrong with them. Right. Roofing is full and construction is full. Really. Construction is full of. In a lot of ways, I call them America's or Canada's forgotten sons. Right. You know, they come up and a lot of them end up where they're at, not by choice, but because they ended up there. Like, they don't even necessarily. You ask them how they end up there. Well, I started roofing out of school and that's what I do now. Like, they didn't necessarily make the conscious choice. And that's not all of them, but it's certainly a huge chunk of them. And everybody who bought it. And the fact is, it's a trade, like trades are in demand. Right. Everybody who bought a roof would have rather bought a boat. Right. Everybody who replaced the roof probably could have waited another month and probably could have done it a month ago. And everybody lives under a roof. Half of them work under a roof. And yet we aren't sitting around saying, son, daughter, doctor, dentist, roofer, whichever one will be proud. So if everybody lives on a roof, half the people work under a roof. Everybody has to do one sooner or later. Nobody who bought it bought it because they wanted it, but bought it because they had to. You don't have to advertise to earn a good living. You want to make ten grand a month and buy a house and live, you can do that. Just go put roofs on, hire four or five guys, go take the hill every day. And if that's the lifestyle you want to live, Go like that's awesome. Every time I get on the plane, I look at the guy with the cones and I think, man, that guy's got it simple. He just gets up, puts his lunchbox in his car, goes to work, 11:45 comes out, opens his lunchbox, eats his food, goes back, puts it away, goes out, puts his vest on his hat, goes, does the cones. 3:30, yeah, gets in his truck, goes, gets home, gets in his three year old truck, you know, no leather seats, goes home, has wife, two kids, you know, hopes for a vacation every year. And it's a simple life and there's nothing wrong with that, but you gotta be self aware, you gotta know what you want. So if you're jealous or angry or bitter and say, oh, those guys advertise, they're just sales companies, all they do is sell and subcontract. Like if you're gonna be a hater, well then there's something in you. You're not self aware, you're jealous. You want that, you want your company to grow, but you're hating the player instead of hating the game because you don't know how to. And the industry is constantly evolving and there's a place for that guy who just wants to get up and roof and doesn't want to bother with business and stuff like that, you know, and not to try and plug you, but like directory is a place for that. You want to just get up, slap a sticker on the door and go roof and just get, just get opportunity, go pull your cash out of the real estate market by having a piece of it in the roofing industry. The real estate art industry is going to constantly keep evolving and needing maintenance of property. It's not going away. People are going to continue to live in homes. You want to show up and just go and do a trade, go plumbing, go roofing, go tiling, go whatever. You know, there's platforms like directory that'll just say, listen, you pass a penance of what it is. You have no investment in your brand or anything. You just do good work and you'll be fine. You'll have an income for life. You will not run out of work ever, ever. You always have a job. You'll be in good shape, you'll be good with your hands, your kids will be proud of you and you're going to pay 3%. Like you drop 3 pennies out of a loonie, you're not going to or out of a dollar loonie, you drop three pennies out of a dollar, you don't, you don't notice it, right? So it's really about being self aware. But if you want that bigger business, you're going to have to invest in systems and processes. You're going to have to invest in coming up with innovative campaigns. You're going to have to invest in an operational, you know, basically mapping out how your company does business. You're going to have to invest in leadership, right? You're going to have to invest in payroll, right? But those guys, they're going to need to invest in marketing because the people who work for you, they're counting on you to create expansion. That Shingler wants to be a foreman, that salesman wants to be a sales manager, that sales manager wants to be a commercial project manager though the commercial project manager wants to be a general manager, the general manager wants to eventually have an equity stake. Somebody wants the general manager to die or for you to open a second location so he can be the general manager of the second location. Right? People need to see expansion and growth, progress and success brings unity, right? That's what brings, it brings a united team. But if you're just saying, oh, I don't like marketing because I don't like marketers and I don't want to spend money on our systems and we can just do it off of three post it notes, well that's greedy, that's selfish. You're not creating opportunity for your team and you will constantly have churn and then you'll sound like these guys that are saying, oh, it's good, helps hard to find, it's no good. People want to go somewhere where they can see the company expanding. And marketing is about expansion. It's a market. You're going for more market share, right? You have to go attack more market share. And that means you have to spend money on marketing. The industry is spoiled in that we now have guys like me who have run around, say click through rate and opt in rate and you know, conversion rate and cost per lead and cost per acquisition, cost per thousand impressions. And now there's this base level of understanding that marketing should report back that we didn't have 20 years ago. You had the phone book, you had the newspaper, you had billboards and you spent money on it and people showed up and you were lucky if someone said yeah, I'm here to use code SAVEROof10 because that was your way of tracking back that your postcard worked, right? And you never went to the postcard guy and said how was my conversion rate? He's like, did your Postcard get delivered. Okay, what do you want? Right? And now we have this marketer that's beholden to every little step along the way. And it's like, how do you control Facebook? The President of the United States couldn't control Facebook. How is some marketer like me supposed to know every little detail of an algorithm that even they can't figure out that backfires on them from time to time, that allows things that they don't want to go viral to go viral? Right? That creates a bad experience for their users. They can't control their own algorithm. But yet I'm supposed to running a tiny little boutique roofer marketer shop out of Canada, right?

