Escaping the Drift with John Gafford - He Sold His Roofing Business for $60M (Here’s What He Built Next) - Mike Feazel

Episode Date: January 20, 2026

Mike Feazel built one of the largest roof replacement companies in America, scaling it to $60 million in revenue before selling it 13 years ago. But instead of retiring to an island, he saw a massive problem in the industry and decided to disrupt it all over again with Roof Maxx.In this episode of Escaping the Drift, John Gafford talks with Mike about the journey from a small farm in Ohio to becoming a roofing mogul. Mike shares the exact "dealership model" he used to scale his new company to 380 locations in just five years, why he believes the "franchise model" is broken for most service businesses, and how a 17-page Google search led to a breakthrough product that is saving homeowners millions.If you are in the trades, own a service business, or want to know how to scale a company for a massive exit, this episode is a masterclass in blue-collar entrepreneurship.In this episode, we cover:How he scaled a roofing company to $60M and sold it.The "Dealership vs. Franchise" model: Why one is superior.How a simple Google search led to a bio-oil breakthrough.Why he believes "white collar" jobs are in trouble and "blue collar" is the future.The 3-minute rule for pitching your business to anyone.Chapter Titles & Timestamps00:00 – Intro: Sold for $60 Million02:15 – The Problem with Asphalt Shingles (And How He Fixed It)08:45 – Dealerships vs. Franchises: The Scaling Secret15:30 – How to Scale to 380 Locations in 5 Years22:10 – The "Google Mafia" & The Cost of Leads29:00 – Why Blue Collar is the New Gold Rush36:45 – Managing a Remote Team of 50+ People42:00 – Final Advice: Don't Retire, Reload💬 Did you enjoy this podcast episode? Tell us all about it in the comment section below! ☑️  If you liked this video, consider subscribing to Escaping The Drift with John Gafford *************💯 About John Gafford: After appearing on NBC's "The Apprentice", John relocated to the Las Vegas Valley and founded several successful companies in the real estate space.➡️ The Gafford Group at Simply Vegas, top 1% of all REALTORS nationwide in terms of production. Simply Vegas, a 500 agent brokerage with billions in annual sales Clear Title, a 7-figure full-service title and escrow company.*************✅ Follow John Gafford on social media:Instagram ▶️ / thejohngaffordFacebook ▶️ / gafford2🎧 Stream The Escaping The Drift Podcast with John Gafford Episode here:Listen On Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/7cWN80gtZ4m4wl3DqQoJmK?si=2d60fd72329d44a9Listen On Apple: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/escaping-the-drift-with-john-gafford/id1582927283 *************#RoofingBusiness #BlueCollarMillionaire #BusinessScaling #ExitStrategy #RoofMaxx #MikeFeazel #EscapingTheDrift #EntrepreneurshipSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

And now escaping the drift, the show designed to get you from where you are to where you want to be. I'm John Gafford and I have a knack for getting extraordinary achievers to drop their secrets to help you on a path to greatness. So stop drifting along, escape the drift, and it's time to start right now. Back again, back again for another episode of the podcast that gets you from where you are to where you want to be. And today, beaming live to the studio. So I got a guy. I love having innovators on the show, people that are doing something different or new or disrupting an industry in a way that hasn't been done before.

And this is a gentleman that was introduced to me. And I couldn't wait to get him on here and kind of tell his story because this is literally a century's old profession that hasn't had a lot of change in it at a long time. And they've kind of come up with something that is disrupting that industry. He has built a massive company nationwide before. he got into this, but now is the CEO of a company called RoofMax, which is changing the roofing business forever, saving people a ton of money. And this is a really cool product. And I wanted to get on to hear his story. Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the program. This is Mike Feasel.

Mike, how are you? Hey, doing great. Thanks for having me on. Good. Yeah, welcome, welcome. Glad to have you. Let me switch over to this camera. There we go. Now I can kind of see it. So first off, man, tell me about you. Let's get into who you are as a human first. Sure, sure. So, and raised in a small farming community just outside of Columbus, Ohio, got in the roofing business right out of high school. And then my brother and I started our own company back in 88, so almost 40 years in the industry and seen the good, the bad, and the ugly within the roofing industry. And about 13 years ago sold our roof replacement company. We bought one of the largest roof replacement companies in the country and went down the path of trying to figure out how do we

get more life out of asphalt shingle roofs, which is 85% of all steep slope, you know, homes, churches, schools, apartments, condos. So are you still in Columbus now? I actually live in Puerto Rico. But we are a-weather's better. Weather's better. Much better than Ohio, but for this time of year. And I like the ocean.

