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
The #1 Mistake Roofers Make After Getting Leads (And How to Fix It with AI) with Josh Crouch
Most roofing companies pour time and money into getting leads… but then blow it when it counts most.
In this episode, Josh Crouch shares how to STOP leaving money on the table. You’ll learn:
✅ The #1 mistake roofers make after leads come in (and why it happens)
✅ How automation and AI can follow up faster than your team ever could
✅ The easiest way to plug the holes in your sales process without hiring more admin
✅ Why being the fastest to reply—even if you’re not the cheapest—wins jobs
✅ Simple automations that help you book more appointments, nurture leads, and stay top of mind
Josh isn’t just a tech guy, he’s been in the trenches hauling furnaces through Wisconsin winters. Now he helps contractors use technology to grow without chaos.
If you’re tired of slow follow-up and lost sales, this episode will show you how to finally get control.
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What do you do when the winter is the coldest in 30 years, your company's down to three techs and you're running furnaces around town just to survive? In this episode, we're sitting down with Joshua Crouch to explore how he went from grunt work in the HVAC world to launching multiple businesses and becoming one of the leading voices in home services automation. Josh is the co-host of the Service Business Mastery podcast and the founder of Relentless Digital and Trade Automation Pros. He's built the name around using automation and AI to eliminate inefficiencies and create better customer experiences in service business. Joshua isn't just a tech-savvy entrepreneur. He's someone who knows exactly what it's like to work a 20 hour day delivering furnaces during a snowstorm and still showing up the next day asking how do we make this thing better?
Speaker 1:If you've ever felt stuck between growing your business and drowning in manual tasks, this episode is a goldmine. We're breaking down real automation strategies you can use today to stop leaving money on the table, let's jump in with Joshua Crouch. 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. Joshua Crouch, how's it going today? Service Business Mastery Podcast. Relentless Digital man, it's good to have you on.
Speaker 2:Yeah, thank you. Yeah, we got a few things going on. There's always opportunities out there and, honestly, I just can't keep my hands off of opportunities. So we just keep building businesses and seeing what we can do with them.
Speaker 1:That's the way to go, man. We've, you know, we've gotten to know each other through a mastermind group in the digital marketing space and um, and through the podcast space and shared a lot of things there. You've shared a lot with me. You guys have a very successful podcast in the home services space and uh, and wanted to have you on and talk about marketing and talk about you know, business in general and for my audience. Now this is the roofing space. You got all you HVAC guys and you know all those you know you could. You know it's a little different business, but let's introduce you to the roofing industry.
Speaker 2:Yeah, so I first of all appreciate it. I've always enjoyed our chats, jim, especially when we're getting in person and some of those events that we go to. But so my name is Joshua Crouch and I was an HVAC contractor for nine years. I worked at three different HVAC companies and cut my teeth there. I am not a technician. I'm definitely better at business, sales, operations, marketing, technology. That's where I've always lived.
Speaker 2:I've been a grunt when my team needed it. I've hauled in and out furnaces and air conditioners and did all the grunt work. But I'm not the guy that's going to probably turn the wrench real well, and my wife knows that. So I am not allowed to hang any pictures or anything on the wall anywhere, because when we I moved to Arizona about three years ago when we were in Wisconsin, I would do it and I just thought, fine, I know the right stuff, but I just just couldn't quite get the holes right. So I made too many holes that had to get patched up, and so I just I stick to what I'm good at and I hire for everything else. I stick to what I'm good at and I hire for everything else.
Speaker 1:That's a good way to do things. That's a that sounds like you, uh, you're, you're focused on being a business owner. Then not, not, not, uh, uh, not self-employed.
Speaker 2:I will. I will say it it that philosophy has served me very well. Um, you don't think about it at the time, so you're kind of like, oh man, I'm a man, I should be able to do this stuff. But honestly, it served me very well because I know what I'm good at and what I'm not good at and I hire for the things I'm not good at, and that's really something that's really helped propel our digital marketing company, our podcast. We even have a company that helps coaches.
Speaker 2:It's not really home. It doesn't have to be home service specific it anyone in my. It's not really home, it doesn't have to be home service specific. It's called trade automation pros. We teach people how to use automation and ai together to really get the outcomes they want. With all that with. We all know that you probably got all your listeners probably shaking their head at this. They probably got 10, 15, 20, 30 softwares. They don't all communicate together, so data has to get entered here and here and here, especially when it comes to proposals, and then invoicing and all these sorts of things or leads coming in, and it just gets like it's very difficult. It's very time consuming work. You have to hire more admin people or VAs and it's just. It's a mess and it just creates unnecessary complication and additional overhead.
Speaker 1:Yeah, it's amazing to me that people still do so many manual actions when there are so many tools available.
Speaker 2:I think they're scared of it. To be honest, like I, I have asked this question probably a dozen times in the last four or five years and the response is always. I always chuckle because I'm like if you could automate anything, what would you automate? And most people are like I don't know, what can I automate? They don't know. They don't know that this stuff exists.