Guys, give it a. Like, I'm pretty sure someone out there needed to hear this message. Comment below what you think about Adam's take on it. Absolutely amazing answer. Why do you think we have so many roofers and roofing business owners in particular depressed and have addictions to, you know, alcohol, drugs? I see epidemic of it. We work in very good industry, lots of opportunities, but so many unhappy people.

You know what? I've seen this. I've seen this quite a bit. Being that I own like half own a roofing company back home. I see a lot of this. And there's a certain cultural element of it, right? I think that there's this thing we can say society's to blame because they don't give tradespeople respect. So therefore they don't feel respected and then they don't respect themselves. That's an easy blanket answer to go from a social aspect of it. But it's also that, and I can only speak to roofing owners in this one. But running a business is hard and this business can get disorganized. If you look at how Walmart tries to control their store, they got 100,000 square foot store, they got 300 cameras, managers, everybody watching every aspect of the business. The cash register, monitoring the amount of time cameras on those cash registers, they're monitoring every part of the business. And then you as a roofing company owner and you're in, say like around here, like I'm working with a client in St. Cloud. Their market is 100 miles that way and 100 miles that way in all directions. And now you have to try and manage this whole thing, right? This huge, huge space. And you have so much going on. There's so many moving parts because you don't own your labor, you don't own your labor. In many cases you don't own and sometimes you don't even own your sales team, right? You're 1099 in your sales team. You know, you don't own. There's so many moving parts. And what happens is that if you're not organized, you have this, like, constant thing going on in your head. We're trying to keep it all in your head. And so you need systems and processes that can basically allow you to get your hands around it. And you need to learn how to get your hands around your business and know what's going on. Because if you know what's going on and you have yourself a clear process where you know, we're on the roadmap and someone fell off the roadmap, this person checked this task. This person did this in this CRM. This person checked in over here. We got a net message. This person's estimating this crew's at this stage of the job, when you create a system like that, then you can go, okay, stop. And then you can put it out of your head and you can go home. And if you go home and know that your business is okay, I think that that's going to decrease the anxiety, and that's going to cause people to stop resorting to drugs and alcohol and stuff like this and allow them to take time to focus on things like respecting themselves. You know, that social aspect. We can take the time to focus on that. You can read a book. You can spend time with your family. You can. You're not going to constantly be sacrificing time with your family for work and then, you know, and not for work. Like, passion, like, I believe, following. I mean, look at me. I've been gone for three months, right from my home. So I know that I'm spending a lot of time on work. And so. And it causes stress for sure, but I don't resort to, like, heavy usage of drugs and alcohol or any kind of form of escapism because I know that I know how to run my business. And so I think that getting that part figured out is how you're going to create that freedom to focus on your own mind, focus on your own health. And that way you're not going to resort to drugs, alcohol, and other kinds of addictions. And really, it's just escapism. It's just you're just trying to numb the anxiety of what's going on in your work because you're trying to sit there and take care of your future self. You're trying to make. I'm making these decisions today so I can take care of my Future me and make sure my future me is happy. And that anxiety of what could happen, what might happen, you need to know that. Another thing I think is finding good mentors, right? Finding people in the industry who can give you that confirmation bias that you're doing it the right way. I have this one guy, we help. We're doing, like, implementation of the book Traction, like the entrepreneurial operating system. And he's a visionary. Helped him find an integrator, doing that whole thing. We did this whole project over winter, and there were days where we showed up, and literally all I did was we got on Zoom, we reviewed his Vision Traction organizer, we reviewed his people analyzer, and it was like just more or less me going, yep, good job. Like that. Like, that's how you can summarize the call. But if you have good mentors, you can get, you can eliminate that double that questioning of yourself, that double check where you're like, am I doing this right? Am I doing this right? If you find good mentors who will invest time and energy in you and go, yep, that's exactly what you're supposed to do. Now just go execute, right? And I don't know if you get that from a book, right? Like extreme ownership, and you just, you know, get something from Jocko Willink or if you find someone in the industry, right? I think more people, if they had good relationships with their family, dad who ran a business, that would help. But, you know, if you don't have that role model, you got to go find those good mentors. So good mentors, systems and processes, and then finding yourself the time to focus on the social part of it, respecting yourself and taking care of yourself.

