Would You Buy a Roof Online? Here’s What’s Coming For Roofing Industry in 2026.

If you're in the roofing industry, this might be the most important conversation you'll hear this year, because roofing is standing at the edge of the biggest shift we've ever seen, a shift that will determine who grows in the next five years and who gets left behind. What happens to the buyer's journey? And then by association, HubSpot and our people, if we ship from that traditional kind of retail model to this E Commerce, what do you guys see in terms of the different pipelines that we'll need? How will insurance and retail fit if this buyer's journey starts to change? What kind of things will change in HubSpot? What do you guys see in differences in roles, compensation plans, team culture? What do people hate about the roofing experience today that has to change? And how do we make it so that we don't have to completely rip our business up and throw it in the garbage to, like, be able to handle, like, this transition? And so I wanted to show you guys one of the coolest things I saw, and then I'll kind of open the floor. So in my research, this company out of Philadelphia was probably one of the more interesting things, essentially. Think of it like property management for homeowners. So you pay a membership, and in this membership, you're getting things like leaks, paintings. So like the kids scratched the walls or the kid run thing, painting, electrical or carpentry, seasonal maintenance upgrades, smart home stuff. And so these people will come in and they'll like, do these little repairs on a membership basis, but then they also support you in the purchase of other, like, specialty trades and stuff like that. They've already got customer stories. They're operating in a few small regions up here. Right. They've got lots of kind of things happening already. And the Pricing is not crazy. 550amonth plus onboarding, which I don't know what onboarding is. Right. Obviously they got some salespeople for that. But it's interesting. It's like property management for homeowners, but they're getting lots of reviews and people really seem to like it, but interesting concept. So with that, I'd love to kind of open the floor. Jason, you kind of kick this off. So give me your thoughts. I would love for you guys to just roundtable discuss.

So we are looking at it from a standpoint of not changing our entire business to just that, but as more of an arm of the business. I hear some of your concerns of, like, hey, they're going to push all of this into inside sales or the E Commerce into inside sales, but as a goal of maybe pushing as much as we can into there, you know, setting that as a standard standard and then making sure that we have enough for our outside sales. Because I think that no matter what, you're going to have that need for that standard process. But in my mind it's the same way that we've been doing it with small tweaks, the way I've been doing it for 20 years. You know, when I first started selling roofs, you go to the appointment. A lot of it was hand drawn and handwritten estimates then. So that's changed, but essentially the steps of getting there haven't. And I've only bought on Amazon one time myself, but my wife shops on Amazon a lot. We get packages all the time. Everybody shops online. Yeah, I guess that's pretty much how everybody buys things anymore. What does that look like? I think that if somebody wants to do the E commerce so they go and maybe we cold call them or they call in and we develop qualifying questions that say if they're a good candidate for the inside or the E commerce journey, they'd have to be tech enabled, willing to go take the pictures for us, be kind of hands off. But I think some people would like that, even though I think there's friction either way you go. Because if you've got to go meet with them and you want to get into their house, they want to make sure their house is clean and they have visitors coming over versus hey, we're going to send you this link. We set up a meeting for you in two days with our sales rep. Can you have those pictures taken by tomorrow so then we can have time to get our estimate. And now we've got measurements and we've got pictures to see, accessories, things like that. Now there's some things that we won't be able to see. Is it going to need new decking, does it have two layers and stuff like that? But I think we'll be able to catch most accessories, things like that. When we're estimating for a full roof, then you kind of develop your process to say, hey, we will. If you decide to move forward, we do have to send out a, an inspector who's going to get in your attic, check the layers and kind of get final pictures. So I think that we can get mostly there and make it easier for people to sign up for it. But again, we're not looking to put all of our eggs in one basket in it, but more or less make it another arm of the business that is maybe going to make it easier for us to scale up and bring on more people and train them properly. I don't think is going to put too much of a wrench in what they're doing now, but I'd love to hear everybody's thoughts on that. And that's kind of my piece on it.

I do have thoughts if I can jump in on that. My feelings are don't do that. The inside outside model works pretty. I would advocate for not putting follow up back on your outside guys. Keep them doing what they do well, which is get in the house, sell roofs, do inspections. I think that would keep everybody happy that way.

Like it puts the pressure on them to close the deal in the house. When I'm talking to roofers that are newer in it, their concern is always the outside guys are better than the inside guys. That's the problem to solve. The inside salespeople should be trained. This model was created out of an acquiescence to the fact that outside salespeople typically do their follow up on Friday because they're out there doing their thing. And if they haven't sold enough deals Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, they start thinking. So on Friday they tell their wife, hey, I'm going to be at the office, I'm gonna do my follow up Friday. And so then they have follow up Fridays. And I do want to keep this somewhat E commerce centric. Right. And not so much like inside outside sales training. Charlie or Alan or I think James is in here. I would love to get your guys's thoughts on like the E commerce portion of this.

