Roofing Success
The Roofing Success Podcast is a show created to inspire roofing contractors to achieve optimal success in their roofing businesses. The host, Jim Ahlin, is the co-author of the book, "Internet Marketing For Roofing Contractors, How to TRIPLE Your Sales and Turn Your Roofing Website Into an Online Lead Generation Machine", and Co-Founder of Roofer Marketers, the Digital Marketing Agency for the roofing industry. On each episode, Jim will be sitting down with industry leaders to talk about their processes, the lessons they learned, and how to find success in roofing.
Roofing Success
How This Roofer Scaled by Fixing the One Thing Everyone Ignores with Marty Sheegog
Most roofing companies are built on sales first. Marty Sheegog did the opposite, and it changed everything. In this episode, you’ll meet the founder of Sheegog Contracting in Orlando, Florida, and learn how building operations first can actually be your BEST sales move.
Marty shares how he went from an average salesman to building a rock-solid company where field supervisors manage every detail, project quality is king, and homeowners are raving fans. You’ll hear how he built simple systems that prevent chaos and drive better reviews, referrals, and results.
🔗 https://sheegogcontracting.com/
✅ Why “sales first” could be ruining your business
✅ How field supervisors changed the game for Sheegog Contracting
✅ The review, referral, and photo system that proves customers are happy
✅ How to scale operations without sacrificing job quality
✅ The biggest lessons from storm chasing to building a real local brand
🤖 Have a question? Ask this customized ChatGPT for the answer! Specifically designed for this episode, it’s here to help! https://roofingpod.com/chatgpt-256
Listen to the episode on Spotify & Apple Podcasts (256) 👇
🎧 https://roofingpod.com/spotify
🍏 https://roofingpod.com/apple-podcasts
Resources & Links:
🤝 Join The Roofing & Solar Reform Alliance: http://roofingpod.com/rsra
👉 Take your marketing to the next level: https://roofingpod.com/jobnimbus-marketing
🎯 Join Our Facebook Group: https://roofingpod.com/facebook
IG: https://www.instagram.com/roofingsuccess/
FB: https://www.facebook.com/groups/roofingsuccess
📱 Text Jim @ (612) 512-1812 – Say Hi!
💬 Leave Us a Review: https://roofingpod.com/review
Most rivers start with sales. Marty Shigog built his business on something different operations first, and that decision it changed everything. In this episode we're talking with Marty, the founder of Shigog Contracting in Orlando, florida. He went from being an average salesman who cared deeply about every job to building a company where field supervisors run clean, professional projects and communication is dialed in. Marty's story is about quality over chaos. You'll hear how his team created detailed project examination systems, set clear boundaries between sales and production and even turned homeowner walkthroughs into powerful review drivers. What makes Marty unique is his obsession with getting the job right, even when it's hard, even when it costs more. He's a systems thinker with a heart for doing the right thing, and his transparency is refreshing. In today's episode we'll unpack how to go from disorganized to dialed in and why building a truly operationally sound roofing business might be the best sales move you ever make. Let's jump in with Marty Shigog.
Speaker 1:Welcome to the Roofing Success Podcast. I'm Jim Alleyne and I'm here to bring you insights from top leaders in the roofing industry to help you grow and scale your roofing business. Marty Shigog with Shegog Contracting, how are you today, man? I'm good, sir, I'm good. Thank you, how's that? You know you got the surfboards out Florida's. You know you're down in Florida. You know you getting out to the, you getting out and catching some waves recently, or what I'm hoping this Saturday is my first time out.
Speaker 2:The weather's been back and forth, so it's been like 85 degrees one day, then it'll be like 65 the next. So it's not super solid weather yet for it, but it's right about that time. So this Saturday is going to be the first.
Speaker 1:Awesome man, that's awesome. Well, tell us a little bit about she Got Contracting. How you got started in the roofing business Sure.
Speaker 2:So she Got Contracting. We're based in Orlando, florida. I got my starting in this, like a lot of other guys did, selling roofs, so I started out doing a little bit of storm chasing. So I got the experience of what it's like roofing in about seven different states, which was extremely beneficial to not only get a real well-rounded look at how to install roofs and do roofs and how the different components and different systems work in different areas, but I got a really good look at like how the insurance side of things and insurance claims restoration works in a bunch of other different states as well. So there came a time where my knowledge base got good enough to where I wanted to go out on my own and I wanted to do it somewhere that I knew was going to keep us busy year round. So eventually we made the move down to Florida back in 2015. I got my roofing license and we've kind of been doing it ever since.
Speaker 1:Awesome, man, where are you from originally? I'm from Louisville, kentucky. Okay, all right. Yeah, so down to Florida, man, this is a place where there's going to be more, you know, some consistent business going on and you get to surf, you know, when you get the chance, when the weather's nice, right.
Speaker 2:So it only takes a couple of years to wear out the cold, the cold part of you. So now I can last about a week in the cold and that's about it.
Speaker 1:Your body changes quickly, right it's a. I live here in Minneapolis and I you know I I joked that like I got neighbors that are out shoveling snow and shorts and a hoodie, you know doesn't even bother them, you know, no big deal. I'm like this is crazy man, but you try not to brag about it you know, but it's hard sometimes.
Speaker 2:It's hard, you know, salesmen like it too. They like to be able to sell all year round. The productive ones do anyways. I think there's some guys that if they've done storm chasing before and that they've done that kind of work, or if they're from, you know, a Northern climate region and they come down here, they some guys do miss that off season to where they can kind of do whatever they want to.
Speaker 1:So it's a, it's a double-edged sword sometimes Up here. It's just, you know they get to go ice fishing, so you know whole different thing.
