Shed Geek Podcast
The Shed Geek Podcast offers an in depth analysis of the ever growing and robust Shed Industry. Listeners will experience a variety of guests who identify or specialize in particular niche areas of the Shed Industry. You will be engaged as you hear amateur and professional personalities discuss topics such as: Shed hauling, sales, marketing, Rent to Own, shed history, shed faith, and much more. Host Shannon Latham is a self proclaimed "Shed Geek" who attempts to take you through discussions that are as exciting as the industry itself. Listeners of this podcast include those who play a role directly or indirectly with the Shed Industry itself.
Shed Geek Podcast
Blueprints To Bytes: Building Smarter Shed Businesses
What does it take to turn three‑a‑day shed builds into a software platform that runs an entire industry? We sit down with Jason Graber to unpack that journey—starting in a Pickens, South Carolina shop and scaling to Shed Suite’s vision of becoming the operating system for shed and carport businesses. Jason shares why you don’t need to be a programmer to build meaningful software, how to turn field pain into product clarity, and why systems—not endless processes—unlock speed as you grow.
We get tactical about the playbook: do the hard work manually first, then automate what you fully understand. Use AI not as a search engine, but as a thought partner to sharpen requirements, surface edge cases, and accelerate decision quality. From dispatch to e‑commerce and dealer management, we explore how openness and reliability beat feature lists, and why the true moat is a team’s ability to innovate precisely and support customers relentlessly.
You’ll also hear what’s next. Shed Suite is pushing into CAD‑driven configuration, material resource planning, and real per‑shed cost accounting—modeling components, labor, and consumption timing to deliver automatic job costing at scale. On the rental side, RTO Suite aims to replace legacy tools with an open API approach that closes the lifecycle loop: delivery, returns, repos, and resale routed cleanly through driver apps and inventory. Add in pragmatic features like order mapping for sharper marketing, and a services arm reserved for existing customers, and you get a focused path to modernize without chaos.
If you lead a shed brand, carport operation, or RTO provider, this conversation offers a practical roadmap: think in systems, measure what matters, build for openness, and let innovation—not noise—set your pace. Subscribe, share this with a teammate who owns operations or finance, and leave a review telling us which workflow you’re automating next.
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This episodes Sponsors:
Studio Sponsor: Shed Pro
Three Oaks Trading Co
NewFound Solutions
Cardinal Manufacturing
Shed Suite
Hello and welcome back to the Shed Geek Podcast. Here's a message from our 2025 studio sponsor. Let's be real. Running a shed business today isn't just about building great sheds. The industry is changing fast. We're all feeling the squeeze, competing for fewer buyers, while expectations keep climbing. And yet I hear from many of you that you are still juggling spreadsheets, clunky software, or disconnected systems. You're spending more time managing chaos than actually growing your business. That's why I want to talk to you about our studio sponsor, ShedPro. If you're not already using them, I really think you should check them out. ShedPro combines your 3D configurator, point of sale, RTO contracts, inventory, deliveries, and dealer tools all in one platform. They even integrate cleanly into our Shed Geek marketing solutions. From website leads, to final delivery, you can quote, contract, collect payment, and schedule delivery in one clean workflow. No more double entries, no more back and forth chaos. Quoting is faster, orders are cleaner. And instead of chasing down paperwork, you're actually running your business. And if you mention Shed Geek, you'll get 25% off all setup fees. Check it out at ShedPro.co/ ShedGeek. Thank you, Shed Pro, for being our studio sponsor, and honestly, for building something that helps the industry.
Shannon:Okay, welcome back to another episode of the Shed Geek Podcast. And uh good to be back. Uh it's good to be doing this. I'll tell you how this came together is Cord has a vacation and he's out somewhere in the Caribbean, hopefully, dodging hurricanes and everything else. And he said, when I set this up, I thought, surely we'll have good enough internet uh on the boat, you know, on the on the cruise to be able to do this interview. And just today he said, abort, abort. You know, he said, I can't, uh I don't think it's gonna be good enough. We're gonna have to reschedule. And I said, Man, it'd just be good for me to hop back in there. And who better to hop in uh to a conversation with about sheds than someone I'm already extremely familiar with and someone that the audience knows well? Jason Graber, how are you today, sir?
Jason Graber:Man, I'm doing fantastic, doing great. We I got a chance to take my family to Hilton Head last week and spend the whole week with Michelle's parents and her brother and the kids, and just unplugged and got a lot of rest and retreat. And um then I was able to go to South Carolina for two days after that. So we were there Saturday to Saturday, and then we went up to my mom and dad's for a couple days up in the foothills of mountains where I grew up, my you know, property dad is uh homesteading on now that I grew up on, and it's just always fun to get up there and take my kids to it. So, I'm coming off of a good rest and retreat uh time and I'm ready to get back in the saddle. So I'm doing great. Well rescued.
Shannon:Very nice, very nice. Where did we've talked about this before, but I'm struggling. Where did you grow up?
Jason Graber:Up upstate South Carolina. So Sam Biler's home kind of um stomping grounds. He um Seneca, Clemson, Easley, Pickens. So when I started uh out of high school, I was building sheds in Pickens, South Carolina for Graceland. So my dad owns property way up in the up, like right up in the corner. It's Long Creek. It's literally like 10 minutes from Georgia, 15 minutes from North Carolina, right up in the corner. Um, so when I was working in Pickens, it was a four, it was about a 50-minute drive from my house, dad's house, way up in the mountains over to Pickens to build sheds every day. And that was that was crazy. I can drive that drive in my sleep, probably drove it a million times.
Shannon:What year were you building in Pickens?
Jason Graber:That's a hard question. I so I got married in 2010. We'll work backwards from that. Um, and I was working there when I got married. So and I think I pretty well came like in out of high school, but in high school. So, 2009, 2008, 2007. Um, pretty much those years. And I think it was probably about four years that I built sheds, three and a half, four years, and then got married in 2010, and then started a little marketing agency in upstate South Carolina in 2010 and 11, and just completely failed. Like nobody knew what marketing was. They didn't have told this story before, but just failed miserably and then started waiting tables and went back into construction, doing siting. And that's when I got the call from my uncle, great uncle, actually. Uh he's like, hey, we're starting another shop in Florida. You want to go down to Florida and manage a shed shop? It's like, yeah, actually, I do. That sounds great. Let's do it. So that was a great opportunity to just, you know, reset, um, you know, coming off of a failed business venture, um, reset um and even go deeper into the shed world. And that's really where I got a lot of the experience that I had beyond just building sheds of what is the shed company's um operations look like. You know, we've got dealers that create orders and send orders to corporate and they process payments and send orders to shops. And so, I was in charge of that shop and working with just no system, like you know, getting faxed work orders and getting hand-drawn floor plans from dealers, and like, okay, like this is that's where all the inspiration from Shed Suite really came from. It's like we got to fix this. Um, so yeah, that was uh kind of how I got into all of it. But building sheds was uh a great experience, man. I mean, and back then, you know how it worked. You know, you got a commission and you're just you know hammered or nail gun, chop saw, just cranking them out. Man, we can me and Nate Shetler, we were a team there in Pickin, South Carolina. We could build about three almost three 10 by 16 lofted barns a day.