Yeah, so I was writing some notes down as you were talking, Jason, and I thought about the way that like me and my family shop in the way that a lot of us shop and dealing with like E Commerce. So, you know, I think we all maybe in here have done some form of like the site unseen estimate where someone calls in there, like I just need a price, I just need to know. And you send them, pull an eagle view. You send something with some verbiage that says like, hey, this needs to be checked out by somebody before we can like make it a contract. You know, so we give everybody that kind of option whenever they call into our office. And the majority of people don't want to do it actually, which I think is interesting. So we always end up sending a person out to go out and you know, then we run our typical model. But if it started online and stayed online, here's kind of the way that I'm thinking about it is like, just like Amazon. I bought a new laptop a couple months ago. It's a $5,000 laptop, right? I got the most optioned out MacBook Pro that I could possibly get. And I had no problem swiping my credit card, putting the down payment down. But when it got to me, it was supposed to have, like, the fancy screen on it, like, is smudge proof. And I didn't have that. So I picked up the phone that and called, or messaged rather, Apple support. So it's like if people could do this process entirely online, but when they throw their hand up and they need help, right? People get frustrated when they press 0 and they can't get an operator. Can outside sales be that operator in a way, right? Like, let people take themselves the entire way through the process, but when they need to press 0 for an operator because they need assistance, something's wrong, or they have a question, bam. That's where maybe outside sales jumps in and they come out to. They come out to a house. You know, the homeowner is having an issue capturing the pictures, right? So that's where outside sales pops in. So that was one of my first thoughts, was like, thinking about this as, like, calling somebody and trying to get through the customer service line. People just gotta be able to press 0 and get to a person, because if they can't and they just have to talk to a robot, I think that's where they get pissed and they hang up and they're like, refund my money. My second thought was, people will take those pictures if it's easy. I've never had a person do a remote capture for me on hover. I don't know if anyone else has, but a friend of mine just traded in her car right up the road and she got taken to a website. It's a landing page, basically, that was like, hey, thanks for your interest. Let's get you an instant quote on your car. All from native within this app. They just walked around the car, took eight pictures, and they went inside, took a picture of the odometer and then a picture of the vin and that was it. So, like, Carvana's proven that. Especially if you're going for something like siding, where you need full elevations and, you know, not just something like an eagle view. Like, I feel like they've totally proven that people will, as long as it's stupid easy to catch those photos.

I've heard plenty of examples of people getting customers to use the hover.

I've never tried it, so it works very well.

I Actually did this for a flooding incident that I had in my basement a few months ago. They sent me a hover link. I went through, scanned everything and the way it went through gave me a lot of confidence that it was grading it properly. Even though you and I know the margins on the accuracy of a hover.

So I agree with what Charlie said. Like as long as the app gives them the confidence, you know, as they go through that this is accurate, this is not. Okay, the opposite. You get online and you say get an instant quote and you go through this and as you click through that you have less and less confidence that that's going to be super accurate and that this is probably just capturing my data for something else, you know. And then Charlie also made a really good point about when they need to access that person. Like if that's easy to do, then I could see it work.

What are your guys thoughts on like kind of current existing kind of models for E commerce which would be like the rueful concept but just going straight to purchase from like Roof Quote Pro?

Yeah, it doesn't feel like it should be accurate. When I go through Ruffle, it doesn't.

Feel like it is accurate. Like the prices they're getting are inaccurate.

Like as a customer I wouldn't feel like okay, that's a fair price because I just don't feel like they got enough information to give me an accurate price.

Yeah, I feel very much the same way. It's almost like if the customer had to do more work upfront to feed good information in that they would feel that the output was more realistic. Right. Like if they had to go and do a hover with 10 photos versus being like, oh yeah, here's an orange square over my house that doesn't quite fit. It's almost like if they invested more time, I would agree.