Speaker 2:We take it for granted when we're in the space that you and I have been in, that we literally see these tools everywhere, all day, all the time, and we get accustomed to using them and people just don't understand that the stuff is out there and we can take data from multiple places, put it into one thing and make it do something else, and it just happens on repeat. We don't even know what's happening. It just keeps happening, and so we we go around. We do a lot of presentations at home service shows. You will see us at roofing shows later this year and next year. So we will see you guys will crash the party, um, but we'll, we'll try to bring some of that stuff to the roofing space as well.
Speaker 1:that's awesome and and it's really, you know, it's some of it's a lot of the stuff that we did at roofer marketers and our job nimbus marketing. You know the. You know we really focused on that up front lead generation. And you know the. You know we really focused on that upfront lead generation. And you know I've had, you know we work in the roofing and solar reform alliance with Adam Benzman and he's you know, launching, launching a program about how to be your own, the GC of your own marketing, and one of the things that that we see on the marketing side is that everyone just thinks about the lead but not what happens after the lead comes in. And it's been so challenging. But that's where the automation comes in, that's where the AI comes in, that's where all of these things fill the gaps, because I'm sure at every HVAC business that you worked in, everyone made their phone calls when they were supposed to.
Speaker 2:Yeah, no. So my first experience was so the first year I was in the trades was 2013. I didn't know what I was doing. I didn't grow up in the trades. I don't have some of the typical stories that you hear where it's like I grew up in the trades of second, third generation or my father's uncle was in the trades and brought me in. I literally went to a job ad. I've always loved numbers, data and statistics so I thought accounting was going to be my career. I found out pretty quickly. I hated accounting because it was boring. And no offense to any accounts I love you, you're great, I need you we all do but it just wasn't for me. And so I found a job ad as an accountant for this local HVAC company I never heard of. I got the job. I wasn't a very good accountant. I very quickly kind of took over office management because I did grow up in a small family martial arts environment. So we had three schools. I ran two of those schools myself when I was young, so I did have some business experience. And then our marketing was like whatever I could create on whatever program was up in early, late 2000s, early 2010s. So I had some chops there, but to do it for an HVAC company when someone needed demand. I had no idea what I was doing.
Speaker 2:The winter of 2013 comes in and I don't know if you remember this winter, because I'm sure you had the same weather I did in being in Wisconsin. It was the coldest winter in 30 years. The day I walked in March of 2013,. We had 20 techs by September. We had three because we couldn't pay people on time and I didn't really know this at the time. I was writing their net payroll checks. I didn't realize we weren't paying with fully. I didn't really know this at the time. I was writing their net payroll checks, I didn't realize we weren't paying with fully. I didn't. I didn't know any of this stuff. We weren't paying withholding taxes. We owed our only line of credit to get new equipment, which, in the HVAC space, you get equipment every day Like. You need a line of credit was the time it took for me to write a check, drop it at the bank and the bank to cash it. So we had like a two day line of credit. Nobody would give us a line of credit because the business owner that I worked for had terrible credit in a bankruptcy on his right Just all the bad things. Like it was. It was the best learning experience I've ever had in my life and it was also probably the most stressful three years of my life. That's probably when I started losing my hair because I saw the potential. We had a really big customer list, but then we had this winter, so we went from being able to serve with 20 techs to three and then the coolest winter in 30 years hits. We have a customer list of about 30,000 people and we got our ass handed to us.
Speaker 2:I was literally out. I was more of a parts runner that year. I just literally was running furnaces, picking furnaces up, dropping them off, going to the supply house Like you stay at the job, I'm going to like run in between Milwaukee and Madison. It was a shit show it was. We ended up getting it all. We started learning and I started getting a little bit better and and and we started figuring things out. We started paying our taxes. We paid the tax debt and all those things, but it was like a massive learning experience.
Speaker 2:But to talk about making phone calls and this is where the story started from was 2014,. It was a very mild winter. I've never experienced this before. And between Thanksgiving and Christmas, we all know a lot of people don't like spending money. And between Thanksgiving and Christmas, we all know a lot of people don't like spending money, especially on things like roofing, hvac, maybe plumbing, because of Thanksgiving, but they don't want to spend money.
Speaker 2:So I had to start outbound calling and setting up tune-ups and I had no idea what I was doing and I hated it Literally hated it. And at that time texting people was not an option. Reaching out with all the different things we have today was not really an option. We didn't our. Our crm that we use was a dos based system that nobody knew how to operate, so it was all keyboard and I had no idea what I was doing like. I couldn't pull reports I couldn't get, we didn't have email address. We had nothing like. We just so poorly ran for so many years. I learned a lot of very valuable things very quickly. But outbound calling can definitely work it still works today it's just it's not fun. It's really not at all. I hated it.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and it's amazing how many of the calls don't get answered or don't get responded to. And it's amazing how many of the calls don't get answered or don't get responded to Now, 10 years later. Think about it like we're only 10 years later.
Speaker 2:It's a completely different world.
Speaker 1:It was unrecognizable from when I started, unrecognizable right, and it's only been 10 years and it's moving fast. What are the most effective automations that you see companies putting into place? That that like that 80, 20 rule where they get like put, put these in place. That's an 80%. The others fill the gaps and really make that, make up the difference.