Shannon:We well there's something to be said about you know growing up into it, you know, before even creating the software. Because one of the things I wrote down here is, you know, about programming and being a programmer and what it looks like. And maybe we can just have like a bigger conversation, you know, about um just a bigger conversation about the tech space kind of in sheds. I thought maybe we could go down that road, but uh me and you have that uh in common. I think we discussed that before, our start at Graceland, you know, and I started in purchasing, and I can remember doing uh purchasing for the Pickens plant. Uh but I think he would have been gone by then, you know. There was I don't know, like 13 plants or something. I hope I'm not giving away too much, forgive me. Uh Graceland as is at the time. I think they've grown since then, so uh it's only gotten bigger for them since I left. So obviously uh I didn't hurt them too much when I left. Uh but uh you know, I remember that, and it's kind of cool because I've gotten to meet some of the folks that you know probably 10, 12 years ago I talked to, uh, and then we just kind of like fell out. Not like anything bad, just kind of like I ended up work doing some ministry work and things like that before coming back into it and went into the shed sales side, and that's where things really began to blossom uh for me. But um let's jump in there, maybe like we kind of talked about history. I mean, most everybody knows, you know, I would think who Shed Suite is, or kind of what Shed Suite does. But give us the give us the two to three minute commercial of like what you tell people uh in the industry uh if they haven't found you.
Jason Graber:Yeah, yeah. So I mean, our elevator pitch, short and sweet, is we help shed companies create and manage customer orders. That's very simple, basic. Shed suite is a business operating system in a lot of ways. And our vision is to be the operating system of the shed industry. Think kind of like Windows for your computers or our Mac. Um, you know, we want shed businesses to be able to come to Shed Suite, get the software they need to manage their inventory, create customer orders, track all of their dealers and pricing, and have kind of a you know, business operating system, a business in a box, if you will. So, you know, we're on our way. Shed suite's not done yet. We've got another five-year plan to get there. But yeah, it's a it's a software that centralizes your data and it helps you create and manage all your customer orders uh in one spot. Um, but yeah, I mean, I want to I do want to talk about it, and even before we jumped on here, we talked a little bit about you know my um my desire to really empower people that have somewhat of a similar idea and this position that I'm in. I I've been thinking about it a lot, you know, over the last year or two is like, you know, God's blessed me with the business that He's given me. Why? You know, what's the purpose? Well, I think it's the purpose is to so that I can help shed companies thrive. That's number one. But I think there's another purpose there, and that's you have a testimony in everything you do, right? Everything that you do, um, that can be used as a testimony. And I think mine is I'm a non-technical software CEO. Like, how do you do this, right? I mean, how can I bring that experience over the last eight years of starting a software company and scaling a software company, not knowing how to write a single line of code? I don't, I don't, I'm not a programmer. Um, and I think that can be really inspirational. And I can teach people in, you know, kind of even how I did it. And like it's more and more relevant every single day. Like, you know, technology is not going anywhere. Software is even more important today than it was eight years ago. It's going to continue to be more important. I think in the next 10 years, every business will be a technology company in some way. Like, shed companies aren't going to be writing software, but they're going to be technical companies. You're going to have technology in your companies and you need to know how to use it. And so for me, the ability to, you know, I've been talking to Shannon's like, just for me to like, how do I kind of inspire and help and encourage people that could be in my shoes now, like I was eight years ago, working a job in the shed industry or not in the shed industry, and you have this idea. There's a problem here. I think that this problem could be solved with an app or a software. I wish I could build it, but I can't because you know I'm not technical. Well, I can tell you can, and a lot of just trial and error. There's a lot of like school of hard knocks that happen. Um, but it's a it's a you know curiosity that you have to have, but it's very possible. And I think for me, I want to um kind of lean into that over the next six to twelve months is like, you know, if there's somebody out there that has an app idea that has a problem that they're close to that they can solve, and I'll put this in here most of the best software solutions that have been created over time have been have come from somebody solving their own problem. That's usually where they come from. When you go out and you're like, hey, I think I can make millions of dollars, you know, building this piece of software, probably not gonna work. It hardly ever does. But what really, really tends to work is somebody saying, I've got a problem. I think I could solve this problem with software and then turn that into a product or just you know become a cult consulting uh person on that. But I think yeah, that's I've been challenged with that, and I think that's where over the next six to 12 months, I'd love to really help people if that's where uh they are, um, be able to pour into people. And you know, I'm not there, but I'm learning, and there's a lot of water under the bridge from where it went from when we started in 2017, and um you know, we're still scaling, but there's a lot of stuff that I wished I would have known. If somebody would have just told me, hey, watch out for this, or if you could do it this way, could have saved me a lot of time.
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Shannon:Yeah, having a mentor in that space is just really uh uh precious. I wrote down a couple of things um while you were talking. Uh I it reminded me of an idea when you were talking about, you know, kind of like you know, being that solution, like Windows are our Mac. Uh, maybe you'll find this funny. I hope this doesn't get me in trouble. But I was like, you know, there's nothing I'd love more than to do a uh an ad at some point. Um, you know, whether that's uh you know technology driven. At one point I was talking about doing it from a marketing perspective. Do you remember the commercials uh where you had the original PC and the guy was in a uh wore glasses and had a suit and tie or often always a tie, buttoned up shirt, slacks, and then you had Mac. And Mac had like dirty blonde hair, kind of you know, long and unkept, uh baggy jeans almost, and it was just kind of like, you know, we're just a PC, we do this, we're kind of boring or whatever. And it was like, we're a Mac, you know, and it's like we're the cool kid on the block, right? Or whatever. And I was like, for our industry, I actually thought uh a clever idea for a video would be to do that in reverse and to be like, hey, I'm the cool um look-at-me big software, uh, big market, big RTO company or whatever, and then like to do the opposite effect where it's just like, hey, I'm just a boring RTO company. Uh I really like to take care of my customers and like we really focus on, you know, you. And I was like, how great would that work for this industry? Because the industry is so ultra conservative that it's like I would appreciate the PC side. So, I don't know. I was just I don't know. I'm thinking about uh uh uh creativity, uh you know, I feel like is the is the key uh a lot of times, Jason. I'm learning a lot about this uh uh myself and we can we can get into those adventures at some point. Um, but that's all my test scores. Anybody who comes back, I'm always like really heavy on ideas, really, really like light on implementation. So I'm like, any of you guys that's got one needs ideas, I can give them to you. I just can't actually make them work. I think that's where guys like Jason excel where I don't.