I stopped Adam for a second and grabbed the book off my table. Guys, this is the book. I'm gonna put Link below Traction. I see Adam has it. He travels it everywhere with it. The best business book you can get. As a matter of fact, if you go to Amazon and type in Roofing Insights, we have the full library of all books we recommend. Link is below, but this one is a must read. Last year, I visited a lot of companies, and most successful, they implementing this Apple roofing rapid roofing. Most guys, they're doing it well. They actually follow EOS system and Traction highly recommend. Guys, Link is below. You travel, you read it many times. Why you keep traveling with it?

You know, because. Okay, so the book Good to Great, I think is probably one of the best business books ever written, right? You have the Great by choice, Great by choice. So Good to Great, Built to Last Great by choice. Good to Great is one of the best books I've ever read. I've read that book probably 10 times. But that book always left me feeling, okay, great. Like, I understand how Bethlehem Steel did it and Standard Oil and all these things, but it's like, how do I go and implement it? And this book is like the handbook to it. It mentions good to great one time, but really, when I read it, I was like, this is like a handbook to good to great. And so then for me, I keep it. Because everywhere I go, every client I go to, it's like a second. It's like a edification of my point. It's like, see, it's in this book. And then I help them with it. And every single one of my clients ends up buying this book and reading it. Now they're reading like Rocket Fuel, which is about the visionary integrator relationship. It's my bible.

What education do you recommend for a business owner? Huh. Let's say high school dropout who got into the trades, maybe started business later, never went to college, never graduated, kind of skeptical. College degree in general. What options does?

Well, speaking in terms of contractor, 18 years old, getting out of school. And if we're thinking about education that they need to get where they get it is up to them. But doing your books, hands down, business, it's all about accounting. Yeah, Doing your books. A million dollars comes in, $990,000 comes out. If you can't handle this process, you're done. Because that's what you're doing. You're shoveling money in and throwing it out the window. And if you can't manage to get accounting, get accounting now. If you can go to roofing business school like we've talked about, that's a place, right? But anywhere you can get to learn how to manage your money. Because that's going to be everything, right?

Any other courses, education?

No, I really think that everything else, if you learn how to manage your money, you can pay the other people to come into your company and do those things. If you can just manage the money. Right.

Love it. Great advice. Biggest mistake surfers make in business, I.

Would say not knowing enough to be dangerous in marketing. I don't. I don't think that. I think when you're looking at mistakes, there's tons of things that they do wrong. But if you don't know enough about marketing to be dangerous. And if you've taken care of understanding how your money works, if you don't know how marketing works and you get taken advantage of. It's your own fault. There's. It's so easy to know enough to be dangerous. There's so many things that roofers can do wrong. But this seems like the mistake that they're suffering from the most is bad marketing. And yeah, there's bad actors, right. But there's also people who don't take it seriously. They don't know enough to know what should work and what shouldn't work. And they get. Sometimes they get taken advantage of, but sometimes they just make choices that were easily, easily avoidable. And that's what they seem to be suffering with the most is the bad decisions that they make there. They could drop a brick chimney through a roof and it's a huge mistake. Costs them more than the marketer did all year. But they don't. They're not suffering from that as much. They're really suffering from feeling inadequate and unprepared to properly market their companies.

Let's talk about boring people, introverts, people who hate being on camera. People who just shy. They run a business, they need to promote it. I deal with quite a few of them. They don't have a charisma. They refuse to throw their self on the market. Give those people advice. What options do they have? Do they have to hire someone to do it and be behind the scenes or do they have to step out of comfort zone and try?