Speaker 1:We were talking I think it was last week, we were talking, talking and when you guys kind of, when you structured the business, you have a business partner in yourself and you really structured, give us some context to that. I think that that was that. That's a great insight. You know a lot of, especially coming from the sales side. A lot of, a lot of contractors that start a business that come from the sales side. They're like sales first right, like let's just, let's just go out and sell what. What made you? Or? Or let's talk about that operational first philosophy a little bit.
Speaker 2:Sure, I would love to say it was on purpose. I would love to say we sat down and we were like, let's strategize this, how do we want to approach it? I don't know that. A whole lot of businesses start like that when it's you and another person, so I'd love to say it's strategy. But yeah, you're exactly right, most especially if they're coming from the insurance claims restoration side of things. Most of them are really good salesmen that are really strong in sales and they see this big opportunity to make more money if they go out on their own, and so that's how they start their business, with all the concentration being on the revenue and the margins and being able to make the most amount of money possible, which is there's nothing wrong with that. It's just that the side effect to that is is that the quality and everything that's going into those jobs and those customers is going to be secondary, and it's probably going to be years until they realize that and then have to start repairing things on the back end, which will be a slow process.
Speaker 2:So, with us, I probably started the business the way that I did, because when I was a salesman, I really wasn't a great salesman. I did well, but I wasn't a great salesman in terms of convincing homeowners to go with me for any particular reason other than the fact that I just wanted to do a good job. And so when I started to recognize that there was value there and that they liked that, then I kind of found what my little niche was. So after doing that, I just told people that I would do the best job for them that I possibly could, and since I really didn't know a whole lot, that just included me compulsively going to my job sites and just like micromanaging even though I had no idea what I was doing at first and then just making sure everything went well.
Speaker 2:When a piece of little tar paper fell on the ground, I was running over to pick it up. You know what I mean. It started out at that level and because I was on the job sites all the time, I just slowly picked up on the inner workings of how the roof goes on. So by simply wanting to uphold my promise to my customers that I would do everything I could to make sure that the jobs went well, that taught me how to do roofs and how to do roofing correctly and the pitfalls of not having supervisors at job sites which is why I was there and things like that. Like I saw firsthand all of that stuff.
Speaker 2:So whenever I went to go start the company and do our own thing, it was already in the mindset of that had to come first, because that's the only way I knew how to sell. So that's really how we started the company. And then my business partner he's more on the front end sales part of things and I brought with me my brother-in-law and good friend, jonathan, who runs my production now, and when he came over to sell he kind of helped us build up the inner workings of the production side of things. So we all kind of had that same mentality of the quality first type of thing, simply because that's the only way we knew how to sell jobs. So that kind of forced us into building things with that in mind first. And then the sales were like an after, not necessarily after. I mean, we were all in this to make money Obviously it's why you start a company but the sales were a side effect of the job and quality we were doing with our customers. So that's kind of how that whole thing developed.
Speaker 1:I think that's awesome and I think it makes me think of that analogy of are you a salesperson or a sold person? And you know, if you're a sold person, you, you know you're going to do everything you can to to help the homeowner work with you versus the competition, because you know you're going to do that well of a job for them. Right. But to have the confidence of being a sold person, you have to have the details in order, right? If you're a salesperson, who's who's out selling? And all of a sudden production's getting backed up lots of problems on the job sites, problems with crews, problems with cleanup, problems with, you know, problems with problems with problems with you're getting those phone calls You're the one that sat down with that homeowner and had them sign that contract. You're the one that, that, you're the face of that sale. And so, uh, I see where you came from, where it was like. You know, man, maybe I'm not good at sales technique, but if I convince someone that I'm going to do the best job that I possibly can, that that's your say. You know that's that's being a sold person. You were sold that. I don't care what happens, I'm going to be out here cleaning up, cleaning up, helping out, doing whatever it takes to make this job go well.
Speaker 1:You were you. You may have been sold on yourself at that time, right Like in, in, in, in in your efforts, but so I love that I I love how it came together. It may not have been the idea upfront, but it just came together that way. What are some of the like key processes or systems that that you've implemented over the years? Or what's been the stepping stone, like what did? What were some of the like the things that you put in place that made the most difference first? And then, oh, then we moved on to this, then we moved on to that. What problems did you solve that that really have made an impact on the business?
Speaker 2:Wow, did you solve that? That really have made an impact on the business, wow. So, um, over the years we had to break the mold of uh, of how we we first organized the roles of what everyone did in the company, and so in the very you know, we we do what we're taught until we know any different. And so, like, our salesmen also were like the job site people you know. So in that sort of model it was a matter of, like, trying to get them to do as good of a job and communicating with the homeowner. And you know, communicating with the crew as we would have done with the homeowner, and you know, communicating with the crew as we would have done. And I think you quickly learn that, like, if you're going to scale anything past two or three reps, that's just not a working model. So, if you want to, so what you find as you expand is that you can't control all of those salesmen being really good project managers, right. So then it's like, okay, well, like, you start to see some quality problems. You start to get the phone calls, some reps are good, you know better than others, and then you're like, okay, well, like we, we have to build in some supervision. In my, in my humble experience, if you're going to have a supervisor on the roof, it has to be someone different than that is on the crew. I have had to learn some really hard lessons and you just simply cannot take one of the crew members and make them a supervisor. In my experience it just doesn't work. Maybe I didn't do it right, but in my experience it works far better if you hire a completely separate person to manage the job site, manage the crew and they work as a team. That way there's no biasness. So us implementing a field supervisor, a non-crew member field supervisor, was probably one of the biggest moves that we made to control the quality and improve communication with the homeowner, and I would love to say it's an overnight success, but in no way shape or form is it. There's a lot of learning curve that goes in there, from simply having the field supervisor make sure the roof goes on well to over time and as you get bigger and bigger and have more field supervisors, do a shift of roles between the salesman communicating with the homeowner during the build and now it's the field supervisor. And that is a very hard thing to work out all the details on and control the overhead as you're doing it. So that was a huge thing that we put into place. That probably had the biggest impact on everything was field supervisors managing the job site and then also let your salesman go out and sell more jobs as well. Yeah, so that was a really big thing. And I would say the second biggest thing was project examination examination. So, wow, there's a lot of business owners out there that are just I mean, they get their jobs done and scheduled and put on lickety split. And I come from that where, like your turn in is the contract and like that's it, and then it just gets put on.