Jason Graber:It's funny because I would say I'm the same way. I've got a billion ideas, and I mean, ideas are I'm like, you know, it's all about execution. So, I think it's been a discipline of mine because in the early days I did have way too many ideas, and I would give those to my team, and you would change directions too often, and it was just it causes a lot of chaos in an organization. However, I think it's my and your biggest asset, right? I mean, if you can be creative and you know, understanding customer problems or interests, and then providing solutions to those problems, I mean, it takes a lot of creativity. So it's just harnessing it. And that's one thing I've definitely grown a lot and learned a lot in the last two years, probably, is like, hey, number one, you have a team now, and whatever comes out of your mouth is important, and your team respects you and you have authority in your company. So what you share, they value and they think that it's really important. And it may not be. So you got to be very careful about what ideas you share because people are like, that's a great idea, let's do it today. And they're like, No, wait, wait, wait, don't stop what you're doing now to do this. Like, wait. So that's been something I've had to learn. You you know, you don't stop dreaming and don't stop having ideas, but you you share them strategically with your team. And what I've learned is I I share them only with my leadership team, and I have a very clear understanding. Leadership team, I'm gonna vomit a lot of ideas at you. Don't do anything about it, just hear them, you know. Um, and then we'll decide, you know, see what sticks, right? But as your team grows, you cannot do that to the whole team. And I learned that, right? Because when we were young and we had four people, well, my whole team was the leadership team. I needed to do that to everybody. And now we have 15 people, and you know, you can't you can't do that anymore. Um, however, you know, you need to give people um early communication if there's an idea that's gonna stick, tell people early. Um, but yeah, that was on that was a revolutionary point where I was like, oh, I can't just tell everybody, you know, my team all these ideas. Not that it's bad, it's just that they're gonna take them and run, and then it's gonna cause a lot of confusion.
Shannon:It's easy to do, it's easy to have happen. Um, I've heard stories not just in the shed industry, but even outside the industry where the boss comes in and it's like, okay, new idea. I got this. I've been cooking this up, I've been thinking about this. This is our next big idea. Me and you may be guilty of this, right? Uh, and everybody's looking at you, you're like, yeah, right, but that that changes the everything. And you're just like, you're right. You know, maybe I should uh I gotta think this thing through, but you're just so excited for that. But I'll but I'll tell you what this does at Segway is really good into something else you said, where you talk about technologies here to stay, right? You know, think about what AI, and I know that people get you know so tired of. Hearing about AI just the same way as they got tired of hearing about, you know, uh the dot-com boom or whatever it is. It's whatever the newest, biggest, best thing is social media. But um, but I mean it really is here to stay. I mean, you know, uh, minus the you know, the Lord coming home to rescue us all, we're probably gonna be in some form of technology. But it goes back to what you said, even not being a programmer, having ideas, the one thing that you recognized is that you needed systems and processes. And I think we could almost just hammer on systems and processes. So, when you have all these ideas, what's gonna help implement them? And technology plays such a big role in our in our lives today. Um, let's get some of your thoughts on that.
Jason Graber:Yeah, it's a really relevant. This morning we had a call with some of the team members, and we were just talking about with technology, it's actually systems over processes. And you need both, but if you want to stay agile, which we all do, it's just an like inherently harder, the bigger you get. It's just how it works. So if we want to stay agile, you don't want a lot of processes because the more processes you have, the more slower things get. But you need some. So I would rather think in systems because when you think in systems, then those are things that automate work, not slow work down. Processes are things that work has to flow through, and systems are things that push work through. And so we've just really been spending a lot of time thinking about systems for work so that it just eliminates a lot of training requirements and needs. It eliminates a lot of questions. Um, if some feedback is required during a process, the system prompts that feedback. So there's just a lot of things that I've been thinking about. Um, as a software company, we have the luxury to use software, you know, and even build our own software um for our own, you know, needs. And um, it's actually it's really interesting because you can get caught up in that too. And it's like, oh, well, we've we're building all of our own internal processes and we're not delivering any value to the customer. Well, you there's got to be a balance there. Like the customer is the most important. But think about it this way: if I build a system that saves me two hours a week and that pays forever in perpetuity, I just saved you know hours and hours and hours of time. Um, so the compound effect is huge. So we dedicate a portion of our energy, of our time, about 10%, to build systems. Because if we do that, that's going to pay off long term. But if we were spending 80% of our time building systems, like that wouldn't serve the customer. Um, so yeah, I think you know, technology now is just going to allow us to build these systems so much better, so much faster. And that brings us back to creative thinking, right? Because you can build a system, but to what end, right? You're trying to solve a problem. Most of the time, it's like, I've got this objective, I need this thing to happen. And until I define that really well, I know what this process is, I can't build a system around it. So, where a lot of people fail is they try to automate a thing before they do the thing. And they're like, Well, you don't you don't even know what works, right? So I tell my team and I tell everybody, it's like, do it the hard way first. Like do it, do it manually, like use a spreadsheet, whatever. I don't care. Track it on paper, whatever it takes, do it the hard way, and then figure out how you can automate it. Because if you try to automate it or build systems around it first, you don't know what you're trying to accomplish. So that's been something that's just like a principle that we live by.
Shannon:It's like, you know, with the with the advent of AI, even like the amount of work it takes off. You're you said, you know, hey, I'm I'm a you know, I'm a software company, but I'm not a programmer. I don't write code.
Jason Graber:Yeah.
Shannon:Uh excuse me. It's unnecessary in the middle of the day. Um you need what you need what I'm having. I've over here drinking water. I've been I think I'm crashing out from all the sugar I've been eating. Um but no, I'm I'm thinking about like AI, and like someone the other day was showing me like, hey, I've never built a website in my life, but take a look at this website I just built on AI, and it was just like, wow, that actually looks really good. And of course, the the the the bigger conversation starts coming in is like, you know, uh how how you know uh SEO friendly is this? You know, like can you, you know, is it and it's like next thing you know, you can prompt it to ask it questions about you know indexing, and it's just there's just really no end to um the fact that we have information available. We're just finding a place or it, you know, I've heard someone say this recently. It was uh no telling where, but it said we're we have more information available to us at our fingertips than at any point in history, and we might be the dumbest we've ever been. Um so so you know, that sounds like a harsh comment or whatever, but you know the question really is like why and how are we not using that technology, the information that is available at our fingertips? How and why are we not using it um better?
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Jason Graber:Yeah, I think it's being creative enough and using it correctly. And I think it's just so new that we don't really know how to use it yet. We're used to Google and search engines and the internet and published content that we go consume. It's there. I'm talking specifically about AI right now, but like, you know, we're used to you know, going to Google and searching something and then going through articles and you know, figuring it out. That is that is research, and that's kind of figuring out like that's consuming content in in a way, and that's how we're using AI right now. And it's just like the tip of the iceberg. It's not even it's not even really what AI is the best at, I would argue. I would say that's true. It's not what it's best at, it's really good at it, but it's so good at so many other things that that's just you know cool. But the way I've been thinking about AI and the way that I'm leveraging it is I think about AI as my thought partner. So when I have a complex problem that I'm trying to solve, what would you normally do? You would find somebody to talk to about it. Like, well, I'm thinking about this problem that we have. Let's talk through this. Well, now you have access to that person through Chat GPT, just go do that. And the first prompt can just be like, hey, identify yourself, what your role is, what the business problem that you're thinking about, and then you give the prompt to the chat GPT, the AI, the directive of I want you to act as my thought partner, and I want you to think this through with me. And I want you to ask me questions that would prompt me to think deeper about this thing. And you just start going at it, like it's literally just a thought partner experiment. And I've used this to I've used this to get better and more knowledge about so many things, and one that I'm working on right now is material resource planning. So this is an age-old problem. It's been solved and is being solved by you know billion-dollar companies. So how do you make it work for shed companies? And how and and and really like at its basic, you know, functionality, what is material resource planning and how does it work? And how do SAP and Oracle and other companies, how do they do it? And I've just gotten so many great results from using just Chat GPT or Claude or Anthropic or whatever, um, as a thought partner and just saying, okay, you know, I want to I want to build this for my company, and I want you to ask me questions, and I want you to kind of act as like a material resource planning expert. And I want you to, you know, help me understand this at a deeper level. And that that I think is something that people just aren't doing as much. I I don't see people doing that as much as using it as a search engine. And once we start doing that, that's a step closer to using it to its full potential. And then you you're gonna pretty soon see other uses. And to be perfectly honest, I don't even think we all, I don't know what it's capable of, and even like how how to use it, because it requires a paradigm shift. It's almost like the internet when it came along is like email, what we don't need email, what's that? You know, until you understand what it's capable of, you don't really know how to use it, and that's where most of us are. But I read a really good book called Um The AI Driven Leader, and that's what its premise was. Use AI as a thought partner, and that's a great way to level up.