When I sold cars it was the same kind of deals. Like you had to get the customer working for you, getting their proof of income, getting their VIN number and their registration and you get them to take pictures of their car. You brought up an interesting point, Charlie. If they had a question as soon as they raised their hand, if somebody driving out there, I think of it as like a triage, like one you dump the knowledge base of this web based app into a chat bot so they can be like get help. And it's like they could just like, I don't understand, there's a bush in the way of the picture. Is that going to prevent it from working? You know what I mean? Like they're going to have like those simple questions. Level two is like, I'm having trouble with the app. What do I do about this? You know, my house is too close together. That could flag a chat with inside sales or a call with inside sales. And then it's like I'm completely incapable of doing this. And then it's like I'm in a wheelchair and my house is on the side of a mountain. Okay, well then now outside sales is booking in home. Let's say when they get through that, as they're taking the pictures, the system could be pulling an eagle viewer like report to also get the like secondary kind of back check. The next step is like you want to have almost double redundant measurements to make sure you're right. So while they're walking around taking the pictures, you could order a quick square. Like a system could order quick squares. But then it kind of has to corroborate that evidence of that report and then provide a quote at that point. If you had that like a hover report and an eagle view quick squares and you could put your pricing table in there, would you feel confident in letting them buy now and schedule and pay a deposit within a thing?

I feel like the rate of cancellations would. Would go up. There would be something that we would find in the office or customer would find uncomfortable. I don't love the idea of it being anything other than like the guesstimate roundabout price kind of similar. What you get to roofle.

I think I agree on the roofle aspect. I'm not confident, you know, as a roofer and I think kind of that's how we look at it. But the homeowner doesn't know any better. When you look at a roofle, I'm not that confident that it's accurate. I think it just gets you that roundabout like you were talking about. And then, you know, when they raise their hand, it doesn't necessarily need to go out to outside sales, but it can be the inspector and then, you know, you triage it and things like that. And then you also you educate them up front. So I did a little test run on a guy that called us as a referral a little further out than we service, but we sometimes service. He's down in like the Chicago area. He was referral from somebody else. I don't even know exactly how he got us, but he wants to do business with us. I sent him the hover link. He took photos. I think it took him three days. Got the hover back. It was pretty painless. I had a Conversation with him. I explained to him I was looking at his house on Google Maps. He was on a corner, so three sides were open. And I said, hey, you know, when you get to that backside though, it's nice and tight to your neighbor over there. Make sure that you take some extra photos. And he didn't. He did a good job. So I think that a loom or some sort of educational video that sent when somebody does want to go on that journey, like one, they're qualified, they're tech enabled, they're like us. They're willing to be able to do those things. And then you educate them on how to do those things. And now they, like Adam said, about being involved, you know, getting some of those things. I, I feel like they would feel very confident, especially I think hover, although I've found a lot of things off about it. And so maybe you weigh it back against some other measurement tool. But, you know, now They've got a 3D model of their house and this and that. I think, I think it gives them confidence that this is, you know, accurate. And you know, it's 2025. So we've got all types of tools out there to be able to, to get them accurate information without having to go out there. But also at the end of that, we send out an inspector anyways. So now we could either do a quick squares or we could even have our inspectors do a measurement across this eve to make sure that it's accurate on the hover and then you can call hover and get it updated. And if there is any differences, you just kind of set that expectation and if it's major, you address it with the homeowner. And yeah, you know, I, I do realize that. I think there's going to be a lower closing rate and, and things like that. But we're also not advertising towards people who would want that type of thing. So I think this is what you were talking about, Charlie, is that you don't feel like a lot of people would. But that's also not what we're looking for, is people that would want to.

Do it like this.

So I think if we start making that one of our avatars and, and we're marketing towards that type of person, then we start getting more people in, in there that would want to do that. But yeah, sending out the informational video I think would be helpful in getting people to actually be able to do the hovers and take the proper pictures and stuff like that.

I think I would be comfortable with it based on the Way we described it, you would have. There's two things that I think would be important though, is that you would track the data on the back end and you would just figure out what your margin of error is. Like, out of how many houses do you end up with a double layer job? Out of how many houses do you end up with? Whatever. And you would also be, in your terms and conditions, that if you'd have a good way of saying that if, if it's off by this percent or whatever, that you have the option to back out of the deal at the inspection. Like I'm okay with a little bit up and down on margin.

Carvana, my research project this morning, Carvana actually had that. And that was one thing that think it's an appropriate time to bring this up is Carvana had to do that. They had a SCPC surprise cost per car, some number they tracked. Right.

And, and they included that in the cost in there.