Speaker 2:Florida is just different, guys, it just is. I've worked in seven other states. I'm telling you Florida is just different guys, it just is. I've worked in seven other states. I'm telling you Florida is just different. The roofs here can get complicated. There's just small little things that you have to pay attention to, all kinds of building codes and inspections. So what we did is we built in a filter system where the jobs actually get looked at by someone who knows what the heck they're doing. It's as simple as that. It creates the problems you have to fight. There's bottlenecking, but you know you've got to work through that and the thing is is that if you examine those projects and try to find problems ahead of time, you're going to save yourself money later and you're going to be more upfront with the customer. They're going to know more issues up front than they are later. And that's probably the second biggest thing that we did as a company that makes the largest impact.
Speaker 1:That's awesome. I want to dig into this a little bit more that field supervisor role. What have you found are the qualities that you look for now in a good field supervisor?
Speaker 2:The qualities of a good field supervisor. It's got to be someone that can mesh well with the crew. If they don't mesh well with the crew, then it just doesn't really matter. So they got to be a little bit of a people person. They have to understand in large part the Hispanic culture and the way those guys communicate, because the way they communicate is different than the way most of us communicate. So there has to be that. Bilingual guys are way more preferred. Someone that's actually going to take that, someone.
Speaker 2:You got to find someone that actually cares and none of it really matters if they're just trying to follow a checklist and that's it. It's too easy of a job to overlook a whole lot of things if you don't actually care about what you're doing. But a lot of that comes from you know the culture of your company, what you've done to build that culture of actually caring about the type of product that you're putting on and if they'll buy into that and they'll actually care about that and you incentivize them correctly. Now you've got someone that you can rely on, even if they don't know a whole lot.
Speaker 2:We've set up company camp templates, a field manager to oversee the field supervisors. We've got a lot of things in place to make bringing in a new person and quickly ramping them up to an experienced level. So we've kind of closed the learning curve gap through a lot of things like templates and processes. That was really valuable because you can't afford to wait six months for a guy to go from little to a whole lot of experience. That just doesn't happen. So you got to put things in place to be able to close that learning curve gap. But finding someone that will actually care about the job site, that's what you got to find.
Speaker 1:Yeah, from an operational perspective. You know I'm a big fan of EOS and metrics and you know metrics for each person. How do you measure care? Like, what are you looking for? That is, what feedback are you getting from, from from the job, from the customer, from the crews, from the salespeople? Like, what are you measuring to determine to to really say, yeah, that person really like they're, they care about what happens on their job site.
Speaker 2:So the easiest thing was uh, we give, we give small little spiffs on two really important things. Well, three really. If they can get referrals, so they're not getting any referrals if they don't do a good job we have them take a picture with the I love my roof sign. So again, the homeowner is not going to pose for a picture with you if you're not doing a good job. And then, lastly, they ask for reviews at that time. So they get a SPF for all three of those things individually. So, if nothing else, there's one of their big driving motivators to make sure that they keep the customer happy, keep in communication with them and have a resulting good job. That's the easiest.
Speaker 1:Yeah, so it's an incentivization of the, of the things that would that that lead to caring for the customer, right, like that show you that this is what you know. Hey, if the, if we took good care of this customer, they're going to leave a review, they're going to take this picture, they're going to right. You have those things in place. That's awesome. You mentioned that communication was a challenge in the beginning and maybe you figured it out now. And, as we all know, like, business is always evolving and there's always a problem to solve, right, so it's not like everyone's perfect, but like as you're, as you implemented this field supervisor role, how did you know what were some of the kind of things that came up early on in the communication process and how did you solve them?
Speaker 2:So the first obstacle is creating a division between the salesman and the field supervisor. You got to solve that first, because what will happen is the homeowner wants to talk to the salesman and now you're trying to force a field supervisor onto them and field supervisor is trying to communicate with the homeowner. Homeowner doesn't want to communicate with them, they want to communicate with the other guy. That's the first hurdle you got to get over. You got to create that clear line of division, and so that was very difficult and it really we came to a point with it where we had to make it to where we told the salesman listen, like had to make it to where we told the salesman listen, like, once you turn in this job, your role is over. Obviously, if the customer calls you, you know you take care of them, you get them to the right department, but you don't answer questions for them when it pertains to production, because then we're just going to miscommunicate. That happened for a very long time I would say a year From the point that we tried to do this conversion. It took a year for for that to stop happening like a lot, and so once we kind of made that a thing, then it became a little easier. Then it became not only is your role over, but like you need to, at the end of the sale you really need to start prepping the homeowner on what to expect next, who's going to be their next point of contact. So when you start making that preparation, then the homeowner starts understanding. Then we started doing like contract calls to review the contract with the homeowner after the job was turned in, and in that contract call we're further explained to them hey, when the job goes on, this is going to be your point of contact. They're going to touch base with you when they come out there during the whole project, talk to this person. And so we're just reminding the homeowner throughout the process who they're supposed to be communicating with. And that really dials back now. Now we know who is supposed to be communicating and now you can actually focus on that communication happening.
