Why Roofing Jobs Go Wrong—and How to Fix Them with Systems

Foreign, Somebody farts. Now, we'd have a rule that everybody has to wear rubber pants. And the problem with that is that most businesses start to throw people at problems. So you get one person farts, everybody wears rubber pants. Then you have too many people wearing rubber pants. So then you need a rubber pants inventory manager then, because you have so many people out there wearing rubber pants. And whoever just jumped in on the webinar is really going to find it weird that we're talking about farting in rubber pants. But. But if one person farts over his rubber pants, now we need a rubber pants inventory manager. But then you have to make sure everybody's wearing them because someone's complaining that Barry isn't wearing his rubber pants. So then we need, like, the rubber pants policy. So safety site manager manager guy, right? And the next thing you know, you have all these people that flow around it, and you're not solving the upstream problem, which is that let's stop serving beans at lunch. But we would have to create these progressively deeper and deeper checklists and more and more and more people to throw out the problem. We had to try and find a way to quickly and easily make sure that we could just know all the stuff that would go wrong. Also, me being in the position I was in, it was like, hey, do you have a checklist? And they would say, yeah, we asked these five things, and I was like, wait, have any of these things ever happened to you? And they were like, no. And they would say, I know, we don't need to worry about that. And I remember the second time that this happened where I was on site rolling out the CRM and they had a church job, and they ripped off the wrong section of the roof. And. And that's when I realized that I had a responsibility to my clients as a consultant to start making the things that they needed before they asked for them. I could have prevented this because I literally have this checklist somewhere else that talks about exclusions. And I didn't put that in here. And now they don't have exclusions. And they had the exact same thing happen in the exact same way. They ripped off a section of a church that they weren't supposed to. Literally the exact same thing happened the second time. And I realized that, huh, this shit's the same from Syracuse to San Diego, from Texas to Joplin to Seattle. This stuff is the same. And so when we talk about what goes wrong, well, put the wrong color on a job, you don't have a gutter color. When you show up and you go to order the gutters and you don't have the right gutter color. And now you're scrambling to get somebody out there to get the colors. You have the wrong vent types, the dumpster location was wrong. Or you didn't know where the dumpster was supposed to go and you had to bug the sales guy permitting, you went and installed the roof, realized there wasn't a permit or now you're scrambling to find out if you need a permit. Homeowner association, you didn't check to see if the color was approved. Now the color is not approved. The color that they want isn't in stock. Now you have to reorder the color. But somehow homeowner association threw a wrench in the works. Husband's a firefighter and you can't go, you can't go there between Tuesday and Friday because that's the time he works night shifts. And you're not supposed to, you're supposed to work do the job by Saturday, Friday, Saturday, Sunday or Monday or whatever. Or the dog needs to go to a kennel and you didn't tell the customer you rescheduled a job or the customer rescheduled their job and they were pissed off about the fact that their dog's home. Now, skylight size and type, you don't know the skylight size. You didn't get the right skylight type. You didn't know if it was a curb mount or a deck mount. You didn't know if they wanted the retractable screen or not or if it was power opening skylights. Something went wrong with the skylight size and type. The upgrades, you didn't know what upgrades are sold. You didn't put the upgrade on. You had architectural cap upgrade. You didn't put the architectural cap on. You just ordered the normal cap. Or they wanted two rows of ice and water and you didn't do it. Or they wanted some kind of upgrade that was sold that you didn't know about. Or you had a homeowner and tenant communications. You didn't realize that the person you sold the roof to is the homeowner. But they have a tenant. And now you didn't communicate with the tenant. Now the driveway's got cars in it, tenants are pissed off. Now they're leaving one star Google reviews or maybe didn't get that bad. Exclusions. There's something that you, you weren't supposed to do that you did do because you weren't supposed to touch that thing and then you touched that thing. Promises to do the shed, too. You didn't realize. And you get a call at the end of the day, and the customer's like, hey, why didn't you do the shed? Your sales guy said that he would do the shed because you guys have extra bundles. You had long lead items. You go to. You go to move a job into place. You think, hey, you know what? We can move. Barry canceled. We could move John up. So you move John up, and then you realize that John has a custom skylight size. That skylight isn't in now. You have to call John back and say, actually, sorry, John, I know you just want to put the dog in the kennel, but you can't do that because the skylight's not here, and I accidentally made a mistake. Carpentry work. You didn't realize there was carpentry work to be done. You were supposed to change something out. Or maybe it was like, not necessarily carpentry, like painting the fricking window sill or some shit like that. You get these answers from your customers. We told the guy. We told the guy. And that's your reason for having to apologize is because they told the guy. Because when I look at the chat, and if everybody takes a second to look at this stuff's happened to a lot of you, and it's because the guy doing this job who's out there selling doesn't always make sure that this guy knows he's supposed to do. And that's what his face looks like. He's staring at a bunch of company cam pictures with no annotations and a quick little thing where he's got, sure, maybe they did the takeoffs. They got. He's got a material order, but he doesn't know what the hell he's supposed to do. And this is super common. So I want to give you guys a little visual demonstration of what it could look like. This is basically what I got paid for for a long time. And before there was things like ordering material from the supplier. This is all anybody cared about. It's. I'm amazed at how much people care about the material ordering process these days. And I think that's mostly because nowadays there's a lot more parts to a roof. It used to be that you just had three tab shingles. So all you really need to do is order three tab because you flip it one way, it's a starter. You flip it the other way, it's a shingle. You cut it in three, you get a cap. And so it used to be a lot easier. Now It's a lot harder if we look on the timeline of a deal. You have the point when the deal comes in, and you have the point when you get the money. So this is when you get a new lead, and this is when you have money and hopefully a Google review. So in marketing, we have a pretty common statement a lot of marketers use. It is to begin with the end in mind. So if we know we want to do that, then from the point that the green light means go and we got a new deal, everything about our process and what we do should be with the goal of getting paid on time and getting to Google review. So then how do we design this in such a way that we increase the square footage? Right? Like, you have this much good luck as a business owner, what you want to do is increase the square footage of your good luck and decrease the square footage of your bad luck, because you want to make it so that you have all this extra footage of good luck that you might accomplish those outcomes. Okay? And in here, you have a sales process where you end up with a sold roof. And then you have a process of making sure that you get an installed roof. So these two things kind of have to go right through your process. You want to sell it, you want to install it, and then you want to collect it. Sell, build, collect. And the goal for a lot of our platform customers is to do that $670,000 a month. Selling $670,000 a month is pretty easy. Once you've done it, it's kind of like you're sitting there and you're going like, guys who built, like, a $30 million company when they have bad days and they're dealing with all the crap of their employees. Like, man, I could go sell $3 million worth of roofs, install them, and get paid. I could do that by myself at this point. Like, I've heard business owners say that so many times that it's practically a meme. But building it, well, that's a whole other story, because now you need, like, five crews to get that kind of money in a month, and then you got to collect it for that. You need maybe a good claims management process, good accounting, probably, what do you call it, A change order and punch list crew to go and clean stuff up. So going and getting all of this done in a month is hard because I remember in my roofing company, one of my biggest frustrations was that my eventually my business partner kind of peaked, and we could sell way more than that. We could sell that much in a month. But the problem was, is that where he struggled was he could barely get more than this much done in a month. Now, our collections was average 48 hours, so we could basically get that much collected in a month because we were good here, here and here. But our constraint became this, and we don't want that to be the thing.