Well, they, they, they included that in their metrics. And so what things have to be true, knowable, provable and repeatable to make a predict valid attempt at E Commerce. So it's kind of like going through and just understanding how it would work. And this is where it got this like surprise cost per roof, right? Because it was talking about the Carvana story and kind of started postulating some math. And so I came down here and what I did was I said, hey, this is my customer's typical data model. And I kind of blurred out the ones that are irrelevant. I said, these are the usual properties that exist in the system. What I was trying to figure out was like, what is the spread? The stock or shareholder perspective on the E Commerce thing was like, you're eliminating the car salesman. Typically car salesmen get like 25% or 20% of the profit. When I sold cars, it was like you had to make 1500 on small cars, 2,500 on, you know, medium SC SUVs, big SUVs, big, you know, trucks. You had to make like 33,000. 3, 3, 3, 500. Those are like the kind of the things you told sales guys. And they would fluctuate. And then in the back end you would have like the finance products and the, you know, the warranties and whatnot. And the goal was 2000 per car. So dealership tries to make about 5 grand. Call it per car, which, you know, are selling $40,000 cars. It's not huge. Right, but then you have finance managers that get 10% of what they sell. And then you have sales managers that get this like laddering, you know, based on volume. And then you have a, a dealer principal. So there's a lot of people taking a piece of this profit along the way. And you know, the Carvana thing was like, we don't have to pay all that, you know, I mean, because we have a website doing it. That was the concept. And so I wanted to try and figure out what the spread was. So who here has Chat GPT, like a paid chatgpt account?

I do.

Who here has gone through the process of connecting your HubSpot to Chat GPT?

Yes.

Okay, so if you connect your HubSpot to ChatGPT, you have what's called an MCP, a model context protocol. What that means is like, it takes the API of HubSpot and explains it to ChatGPT. So it says, like, these are standard objects, these are custom objects, these are properties. Like, this is what you can do, this is what, like this is how you do it. This is how you make an API call. These are the parameters that you need to request it. Like, this is how you talk to our API. So you can turn natural language into an API request, essentially. So you ask for something, it converts your paragraph into a curl request, which is like how you call an API. I got it to devise a prompt that I thought everybody could run in their chatgpt. It's quite extensive, but the idea was to try and see what, based on your data, what is the spread? Like, what is the spread that would be there, including change orders and stuff like that, and commissions. So some of you may be tracking and some of you may not. So I kind of made it so that the first thing it does is ask you a few questions. And then it's going to go and understand its data model. It's going to scan the schema looking for like, the properties that look like this are similar to it because some of you have QBO payments, some you have deposits, some of you have expenses, some of you have bills. It's the same thing, but just so it understands the language. And then go through and analyze these unit economics and then it's trying to figure out what that surprise cost per car margin or surprise cost per roof margin could be. And so I wanted to send this to you guys so that in the background you could shoot this prompt into your chatgpt. Because this is really what kind of the goal of E commerce is that what KPIs are we going to impact if a customer kind of like, why is it that when your people come to your you know, they go through your 10 to 15 or 15 to 50 cost per thousand impressions. And then for some reason, 1 to 3% is like what we're hoping for in terms of click through rate. And then when we get that 1.2% click through rate, so you send it to a thousand people, see your ad, 12 people come to your page, then we're like kind of hoping for 3 to 10% of people to become a lead. So if you get 12 people to your site, you're like, at best, we're hoping for one, maybe two leads. What are those other nine to 11 people doing? You know, and we dealt with this in the car industry all the time. If you post pictures of the car, well then there's less reasons for people to ask questions was the concern. So like do you use the 3D kind of stock photos that every manufacturer makes or do you use actual pictures of the car? And then, you know, the old nomenclature was like hide information. So don't put the kilometers or don't put the features because then people will go request more information on the car. But if you put all the features, then people might go, oh, this doesn't have the dual sliding doors on this van. Nope. And they like go back and leave your website. And then the Carfax phase came into the car industry where it was like you could request a Carfax right on the site, but when you requested it, you didn't actually get the Carfax. We just got a lead. You know what I mean? But then the salespeople hated it because if there it was always you was always just finding out what was, what was the, where was the body buried on this car? Right. So if it was a $2,000 less than market, and then they would request the Carfax, they'd see there's a $5,000 hit on the car because someone hit a post. And then they get the carfax, the salesman gets the lead. Now they're expected to follow up instantly and go and record the video, do their whole sales process, process. And the customer was never interested because the minute they found out the car accident, they go, oh, that's why it's $2,000 cheaper. And the salesman has to try and switch them. So the car industry went through and I, I lived this transition in my career in the car sales industry, where you went from no pictures, no details, no nothing. And we be. And we started a project called the Truck Depot. We were the number one most profitable Dodge dealership in North America. And they did this no information, no pictures, no nothing. We smarted a small sub dealership called the Truck Depot. That was four guys in a Quonset hut, literally a round rooftop building that leaked and had mold in the corners. And all we did was took Londonderry's inventory, but advertised it the way that we felt the market might be going, which was all like, 19 pictures, all the information Carfax was available. And the minute somebody requested information, we recorded a video within, like, five minutes. Like, we ran to the car. I lost 20 pounds. We ran to the car, pulled it out, record a video in the wheel wells in the engine bay, everything, uploaded it to YouTube, which took forever. And, like, it was so hard, but we got it. We got it done. And we outsold the big fancy dealership. And people were coming and picking up their cars from a Quonset hut. And we were delivering cars all over Canada, like Northwest Territories, like by Alaska, you know what I mean? We were trucking vehicles up there, and that became the model for all six dealerships after that. So I lived this transition, and there was a lot of fear because we were doing deals on trades before we seen them. And then we would sometimes ship the truck up and bring the trade down. And we found out the same that Carvana did. But in overall, we still made more money, more profit out of a Quonset hut and a website that nobody heard of, the TruckDepot CA. So I give you guys that prompt because that math was. The same math that we went through in the car industry was if we put all the information online, we might get. What we ended up getting was more traffic on our website, because people saw our website as the source of good information on car inventory. So our website got way more activity. Like, people looked at way more cars because they were like, oh, I can see all the pictures and all the cars, and I can shop here, right? And they wanted the Carfax. They just got to see it. We didn't gate the Carfax, but. And then our conversion rate was better, like, the conversion rate to sale, because when people inquired about a car, they really wanted that car. And so I'm trying to think of, like, that's what that prompt is. It's to try and help us establish what the math is. So I would love for you guys to run that prompt and shoot the data back to me. You'll have to answer a few questions. I don't know how long it'll take.