Speaker 2:So after that's done, it's getting the field supervisor to text the homeowner in the morning, give an update, introduce themselves. Hey, here's who I am, I'm going to be there or I'm going to get materials and I'll be there later, that sort of thing. So opening up that line of communication via text is pretty big them showing up, introducing themselves, giving the card, that whole thing. That really sets the tone and that's how we were able to improve the communication. And I would say, lastly, doing a final walkthrough with the homeowner, giving them an opportunity to point out anything that they can and anything that they want to and sign off on it. That kind of like closes the loop. It's not 100%, because I don't care. If you walk around the house 10 times with the homeowner four days from now, they're going to find something, they're going to point it out and be like why is that shadow right there? I've never seen that shadow at six o'clock. They're just going to start noticing stuff, but you want to reduce it as much as you can.
Speaker 1:But that's what I've found to be effective. I think that's a couple of really key points for people. We always want this stuff to happen right away, but it takes man, it takes some time. Nope, we got to do it this way. Nope, we got to do it this way. Nope, we got to do it this way. The thing that I want to highlight for everyone that you said was sales reps don't answer questions about production, and so if that is just a simple thing right there like that, you know I have to hand you off to this person to answer that question. I'm not allowed to answer that question. I'm in trouble if I answer that question Because then, like you said, that's where the miscommunication starts to happen. I had heard that.
Speaker 2:Chick-fil-A took something like six years to get everyone to say my pleasure, and that's I kind of like. For some reason that kind of stuck with me because it made it OK for me to take on taking a while to get simple process to happen consistently. And I don't know if it's true, it was just something I heard on somebody's you know podcast or something. I heard it somewhere and it really just stuck with me that it's okay for these things to take a while. You know it's hard to break certain habits and get people to do something across the board.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and a lot of times we just have improper expectations right. For us, it's like, well, just say this, but they're the ones that take that call from the homeowner, right? And that homeowner is asking them questions and they're like, really, you don't know this, like why don't you know this? And so the easy answer is yes, I know this. Right, like yeah, I know this, I know this, I'll tell you right now. But that's not the right answer, right, the right answer is let me get you over to your field supervisor and they'll be able to answer all the questions for you.
Speaker 2:The toughest thing with that was the misconception that, like from an owner standpoint, I'm like hey, salesman, guess what? You don't have to fill these questions, we got it. I mean, literally we were back just like high-fiving each other going these guys are going to love us and it was the opposite.
Speaker 2:It was the opposite. They were angry about it because they would still have to feel the call and they felt an obligation to not look like an idiot in front of the homeowner and passing them off, and it had like the exact opposite effect and it really took a while to figure out how to properly set the expectations for them and how to feel those calls from now on. I overlooked the fact that you're going to have to train the salesman on how to handle that call now, and so it was one of those things that we just thought we were hitting it out of the ballpark and everyone was going to be thrilled and it was the opposite.
Speaker 1:Isn't it funny, like I mean, you think, like man, this solves such a huge problem for them and then you just don't get that buy in it. But that's the expectations, right, we have to have expectations. We got to give ourselves some grace. We got to give ourselves some time. It doesn't happen overnight. Before we carry on with the episode, let's give a shout out to one of our sponsors.
Speaker 1:I talk to contractors every day that feel stuck, not because they're not working hard, but because they're missing the structure to grow without chaos or their culture's falling apart, because their team's unclear, unaligned or just burned out. And when change hits, they're reacting instead of leading because time and priorities aren't under their control. Day 41 Thrive helps to fix that with proven strategies for growth, culture and leadership that actually work. Ready to thrive beyond the storm. Visit the link in the description or visit the Roofing Success Podcast website on the sponsors page to start your journey today. Another thing I want to go back to is the project examination. What is like? How did you begin to develop the process of project exam, of examining each project? Talk about that a little bit Like what, who does what, what you're looking at. You know you said it could be a bottleneck at times. You know what, what's that process for you?
Speaker 2:So the the more things that you try to to set up and implement for your company to to make things better, the more that you realize that you have to stage it that way, and so I'm trying to think back to when exactly we started doing that and why. So there's just certain things that we started doing as a company, like here in Florida. It's something different than what you guys experience Other places. We have stuccoed houses, right. So in stuccoed houses you have like dead valleys, you have chimneys, you have high risk leak areas, and so in Florida a lot of contractors would just simply overlook those because there's flashing there. But whenever you change the flashing in those corners, what's going to happen is you're going to create an additional gap in the corner.
Speaker 1:no, matter what you do, I don't care.
Speaker 2:The reason it doesn't leak is because they're taking a handful of roofing cement and they're slapping it on there and it's going to last maybe one year, two years, five years, you don't know that's if you do nothing. So what we realized looking at the data, was that, man, all of our leaks are coming from these, like two areas. So we, just, across the board, made it a rule that we're either going to reflash it with counter flashing, we're going to cut stucco and redo the stucco and redo the flashing, you know, to bring it back to its original state.