Well, you don't have to do anything when it comes to marketing, but there's a number of options. One, yes, Hiring someone. Go around the office who likes Gary Vee. Good. You're the video guy. That's as simple as that. You can make it so somebody in your company becomes that. You can take courses on getting more comfortable in front of camera, but if you absolutely just don't want to do it, then you go to someplace like dope marketing and get direct mail and flyers and lawn signs and focus on capturing market share there. Or you buy billboards or you pay for radio ads. You just have to know where the attention is in your market and try and do it. If you don't want to get in front of the camera, you're going to be terrible at it. Right? So I don't think that you have to get in front of camera. It's just one way. It's the way that I like and I'm hugely introverted. You take me to a bar. I'm the guy who stands in the corner by myself. I'm not the. That's my business partner, Joe. He's the flamboyant and funny thing is, I do 10. I've done 10 times the videos that Joe's done. But he, you know, for me, I just recognized that it was a necessary part and I was going to be. I chose to be good at it. Even though when I hold the camera, all I see crooked tooth, I'm overweight, I don't look like a roofer. I'm not tanned. You know what I mean? And yet I would make all these videos about roofing and I would get made fun of, and people would be mean. You just got to be like the Kardashians. Don't look at the comments. But if you want to do it that way, you just have to make a decision and do it. But there's so many ways. And I would just say if you're. If you don't want to do it that way, then Facebook, I think, is going to be tougher. Right? For sure. And then just focus on Google reviews, SEO, direct mail. Like, there's. There's so much. Like there is so much. Much that you can do. Yeah, yeah. If you. I always say, I got a great face for podcasting, right. And it's, you know, that's maybe clubhouses, right? That's. Then that. That could be the thing, right. And you'll look dumb doing it right now. But then that was how a lot of people look dumb. People thought you look kind of silly. Who's this guy with a crazy Russian accent on YouTube talking about roofing? Like, what do you think you're gonna do? Become a YouTube star? Right? Then the rest is history. So, you know, do what you think that you're best. Best built for and do what you can.

Casey Neistat. Yeah, do what you can.

Yeah.

Love it. Best business size in millions that you see. And would you recommend? Oh.

I would say that the. The place that you really want to get to is the point where you have a sales manager and a production manager, and they're competent, and you have a good CRM that allows you to monitor it and a good production management system that allows you to monitor it. And so you're able to not just monitor it, but able to deliver the experience that you have intent to deliver. Right. That's the ideal size. Now, that will typically end up putting you around 5 million. Because you're doing 5 million, you should have 500,000 left over. Right. You're probably going to be spending some money on growth still. You're going to be spending 120k on a great production manager. Who's going to make you an absentee owner. You're going to spend 120k on a great. So like that sales manager, production manager, they're going to cost you 5%. You know, I mean, somewhere around there, if you can get to that size and have those two people in place that are running your business and you just have to focus on leadership development of those two, you're going to be really happy. But I mean, there's some guys out there who are 20 million and they, and they have more than that and they're happy. And then there's guys who are 30 million and have that and are miserable. You know, so it's. But I think that that's really the sweet spot is where guys get to focus on that 5 million sales manager and production manager who are competent in delivering the experience that you can be proud of.

Love it. Great answer. The best profit margins you've seen in business, like percentage wise.

From a company like that size. Like not a small guy. Yeah, I would say 40, 50%. You know what I mean? Yeah. Net 15. Yeah. I mean, I usually worry that if you're doing that this year that you're going to have something happen next year. Right. Because it's. What is your run rate? You know, what do you actively doing every month and is that trending up or down? Because if you do 15% this year, you buy a Ferrari, you don't take care of your people, they see you as a profiteering glutton and then next thing they quit and you go down next year and you're doing 2% fixing everything with band aids, you know, So I think, I think a healthy number is between 6 and 10.

6 and 10.

That's a, that's a healthy number. If you can. I think if you're doing between 6 and 10, right. Then you can make a good living off that. You can scale on that, you can pay for the kind of people you need to grow off that. And, and that's enough money to take care of you as a business owner. Right. I might be completely off. That's just what I'm seeing.

Best marketing ad you've ever seen in our industry. Oh.