Speaker 2:Yeah, that's an awesome question and a lot of times people want to get really specific and really complicated when they start learning what automation can do. But honestly, if you focus on just a few core things, one for me is anywhere you get a lead, have a speed to lead system Immediately, immediate text message or email, whatever is more comfortable for you, because every market is a little different. That way, some people are really active with text, some markets. Everyone hates text, everyone's like stop, unsubscribe, I hate you. But speed of lead. So web form, submissions, chat on the website, anything with a Facebook lead form. If you have a web form that you're sending Google ads to, angie, homeadvisor, thumbtack, even Yelp has an API now, so you can. Anytime you get leads in those sources, you can funnel those into a conversational whether it's an AI bot or someone answering it, at least sending the first text message out and starting the conversation. And then what's nice is because you can funnel all of those things into one place. You can put them in a pipeline so that way somebody can manage the pipeline internally if you don't want to use some sort of AI system to constantly follow up, and that would be like you got to get that in place.
Speaker 2:Missed call text backs is huge. Everyone thinks they don't miss any calls until we like we as an agency you guys might've done this too we have an entire call tagging team. Pretty soon we'll have an AI analysis tool that you can immediately, instantly know what happened with those opportunities. And what will happen is CallRail and other tools will say the call was answered because they thank you, that this call may be recorded. Thanks for calling ABC Roofing. This call may be recorded. The technology says that was answered. Well, then it rings four times and then somebody hangs up and it happens all the time. I think I've seen our missed call rate like 15 to 17% of all calls, and that's over tens of thousands of calls per month. So do the math, you can figure that out Like it's a lot of missed opportunity. And so just those things in general. Just tighten up the ship, plug the holes, if you will, in your, in your, in your leaking bucket, and you're instantly going to be more profitable and book more jobs.
Speaker 1:Yeah, that's. That's the first thing to do, right? It's making sure that you're not leaving money on the table. We did some analysis at Roof for Marketers and it was at a time when we analyzed this. There was 40% of leads that came into that we helped generate for companies were unanswered or or or or not responded to, so they're not responding too quickly like I've seen some studies done.
Speaker 2:It's crazy, literally. Um, I think the company's valvometer. They're out of indianapolis, they do a little home service. They do some other stuff too. They have multiple industries they serve. But they did a study of like 500 contractors or something like this and it's from like 2022 or 23, during COVID and they found that like the like 40 or 45% of contractors didn't reply within five days. Like just being fast, you don't even have to be good, just being fast is a leg up from your competition.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I have a, we have. We have our lake house in northern Minnesota you know about the lake homes in Wisconsin there and I called a gutter company to have a conversation about getting some new gutters on the place and they gave me a call back in 28 days.
Speaker 2:It was convenient for them at that point.
Speaker 1:By that time I'd had someone drive up from Minneapolis, complete the job and go home and been paid before they even called me back.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and the thing is that business probably doesn't even they probably don't even realize it because it's just the way they've been doing business, but they're. They're spending money on marketing or a company or someone. Internally they're just blowing.
Speaker 1:Or someone said you should. This is how they came about. Was I asked around? Hey, who could I use for this? Oh, use, use, so-and-so. So now they have people championing, championing their business, and they don't even they don't even call back. That championing ended at me, it's over. Before we carry on with the episode, let's give a shout out to one of our sponsors. I talk to contractors every day that feel stuck, not because they're not working hard, but because they're missing the structure to growth, 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. They don't even call back. Right, like that. Championing ended at me, like it's over.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I was making a YouTube video the other day for our channel and one of the things I talked about was we're not like your quality of work. You may be the best. The company that answered in 28 days may be the best gutter company the world has ever seen, but it doesn't matter. There's so many other competitors. Somebody else will do close to good enough work and they'll get paid, and you don't need to be the best. Sometimes the focus on these little like being the best just gets us in our head Like you need to also serve the customer. The customer is really what matters, and being fast is going to get you way more business. And that's just one I should say one automation, because it is multiple things you got to connect to one place, but it's one set of automations that is going to make your ROI and your marketing spend and your net profit go up, Because you're already spending that money. You might as well get the opportunities that are coming with that, or at least know where you're weak.
Speaker 2:There's tools out there. Now we're creating one called PhoneTap. It's an AI call analysis. It's an instant AI call analysis tool which can automate workflows based off of outcomes. So think of like qualified lead not booked because of pricing objection, and now that might be more home service Cause we have like service fees. I know roofers probably go out for like free estimates a lot, but whatever the case is for that type of business, then you can automatically alert a manager, an owner, somebody in your business to go do something within five minutes of that call being hung up before they get the work done, before they get to somebody else. And it's stuff like that that really is what contractors need. It's the stuff that's going to make decision making very simple for them and very effective.
Speaker 1:That's a good thing, a good, a good thought process for people as they're, as we're moving into, especially into the AI age. Right, like, what can, what can you do that that helps you get to those decisions faster, that get that gets you to those, those, um, those things that matter, those things that'll move the needle quickly? Um, what other, what other parts of of companies are you seeing automations done? Well, like we're on the front end of the funnel here. This is awareness consideration into the buying decision a little bit. Where else are you seeing a lot of automation and AI being implemented?