Shannon:I think the best the best advice I got was kind of goes along with what you're saying, which was like, we're using AI wrong. You've got to prompt it to um ask it what the best questions are to ask it. Uh as opposed to like coming up with your own questions, ask it what are the best questions I could ask you if I'm looking to build a website. And then ask those questions. And then all I do is like afterwards say, okay, now elaborate on that and tell me what are the things that I would need. You know, do I need to build something uh custom coded or, you know, do I need to build something like what's going to give me the best opportunity? Should I just use a, you know, uh uh known web uh, you know, uh uh hosting site or you know, whatever, just all the details. It's amazing that you can you can come in without like all of the expertise and you can get the same information. So a lot of it comes down to your creativity and your ability to be driven because you can beat your competition uh through your efforts. Um it doesn't it doesn't always have to be your skill, it doesn't always have to be your finances. Like there are things that you can do to maintain a competitive advantage for quite quite some time.
Jason Graber:Yeah, yeah, 100%. And I think that's just our our like desire to continue to learn, like never stop learning. I think that's one of my core principles in my life is like I'm I'm never gonna be done learning. As much as I probably know more than I think I know about a lot of this stuff, um, there's just so much to learn, and I'm just a student of it, and you know, I expose myself to a lot of it. I go to tech meetups and I go to events where there's a lot of people much smarter than me that are there, and you know, I get to talk to them and um, you know, use AI as a thought partner. There's just a lot of things you can do, and then you know, that's increasing your knowledge, I think. And then there's the whole side of I know we're talking about AI a lot, but like that's then there's the whole side of like leveraging it to actually get work done, to actually produce things for you. And it's fantastic at that. I mean, at the basic level, having it produce like a terms of service document and a privacy policy, and you know, a contractor agreement, and like all these things that are like you would have to go to Google, find a template, download it, modify it. You can just tell it what you want and it spits out these this great contract, and then you can be like, okay, like make it better, bulletproof it. I had this experience where this contractor did this to me, fixed, you know, makes that as bulletproof for this, and it's just great. It's so fantastic. So it can save you a lot of money when it comes to you know content creation and not just like marketing content creation, but just you know, that kind of stuff.
Shannon:Well, I mean, even just social media content creation, if you're just trying to keep your you know, your feed uh full uh for a month on just basic social media content, uh just you know, uh now uh you know there's a lot of debate on that, you know. Oh, this picture looks too AI. Don't get me wrong, like I look, I just don't get on social media as much as I used to. And really, I'm I'm old enough that you know, boomer book is about the only thing I do, you know, at this point. Facebook is about it for me. Um I know that other things are useful and they're awesome and and they they can be. It just, you know, I also understand that conservative mindset to be like, I don't know. I can only I can only handle so much, especially when it's social. And social media doesn't often feel like real life, but uh I read where somebody said, Man, these AI videos uh that you're seeing constantly on Facebook, gotta be messing with these the the elderly crowd. Because I mean, like, it's nothing to see a bear uh come into a yard and a cat goes and runs it off, and then you see like a little kid ride off on the bear on a horse saddle, and you're just like, what's going on? I don't even know what's happening. And like people see these videos and they're like, Look at this, look what happened in Florida, you know, and they're just like, No, it's not, it didn't happen at all, because you can't tell fake from real sometimes anymore. And that's kind of a dangerous place to be in society that we can manifest documents, manifest um I you can use it's like anything, Jason. You can use it for good or bad. Right. You can use it for good or bad, no matter what it is, and like you hope that people uh choose to use it for for good, but those things are a reality. Um wow, we we just got into a quick AI commercial. You know, like basically, but there's a couple other things I wrote down that you said early on, and maybe we can talk about that. It's very matter-of fact. I want to make sure to get in here before we forget new things that are happening over at Shed Suite. So I don't want to forget that. I want to make sure that we allow time for that. You're uh advertiser with us and a resource in the industry, and we just appreciate that. Want to make sure that we, you know, can show as much love as as we can. Uh, but you you used this term earlier. You said sometimes it's easy to get too close to the industry when you work in it. I've noticed that a lot whenever I listen to salespeople talk, you know, like um, you know, you understand the industry, you know the players in the industry, or you know the big companies in the industry, and that comes with its own set of um oh, I don't know. It creates its own identity that may make you say, Well, I could never compete with those guys, or I could never do that, or whatever it is. But talk about being too close to the industry and not really being able to take an outside in look at it. What does that mean to you right now in 2020, almost 2026, Jason? Already. And this will probably come out in 2026 or close to it. Uh it'll come out probably in December or something.