But we're a virtual company with the largest probably home improvement company in the world. The only brick and mortar we have is our manual. manufacturing facility. And we have 300. Our employees are across the country and actually some overseas. And then our dealers, of course, are in all 50 states. Now, when you were doing traditional roofing, how big did that company, how big did you scale that business to? So we scaled it back, you know, we were at our largest, we were 20 million dollars, which would be about 60 million dollars in revenue in today's dollars from the time we sold it to. It's about a $60 million company. Well, because the reason I asked if you were still in Columbus is one of my good

friends, I just occurred me when you said that, just had a massive exit to private equity in the roofing business and they live in Columbus. So I was like, oh. And what is his name? His name's Alex Gerhardt is his name. I don't know Alex. Wow, that's interesting. So he's probably on the on the on the on the insurance side. But yeah, private equity is all over the place in the roofing side of things now. Yeah. Anything I think that's the hedge against AI is anything that, you know, AI is not going to come roof a house and it's not going to come put an air. conditioner in and it's not going to come plumb your pipes. That's where private equity is. It's cool again. Yeah, it's moving. Well, it's where the jobs are going to be and it's what,

you know, what you can keep. So when you exited that company, was that something you were looking forward? Does somebody just come knocking on your door with a check that you couldn't say no to? We were, we were looking at, you know, somebody came knocking on the door, but my brother and I were getting close. We'd been in it for 25 years. We, there was a lot of changes in the roofing industry, of course, over 25 years. and just decided we wanted to go down this path. So we felt if we completely got out of that side, the roof replacement side of the business,

we would have a better opportunity here, which was figuring out how do we get more lives out of asphalt shingles. So we exited back in 13, partnered with the Soybean Association, Ohio State University, Patel Labs, which is the largest research and development lab in the world, based out of Columbus, Ohio,

and went to work. And see, you guys developed this product. This was a problem you took to the lab and said, well, how can we figure this out? So I found the old patent that had sat on the shelf for 17 years had tried to bend a couple companies tried to take it to market, didn't have any success with it. But I think it took a roofer to understand the challenges in the industry and how to bring it to market. And that's what we did.

And then we created a Generation 2 product through Battelle Labs, you know, increase the product. and then had a lot of testing done with Ohio State University. We had it tested through the same labs that test roofing shingles before they can get an ASTM stamp, right, before it can be sold into the market. So we had all of that testing done and then went to market back in 2017. 2017 is when we founded Roof Max. Really went hard into the market in late 18. Okay. What you just said, you glossed over it, but I found really interesting what you just said, which was I found an old patent.

and I just figured they didn't know how to take it to market. Walk me through that entire process because that's something, if somebody's listening to this right now, right? And you have an expertise in some niche business. Sure. You might be able to just start doing patent searches around your business. I would love to hear this story. I find this fascinating.

So we sold Fiesel Ruping and immediately started a company called Roof Revivir. So as the name implies, we were trying to figure out how do we get more life out of a roof? So in the midst of that business, I'm researching, researching, researching, talking to coding manufacturers, different solutions that I thought could be a good fit and just came across this on like a 17th page of a search.

And the technology sounded promising. The marketing was horrendous, but I thought maybe there's something here, track them down, got some product. It did what they said it would do or at least short term it did. you know and this kind of went from there but once we once my brother and i got the product and i'm not a you know i am a technician i started on the roof i borrowed my dad's ladder and put it on top my car

and started a roofing company so i am a roofer um so and my brother as well and so when we saw this product we're like man this can really change the roofing industry if it doesn't stain the home if it doesn't peel the paint off a car if it doesn't kill the landscape you know or give you cancer yeah Yeah, yeah, right. And it is a biopace product, so it's very safe, didn't cause any damages. And so we really knew we had something. And once we realized we had that product, we ended up selling roof revivers after just a few short years and started roofmax. Well, tell me, I mean, did you buy the patent? Did you buy the rights to these guys? Did you license it? Are you paying a royalty? We did a licensing fee on the formulation. Okay. Yeah, there were years left in the patent. Were these guys just surprised that you called? I mean, do they think this was a dead product or were they still trying to like push it out of their garage?