Speaker 2:The most obvious one, and this doesn't matter what business type you're in or what you do for a service, but it's it's estimate followups. We all know when new jobs come in, new estimates come in, the salespeople are going to run to the new one and they might eventually get back to the other ones, but we all know the stat like the, the, the magic is between touch point seven and 12. Most people follow up maybe once or twice, and so having a system where you have nurture and this gets into a broader discussion about content marketing, because I think a lot of people, one contractors as a whole have gotten better at creating content, but they don't create enough of it and that content you create serves multiple purposes I think this is a concept that doesn't really get talked about a lot. It's like you've got to create content Okay, cool, why and what and how and what's the purpose, because some content like this, for example, this for me, is a very, very top of the funnel. I just want you to know that we exist. It's top of funnel. Just know that Relentless Digital exists and you can always reach out for questions if you have them as you get down to the middle of the funnel.
Speaker 2:If somebody booked an estimate with you, they want to know you know maybe, the materials you use. What's the warranty? Why should they choose you over somebody else? What are your core values? Maybe some video testimonials of happy customers you've served in the past that live in their market? Things like that can be really valuable middle of funnel towards bottom of funnel content to get them to actually move forward with something. And I think contractors I see some people do really well, really funny stuff online. But it's the content driving people from top of funnel hey, I'm aware of your company down to my solution and how it can help you Really takes practice and skill. So the more you practice, the more you get accustomed to it, the more you pay attention to content marketing, you'll start to see that it will all come together.
Speaker 2:But the content market isn't just for the social media platform. It's for email. It's for sending prospects that are in your pipeline. It's for sending people that maybe don't know if they want to get an estimate on the roof. Maybe they're in the. There's a little leak. I don't know if I need someone, or my. I know my roof sold but I don't know if it needs to be replaced yet, but they're not really. They're trying to do research phase.
Speaker 2:Content can help because everyone absorbs content differently. Um, email video text posts, local Facebook groups, Um, and it's just. It served me extremely well at the last two HVAC companies that I was at and then my marketing company now, and, of course, with the podcast, we put out episodes every week. Content marketing is the current and probably future currency, especially as AI becomes this massive behemoth of a thing and we don't know who to trust anymore. Being authentic on camera and showing the authentic brand and the people and who you are and what you do for the community is going to become, I think, even more powerful, because a lot of people are using it just to regurgitate a bunch of stuff. Right now, this is like how much crap can I put out and hopefully it sticks and I grow and I get followers?
Speaker 1:yeah, I just did a podcast recently. Uh, the guys from East Coast Roofing Systems out in Philadelphia area and, if I remember right they talked about their content is almost. It's so educational. Just, they want their customers to be so well-educ, educated, before they reach out to them. That's just a goal. I think it's a mindset thing with content. Content is hard. There's a I guess business is hard in terms of needing leads, right like there's a need for new business and so so much effort goes into that now and new business, that a lot of the other things. It's like well, I'll do that one day. I'll do that someday.
Speaker 2:One day never happens One day never happens.
Speaker 2:Just do it. Just do it Literally. Turn your camera on. It doesn't matter if the sound sucks, if the quality of the video sucks, just start and there's, you know. I mean I know you know this because there's a lot of tools out there that can help.
Speaker 2:I think a lot of people like they don't know what to create a content on. One of the easiest ways I tell people is go to a tool like answerthepubliccom or alsoaskedcom. You get free searches, free searches, yep, and they just pull people also ask questions from Google. So type in roofing replacement, roofing repair. They'll give you 200 or 300 ideas on content to create and this is literally search engines saying hey, people also who search this term also search these questions. So it's like a hidden key to the kingdom. Just start shooting.
Speaker 2:You know the content doesn't have to be great. It doesn't have to be movie production. Honestly, I've seen content that doesn't get edited perform way better than stuff that's got fancy edits and fancy camera and everything else, especially when it comes to local businesses, because people know you're not going to have a huge budget for like movie level production. Grow into that at some point. Then you can all be tommy mellow and be this big audacious guy. He's got cameras following him everywhere. But the for the, the rest of us, mere mortals, just just start with your phone, because the quality of everything on there is great it is, and it that's a great one.
Speaker 1:So it google's essentially telling you what it's google's data and what people are searching for.
Speaker 2:So you can't know where to look right. I mean, that's the key, everything. Just if you can cut through the noise and just like hey, I got two tools today, let's go create a free account, type in something that's relevant, that you want to create some maybe you want to create some content on and just see what ideas pop up. Most of them have an export feature so you can export them into like a Google sheet or an Excel document. And now you have a massive list and then when you get new free searches the next day or next week or whenever they renew, just do another one, put this list together and then, honestly, what I like to do is I time block and I will. I usually record one hour a week.
Speaker 2:Now, at this point, because we've been doing it so long, I have actually hired someone to literally help me with like content, ideas and all that kind of stuff. But when I started out, I literally just like I found a question, I just answered the question and just start basic Act like if you have to have someone literally ask you the question while you're on camera, they'll be behind the camera and just answer the question to the best of your knowledge and post that. It can be as simple as that. It doesn't have to be some fancy thing. And then, once you get used to it, you get better. And then you start diving into it and you want to improve and you want to improve the editing and add some B-roll and all of those things. But everybody gets started with just a camera and their first videos suck. So don't worry.