Jason Graber:Yeah, I don't I haven't really thought too much about that. I mean, I think when I was mentioning like being really close to um the work or the problem that you're trying to solve, sometimes you you don't realize how much you know or how much you assume, I guess. It's kind of what that's that's where I'm learning. Like, you know, we we see it when we're trying to develop a new feature for a certain subset of users. Like, for instance, like developing a dashboard for dispatchers. Well, I've been in the industry for so long and I know so much that I it's almost not um advantageous. Like it's so interesting to think about. You think about, oh, the domain expert, that is the most valuable person. But it's actually not the case in a lot of ways, which is like a paradigm shift because you're like, oh, I thought, you know, that's the advantage that you have. You're a domain expert, you've been around it a long time. But then I bring in a brand, like person like Victoria, my user experience designer, and Gallia, my UI designer. And they have no idea. I mean, they've been working with me for a while, but like the shed industry in general, they don't really know. So, they start asking these users questions around, you know, what's your job? What do you, what's your biggest pain points? Like, how do you go about scheduling these orders and all this stuff? And I'm like, oh my goodness, I'm way too close to this problem. Like, I I never even considered that. And I wouldn't have even asked that question. And it's what's interesting is that's like another reason why it's a myth to think I don't know enough, I'm not technical enough to solve this problem. You just need to be curious enough, right? And then be able to learn the hard skills that's required to like actually build the software. But like I that was a revelation for me. It's like, you know what? I domain experts are great, and I I value my experience that I've had in the industry, and I think it does have a lot of value. But when I can see a really skilled user experience designer person. Come in and be extremely effective by asking the right questions to a user that they're building a saw solution for. Like that's actually really encouraging because that they don't have 10 years experience in the shed industry. They just got really good at understanding, you know, asking good questions, interviewing customers and compiling user requirements and then designing a software around it. You can learn that. That's a skill. That's not a that's not experience that you can't get. That's a skill that you can learn. So I know that didn't answer your question, but that's kind of what I was talking about when I was like, you know, I found that I was too close to the problem sometimes. Um, you know, but and to be frank, like I'm close to the industry. Yeah, I know a lot of players, I know a lot of the people, um, but I don't really spend a lot of time there necessarily. I'm I'm a product-driven guy. I love product. What I do like to do is talk to customers, people in the industry about their vision and plans for the future. And, you know, I want to hear um what they think is gonna happen in the future. And I'm really close to looking at how is the, I think this is really relevant, like how is the carport industry and the steel frame building industry in the shed industry going to shift over the next couple years? Um, and it's really interesting. I don't have all the answers. I'm just interested to look at it because I think it's gonna change. Um, you know, in the past business was done a certain way. Um, shed dealers sold carports, and now I'm just seeing a lot of shed companies saying, Well, why don't we sell carports at the brand level? You know, and and this is gonna disrupt a lot of things. Like, what's this gonna do? Well, it's kind of like I'm seeing it play out almost exactly like rent to own played out, like 10 years, five, not 10 years ago, because I don't know, but like five or six years ago, where uh, and that's before my time, but even 10 years before my time, people tell me, you know, rent to own came about by rental companies going to the dealer and say, hey, let me offer you another solution to sell more buildings, right? This is another payment option that you can give to your customers. It was a great service, fantastic. Now the dealer can say, Hey, let me sell you this building for cash today, or I can sell it to you on rent to own. And that's how rent to own came about. It's how it got into the industry, but it started at that dealer level, and then we saw uh maturity of the industry over time, and rent-to-own companies started going to the brand level and you know, working those partnerships because they're more valuable. They're like, hey, let's work with. So I think that's kind of what I'm seeing in the carport industry too. I'm seeing that, oh, you know, the way we used to do things is yeah, dealers sold carports. Am I seeing it happen again, you know, with with carports that I saw with Rent Owned? It seems like it. I don't know for sure, but it kind of seems like it. So those are fascinating things I like to look at.
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Shannon:The manufacturers, like, you know, that are getting into the carport side because they have such a large dealer network that they can provide them with a solution and then also be in control of the of the customer experience, the pricing, the delivery. Yeah. Uh the fact that, you know, you're all of a sudden building so many sheds, you buy a roll former to start producing your own metal because it becomes more financially effective than ordering your metal. And it's like, well, what are we gonna do with this roll former? Guess what? We're gonna sell metal to other people in the industry. Or, you know, and like that that the hard thing, you know, uh is to separate the the industry is so connected, but you know, through relationships. But then there's also this side where it's like you you can call up your buddy and say, you know, where'd you get that role form, or what'd you pay for it? How much has it helped you? What's it look like on your bottom line? Um, you know, hey, we're thinking about doing that. And all of a sudden you're in the carport business because you say, hey, shed sales have been kind of in a slump. So we started this other thing over here. Um, so I agree with you. The matter of fact, I'm gonna I'm gonna take that time to do a quick little commercial for myself. Um, I get to solicit just because you know, we do the show. Uh, but uh, you know, that's something that I've considered through our consultation efforts, uh, even creating a revenue stream with mergers and acquisitions. I've had quite a few companies call me over the years, even some RTO portfolios, you know, go up for sale and say, hey, do you have any connections? You know, I've gotten I've gotten a lot of people say, hey, you know, would you like to, you know, help be a connector because that's what you do and you get paid for it. And I'm like, yeah, I'd love to. Well, it's hard to turn down those opportunities. I mean, you know, I've tried to hear from the Lord on them, obviously. And I think there for a couple of years, I kind of got got lost, you know, in the opportunity. And I've kind of come back full circle post, you know, uh uh our marketing experience to kind of say, well, well, who am I? And like what do I want to do? And most importantly, like, Lord, what do you want from me? Like, because sometimes it's easier to forget that part when you're in the thralls of business every day. But I'll tell you what, like, we've already been able to help um, we've already been able to help be a liaison or a broker to some extent to help make some connections for a couple companies. And I've been talking about this for a year or two now, just based off of what I'm hearing, is I think that you are gonna see more mergers and acquisitions, which kind of leads me to my next question when we think about the fragmentation of the industry overall, Jason. You know, from a tech perspective, you know, is there is that like we talked about rent-owned, right? We talked about how it matured and like it was a service-based situation initially. And now, like, look, it's so competitive. Yeah, it's so competitive and rent-owned, in my opinion. Just my opinion. It's so competitive that it's like, what will you give away to get the business? I mean, I'm convinced that there's companies out there giving away their yield, you know, to keep the business or to gain the business, you know, uh, and that just I that's probably not true. And that's probably, you know, uh hypersensitive way of looking at it or whatever, but it feels that way because it's like, man, it's no longer just helping. I think Vance talked about this when he was on the show, to your point. It started out as a service, and now it's like, hey, to get your rent to own, I'll give you this or give whatever. I'm not gonna sit here and dog on rent to own. I'm saying tech is kind of in that same boat. And with the fragmentation of the industry, does an all-in-one system exist? If not, will it? Are are are you or others going for that? Is there a race to the top, you know, and trying to create good systems and processes through technology to solve problems for a manufacturer, whether you're selling $500,000 a year, you know, or $300 million a year? That's a huge question. So feel free to dissect that however you want and share your thoughts on whatever parts you want.