But when you use that information, the breakage, the percentage, let's say it's 3%. Would you just add 3% onto your, all of your quotes or how do you use that then?

Well, I'm looking at it and saying, okay, like if I had to, if I was designing this and you guys are boots on the ground, I really want to own roofing companies again. But like right now you guys are boots on the ground doing this every day. I haven't done this in a minute. I'm just doing it by extension through you. But the way I picture it is kind of like people get something like the hover. You know, you can integrate the hover API. It's getting easier and easier and easier to make software these days. Like you integrate the hover API, so you create the like the scanning, picturing kind of experience within your little micro app. People do it. They're going to get a quote, right? And it's like that's their quote. And they have two things like buy now, see if I get a discount, like buy now or see if I can get a discount. If they click to see if I can get a discount, it books a meeting with inside sales, which inside sales is standing by. So usually like we want to be able to get to them in five minutes, open up a video meeting right there where the inside sales is provided with all the information and there can be a conversation. And the idea is that we sell that online and we go from website visit to roof sold in an hour. And for that, an inside sales rep would get something like a 2% commission. And the site supervisors, who are typically in a lead generation and site management position like they're running, they know what goes wrong on roof jobs. They know what causes change orders, they know how to walk on a ladder, they know how to talk to a crew. They're more of a field specific thing, but they have a little bit of a human communication ability. So then the fields, the site supervisors get a task to go check on this roof and they validate the no layers, everything like that. And to Alan's point, you start to track your surprise cost per roof and then that informs your site supervisor inspection. But then the outside sales is kind of cut out of the deal. And that's the point, right? That is the point. The point is, is that E commerce eliminates the need for outside sales. But the market isn't going to instantly transition to this model, right? There's going to be old people, but there is also young people. Like all of you in this room would participate in an E commerce like transaction for something that previously had been considered kind of Faux par off limits for E Commerce because you're all business owners, you all get it. You would all say oh I wonder if they would do this because to kind of take it to the realm of the weird. The thing that's even crazier than E commerce is live shopping which you're seeing on like you saw it like old days was like the shopping channel or whatever, right? That you slept in your parents bedroom at three o' clock in the morning, turned on the TV and it was the, the whatever that thing was, the shopping channel, right? And now it's TikTok shop. People are buying cars, mattresses, furniture and home renovation and construction content is thriving on things like that. But there's weird things that are, that are selling that previously would have considered odd, right to sell on a live shopping thing. It kind of shows that like cars are being sold from dealerships. Like there's been thousand plus dollar mattresses that are being sold on live shopping. So I'm not asking for live shopping where people buy in a TikTok live. I'm saying E commerce. But I don't know, I wanted to kind of inject that into the conversation and see like if you could save the 8% commission if your marketing cost became 2% because more of your leads converted to your E commerce option that previously just bounced off your website. So now your conversion rate goes from 1 to 3% or sorry from 3 to 10% all of a sudden to 5 to 7. And your click through rate when people found saw in your ad that there was an E commerce buy online, no visit required, would your conversion rate go up? And I have evidence of that piece because Bay Valley in San Francisco is doing that. They're advertising like hey, we know you don't want somebody to come to your house. Book an appointment online with us right now. We'll provide you with a quote online, right? And they literally just book a one hour zoom call and they like go through the process of ordering the Eagle View and all that kind of stuff but they get the address ahead of time and they literally take them through like this is how we would price your roof and the cost per lead is ridiculous. Like they're spending like 78, 85 a lead to these zoom meetings and they're having like an 80% show rate. So you get an $85 lead times divided by 0.8, that's like $112 a lead. So I kind of want to like kick that over to you guys and see what your guys thoughts are.