Speaker 1:They will suck, but it's okay. Who should?
Speaker 2:be on camera for a company.
Speaker 1:It's a great question.
Speaker 2:My personal opinion, is the owner, especially if you're privately held is the owner especially if you're privately held is the owner. It's one reason we've never done social media for clients is because it is extraordinarily hard to speak their brand into existence regularly. We can create graphics and we can put stuff together to, you know, put some information out there that's valuable and educational, but speaking the brand and like that brand voice, everybody's got a little different way of going about it. The best content we always created was when I did it in house or I had a team and I trained them how to what I wanted them to say, and they just kind of get used to the way I talk and the way I push things through it. It's the best way to put content out.
Speaker 2:And I know that sucks to hear. If you're an owner, maybe, and if you're lucky and you have a big enough organization, maybe you have a GM, a service manager, uh, someone in a high level position that wants to create content. Maybe you have techs that want to create content. I've seen, uh, companies use their techs. They're really um, they're higher level technicians and they help them create content.
Speaker 1:but typically it starts with the owner them create content, but typically it starts with the owner. Yeah, in most cases it's got, it's got to be the owner. Um, in my opinion too, um, it starts there. But I've seen a lot. I've seen some companies that do a good job of getting the team involved, and I think it's it's a special thing when they do. But it's a lead by example a little bit right.
Speaker 2:Well, you can have a lot of fun with it. So they're not in the roofing space but for anyone listening, I would go find climate experts in Florida. His name is Derek Cormier. Their content is hilarious. They have some of the funniest kids. They usually take some sort of trending thing and they take it for the trades. Their hvac and plumbing company content is is hilarious. Like I don't typically watch a lot of home service content because I'm not really the audience for that, but it's hilarious like I actually watch their videos because this is hilarious, so I always take time to watch their stuff. So if you want some inspiration and you feel like you got a creative team, derek would be the person to reach out to, because he's he's doing a great job.
Speaker 1:Yeah, that's awesome and that's that's the thing. You have to be yourselves in it, right? So I would assume, if I met the owners of of that company, that's their personality, right. That's the culture that they've built in that company.
Speaker 2:They're, they're probably, it's, probably's, probably oh yeah, there's team members in almost every single one of his videos and, honestly, I've gotten to the point like I recognize the team members almost more than I recognize him, because I've seen every video that I watch.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I think there's a little. You know, we kind of talk about automation and ai a little bit and in content, but, like man, this thing is changing fast. You know we we now have zero, a lot of zero click searches on Google for people that don't understand what that is. It's, it's the answer being presented without having to go to a website or or another property. You know, more people are going to asking questions on chat, gpt and cloud and perplexity and all the other AI solutions. What do you see changing in digital marketing right now? I know you're enjoying the episode, but let's give a shout out to another one of our sponsors.
Speaker 1: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 24-7, 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. We now have a lot of zero-click searches on Google For people that don't understand what that is. It's the answer being presented without having to go to a website or another property. More people are going to asking questions on ChatG, gpt and cloud and perplexity and all the other AI solutions. What do you see changing in digital marketing right now?
Speaker 2:Well, I have some good news. The local side, like the people that are searching for a service company near me like the service you offer near me, or in my area, for a service company near me like the service you offer near me or in my area that I don't. I think Google would have a massive war on its hand if they got rid of the Google business profile. And the Google business profile is still where a lot of people go to local search Because ChatGBT, if you ever ask it for like reviews and stuff, I've seen it pull TripAdvisor reviews for the trades. It's either that or it's pulling from Bing Places Bing reviews for the trades. It's either that or it's pulling from Bing Places. Bing Places is connected to Facebook and most contractors don't get a lot of reviews on Facebook, so it's not very reliable. So the good news is the local side. So very bottom of the funnel customer knows they need to hire someone and they're going to try to pick a provider. I think that's safe for now. I say for now because we don't know, but you're absolutely and honestly, I think a lot of people think chat GPT is stealing all their traffic. It's actually AI overviews on Google stealing their traffic.
Speaker 2:I did an audit for a plumbing company, cause I was just like why is the traffic in the website goes? I was looking at their rankings. I'm like nothing's really changed here and they've ranked for a lot of blogs like either one, two or three. And so I started. I went into a incognito browser where I can use the ai overview, because the when you have a workspace account for a reason, it doesn't work as well.