Speaker 2:That's complicated yeah, it's very, very complicated and it's very time consuming, and especially, even if you go back with counter flashing, what you have is you have homeowners that were not prepared to see any raw, shiny, shiny metal on the face of their house. And now they do. And so it was through all that trial and error where we're like, oh, we did a great job, but now the homeowner's mad because it doesn't look good. What if we paint it? All right, what if we cut the stucco? But cutting the stucco is like four times the cost. We realize that's just one example of like a few different ones where there just has to be certain decisions made and evaluated before that job goes into production, because if you try to solve it at the job site, everything is 10 times harder. And so we really looked at those and we were like, all right, well, let's start looking at the jobs before they go to be scheduled to get a handle on that one situation. And then that one situation led to oh well, let's go ahead and catch this, this and this. And then it was like, how have we not been doing this before? We're catching all the problems? And so that's kind of what it led to was. Then we started developing a checklist system of everything we're going to look for.
Speaker 2:It's a little difficult because the sales reps it takes a little bit more work on their end. They got to get a lot more detailed pictures. There's definitely some things. If you're going to put it in place, there's things you have to consider. There's a lot of things you're going to have it in place. There's things you have to like consider. There's a lot of things you're going to have to work through.
Speaker 2:It's going to have an effect on what you require from your salesman. You know to turn in like a perfect packet um, they're going to have to go back and get stuff. You know. If they miss it, um and it. You got to be able to make it to where the highest level stuff is being looked at by your highest level employee.
Speaker 2:If you take the person with all the roof knowledge and have them look at, like job profile, set up stuff, well then you're taking your most highly paid, experienced person. You're having to do the most menial tasks and, to be perfectly honest with you, it wasn't until this past year, year and a half, that we really started working. Start looking at your bottom line and you start going. This is expensive, field supervisors are expensive and we're bottlenecking our jobs to this one person.
Speaker 2:We need to fix this, and those are the problems that you have to start solving, because the other option is you go back to doing what everyone else is doing, that all of your salesmen that you're hiring are used to doing, which is you mean I've got to do all this to turn in a perfect job at my old place? We just we just turn in the contract with, like the colors and like that's it, and it's just kind of like listen, like once you know you can't unknow it, know you can't unknow it. Like there's no way that I could take my production team now and go, hey, all that cool stuff that we do now and all those mistakes and all the better job we do on the job, and we know the customer is going to get a better roof because of and all of the mysterious things that we're fixing now, and the homeowner is not going to find, three years from now, stop doing those because we can't afford it. That just becomes not an option, and so you have to figure out how to financially make it work.
Speaker 1:Yeah, To me. I mean, I could see the resistance from a sales perspective, but I can see how you could frame it in a way where now they have a competitive advantage in the sales process, right, you know, making sure that the customer understands that all of this is going to be done too. And this is why, and and everyone else that comes by afterwards or before is like oh yeah, they're not doing this Like I think it would. I would say, has it? Has it become that now? I mean, I maybe it's in the beginning or with a sales rep, do they see the value in the sales process now?
Speaker 2:I love the fact that all my salesmen are going to see this. This is fun. So the thing about it is that I think you have two different types of salesmen out there and with a small degree of gray You've got your salesman on the structure and in the companies that they just sell, like the contingency contracts and they're out. Or maybe they put it into a little bit further contract, but they're just completely out. They don't even field calls from homeowners. They don't really care how the job's put on because they don't have to deal with the homeowners calling them. They're just that far out of the production side and solely focusing on the sales side. Those salesmen have never felt the pain of what it's like to not do a good job. The other guys the other guys that are a little bit more involved in either the contract and do fill those calls from the homeowner or are used to dealing with that, when they come into this system and they do what they're doing, they see what we're doing. They immediately see the value and the competitive advantage that they now have. And I actually have salesmen now that are with me simply because they were tired of getting the phone calls from the other people. They're like man, I just can't deal with telling selling a homeowner on something and then like it totally not going the way it was supposed to, and so that's.
Speaker 2:We've just, incidentally, found one of our competitive advantages, just you know, just by trying to do the best job that we can do. So the salesman, it's a little bit of a thing and, again, it's still not perfect. It's always something that we're working on and finding that line between expectations and then like, what can we live without? And there's stuff I've seen from Elon Musk saying you should always be adding back in 10% because you're taking away a whole bunch of other stuff in your process. And I try to do that. We built this super micro, detailed thing and you find that it's just too detailed and so you got to take some of it away, find out what you need to put back in and just find that balance. And it's really hard, it's really really hard to find the balance, but you know it's there somewhere.
Speaker 1:I think that that's, that's something that that a lot, of, a lot of times, when we're building out systems and processes and operational, operational activities, a lot of times we're coming up with it, like you said, even even the field supervisor role that all of these things, times we're coming up with it, like you said, even even the field supervisor role that all of these things we're coming up with it from our idea of what could, what could be better, but what? What that made me think of what you just said was that a lot of times you don't it's all. You need the feedback loop. Like you need the feedback loop, you can you can sit around for a year and build systems and processes and not do any business, and then you start doing business and you're running customers through that. Your team members are operating these systems and processes. It's not going to be what you thought.
Speaker 2:Let's go ahead and ruin the surprise for everybody out there. It's none of your ideas are going to work the way they're supposed to. That's right.
Speaker 1:So maybe a better way to think about it is from a like in software, we call it minimum viable product when you're building software.
Speaker 1:So what we do is we decide what is our minimum viable product, like, what is the smallest amount of features that I can give to a customer to be able to get feedback from them? And then, once we get that feedback, we iterate on that feedback, right, so now it goes oh, okay, everyone, they worked with this and now they're asking for this feature set, so now we'll add that feature set and then we'll get feedback on that feature set and how it worked. And then, like there's a great book called the Lean Startup that, for everyone listening, that that really outlines the MVP model and I but I think I've taken it into other aspects of business, into things like this as you're doing these things, you just say, okay, what's our minimum viable product? What's the easiest way to get this thing going and get some feedback from the team, from the team from the customers, from everyone, and then you just continue to iterate on it. There will never be a time in your business that you are not iterating it won't all come together.