That. I would say it's a tie between the $97 metal roofing ad because that one killed that one when that one went everywhere. My favorite of all time would be dreamworks Pumpkin Spice. Pumpkin spice ad. Right. Talking about the gutter covers and putting the pumpkin spice in the gutter and then talking about getting a pumpkin spice roof in fall. That Was really fun, you know, and I love the creativity that some people come out with from effectiveness and legitimacy. I love the financing ads. I think it's a great way to help more people get a great roof. So yeah, that would that be answer. But I really love, I really love it when guys have fun with their marketing. And to make that, to make that pumpkin spice video is awesome.

What's your taking? Do you remember buy a roof, buy a gun campaign?

I, you know, when you asked that, that was the first ad I thought I was like, oh, that was a funny ad, but it made us look like a bunch of idiots, right? So I was like, I liked that ad. It's just like, I really like this ad. This fully paid for by insurance. You say best. I'm like, well, that seems to be one of the best performing ads right now. But I don't like it. You know, and just like that one, that one performed really well. It got a lot of attention, but I didn't like it. You know, the pumpkin spice one the Dreamworks guys did, that was fun, creative. It was a way to make people have fun. Watching an ad about roofing and then the $97 metal roof one, I thought that that one was just super creative and clever, right? They just found a way to take all the different things, a high priced roof, make it seem affordable, negotiate good things. With finance, the entire financing industry adapted to offer that capability. A lot of financing companies changed how they, what kind of financing terms they were offering roofing companies just so that they too could be a partner in that great ad. So that one changed the industry, right? So that's why I like that one.

Love it. Can you name couple growth hacks for business owners in 2021?

Growth hacks that you definitely have to focus on. You definitely have to focus on improving the customer experience People today have grown accustomed to. Overnight shipping from Amazon, two hour delivery from Target. You know, you order a sandwich on Uber Eats, you're gonna get, you're gonna get that, you know, Tommy's picked up your order, Tommy's on his way with your order. Tommy's knock, knock, Tommy's at the door. And then roofing, it's like, you know, yep, we're come out to your house on Wednesday, Thursday comes by and they're like, hi, I don't want to, you know, I don't want to bother you and I don't want you guys to be upset when you're doing my roof. But I just want to ask, you know, it's Wednesday. You said you're coming and it's Thursday and I'm just wondering, when are you coming by to do my roof? And we get away with it. This industry gets away with that. And construction in general gets with, yeah, it'll take three days to do your project and then it takes three weeks to do the project. So I think that, you know, getting a, getting it so that your CRM is better set up, not just to say, okay, we got an incoming lead, we called them, we sold them material, order, work order, you know, invoice, QuickBooks says it's paid. You know, that's the bare minimum, right? That's like just the minimum barrier to entry is doing a good job and managing your project efficiently. I think you have to build your systems to now keep people in the loop. That's what's gonna get you the ranting raving fans. No one's gonna say, you know what, that ABC roofing man, they had the best advertisement ever. I loved their video on Facebook, that flyer I got, man, that made me choose them. And their Google reviews were great. You know, almost everybody's either got good Google reviews or none. You know, they're deleting their Google my business if they have bad reviews. So you go to the roofers, like, how is it that almost all the roofers have 4.4 or better, you know, yet we have the most complaints of any industry. So how do you create the ranting raving fan that doesn't just leave a five star because you obligated them to? Or you held up the phone and said, can you do this? How do you create the ones that write a storybook about you? And that's where they say, you know, we sent in a request on the website. Five minutes later somebody called me. Then I got a notification that the inspector was on their way. When he was there, he was safe, he