They'd given up on it. They'd completely given up. So this was like a lottery ticket for them. This was a lottery ticket for them. Did you do a sit? Was it a one time licensing fee or was it based on your sales? It was based on sales. So they made a lot of money.

That's up. So that that is over now. But they made a lot of money a lot more than they ever thought they would. Yeah. But that also got you going because that formula worked. It did. It was, yeah, it was a fair trade. So what did you think?

So what was the reasoning for developing something different, just the evolution of the product, or did you feel like you needed something else? We wanted to evolve the product. We wanted to do a little bit more than what it originally did. We wanted to remove the staining from shingles, the black algae that you get in 80% of the U.S. And we wanted to get a little bit more soy into the roof.

a little bit more of the oil into the roof. So, and we're always playing with the formulation trying to make it better. That will never stop. So look, I'm clueless when it comes to what this does on a shingle roof. Like, what does this actually do? So real simple, right? Shingles are made of asphalt. And it's the petrochemical oil within the shingle that makes it flexible and waterproof.

And as that oil dries out, just like you get a pothole on the road, it's only because the oil dries out on the road. you start to get hairline cracks, eventually a pothole, they come in and pass the pothole and replace the road. And so all we're doing is putting petrol, we're replacing the dried out petrochemical oil with an all natural bio oil. And we take a, you know, the studies from Ohio State University, we've taken 17-year-old shingles that were removed from a home because they had failed, sent in treated and untreated samples to the testing labs. And we passed the same flexibility testing required for a brand new roof. The only difference between a new roof and an old roof is one is dry and brittle, the road, and the other is flexible because it has oil.

So all we're doing is replacing the dried out petrochemical oils with a bio oil and bringing that roof back to a fairly like new condition. So at what point in what point in like the roof's lifespan do you got to do this? You know, we can do it on roofs that they're all the way up to the end of their perceived life. 90% of roofs that we approach that we get on where the customers had multiple quotes for replacement, nine out of ten roofs were able to take out another five years. 80% of those roofs we can take out another 10 years, two treatments. Every five years we apply the treatment again.

And probably 60% of the roofs, we can take out three treatments or double the life of the roof and take it out 15 years. How does, I know that Florida just passed a bunch of weird insurance laws because of the hurricanes. How does, I mean, are you guys, can you play in that space or is that we do? Does this, does this count to the insurance companies as a replacement? Or how do they, how do they look at it? So they're accepting not so much roof max or now there's a whole industry that has grown up around what we've done.

There's competitors, which we see as healthy. The insurance company will never support a product. They just want to say that, hey, you've got five years of remaining life. So let's say you think you need a new roof. The insurance company sends you a cancellation letter. we come out, we treat the roof, and inspector comes out, inspects the roof, says this roof has five years of serviceable life. You send that to the insurance company and the insurance company will keep the insurance policy intact without replacement. Okay.

Let's go back a little bit, right? So once you got the formula and you had this and you figured it would work, you said that the other company failed because they didn't know how to take it to market. So what did they do that failed and what did you do that worked? I'm going to say that they quit too soon like most people. went in and did the grind and didn't stop, you know, tenacity, persistence, same with any company. And I think I understood how to take it to market better than they did. They were trying to take it to roofing companies. And as a roofer, so did I.

But I very quickly pivoted and realized the roopers were not our partner. 90% of roofers are replacement contractors, not maintenance contractors. And so quickly, we went after business opportunity seekers. because they sold it to a great opportunity. Yeah, because I would think this obviously is a much cheaper option than replacing a whole roof. So going after roofers, you're like, hey, here's this solution. They're like, why would I do that? Because it's just going to kill my margin.

Correct. I want the $20,000 replacement, not the $5,000 rejuvenation 100%. Yeah, why would I do that? So I'm guessing your strategy is consumer direct, I'm guessing. It is. Yep. So what channels did you use to get the word out on that? We went after like franchise gator, all the franchise aggregators that are lead aggregators.

And then we create a lot of our own marketing on Facebook and YouTube and, you know, pay-per-click ads, people looking for a business opportunity and just went that route. And so really worked well. So you're selling more franchises than you are worried about actually as a company going direct to consumer. Yeah, and we're a dealership model, which is similar to a franchise. We control the brand. All of the vehicles are wrapped the same. We built out vans for the, excuse me, for the dealers.