Speaker 1:It just won't. There's no, there's no time in your business it's you. Go to ge and all these companies that have been around for you know a hundred years. They are still having meetings about what they could do better and how to change this process and how to affect that process and what, like it never ends. So if we accept that and just continue to say, okay, well, that one didn't work, let's make a little adjustment, right?
Speaker 2:I remember thinking like five years ago I remember just sitting there being like man, I can't wait until we just have all these processes in place and then we can just run the business based on the processes and like we do. We don't have to like be thinking of all this new stuff all the time. And then a couple of years ago I had the realization of it's always going to be like this. All right, it just is what it is. And then it slowly becomes a little bit Okay.
Speaker 1:Yeah, that's where everyone needs to get to the okay. The okay that there's another problem to be solved there, you know, and that that that's really, really impactful. So, um, you got you. In hearing you talk about your processes and in hearing you talk about your company. In hearing you talk about we identified, what did you say? Four regions, that of the? We identified, what did you say? Four regions of the roof build that had the most problems. Was it four? You have to have some data. You must be collecting some sort of data to be able to come to those conclusions. Was that something that you did intentionally or was it like all right, we got problems? Let's just look through the last 20 jobs and see what the issues were. How did that come to be?
Speaker 2:I think, like so many other things, it's kind of a slow process. It's. You know, you start out. You start out just trying to look back at okay, well, like where are all our leaks coming from? Let's start a spreadsheet. Anytime there's a leak, I want to know what crew it was, I want to know where on the roof it was and if it was our fault or not. And then, like, you build that list for a while and then you start staring at it and you're like, okay, that was pretty useful. What else can we have a list on?
Speaker 1:And you just kind of like, all right well now.
Speaker 2:Now I want to know this and now I want to know that. And, uh, once you, once you kind of figure out how to delegate those lists to people and make them their responsibility, then it becomes even easier. Because I started out, I mean, like a lot of owners I'm, I like to control everything and so like I would want to manage all these spreadsheets and do all this, and it's just kind of like. Then you stop wanting to get more data because you have to do it. So if you can assign the data responsibility to other people, then it's endless. Whatever you want data on, you just have someone make it a part of their job and truly, the more information and data you have, the better every. The more potential you have, the more potential you have to handle problems or increase sales.
Speaker 1:Yeah, that's a key insight. Like it's it. It it will show you where you need to work on, what you need to work on Right, like the, the, and if you don't have any data, you don't even know what to work on. You may feel something, but it might not be true. Right, you may feel like there's a communication issue over here, but it's something else over here. You may feel that it's that you need to read do your process in in.
Speaker 1:Uh, um, like removing the stucco, you know what I mean. Like we may need to do a whole different thing here. It may be something completely different. Um, yeah, those are great, great things to cover. Okay, so you, I want to get into the way that you kind of built out SheGog and kind of using a, what we talked about it like last week, it was like a. You came into it kind of like a storm chaser and so you kind of spread out quickly around the state where there was a need for work, and then you know, kind of built it up over there. Talk us through that, like what was, how did you, what was the expansion like and what lessons did you learn from that?
Speaker 2:so the uh, the scariest thing from going from a storm chaser mentality as a salesman to owning a company and just staying in one spot is how am I going to continue to get business in one area If you spent five years going from like one storm to the other and like you kind of get a sense of when it starts to dry up, like just a man? If you're a storm chaser listening this, just imagine whatever storm you're at now. Imagine having to stay there for five years. It was a really scary thing. So it's like you know, can, can we do this? Can we stay in one spot? Other people are doing it, and so then you just have to kind of like learn how to do that, and I think for a really long time you just take advantage of every opportunity you possibly can. And what that did is it was kind of like playing the game of risk, like we had, like you know, our army right here, and then, if you look back, we got like one soldier there and one soldier there and one soldier there, and and before you know it you're kind of strung around, and so as your tactics in your company start to change, that spreading out becomes a problem and if I could do it all over again, I would centralize my efforts, but I get that would require me knowing a lot of things that I just didn't know.
Speaker 2:Then you know, if you're trying to feel you know, put in field supervisors, that's a whole lot easier. If you're just trying to do a one hour radius, you know one Orlando, florida Field supervision great easy. You can manage a couple of different jobs at one point. Everything's going to be in this nice little area. But right now, currently, you know we are from everywhere, from Jacksonville all the way down to Rockledge, which is, you know, about the middle of Florida East Coast, and then from there all the way over to Tampa on the West Coast. So when you have jobs that can potentially be four hours away from each other and you've only got so many field supervisors, you're talking logistics and you're talking like a whole different ask of your field supervisor and you have to start rotating, like them staying overnight and per diems and additional overheads that you weren't prepared for.
Speaker 2:It become and and that's not even to get into the whole strategy of online marketing marketing dollars is a real thing. So you and for for everyone, with three salesmen and you just came from storming, and that's not a thing for you guys. You're just used to just knocking doors and I was there. But when you start looking at investing marketing dollars into a geographical area online, you realize that your budget will only carry you so far, and at some point you have to pick a place, and so I think some of what we're doing now is taking some of the strategic door-to-door sales, strategic marketing, and really dialing it into one specific area and then, once we've kind of got it down pat, then taking it to some of the other places that we are.
Speaker 1:That we have salesmen, but it's not as highly concentrated as our meat and potatoes. Yeah, so something that happened was your team got spread out because of going after this work and now the lesson was okay, well, man, there's a whole lesson around marketing. There's a whole lesson around the field supervisor role. There's a whole lesson there. Now let's dial that in. And now, now we can say okay, now we're going to go and support that sales rep with this model and build it out around there and and and and kind of uh, do it better, build it, you know, do it do?