I'm almost wondering if you could get away with a per deal commission rather than a percentage, maybe doing E Commerce only.

I was just gonna say, Jason, you had asked, like, what do you do with that surprise cost per roof? I would just figure out what percentage is and I would, I would split that out across all the roofs, you know, and as long as it's managed correctly, it should be a very small percentage. But yeah, I wouldn't plan to just eat it completely, but I would. I would just plan that it's part of everybody's costs.

We did this year, we did a plywood guarantee. And we haven't had a change order for plywood all year because we looked at our numbers last year, saw how many roofs did we do, how many required plywood, what was that average cost per roof in plywood? And it turned out to be a little less than 1% of revenues if we were to track that from all the prior years. So we tacked on 1% of those revenues or 1% to our profit margin. And sometimes we lose 99% of the time we win. But we have that 1% invested in a money market account that's bringing us three and a half percent returns. So after the course of the whole year, we're building this thing up to a kitty, essentially of $100,000. So if a whole roof needs resheated, you know, the $6,600 or whatever that cost us doesn't really matter. So that's one of the ways that we've taken that one unforeseen cost and, you know, figured out how to market it to our customers.

Yeah, I've thought about doing like, you know, including 10 or 15 sheets in, in every roof, just in case, you know, there's partials and stuff like that. And maybe to. To go back on one of the things Adam was saying, you know, you have your site supervisor or project manager. One of the things that we want to do is commission them to upsell, and they get paid on upsells and change orders rather than going back to sales. So they kind of have a sales role in taking that job over and looking at the roof and going over there and saying, oh man, we're going to need to replace the gutters as well. And so that's some of the ideas that we were having to overcome. Some of the things that might come up, that when you don't have that inspector or that outside sales, maybe we send an inspector, but we're looking at our inspectors just to be like good picture takers to check Layers and stuff like that and maybe not have the knowledge that our project managers will have. And so that we thought that was a good way of kind of like sliding that responsibility over to them and then them going out there, upselling them, selling them some gutter covers. You know, they get paid on the change orders and stuff like that. And I thought that might be incentive enough to have them being thorough on the back end. And then again, I think it's all about expectations and however you set that up through the process.

Yeah, an interesting thought that I have is, does E commerce, does it have to start on E commerce like the customer, does the customer have to be the one to start this ball rolling downhill? Or can we be the ones? So let's like for instance, my. I look at it like, okay, someone sees a Facebook ad, get your instant roof quote and schedule your instant roof code in five minutes, they click the button, some disclosures pop up and it's like, hey, in order to do this, we send an inspector out to your house and that inspector gets paid maybe like the inside sales rep, right? Maybe $150 per appointment. You almost play to like the gig economy of like, hey, you know, just hire whoever, whatever nose picker you can give them a watertight company cam checklist, give them a watertight, you know, series of drone photos they have to do. Perhaps if it's a two story and you can probably get 90% of what you need to know. And then your vig cost or your overage or your oh, shit, or your whatever you call that, like, could we put the $150 out? I mean, there's Uber drivers out there driving their cars all around Timbuktu for, you know, $24 tip capability roofing, they.