Jason Graber:Yeah, it's a really good question. Um, you know, I've always been uh a product focused founder, and uh there's this term called product-led growth, which Wes Bush is a big profoner. He's built uh wrote a couple books, he's active on LinkedIn. I follow him. His his whole coaching system is product-led growth PLG. And I just I believe in it a lot, especially in a in an industry, a small niche industry like you know, sheds. It's not small, but like it's very niche. Like our shed sweet is for shed companies and carpour companies, right? Small. Um the best product will always be relevant. Always. It doesn't matter, you know, even how bad you do your marketing. You're just gonna if you have a good product, it's always gonna be relevant. Is there room for multiple? Yeah, I think there are, but because any industry is very, you just don't see like one or two solutions uh for an industry. Um, but you know, given enough time, I think Shed Suite will be almost a you know all in one solution or or really close to it, and and the things that it doesn't do internally will have really great integration capabilities. Um so yeah, I think our vision is the more that we can help the shed company do, the better we serve them and the more healthy we are, because the more solutions we give to the shed company, you know, the more business we get from them. That's just the way it works. Um so yeah, to answer your question, I think that you know, I see that the the industry, like the tech industry or software solutions um maturing. Um, and you're gonna continue to see like efforts of new new players, like ideas that come on that that that want to do similar things. And I think there's absolutely room for it. I just think that the the best products will always be relevant and they'll just rise to the top um when it comes to your options. And like anything else, there's usually like different priced and um you know quality and type of products that people want. You know, if you want a low-cost option, that might actually work well for you and the type of business you have. And there's actually, you know, business models inside the shed industry that we're really not targeting. You know, we're not going after the dealers. And if there's a solution that is targeting dealers, that's fine. Um, we want to really focus in on the brand, the manufacturer, the company that is responsible for the logo on the trucks. Um, that's that's who we want to serve, and we want to serve them really well. Um and yeah, I think there's always going to be options. And when when we go to the Shed Expo and we go anywhere, um, I encourage everybody to you know do your due diligence. Like you should you should do a demo with everybody, you know, talk to everybody. And I think as we go, the software solution itself, I tell my team this like, software isn't our moat anymore. Our moat is our ability to innovate. And that's it. So as we grow, anybody can build software, but not just anybody can assemble a high-performing development team that can innovate at a really fast and you know, precise and meticulous uh speed and and way. Like if you are solving business problems for your customers uh precisely, sustainably, and quickly, that's a defense. Now you've got a mode. But just building software is just not a mode anymore because I mean you've got uh AIs that can build software. Um it's supporting it, you know, customer support is huge, um, ability to get people on it quickly, and then sustainability and performance, like that's huge. Like if your software isn't isn't fast and if it's unreliable, if it's offline and you can't do your business, like that's a big deal. Um, especially in a business critical situation like us, like Shed Suite has a 99.99% uptime, which is absolutely incredible. And my team is really proud of it, and we track how many bugs get shipped to production, and we're really proud of it. Like, if a bug gets shipped to production, that's a problem. And we address that problem and we try to make that not happen again. Um, so I think it's about yeah, it's just it's just about the level of care and the level of precision, level of in innovation, and there's gonna be people like Shed Suite that are gonna care that much and they're gonna innovate at a really high level. And I don't think we'll be the only one. I think there'll be more than one of them.
Shannon:Well, there's a lot of talent, I mean, out there for sure. And there's a like you said, there's there's room to help, uh, a room for others. You know, it really comes down to, you know, uh if you've got a good product at a good price, you know, you build confidence with the uh, you know, and you can communicate well with everybody. I mean, it's a winning situation, but sometimes it's who you find. Uh sometimes there's, I mean, that's why I love doing the podcast, is is there's like, you know, I I'm a communicator. I, you know, I've learned this about myself, even as I I've taken some time away to self-diagnose like what my drive is and what my interest is. You know, I always find it interesting whenever you say, you know, tech or all in one system. It's like, man, it's so ambiguous, Jason, that it's a struggle for me because of the fragmentation of the industry. And and having traveled in probably 30 states and met with at least someone in each state, um, you know, who's a shed manufacturer dealer or involved in some way, shape, or form. Um, the one thing that I've noticed is is that like people want resources, they prefer an all of one if possible, but they've built their their system up so that it's different. So I I guess what I'm trying to say is like even the question that you ask. Um I last year I was at the Shed Haulers barbecued down in Georgia, and they were doing a a mule and a and a challenger, you know, and they were like, Well, you gotta overcome the mule's been around for so long, it's obviously a staple in our community. And the challenger coming in and trying to establish, you know, what they do. Uh, they were like, we've had uh a barrier just getting around some of the language that people call certain things because the patriarch in the industry for a long time has been this mule, and then the wording around it. Well, that happens I found in tech as well. It's really hard when people say marketing. It's like, well, well, Jason does marketing, he does, but like what all does he do? It's like, well, I don't know. Do you guys do brochures? And you're like, no, and it's like, well, they don't do marketing, and it's like, well, wait a minute, we got to get back to identifying the value proposition because there's a very important part of marketing that you do, right? That and and and and if you can grow that to serve your customers, well, that's just good. It just allows you to have autonomy with your customers and keep um an experience in-house as best as you can. But what are some of those things that you see? I mean, what are some things that are coming up to help create that all in one system? Either things that you're doing, feel free to take this time to talk about new Shed Suite products or services too. Hey, sell them on it, buddy. I'm in your corner. Buy something from this guy.
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Jason Graber:I'm very, very excited about our future. I mean, we've got we've got some really innovative initiatives coming and that honestly we nobody we haven't even talked about yet that could fail. They're so crazy that they may not even work. Um, but one of them, I won't go into a lot of detail, but one of them is um like a CAD system. We're literally gonna create CAD for shed companies that you're gonna be able to go in and set up and and through a through parameter-driven um JSON, that's getting a little technical, but like be it being able to define your models um at a parameter level and then have a CAD system generate all your 3D assets, um, studs, floor joists, runners, and everything. And you be able to, and this is going to be a big component of our material resource planning tool that we're trying to uh that we're developing now, is you know, one of the biggest pain points in the shed industry that we've not addressed yet is the ability to track costs, material and labor inside the shed suite and and and of the shed. Um, we don't have the ability for you to point to a shed and say, this lofted barn that's got this serial number cost me this much money to make, and I'm selling it for this much money. Um, that's a problem. Like shed companies need to be able to know that, but to be able to get that data sustainably, you could just go enter that number. But to be able to do it at a at scale, you know, at 300 million a year, that's not gonna work. That's that's not sustainable. So you have to tie, you have to bring it all the way down to Shed Suite has to host the sheds, the configuration of The sheds and the components of the sheds, so that when the manufacturing happens, you're able to know how many pieces of material go into every shed, what the price of the material was when you bought it, how much it cost when you used it, and how much labor that you put into it so that you can calculate automatically, no manual calculations, just you set up all the set all this up, and a work order comes in and it you finish production and it says you it cost you this much money to build the shed. So that's a big initiative. Like that is something that you know when we get that done, um, I think is gonna be pretty revolutionary. I mean, there's a lot of our competitors are working on something like this. Um, and if you know me, I'm like, well, I'm not just gonna do it, I'm gonna do it like the hard like do it like crazy. And I pitched it to my team. I was like, what if we built like SketchUp inside Shed Suite, like CAD, where they can actually design their and uh we started building a couple prototypes, and my dev team was like, Yeah, it's doable, absolutely doable. And building an AI agent on top of it where you can literally tell it, like talk to it, and it generates your parameter file that generates 3D models actually works, which is pretty crazy. Uh so that's what we're working on. Working on that. Um, 2026 will probably start to see some of that. Um, we're working on uh RTO Suite, which is another big like pain point the industry has. You know, RTO Pro is recently purchased and you know, currently moving a lot of people to new payment processor and saying that they're not going up in rates, but it's gonna happen. So there's gonna be a lot of shakeup in the RTO industry in the next couple years. So we're trying to get ahead of that with RTO suite. Um, and that's really gonna help Shed Suite a lot because the shed buyer, the customer life cycle on a rent-to-owned contract doesn't end when the building gets delivered to the customer. And in Shed Suite, we do a really great job marketing the shed with e-commerce, selling the shed with the dealer dashboards and the quotes and the point of sale and the PDFs, digital signatures and payments. And the driver app is awesome at scheduling and delivering. But once the building is delivered to the customer, and then the rental company says, hey, customer needs to return this building, it's a pain point. There's a big issue there. Like there's workarounds where you can enter the inventory back into Shed Suite and you can resell it. But we want to close that customer lifecycle loop and make it seamless, make it easy, where you can initiate a rental return pickup, use the driver app, go pick it up, bring it back into inventory, resell it. Um, and we're creating all of this in a very open way. We're not trying to create it in a way that's like, oh, you can't use this feature unless you use RTO suite. We're actually gonna be building this functionality to use this functionality within Chetsuite on an open API. So the API that RTO suite is gonna use to create rental returns, track rental returns, track repos sales, it's all gonna be done using an open API, which is really exciting because now any rent-to-own contract management software, if they're cloud-based, if they're innovative, if they if they have an API, they'd be able to use it and they'd be able to do the same thing as what RTO suite's doing. So RTO suite is a Shed Suite company, but it's not going to be you have to use RTO suite if you're gonna use Shed Suite. You can use either or or or both.