was polite, he was well dressed, he had a logo on his shirt. He made me feel comfortable. Sent me a video of him being on the way. So he said, hi, I like baseball and my kid's name is Charlie. So we knew who he was and what he was about when he was up on the roof. He provided us with videos and showed us everything was on the roof and really took a scientific approach to showing us why our roof needed to be replaced or why the hail was impact enough to get my insurance. And then he came down and, you know, they provided me with a beautiful quote like what Sumoquote or Pandadoc can do and went over, showed me the material. They helped Me pick colors. They got me excited to maybe do an exterior renovation. And then when we got the roof, they said they were on their way with the material. The material came, was delivered just as planned. My install, they told me on the way, I knew who the foreman was. You know, all throughout the job, I got updates that my roof is torn, My roof was prepped, my roof was watertight, My roof is installed, they're on the way to cleanup. Then when the inspector came out, he took pictures of everything and provided me with a full job photo file of everything that happened. My invoice was exactly as described because the estimator did his job and properly estimated the roof from the start, so there was no surprise. Gotcha. At the end. Then all of a sudden, when you get that Google review, people are ranting and raving. That's how you change the industry and change, you know, that's how you flip the script that the marketing is going to do it. You want to hack the growth of your company, make it so that people get the Uber like experience where they're kept informed every step of the way. And everything that they get is on par with what they're going to get when they buy. When they go buy a truck, the first thing they do is get that beautiful brochure that they get to go home and read about the transmission and the brakes and the engine type and variable valve timing, and they get to have the experience of, I bought something, not I got sold something or I got forced into a renovation through my insurance company. This is what I got. You know, it's. This is what you. This is what you bought. This is what you're getting for your money. Look at all this great stuff and get them excited about an exterior renovation project. Right? And how. And make it so it's a great experience. Right? That's. That's it. Any. Everywhere along the line there. There's great apps for that. I mean, you talked. I mean, they're all on the wall. I mean, there's a lot of apps along the way, There's a lot of people along the way. But that growth is going to come from giving, from getting out of your head, out of the sand. And just because, yes, everybody needs a roof, everybody works under one or how, you know, everybody. Like, just because the necessity is there doesn't mean that you get to mail it in half and kind of get a C on the experience. Give your customers an experience for 30 grand. Because everybody who bought a roof would have rather bought a boat. So if they get, if they have to buy a roof. Make it so they get to buy a roof. Give them an experience. Have in your company, like have stuff that when they get emails, make them fun. Make the, you know, like make it so that when they get a video, when they get the we're coming to install the material order like in Sargents, it's all military puns like Operation Lipinski new roof crew, you know, material deployed to your sector. You know, like we make it all military and over and out. And we get emails back from people that are like, they're like, we got your six and like, you know, Roger that. Right? We make it fun for people, right? Try and make it so that it's an experience. Because you can see this everywhere else. The success leaves clues. Go look at all these other businesses out there outside of the roofing industry. They're trying to find ways to give you an experience because. And there's a lot of good examples because of the whole Covid thing. We all got locked in our houses and how do you give people a good experience when they can't even come to the store? You had to make it so unboxing your product was something exciting. Now people on YouTube make YouTube videos, just opening boxes of this shit that they buy because they make an experience to even buy and open the product. I think that that's really the growth hack is just make it so that dealing with user and experience.