Speaker 1:it better this time, Right, Um, and so you know. There's always, there's always things that we learn along the way. I know you're enjoying the episode, but let's give a shout out to another one of our sponsors. As a roofing marketing agency owner and coach, I've seen it all Great marketing wasted because no one follows up fast enough. That's why I built Power Up Agents, Not just a receptionist. Our AI handles the entire customer journey, from answering the first call to booking the job, to post job surveys and reviews 24, seven, inbound, outbound, even multilingual. If you want leads followed up instantly and customers nurtured automatically, visit the link in the description or visit the sponsors page on the Roofing Success Podcast website. Your full AI team is ready. So I understand the field supervisor role and how that works.
Speaker 1:Let's talk about marketing a little bit. What are the lessons that you've learned around marketing? You know, especially from coming from the storm side, door to door sales man it's. You know hoots and knuckles, it doesn't matter, Like you don't need any, anything but right Like a truck and a and and your knuckles, and you can. You can, you can create a good living, yes, but when you're trying to create a company, a business in a certain area, boy, that changes.
Speaker 2:It is yes, yeah, it's like there's brand building and then there's marketing and they're two different things with vastly different budgets. And it really it took me a long time to realize that in the beginning, the commissions that we were paying our self-gen salesmen, that was our marketing budget. Because people, you know guys, would come up to me or not, other businesses would solicit me on marketing and stuff, and they would ask me, hey, like, what's your marketing budget? And I'd be like, uh, nothing. And I just didn't realize, cause all I knew was door to door and I didn't realize that you know really what I'm paying myself, jen guys, that is my marketing budget.
Speaker 2:And so I think that what I wish I could go back and tell myself before I tried anything is listen, like, if you're going to not mix the two, if you're going to do door to door, then take your door to door reps and have them do door to door. Don't, don't try to mix in giving marketing leads to door-to-door guys. It does not work. All you're going to do is basically pay them to not have to knock doors. And then you realize you got to do some sort of lead fee. And then, even when you do the lead fee. You realize that you're still not getting ahead because you're taking time away from the knocking doors and it. You got to separate it. You got to go with a clear plan and and stick to it and not mingle the two. Man, I wish I could go back and tell myself that that was a, that was a big lesson that I mean from from you know, doing marketing for a few hundred roofing companies.
Speaker 1:Boy, I knew that lesson that was. You know, I would tell owners a lot of times if they had, if all of their reps were door-to-door sales reps like they're not gonna like a lead from Google, they're not gonna like a lead from Facebook, they're gonna have to stop knocking the neighborhood that they're in or that they're going to have to stop knocking the neighborhood that they're in or that they're working and knowing that there's, there's additional business here, they're going to get in their truck and they're going to drive 30, 45 minutes to the other side of town to run a Facebook or Google ads lead. It's kind of to your point, like they're from their time perspective. It's kind of to your point, like they're from their time perspective. So what? What we found a lot of times is the, the attention to the, those leads coming in from the digital marketing side.
Speaker 1:You know, we just don't respond to those as efficiently as we do. No-transcript. He's going to sign two more deals today and you want him to drive across town for the hope of signing a deal, right?
Speaker 2:Like a lot less close percentage. You know a lot less close percentage.
Speaker 1:It's a. It's a tough one man. It's a really tough balance to make. So how have you? So? Do you have a? You know, a team that are door-to-door sales and a team that are kind of more lead gen sales people?
Speaker 2:so, okay, I think I think it's important to note the precursor for any of that is you got to be prepared to measure it. You can't measure it. If you cannot measure what is going to happen with the money that you're putting into it, don't, don't even start, you're just throwing money away. I wish I could have known that as well. And it's really, really hard. If you're never, if you're not used to measuring anything especially if all your guys are door-to-door and you're not used to measuring their success because they're all self-gen Then measuring close rates and success rates and booking rates and all that other awesome data is extremely alien and it's going to take a lot of time. We're still working on it. We still don't even have it great. We do it okay, but it's still not even great. It's that hard, it is hard to get that information. So once you can, I think then you can start entertaining it, as long as you can like have a whole different like business plan. For just that we got kind of lucky. Again, as with as with a lot of things, it was kind of unintentional. But I have a few different guys. I have a few different self-gen guys that just simply don't do door-to-door. They are high producers but it's because they're in networking groups. They're just high networkers and they get all their business through that. So, hey, if they're already networking and they're already doing that, for them to run leads is not that big of a deal. They're game for that, they're open to that. We also tried hiring on a completely different commission structure, a more salary commission structure, specifically to run leads, and that worked pretty good. Okay, but you know, we definitely forego the thought of giving our door-to-door self-gen guys any sort of marketing leads. It just doesn't work. So we do.
Speaker 2:We have a separate team to take those on and really, even right now in our own business, we're really trying to look at how much we have going on and going man, are we trying to do too much?
Speaker 2:Is there one aspect of this that we should just really put all of our concentration on?
Speaker 2:Instead of trying to write an ad budget, maybe just dial it back to having a budget that just is smaller, that focuses on brand recognition, to help out our door-to-door guys and to give us some, you know, organic leads, and then just focus everything on door-to-door and, like the front or closer model and that's kind of where we're at right now is really just focusing on what we see being the most successful is really just focusing on what we see being the most successful, and maybe once we get that dialed in a bit then we can kind of shift our focus over. But just like in the book, the One Thing there comes a point where you just simply can't be effective in trying to look at too many it doesn't matter how many people you got working on it really as a company to get one big business model to work, whether it's marketing or door to door, you really got to just focus on it. And we're kind of in the middle of learning that lesson right now.