Flip the inside outside sales model in reverse. So the inside sales get paid 6% commission and $150 a deal and a bonus at quota. And the outside sales gets paid $50 per inspection. I think they may be up to like 75, right? But the outside sales only goes and does the inspection because the building standards are so wacky. In Hawaii, like you have, you know, Hawaiian huts and you know, Oprah Winfrey's mansion within a 20 minute drive of each other. So they've really loose building standards and therefore they have an estimator team. So they have like, probably, I think they have like 8 to 10 inside sales and like 10 or 15 outside sales. And they hire kind of like to your point, like they hire like people who work for the National Guard or university students who work who literally take the out, like, take the arriving jobs. Like, like a gig economy. Like, they put their schedule in, they can work four hours in the evenings, they can work four hours in the evenings, and they can take inspections in the evenings. And this is a way for them to almost uber drive their way. And they do that. They fly drones, take pictures. Their job is to sell themselves, sell the, sell the experience, sell the company and sell themselves, right? And they get paid 50 bucks or 75 bucks an inspection, and that's all they do is meet with the homeowner and they just make them like them, like the experience and like the company. But they don't even try and sell the roof. They don't even provide the price. And then the insight that, that immediately go. Their report immediately goes to the estimators. The inside sales now starts to build a relationship. And the inside sales is selling that model kind of goes. It's a kind of E commerce, but it's not really getting to the point of like, buy a roof online. We'll take the risk based on the fact that we're eliminating the need for all these commission sales reps and we're moving to a customer success model of just like, facilitate the purchase of a roof, don't sell it. The risk or gamble that you're taking, of course, is that had you applied your more high pressure car sales, like, sales approach, you're right. You like, when it come when a person walks into a dealership, you've all been there, right? You ain't gonna like, they don't, they don't want to let you leave, right? Like, the sales manager has to come and talk to you and if you stood up and walked out, the sales manager's gonna run after you to the door, right? Like, they're gonna, they're gonna throw like, the joke in the car sales world was like, you get the keys for the trade in, you throw them on the roof because then they can't leave until they buy the car, right? Like, that was like the joke that we used to tell and consumers knew it. So, like the Carvana story was like the whole idea of like, you don't like that experience, do you? So I guess the real question is like, do homeowners really like the process of shopping for a roof? And are we trying to solve a problem that doesn't exist? Are we like, because in Carvana, that's what it was. Are we trying to solve the. I don't want to, I don't want to go through three two hour presentations with Roofers. Is that the problem we're solving or are we solving the problem of like, I don't want to buy this and I just want the lowest friction possible way to get a good deal. And could you both offer 5% off market and make 5% more money because you're not paying 10% in sales costs and potentially reduce your cost of customer acquisition from a marketing perspective through a lower friction sales process? Like, is that, is that the problem we're solving or are we solving the problem like homeowners don't really want to do this buying journey?

Well, who, who really wants to buy a roof?

Nobody.

Nobody. So I think taking the friction out of it, knowing how people are buying these days, and then reducing the lead, like how much does it take to get a lead? Maybe offering a discount to funnel them into the E Commerce because we have less overhead, you're saying gig economy, Charlie, but we provide all vehicles and everybody's W2 and all of that. So maybe it's a little bit different for us. We're not, we don't have anybody driving their own vehicles. So for us it's like, it's less liability, less, you know, gas, less vehicle fixes from little fender benders and stuff like that. That happen every year for us. And when we do get somebody to the end of that cycle, we still send out an inspector, but Maybe it's only 20% of the people who come through the funnel and then they go to the inspector and we can still make up for through change orders or just setting expectations of if you have a second layer, we will. This will be part of your bill. However, it's still discounted 10 or whatever for doing it through, through this process. I like that you said that they're getting 110 leads because for us probably closer to 400. You know, three to 400 is normal on like a qualified Google lead. And if you're getting a hundred dollar ones and maybe your closing percent goes down, I think that's still a net positive. And you can offer a discount.

I would say, Adam, I don't know how much of a pain point having roofing salespeople come to their house is, but the most attractive part to me is the speed. Like the easier, I guess if E Commerce has taught us anything about other stuff is that when you take friction out of buying stuff, we buy more. They're always improving that, you know, one click stuff and. But yeah, the speed that a customer can buy. The other thing is that people like to be in control of that stuff.

Like Amazon's close rate on you all might also like on my wife, is probably 50%.

You know, I've thought about this for years, even before E Commerce is because siding is a different animal than a roof. And I think people spend more time on it. Yeah, I've thought about hiring somebody as a designer specifically to go in with those women, and typically women and design their house with them for a fee. And you know, maybe, maybe that wouldn't be a bad thing to put into. There is you could still do E Commerce, but you could set them up to maybe do hover design. But you know, maybe that would be a good place to implement the fee because we have a lot of outside sales guys that are doing that with them. They just want dark siding or whatever. And it's, it's a pretty easy sale. But I think it was two years ago we were throwing around the idea of a. Our top tier package having that built in for siding. So our top tier package has a designer with it. You know, kind of the white glove service on it. I still like that concept. And I was, you know, I wonder if that could be implemented in there where you'd just have a designer and they can choose to pay $700, but now they get that service that they really are looking for that maybe a lot of outside sales guys can't give them or give them the best experience on it anyways.