In your observation, best roofing markets?

Oh, I would say South Dakota, Georgia, the Carolinas. Yeah, I would say that. I think that you're going to see a lot happening in Minnesota. I think Minnesota is it. The. Minnesota is overbuilt. The highways are really wide. There's buildings that have been built that there's no stores in. Like it's just built to expand. The opportunity here is, is huge. So I think Minnesota for sure. But yeah, that'd be my answer.

Last question. So the last question for today, probably the hardest. Why big marketing agency with a high fees often don't deliver results they're promised? You know, I'm talking about companies who manage websites. Like you're marketing $360s, you know, $5,000 a month, who do take over your website, hold you hostage, you know, under $60,000 contract a year. And often, you know, during the sales presentation, you know, you're talking about numbers like 20, 30 leads per month, maybe 50 and then you get five and you hit that wall, but you stuck with the contract. Why? Big companies who you would think figure it out cannot sometimes figure it out. And can roofer get out of those contracts?

The first answer is of course they can get out of those contracts. There's usually some kind of cancellation agreement already built in. Every agreement. Well, it depends. Right? But look at the agreement. Right. Every agreement should come with an agreement in case we disagree. Right. I mean, that's why even. That's one thing about marriages. They come with only the agreement of forever until death. They don't come with an agreement clause. Disagreement clause. Right. But every other contract in the world generally has a disagreement clause. And so you have to know what that is and you have to be able to manage that. And so this is an interesting question because you mentioned Marketing360. You used them, weren't happy. I use them. They're a necessary part of my business now. I've been with them for five years. And I had Brendon, Chad and Miguel. And Brendan was great. And then I got some guy in the middle for a very short period of time. I got frustrated. Then I got Chad. Chad was okay. But Chad, you got to remember these companies are bureaucracies. They're big companies, people moving people trying to get promotions. There's, you know, certain people who like working on these kinds of accounts, E commerce. But they got so many opportunities in roofing. So then all of a sudden this E Commerce person gets shot, shoved into doing roofing accounts. And they don't necessarily like doing. They don't understand it. But you're just buying the brand marketing.360 and so I went through. Chad was one of those guys that had a ton of accounts but he was selling so much and he was so busy. He was getting ready to move up and get a promotion. He got promoted. Then I got Miguel. And Miguel's been a godsend. Right. Like we're getting. I can show emails after this $2.63 leads, 300, 400amonth. Right. And you didn't have that experience. And I would say that the reason being is it's bad management. Right. Me being a marketer. Right. Or being known for that. And then me also being really big into like systems and CRMs and tracking and knowing what's going on with my business. Right. I can feed really good data back and I make the commitment to meet with Miguel every Tuesday at 10. So every Tuesday at 10, we have a 31 hour meeting. My Facebook ad account rep, Jeanette, she runs a bunch of the accounts for roofing business partners. She also runs mine. We meet. So it's me, Miguel and Jeanette and we get, we make a Call, we determine what the results are, we make a plan and then we prioritize and we execute, we move forward. And so you have to manage your marketing agency, especially if you're using a big agency like that. In my opinion. If you're. Sorry, you have to manage your marketing agency, you know, in my opinion, because if you hire that big agency, the squeaky wheel is going to get the grease. They have 30 accounts. They're going to go to the ones that treat them with respect, that, you know, understand that they're Busy. They got 30 accounts and then you hold them to a time frame. You show up every Tuesday and then you work together and it's not an adversarial thing. I know a lot of roofers that, yeah, you didn't get me leads, you ripped me off and it's like, okay, but you just paid me three grand a month and then never talked to me again. Right. And if you don't talk to me, I'm just shooting blanks, man. Like, I don't know, we got to talk. Let's see what's going on your CRM. Let's. What were people saying in the comments on that video? What kind of ad did you run? What kind of copy you're in? What kind of offer are you running? How are we modifying the website? You know, did people say anything? What's the best offer you ever ran? What worked for you back when you're doing postcards? How can we re emulate that success? You have to communicate and manage them. You wouldn't just hire a sales manager for five grand a month and be like, hey, sell roofs, bye. And then never talk to them. You wouldn't hire a production manager, say, hey, those folders, they need to go from that wall to that wall and you need to get them done and make sure you get Google reviews and then not watch them. But people do that with agencies. They think because they're hiring a business that this business is just going to go forth with your best interests at heart. But if you hired a subcontractor who you know works for you at another roofing company and the other roofing company gives says that they're going to get a two day job and then it's a 121260 square roof in the middle of nowhere, no access, and that turns into an eight day job. And now you told your customer you had a crew coming on Tuesday and now your crew doesn't show up on Tuesday because that sub didn't get clear instructions from his other customer. This will happen to that agency guy where they're going to have all these different moving parts. So you have to manage your marketing agency just like you manage your sales manager, production manager, your subcontractors and your salespeople and your account. You wouldn't let your accountant just run wild to five grand a month and not talk to him for three months. No, you go sit down with your bookkeeper and you talk to her daily, right? You're the girl who answers the phone. You talk to her daily. But your marketing guy, why am I coming to meet you for an hour a week? This is. You're supposed to. It's your problem. I'm hiring you to solve this problem. And so that's the. That's why those big agencies do that. And they're not getting the manager and the owners. They don't want you to have that experience. They genuinely probably want for you to be getting leads. They understand that's a necessary component of their business for you to get results. But they're like anybody else. If you don't hear that your installer pissed in the. Pissed in the grass, right? And that doesn't get to you. And the homeowner just runs around telling everybody around town, yeah, I hired these roofers and they're pissing in my bushes, you're gonna have a bad rap for it. You didn't want them to do that. But you're seven steps disconnected from this. And so you have to communicate this up and down the food chain. You can't just. Nothing, nothing, nothing, nothing. You're fired. Get me out of my contract, right? I had to go through Brennan, Chad, or random dude in the middle, and then Miguel. And Miguel, he has to be managed. If I don't talk to him, if I don't show up for my meeting two weeks in a row, I won't hear from him, right? He won't bug me. And then every time the invoice comes out of the account, like, hey, let me know if you want to, like, get together. And that's it. And I won't talk to him. But then March comes around and it's Miguel meetings every Tuesday, 10 o'. Clock. Jeanette, I'm going to be on the zoom call every Tuesday, 10 o', clock, and then look at that results go get gangbusters. But we have to manage it.

I would give one advice to the homeowner.