Speaker 2:Um but, and I started typing in the same exact query I was finding in google search console and, sure enough, they're still there as one of the sources, but the answer is right there for them. And then by the time you got to their actual blog post and I have a 32-inch monitor I had to scroll to get to the first blog post because the answer was right there. So they were sourced in the AI overview. They were still the number one blog position, but they lost probably 60% to 70% of the traffic to their website and it was all informational blog style type content. So it's I don't know if anyone has the answer for that yet, because that's going to be the norm moving forward. So it's chat. Gbt is probably stealing some traffic the same way, but yeah, google itself is stealing a majority of your traffic right now, whether whether you know it or not.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and it's special. So those queries just for people listening. A lot of times those informational queries didn't have ads on them Not yet they didn't right. So the local search results have ads. There's Google ads. There's local services ads right. There's the spot in the. There's the Google ad in the map section. There in the GBPs right. There's Google ads. There's local services ads right. There's the spot in the. There's the Google ad in the map section. There in the GBPs right. There's revenue being generated on that local on the bottom of funnel roofing company near me Asphalt shingle versus metal roofing. There was no ads there. So, if you think about it, from Google's P&L they can't get rid of. Just as you were saying that I'm like they can't get rid of that. They can't disrupt their revenue stream in that way. They can't take that out. That's the P&L, that's what they're funding everything else with. Is our Google ads money, right? So so it is. You know that's a realization that you're probably a little bit safer there.
Speaker 2:Well at some point. I know ChatGPT is technically a non-profit but they're going to have to run ads. They got tens of billions of dollars in funding. Those investors want that money back.
Speaker 1:Someone's going to get their money back At some point they're going to have ads.
Speaker 2:Perplexity has already started playing around with ads, which they're quite a bit smaller. But either way, what's going to end up happening is we're going to you're going to have to manage all these platforms and it's going to be and who knows what other ones are going to be created. You know deep seek at its moment I haven't really seen a lot with that, but manis is getting like it's getting wild. There's still a lot of new programs coming out and they're becoming a lot cheaper and cheaper and cheaper to create because the technology is better, um, but being omnipresent has never it's, it's, it's always been important, but it's been growing in importance and that's why we talked about content marketing. It's going to be more important than ever. We're probably I told jim this before we jumped on we're probably going to miss the day in two or three years. We're going to miss the days when Google was the main behemoth, because now we have to put our ad spend in all of these different places and our attention in all of these different places, and it's going to become very difficult to really measure results because there's just going to be a lot. It's going to be a lot of data, like we're all going to have to get much better as marketers to really understand what's happening.
Speaker 2:Um, I've already seen somebody come up with reporting to see um try to explain this in a way that makes sense to people. But, um, so when chat, gbt, gemini or perplexity has traffic and it refers to your website, so somebody clicks one of those source links and goes to your website. I I've seen people create reports on that already. I did, I did one for relentless and I've seen that we had like six LLM sessions in the last 20 days, like and, and what I've noticed is actually the time spent on the website coming from those. I've did a few other tests. It's actually a lot higher than normal Google traffic because they get an answer and now they're going deeper down the funnel, right, because they got an answer like okay, now I want to know who to hire. So it seems like they're spending more time on the website from that. But that's, it's early, so don't, don't call me.
Speaker 1:In six months that could be not the case and we're kind of, you know, I mean I'm, I'm, I'm old enough and have been around this, this. I've been building websites since since the early, early 2000s, you know when, when there was Ask Jeeves there was, you know, there was Yahoo there was, there were multiple places right and and. And. So, thinking about it in that frame of reference, it's just that again, there's a race. Right now there's going to be a lot of people, a lot of places that come in, a lot of properties that become relevant and then irrelevant over time. We'll have to see what happens.
Speaker 2:But well, you know the thing that I think a lot of there's a lot of there's a lack of clarity when it comes to, like people say ChatGPT is cutting into Google's search dominance. But the funny thing is Google is still growing as far as number of queries, so that what that means is people are using multiple search platforms for different things. It's not like for like. When people say this, what I do on ChatGPT, I don't usually search the web different things. It's not like for like. When people say this chat, what I do on chat, you be T I, I don't usually search the web that much, I just help have it as an assistant. Well, that counts as a query and an ask when they do those reports.
Speaker 2:But I'm not eating into Google. I still go to Google for for a lot of things. Um, so, it's not. I'm not cutting into what Google is doing, and most people that don't know this world like you and I know this world really well and your listeners probably know quite a bit about this world Regular homeowners are still just going to Google. That's just how we grew up. A whole generation of people is just going to Google because now we can get our AI answers in Google. So do I need ChatGPT except for like an assistant to do other tasks, and that's what I think a lot of people are using it for. So when people say, oh, it's chat GPT is growing, I'm like yeah, it is, but they're doing different things over here. I'm helping it, help me with video outlines and video scripts and webinar slides and things that I would never ask Google for. So that's just my two cents on it.
Speaker 1:I think we're also entering a period of time. There's a couple of things converging, one of them is AI, but it's converging with the post-COVID slowdown. That's my theory. Yeah, I did a.
Speaker 2:I was on To the Point. It's a home service podcast with Christiana. She's got a marketing company right here in Arizona. I'm in Arizona now. I said Wisconsin. I've been in Arizona for three years.
Speaker 2:We talked about this because I did a Google Trends study and for anyone listening to this, if you haven't heard Google Trends, just go to trendsgooglecom, type in your main roofing and then just go down to your state. You can kind of drill, drill down by state and you can go last 12 months, last 30 days, last five years. I think it goes out to like five years. But you can see the trends and what I noticed when I was looking at like august of 23, that exact thing where I was looking at like ac repair dropped off a cliff, like the.