I'll just throw a personal anecdote in there that I used to be. In a prior life. I was a kitchen cabinet designer, interior design. I put together custom kitchens and bathrooms and I charged a fee of $1,500 to just put this together. And people happily paid it because it took so much time and effort. So I really think it's just to give you some confirmation that I think that kind of thing really could work, especially in, you know, with higher end customers. Yeah.

And they're, you know, a lot of those people are looking for, you know, stone options and you know, they're spending some money on that siding. So it wouldn't be a big thing to spend a thousand bucks like you said, and then still take them through the E Commerce process to sell them some siding and you know, maybe even still offer a discount on the full job. But you're paying for that, that designer now.

Well, I mean, if you adjust your prices because it's high end material anyway, for the most part you can just. If you buy with us, your design consultation was free. We just, you know, moved our prices up by $1,000.

Yep.

Exactly.

And if they don't go with you, that's okay. You still made the thousand dollar design cost. It's not okay, but you know what I mean.

Well, yeah, but if. And then also if somebody's committing to paying you a thousand dollars for design, they're most likely you're probably going to have a really high closing rate on that because they just paid you a fee.

Initially, when you guys started talking, I thought, guys, guys, guys, let's stick to roofs. People aren't going to do the siding from E Commerce. And then as you guys started talking and as I thought of my wife's thing with the bathroom last week and even her Christmas light, she was like, this is what I want the house to look like for Christmas. And she's like getting it to like put red sashes on the thing. I'm like, wait a minute, Adam, you're wrong. Like, it actually might even be more. Because what is the pre. The precedent that to Alan's point, the precedent is I want that how fast and how little friction to get it. So.

And with hover, you do get that immediate 2D which is very beneficial. So to get one of your contexts or one of your examples earlier on where you know it's in the middle of the evening or it's getting dark, you can't actually go outside and take it. And so there's delay, grab a street, street view video or a photo. We can do it. They can do it and upload it. It doesn't have to be perfect, right? Because just when I'm buying a car, like, you know, I bought my. I bought a Jeep actually from down in Arizona, but I bought it completely digitally. I never went there. And that's because anything that I could have bought here in Wisconsin or Illinois was two, three times more expensive.

Yes.

I love my Jeep. I love it. So by extensions, I didn't need to know that the very first image of the car was the exact vehicle. I just needed to know this is the general vehicle that I'm looking at. If I wanted this kind of color, this is what I'm going to probably have something that looks like. I think with each one of these steps, it really is just reducing the friction between customer and salesman.

Yeah. Like going to Drake from the mountainside lights, who's been an interesting project this year. I mean, his whole thing is like the minute they submit a lead with their address, he has an automation that goes and pulls the street view and then basically through the API just prompts three different times with three different Christmas light color combinations like the Rockefeller, which is like the yellow, red, green, blue, you know, like, basically here's what your house could look like. And with permanent lights, it can look like all three, you know what I mean? But that's like the autoresponder that they get, you know what I mean? Instead of like, hey, we've received your estimate, it immediately sends them three pictures of what their house could look like. So you're not wrong on that fact. And I think that like, we have to kind of as an industry, going back to the original point of conversation, which was, what are the pre. The 2014-2017 roofers gonna look like before there's a Carvana? Like, what does it mean to go first? Because it's like, there's that point where it's like you're either first or you're late. There's very little middle ground, right? These things move so quickly. I think of it as like, wouldn't it be cool if someone came to your website needing a roof, just wanted to know a price? Because to Gary's point, they don't know what to expect. So they go through this online shopping experience of getting a roof quote. And it just says, like, by the way, you have a beautiful house, but are you considering like looking at a home remodel? And it's like, I can pre approve you for X amount of dollars. And then by the way, you're like, to Drake's idea, your house could look like this. And then all of a sudden you're upselling people from a $17,000 roof to a $75,000 total home renovation online. Like, I don't think that that's that far off. And the effort and sacrifice required for the customer to get a quote is that they have to walk around their house for 10 minutes, take pictures and answer a five minute questionnaire. Really, the effort sacrifice is a fraction of three two hour appointments, right? And waiting and all that kind of stuff. You get the answer now, you know what I mean? You don't have to have the dog barking at the door as some random stranger comes to your door. You got to go, sorry, but the dogs. You don't have to clean your backyard before we walk in the backyard because of the dog poop in the backyard. Like all of these, you know, please clean it before you come to do the roof. But you know what I mean? But you don't have to worry about the backyard. Like, that's great marketing for the E commerce approach.