Shannon:No, so let's make sure we make sure we clarify for those that are like deep in the uh uh in the in the weeds here on the name, RTO suite. This is not Shed Suite getting into the RTO space. No, no, no. Servicing the RTO uh uh clients through the POS that you already have in place, correct?
Jason Graber:Correct, yeah, yeah. So that's one of our core values, though. And that's what a lot of um like the trust that we have in the industry is based on that core value that we are never gonna compete with our customers. We're never gonna be a shed company, we're never gonna be a rent-to-owned company. We always want to build software to support those industries and those companies. So, yeah, Ren, thank you for that clarification. I mean, RTO Suite is designed to replace RTO Pro. It is a software to manage, think of it as like a customer communication and asset tracking platform. Know where your sheds are, know what the performance of them are, bill your customers, collect money, and communicate with your customers. Um which I think is is really awesome. And we have our our like release scheduled for February 20th, I think. Uh we want to do like our first release at our uh Shed Suite User Conference here in Florida. I think it's February 20th, it might be 21st, February 21st, but um check the calendar really quick. February 20th is a Friday. So we'll be doing that. Um yeah, and then you know, we're we can got a lot of cool stuff. We just launched uh an order map feature on the sales report, which is really fun. Um now you can go to the sales report as an office admin, a sales rep, or a dealer, and you can run a sales report and then look at the map and you can see where all those orders are. So you could say, Yeah, show me all the orders that were off lot sales, and then the map will show you where they went. So you'd be like, oh well, and you can start to see pockets of customers. This will really help you, you know, with your marketing efforts and say, Well, I'm selling a lot of buildings in this area. Um, that seems like I should focus my marketing efforts there. It's like obviously working. Um, or you can see areas that you're not selling into and figure out why you're not, and maybe there's an opportunity there to put some marketing effort into that. Um, so that's pretty exciting, and just overall, just trying to build um more of an open system, and that you talked about, you know, as a um all-in-one platform, I I don't think that's really a like a realistic um expectation.
Shannon:It's so tough. It's so tough when you talk about RTO suite earlier. I think five years ago, I was like, I wish I had the capacity or the ability, because if someone would build something that's an alternative to RTO Pro, like they're really gonna do well. And it uh maybe he was listening to the podcast. I'm gonna I'm gonna assume that he was, and I'm gonna say Carselowey was listening, and it probably I deserve no credit for it, I'm sure. Uh, but the reality is, you know, they took it on and uh have been pushing it the last couple of years, um, yeah, orr a year or two or whatever, really amping it up, it seemed like this year at the um at the uh NSRA. But you know, there's just opportunity there. And I remember hearing that RTL Pro got sold, you know, here about six, eight months ago. Somebody had mentioned it to me. And I thought, well, yeah, I mean, that's kind of going to what you said, you know, it's gonna increase the cost. And everybody over here has been kind of caught, you know, red-handed with their hand in the cookie jar, going, Well, what do I do? And some of these companies, you know, have decided to build something internally their self, you know, to solve that problem. And I think that's what happens a lot in the industry, Jason. Correct me if I'm wrong, but it seems like, you know, when people say, Well, you know, to your point, to not be your competition or ownership company or RTO company. And I hear what you're saying, so I'm not criticizing here, but some people do kind of dabble into that world. And I think a lot of times it's because they're like, hey, I needed to build a solution for myself because one didn't exist. And then all of a sudden you build one for yourself and you go, wait a minute, I could sell this to the industry. Well, now this is complicated because it's like, oh no, what you know, you're you're you're buying from your competitor the solution. And we're all such a good industry that we don't even think about that. You know, we're just like, no, they're probably good guys. And you know what? They probably are good guys, you know, they really are. Uh, but then it becomes questionable whenever you're vulnerable, you know, in your business. So, like, you got to think through all of these things. And to your point earlier, doing your due diligence, you know, helps. And look, this is just another shameless plug, but that's why consultation matters, in my opinion. Like, I have learned that no matter what adventure we've got into, you typically need to educate uh to sell. And to me, that's consultation. We've just kind of I've always done it at the podcast level, I've always done it through the Should Geek brand naturally and not attempted to monetize it because my heart has been to be a helper. Let me help people. And all of a sudden you're like helping people make hundreds of thousands or millions of dollars, and you're like, hey, wait a minute. I didn't can I get a dollar? You know, it's like, uh, anybody want to give me a dollar off of that? And so you learn, you know, and you systematically learn through your experiences of like, hey, how can I help people help myself be transparent? But man, that's a complicated thing in a small niche industry like we have. You you've walked the wire very well, in my opinion. And you've done just such a good job with your brand on how you how you've done that, that I I admire that.
Jason Graber:So thank you. Yeah, I think that you you have opportunity to do what you just said. You know, if you if you have your own shed company or you have your own rent-owned company and you build a solution and you can bring it to market, you there is opportunity there. I mean, I would strong, I'm biased, but I would just argue that it's just not as big of an opportunity as we would have because we're unbiased and we want to serve the shed industry and the carport industry and the you know the rent-owned industry as a software company. And, you know, that trust is not um bought, it's earned, and it takes a long time to earn it. Um and that's where I'm you know, not supposed to be proud, right? But you know, I'm proud of what we've done, and I've I'm very happy with the way we've treated people, the the way that um our brand is perceived in the industry, and that's of utmost importance to me because there is no way for us to scale if there isn't that brand trust and um the confidence that we're gonna do the right thing. And you know, because there's just there is a lot of trust that needs to happen because for us to be able to take the data we now have and start a rent-to-owned company would absolutely be the wrong, the the worst move that we can make, right? However, could we make a lot of money? Yeah, we probably could, but it would be a terrible move. So we'll never short-lived.
Shannon:It's often like you know, fast success is is short-lived, you know. Uh and and I I I've been making this. I think my last article in uh SPJ kind of said that. It was like, man, the pain points of success will teach you possibly far more than the pain points of failure. Yeah, you know, um, it is it is bewildering how you know I hear people say I want to stay in the middle, and I'm like, I get it. I totally get it, because too much failure, you know, you feel just you know like a failure. Too much success, you're just like, I'm overwhelmed. Like I didn't plan for this. What do I do next? And like everybody wants to say, I want good, slow, steady growth. And that really is the key, you know. I think uh so if you can serve everything, brother. An hour goes by faster than you can possibly like yeah, it just and when you're having good conversation with good people, it goes easier. I didn't even get into half of the notes and stuff that I sit here and wrote down, you know. I just kind of try to uh surface level it, but always enjoy having you on, you know, and appreciate your advertising commitment and really just your leadership and what you've done in the industry, how you've done it, uh being able to connect with you, learn from you. I try to uh watch everybody and uh, you know, watching you and how you've handled things have just been really good. And man, you've always been fair and fun, whether I've competed with you or collaborated with you. You've just always been a really decent guy.