Speaker 2:The search volume and the trend dropped hard after a certain point and a lot of people were starting to claim like I don't have the leads, I'm not having my, my uh record months, like I was month over month when it was during covid. Everyone's like another record record month, another record month. Everyone was having a great time and getting real fat, real, real fast, right, um so, and it's this post-COVID slowdown is different. People aren't at home as much. A lot of these big tech companies are forcing people to come back to work. So now they're back to I'm only home a few hours a day. That can wait. They don't like it doesn't matter to them as much because they don't use the home as much. So there's a lot of that at play too.
Speaker 1:It's, and I think that that's one of the things. It's kind of the there's a little bit of blame getting pushed on the AI right now is what I'm saying. Like it's not just people don't realize. Oh my goodness. Well, shoot, shoot, things are. Things are slower. I know you're enjoying the episode, but let's give a shout out to another one of our sponsors.
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Speaker 1:People don't realize. Oh my goodness, well shoot, things are are slower, and I've seen it, you know, in in many of the trades you know, I have a friend that's an electrical contractor. He's like man. People just aren't calling as often right now and so it.
Speaker 2:You know there's a lot of uncertainty in the economy, right like you know, the regardless of where you lean politically, there's tariffs and some of that stuff can be good or bad how depends how you look at it, but that the uns whenever it's just like your home, your home estimate if they're not, if they're confused, they're not going to buy.
Speaker 2:So if they're not sure if they're going to have money for this or they're not sure what's going to happen to the housing industry, their mortgage rates or all these different things. It just creates a lot of like well, we'll wait. We'll wait and see what happens until we know things are booming, like I just saw yesterday. This is the worst it's ever been. As far as sellers to buyers for homeowners, which is usually the real estate market's a really good indicator of kind of where things are.
Speaker 2:And typically and I'm assuming, roofing kind of follows a trajectory like HVAC. Hvac equipment typically gets replaced like every 15 to 17 years. 15 to 17 years ago was 2008. We all know what happened in 2008, 2009, slowed down with construction, so there's not as many new homes and roofs I'm assuming are 20, 25, 30 years, probably depending on where you live and some of those factors. But we're also coming up on that for the roofing industry too, where there's going to be a slowdown because there's not as many new homes built and depending on where you are like I'm in Arizona, it's boom town. You wouldn't know. The economy is not great here. There's new construction projects everywhere, but a lot of other places don't have the same new construction build out right now.
Speaker 1:Yeah, it's, it's challenging. So you mentioned omnipresence. You know I love omnipresence. Man, that's my like. Being best known beats best every time we're you know, and and so what?
Speaker 2:what are you seeing tactically that is, helping people become omnipresent in their, in their marketplaces. Well, I think I think the biggest thing comes back to video content. I didn't share this. I shared it on my social media feed maybe a month ago and I realized I was looking up. I was just looking up our brand, I don't even remember why, but when you look up your brand, if you have short form videos and you have your social media accounts connected to your Google business profile, there's usually a one called short videos and it will pull in Instagram, facebook, linkedin, tiktok videos into your feed. So what that's telling me and Google's Google's always one of those things. They'll never directly tell you what's helping. So you kind of have to see like, well, what do they have access to and what are they? What are they showing on here? Cause you've kind of got to put together the pieces, and that's why there's a lot of marketing companies putting together the pieces, cause it's it's a mystery, but short videos pop up in, like all of my short videos that get posted are on there. So Google is clearly pulling those in and to.
Speaker 2:To make matters worse, google's under two antitrust lawsuits right now One for their ads platform and the other one is for. I think it has to do with search and not allowing competitive products into search, because everything's Google, google, google. So Google's under a lot of hot water and a lot of pressure right now too, where they may have to sell off some of their features, so it's in their best interest. For example, if you're in Europe, the European Union is very tough against tech companies. Here in Europe, the European Union is very tough against tech companies. We are not here in the States, so in Europe the search results are a lot different. They pull in things like TikTok, videos and Facebook, so it's a lot different if you look there versus here. Here it's still a lot of Google stuff, but it is starting to shift a little bit, where they're starting to pull different things in from social media platforms.
Speaker 2:If you look up your brand, this is a great way to know which sites are the most important or ones that Google's pulling information from. Usually LinkedIn shows up. Usually Facebook shows up like one of the top two or three. So just Google your brand and then just see what's on page one. That's a good indicator of what's important for Google, and so if you don't have listings on those platforms. Get them at least get a listing. Start posting on there, hire a VA. Start, just start putting content out there, because we never know what they're pulling sources from. So if we're sharing our five star Google reviews on four different platforms, now all of those platforms know we do great work and they all see that five star content and it just creates this ecosystem where, if we're searching for best roofer in my area, that gives free estimates that's like a chat GPT type search right, that's a voice search we can start. If we have everything pointing to we do five star work and we're great, chances are better you're going to be listed. So just things like that, and this again, can all be automated.