Speaker 1:Yeah, that's a great, that's great feedback from your marketing perspective to. My favorite metrics are customer acquisition costs and long-term value. The long-term value of a customer Are you guys like is that part of? Are you measuring customer acquisition costs per channel? Is that something that you're looking at or or are you just doing lead costs? Where are you, where are you guys at with that, with that process?
Speaker 2:We're kind of in the middle of breaking those numbers down and and getting it from like. From from like not even lead, but like what's. You know, when you do pay-per-click, the very first one is like it's like the interest click and then like the ratio from that to an actual lead and that you know that from lead to booking and then show rate and then close rate, and then it's just kind of like yeah, you got to work all those numbers back all the way to like what does it cost per deal? And that number is scary for like a while, yeah it's scary.
Speaker 1:So I've been having this conversation a lot lately, lot lately, and I think that before any contractor begins allocating a marketing budget, they have to determine what their optimal customer acquisition cost range is. I like range because it is a range, it's not one number. Of course your optimal customer acquisition cost is zero, but that's whatever. Let's throw that out because you're not a real business owner if that's your customer acquisition cost. So, determining that range of, hey, we're between here and here.
Speaker 1:You know, on the high end man, I don't like it when it's up there, but I know that when we do that job, that customer is going to be a raving fan and they're going to refer us. That's the. You're thinking about that long-term value of a customer. On the low end it's like, boom, we're printing money here, let's go, you know, um and so, so. So that that's what I like to, to give people a, a kind of some context around in that is is, develop that range because and and all those metrics that you're talking about, click to, to, to lead to, call to appointment book, to show that's all phenomenal data to have. But even if you get to the end of that and you have to know that customer. You have to know if you're within your customer acquisition cost range.
Speaker 2:You have to know what your commission structure for the guys taking those are.
Speaker 2:Because if you don't know what your range is, your acceptable range, then you either don't know what commission to give someone, or you know a commission to give someone but you don't know the range. Like you got to know what your ending net looks like on that, and we actually started that a little late. I wish we ended up getting that down, but it was just kind of like oh man, yeah, that would hit us. It was like all right, well, like the cost per contract number is like really high. Well, what does that mean? You know, what does that mean that we can do with commissions here? And it's like man, we we're thinking about that all wrong. We should know that number first and then get into it so that we can drive it down and either call it a win or a loss.
Speaker 1:That's right, and knowing that end metric will help everyone listening. That's the one, because now you have something to shoot for. You have something to measure your success against. A lot of times you got guys out door to door. There is a customer acquisition cost in that. From all of your digital marketing, direct mail, all of those things you're going to, there's a number direct mail, all of those things you're going to like. There's a number Facebook leads not as much nowadays, but there was a time when those were super cheap and it was like, well, just get a whole bunch of them. Well, what's the customer acquisition cost on those? If you go back to that customer acquisition cost number, wow, we got a lot of them, but it didn't change much from the Google ads, right, like you know, because we had to wade through a whole bunch of junk to get to that deal, right. So lead cost means nothing if you don't know your customer acquisition costs. That's my thoughts on that one.
Speaker 1:Well, marty, this has been awesome man, any like closing thoughts, or you know what you know as you've looked back over the time. What you know, what things would you? You know, there's so many lessons that you learn along the way. There's so many lessons that you have to learn. We talked about a lot of them here. But if you were just to kind of say, man, if I was, if I had to just shut this down and pick it up in another place or, you know, start all over, what would be the steps that you would take to do that?
Speaker 2:Oh wow, what a loaded question there.
Speaker 2:That one's that one. Yeah, that's a big one. If I had to, if I had to just boot it down hard, reboot and restart again, I would pay more attention to exactly how I wanted to build it up, what is going to be the exact strategy as to how I am going to obtain the customer, as to how I am going to obtain the customer. Luckily, now I have way more of an idea as to how the structure needs to go from one employee to 40. So I kind of know, like, who needs to do what job until that job's overwhelmed. And now you got somebody else. So I would probably focus way more on separating out the job duties instead of starting out to where, like the salesman does this big, large volume of things. In my experience, the more that you narrow that down to where they just do one thing and they do it really well, they're going to sell more, they're going to be happier and you're actually, as a company, going to be able to control more of the process and the experience that the homeowner has. And so that's what my process would be, is I would start out with my salesman just selling and that's all they have to do, and then I have like one person that knows everything and they can make sure that customer gets the experience that results in you doing a good job. And that's that's what that would be.
Speaker 2:The foundation of my new company in a new place would be exactly that, cause that's going to maximize my sales. It's going to make me, make it actually easier for me to control the process, cause the, the, the lie, the lie and thinking, lie and thinking of doing. The model that I came from when I first started, of the salesman does everything from A to Z, is that it's easier to control that process because there's less moving parts. That's a lie. Once you get over three people, it's not true. It's easier to control it if all they're doing is selling and now you control in office all the other moving parts. That would be the foundation of a new company, awesome man.
Speaker 1:Thanks for your time today. This has been another episode of the Roofing Success Podcast. Thank you for tuning into the Roofing Success Podcast. For more valuable content, visit roofingsuccesspodcastcom While there, check out our sponsors for exclusive offers, shop for merchandise and sign up for our newsletter for industry updates and tips. Also join the Roofing Success Facebook group to connect with other professionals and stay updated on the latest trends. If you enjoyed this episode, please subscribe, like, share and leave a comment. Your support helps us continue to bring you top industry insights. The website link is in the description. Thanks for listening.