Jason Graber:Uh yeah, if you're not gonna have fun, it's not worth doing. That's my opinion. Yeah, let's have some fun, man. Life's way too short. It's one of our core values. It's you know, life's too short not to have fun. So enjoy your work. Have fun.
Shannon:That's right, man. I love it. I love it. Anything else you want to share? How do people get in touch with you? We've got a link in our newsletter. So, for those of you guys who don't get our newsletter, just message me at info@shedgeek.com or my wife, Deanna, D-E-A-N-N-A@ shedgeek.com. We'll get your email, we'll put you into there. But there's links where you can go and click on uh lead forms and go and like uh uh suss out for yourself like what is Shed Suite? What do they do? What do they offer? Go look on his website and creep him a little bit and check out everything that they do. Um they'll appreciate that because it gives them a you know a good honest chance at winning your business. But uh what do you want to share? How do people reach you? What's the best way to get in touch with you?
Jason Graber:Yeah, I mean, obviously, our website's a great place to get in touch with us. We have uh a direct, like book your book a demo. We like to just again, like you made a comment, sales is consultation, like we don't want to sell you something you don't need. So, our sales process is let give us the privilege to sit with you and hear about your business. We want to understand what you do, what are your pain points, where what's your goals, what's your vision? Where do you want to go? Where is your you know vision to scale or is it to sustain, or is it to you know, maybe even just slim down, but be able to be more profitable? Is it so we really want to sit with you? And so myself or Josh, we'll sit with you for 30 minutes, get to ask you good questions. Um, so website, book a demo, you can obviously uh give us a call, but our we've got a chat widget on the website, you can chat with us as well. Um, but yeah, I mean we just want to get to know you, uh understand your business. We actually turn people away more than you think. Um, because if we realize that your business model isn't the right fit for us, we'll just tell you. You know, we we've been blessed enough to be able to have uh an extremely um stable and great customer base that are, you know, our retention rate's about 98%, and which you know says a lot. I think that you know numbers, revenue numbers are kind of that can be vanity in a lot of ways. It's like what I like to look at is what is your retention rate and what is your net promoter score? And we've we track those two things very closely. We ask our customers in the app, how happy are you with us? Uh what can we do better? And our net promoter score, uh it's kind of a weird number because if you're not familiar with net promoter score, it kind of seems weird, but it's in the 45 to 50 range, which is really good. Um, you can do some research on net promoter score. But anyway, um, those are the numbers that matter. And I think as you're starting to re research companies, you should ask those companies too. What is what's your retention rate? What what's your net promoter score? Um, what's your average length that a customer stays with you? Um, stuff like that, because that's gonna that's gonna indicate your experience with that provider. And you know, we just take it very seriously. And so, if we don't, if we don't think that we're gonna be a good fit for you, we'll just tell you. Um but yeah, we're starting to, and back to your, I'll do a little bit more of a like plug or commercial, but what we've decided to do is not try to compete outside of our customer base on like you know, auxiliary products. But what we really, really, really are passionate about is making our customers extremely successful. So, what does that look like? Like what we're passionate about is making our customers stand out. And so to do that, we've decided to do a couple more things for our customers, like marketing, uh, website design, logo design, brochure design. We do that stuff, but only for our customers. So if you're a Shed Suite customer, you know, you can engage the Shed Suite Services team and we'll do that stuff for you. But it's just in our effort to make our customer base and serve our customer base the best. And uh we never want to, you know, swim outside our lane. Uh, we know we're a software company, we want to do that, uh, but we want to serve our customers well. And it just turns out we had a really good branding team and a really good marketing team. And we were like, well, maybe we should, you know, see if a couple shed companies want this service. And turns out they did. And now we're actually booked through February. We don't have any more openings. We can't, we can't take on more clients, but you know, you can reach out. We are very honest with you. We like to, again, assess your current situation. What does your brand look like? What do you might need? Um, and be very honest with you. And you might just need one thing or two things, or you might need everything, um, but we'll tell you.
Shannon:And then kudos to you for recognizing, too, you know, that you're busy enough to say no, right? Like that's a hard thing to do, is to say, well, hey, we need to uh camp out here for a while and do a really good job before moving on. Because the temptation for growth and it being necessary is often a pitfall. It's something you can step off into and it's really hard to climb out of, uh, overpromise, underdeliver, those kind of things. So good for you to recognize that because not everybody uh, you know, will do that. You know, it's it was hard for me when I was selling sheds. I was just like, yeah, that hauler can get that building in there. You know, it took me a while to learn that lesson because I was just like, well, you know, you just wanted the sale. You were just going for the sale so hard that you wanted everything to be able to work. But sometimes you have to take a step back and say, Whoa, you know, that's a six-foot gate to an eight-foot building. Unless you're willing to pay for a crane or something, you know, might not get in there. But good kudos to you for that. I just always appreciated you, enjoyed talking to you at the expo. I certainly enjoy talking to you more. Wish you obviously nothing but the best. We need to do this again. We need to get you on here a couple of times a year just for relevancy's sake and to know what what's new and what's going on, but just the reality that you're a good conversationalist. I do think people enjoy listening to your thoughts on things.
Jason Graber:I hope so. And I mean, if anybody out there is like in the situation that I mentioned earlier in the show where you're you have this idea for an app, you're pretty close to a problem, and you're like, man, I wish I could do this, reach out. You can find me on LinkedIn or I've got a personal website, jasongraeber.com. You can go over there and find my cell phone number. Text me. I'd love to love to talk to you. Like just to give you pointers. Like, there's so many. Things that I've learned along the way that if I can just save you a little bit or kind of point you in the right direction, um, I wish somebody would have done that for me. So I'm happy to do that for you. If you have an app idea, reach out. I'd love to kind of point you in the right direction. There's some pretty cool tools you can use today that I can give you some pointers on.
Shannon:So excellent. Can't think of a better guy to recommend for it. Jason, I appreciate you so much. We've got some Florida-like weather ourselves here in southern Illinois today. So I'm going to take advantage of it here soon. Um wish you absolutely nothing but the best and always appreciate your kindness and consideration. Um shedsuite.com. If people want to know, go to our newsletter, click on the link, and you'll see more about it. Thanks for having me, man. All right. Thanks, Jason.
INTRO:Thanks again, Shed Pro, for being the Shed Geeks studio sponsor for 2025. If you need any more information about Shed Pro or about Shed Geek, just reach out. You can reach us by email at info@ ShedGeek.com. Or just go to our website www.shedgeek.com and submit a form with your information, and we'll be in contact right away. Thank you again for listening, as always, to today's episode of the Shedgeek Podcast. Thank you and have a blessed day.