You can't screw it. To homeowners looking to hire a roofer. You can't screw this up. It's very simple. One, you want to make sure that they're certified with the manufacturer of the material that you want to do. So many issues happened 20 years ago where roofers come out. 95% of companies that warranties are registered to, the warranties are registered to companies that don't exist. So what happened? Homeowners complained and then the manufacturers get the phone call and they say it's installer error. And then the homeowner's like f you installer error, you're just passing the buck and my roofer's out of business so you should pay for it. No, they put the shingle upside down. It's installer error. And so you have this accountability thing that had to happen. So then the manufacturer said we need to become partners in our roofing contractors businesses. We need to create certifications and hold them accountable, provide them with the training. So if you work with somebody who's a high level certification with the manufacturer, then you're in a good position. Right, right there. That's your first bar that you want to cross. Right. The second thing you want to look for is look at their, look at their reviews online. Right. Just check out what they're dealing, dealing with online. You want to see who else is aligning themselves with them. If it's, you know, all. There's lots of different platforms online that are doing that. And then you ask them about how do they control the end deliverable. Right. So and I'm not saying subcontracting is bad, it's not. Right. I subcontract. So but if you're subcontracting, you lose somewhat of an element of control. Right. So we have like a hybrid of in house crews and subcontractor crews. If we have a big influx of work, then we have a roster of crews that we can go to to get that delivery time back down. But how are you managing it? And so when you're dealing with your roofing contractor, say like, well, how do you have control of the end product? They don't have something like, well, our foremen have company cam. Every time they show up to the job site, we have this job file with annotated photos, a picture says a thousand words. So everything like this is given to them. They're going to take photos throughout the day. We're going to be monitoring that throughout the day. So we're making sure they're installing to our best practices. So if you can get any kind of answer like that, something that says we have control of the end deliverable first, you've seen that the Manufacturer wants to associate with them. Second, you've seen that they have presence, they have somebody, they have some kind of review platform that's aligned with them and there's other people speaking good about them. They're recent reviews because in seasonal markets, what crew you had last year might not be here this year. And then finally when you know that you've got a good idea as to the management of the company, the presence, the company looks good, well then how do you control the end deliverable, which is my roof? How do you make sure that what you promised me here in this sales experience is actually going to happen? And if you do those three things, you literally, you can't screw it up. Like there's almost, there's almost no way for to get screwed up. Because in that example, what's going to happen is if they do make a mistake, if something does go wrong, they have a vested interest in fixing it because they don't want to ruin that reputation online and they don't want to lose their certification, right? And if there's anything else that can back them up, you know, I mean guarantees, bonding, stuff like that, that helps, right? But those three things, if you're a homeowner, you can't screw up hiring a roofer if you just follow that. Most of the reasons that homeowners have bad experiences is because they bought on price and they didn't aggregate that result of our lowest price to what is my likelihood of success with this company.

Give one advice to a roofing business owner, maybe new business owner, someone who just brand new in the business.

Map out your process. Have a work breakdown structure of exactly how you're going to execute your company. Know where you're at in that roadmap. Map out your process because that's going to become your training manual. That's going to become how you delivered for your customers. That's going to be how you know what, where you're at financially. Because you're going to know when you're having money coming in. You know exactly what your service level agreement is with your customers. When you're going to get back to people. Map out your process, right? Like we have this spreadsheet that we use whenever we're doing consulting and we say, okay, we need to break down your process into the exact step. It's a very ugly spreadsheet. We do the spreadsheets, items, sub items, five stages of running, running it from pre qualification to bidding to execution, control phase and then closeout phase. Every, every company essentially has their process like that if you have multiple departments, commercial insurance, residential, whatever, but you're going to map those out, Then you draw them out so that you can see them kind of work through a flowchart. And if you determine the exact things that you like, that determines success at each stage, right? Whether it's 45% margin, initial response time, five minutes, you know, keeping your. Keeping your accounts receivable under 15 days, you need to do those things. If you don't know how to do that and you don't want to pay a consultant like me because you're new, read Traction, right? It'll walk you through it and it'll give you the resources to start that up. But so much of it is just figuring out what is your business's operating system, right? And you have to know your process. Back to front, guys.

If you enjoyed this interview, give it a like subscribe to the channel. Comment Something nice for Adam. Ask a question. Both me and Adam will be coming back to this video answering questions from the comments. See you guys in the next video. Thanks, man. That was awesome. Sa.