Speaker 2:I automated review responses in social media posts back in 2018, 2019, before we had AI. Now AI has made it a thousand times better. My posts were always the same, but now we can do all this and we don't have to set up once and it just runs and we don't have to spend our time. So then we can do all this and we don't have to set up once and it just just runs and we don't have to spend our time. So then we can spend our time on creating two or three really really good pieces of content per week, versus like, oh, I got to post today, what am I going to post about? What am I going to post about? And that's the kind of stuff that we really like helping contractors with. Just be smarter. Just, you don't have to. You don't have to. You don't have to do the hustle grind mentality all the time or work 18 hours a day and always be online and always be answering people.
Speaker 1:You can have technology help you with a lot of this stuff. Yeah, it's, ai is here.
Speaker 2:So, like you better is better accept it because I actually have a really funny story, um, about one of our, because we have ai chat bots for our clients and so we this lady in in texas it was right in dallas she came in in the so she had a conversation with rachel that's the name we gave our ai bot, just because rachel sounds like a really wholesome, good person that you know is really personable and fun and smiley. So she had a conversation, she booked an appointment. She came into the office with fresh baked cookies and asked the receptionist if she could give these to Rachel. The office person didn't know what she was talking about at first. Once it like dawned on her mid conversation and she's like, oh yeah, sometimes people call me Rachel. She didn't want to tell her it was an ai bot that booked the appointment, had the conversation with her, she's like, yeah, rachel was so warm and giving and she was so helpful. I just want to bake these cookies and give them to her.
Speaker 2:And I'm like this is wild, like you never think this stuff would happen in your lifetime. But people don't know the difference and, especially as it gets better and better, they just don't know. Um, I'm still of the belief you should tell them it's an ai assistant. But I know phone calls. I think it's by law you have to, but chats are little little gray area if you will. But that stuff is happening and we've had other stories where people like left five star reviews and named the ai chat bot in the reviews and said, hey, rachel was great and helped me out and all this type of stuff. So people are, they don't know the difference in. This. Stuff is working and it is booking appointments and is helping contractors grow without having to have a massive overhead.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and it's. It kind of comes back to earlier. What we were talking about is that speed to lead, that AI chatbot was communicating quickly and efficiently, and that's all people want is someone to communicate with them, like they just want to be communicated with. They don't want the phone call five days from now.
Speaker 2:Well, not only that, like you know, millennials are the largest home buying group in the country. Now I'm an old millennial, I just turned 40. So I'm at the very like I think there's like maybe two years more than me as a millennial age. But now we have Gen Z becoming young twenties, mid twenties and they're starting to buy homes. So boomers still own the majority of they're the largest homeowner group.
Speaker 3:I know it's a little confusing, but it's because they have multiple properties.
Speaker 2:The ones that are buying the properties now are millennials and we do business differently. Right? We want chat, we want online booking, we want online pricing, we want all of the things that we don't want to have to sit on the phone for 10 minutes and have you qualify us. We just don't want to do that. My wife shares this story a lot and I share it on her behalf is anytime we hire a contractor for our house, if they don't have some way to chat or book online, she just moves on to someone else, Because that's just the world we live in today, and so if you don't have those things, you might be missing opportunities and again you don't, just like. We gave the example about the gutter company that was 28 days later. You don't even know you're missing the opportunity because you don't even have the option.
Speaker 2:What are the main things that a contractor needs to do going forward to make sure that they survive and thrive. Going into this era, my biggest thing would be to own your list so that way you can always remarket that list. I've actively for both our podcasts, for our marketing company. Even when I was in the trades I always made sure we collected email addresses. That was before text messaging we got became a lot more popular. Own that list, grow that list as often as possible.
Speaker 2:Make sure it's a good list, though Don't don't go buy a list of homeowners and stuff that that stuff doesn't work.
Speaker 2:And then you said you send an email and you're going to ruin your domain's reputation, but every single person that calls you fills out a form. Make sure that is required field to send a mobile phone number and get an email address, because with all of these different platforms and we don't know exactly what's making people push them to buy today, the best way to ever get ahold of someone is direct outreach, and we do that a lot with clients now, in the homes of HVAC specifically, it's a little easier to get tune-ups and get back in the door right, because obviously most people are well-trained. Like I need to have someone come tune up my AC. Um, but roofing will maybe a little harder that way, but at least with the email you can nurture them and teach them about their roof, teach them about their home, get them to feel really good about like oh, these guys are always teaching me something that's valuable. You will stand out when it comes time to get that roof replaced.
Speaker 3:That would be my main thing.
Speaker 2:And, of course, we talked about automation Fill the gaps in your bucket. Start realizing, regardless of how awesome you think your team is, you have holes in your bucket. You're just not looking hard enough. Every business does, my business does. We're always constantly trying to find a better way to reach out to prospects, reach out to people that requested information faster, and to just fill the bucket, you know, because if you plug the holes, you don't have to fill it with water, and that water being money, your profit, that's right.
Speaker 2:So you don't have to keep filling the bucket if you fill the holes.
Speaker 1:Man, it was great having you on this has been another episode.
Speaker 2:I'm glad we're able to do this.
Speaker 1:Yeah, man, this has been another episode of the Roofing Success Podcast.
Speaker 3: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.