Then we support them and taking the product to market in their local market. We have marketing programs, TV, radio, direct mail, social media. And that's on corporate side. They also do a lot of the marketing themselves. talking to real estate investors, real estate agencies, home inspectors, things of that nature. Is a dealership model, is that model much cheaper to get into than a franchise model? Because I know that the franchise model is incredibly difficult. From a corporate side, the franchise model is a very difficult model.

It's a lot easier to manage a dealership model. I also felt as I looked at the franchise models, franchising is great for pizza and hamburgers. But when you have to go build the business yourself, meaning that franchisee or that dealer, we only make money when you buy product. And if we're not supporting you, you're not buying product and I'm not making money. It was the fairest tradeoff. A lot of the franchise businesses are in the business of selling franchises. And they make $100,000 and then the dealer, the franchisee fails.

If they win, they make their 7%. They got their $100,000 up front, let's just say. If they fail, they take the $100,000. territory back and they resell the territory and get another hundred grand and i didn't and i saw a lot of of the franchise models and home services is not a very fair business model um and it's and there's just a lot of hoops you have to jump to to stay in that space when so so the dealer model you guys went that route how did you market to people that wanted to be part of this through through the franchise through all of the franchise lead aggregators, right?

Franchise Gator, there's all kinds of websites that are aggregating. You can go there and look at 100 different franchises that are available or dealer models. Or dealer models. So it's kind of the same thing for them. We're just looking for business opportunity seekers. We also did it through Facebook marketing, social media as a whole. Just really. What are you looking for in a dealer and somebody that comes on as a dealer?

In the early days, a pulse and somebody believed in what we did. Fair. Hey, that's fair. I mean, right, you believed in us. All right. We'll take a chance. Today, it is more of somebody who has some, you know, business skills. Obviously, plenty of capital to come in and market it.

Sales and marketing skills. So it's evolved quite a bit over the years. And how many dealerships do you have now? 380. Wow. And how many years? In how many years? Like, oh, we, we hard launch, just call it 19 since 2019. Okay, so in five years you've got 380.

Yeah. What's it cost to get to a dealership from the, from the dealers of the point of me? You're under $100,000. I mean, you've got $20,000 in product. We require that you buy a tote with a tote. We give you a territory. And then you have to invest in the equipment.

So let's just say you go buy a full wrap vehicle, build out brand new. You know, the van wrap. We work with a company, Messer Van Solutions. they'll deliver it to your door ready to go down to the caulking gun and the, you know, the hammer. And that's probably in the $70,000 range, I think. And so you set them up with the equipment and then they've got to start the marketing side of it. But obviously you're coaching them through that. But hopefully you're dealing with people that are a little more innovative and understand how to run marketing into their territories.

How big is the territory? Territory is 100,000 population because it's such a small purchase on products. so we start very small, but we have dealers now that have 30 and 40 territories. You know, we have dealers that have bought up entire metro markets like Tampa or Detroit. Now, I know that, well, I was going to say, I know that like in roofing, it's a heavy, you know, door to door business. Heavy with door to door. Yeah. Is that part of what you guys do or no?

The roofing business on the storm side, the insurance side was heavy door to door. the retail industry in roofing is is primarily marketing and not as much door to door. The insurance industry is getting squashed right now. So there, the insurance companies are shutting down the insurance side of it, unless it's really a hailstorm, a big hail storm or a hurricane. But a lot of the door to door guys in the insurance side of roofing, they were going out and knocking on doors, you're missing a shingle, hey, I can get you a free roof. And that part of the business is being shut down as we speak over the,

the last two years. That's kind of done. Well, I know that I remember a different friend of mine at a roofing company. Their whole business model was to look for, you know, to work with real estate people and find properties at Renskro and then just say, look, if the sellers will, you know, if you'll pay the sellers deductible, we'll get your brand new roof before you close. They're selling it anyway. It's not going to affect your insurance, who cares. So, you know, I can definitely see why they would probably want to close that loophole. When I started in the industry, it was 3% of roofs were replaced by insurance due to hail and hurricanes, and it got up to 33%. 1 and 3 roofs were replaced by the insurance.

They hemorrhions of dollars and finally shut that loophole over the last few years. They won't get the genie back in the bottle 100%, but probably down to 10%. So now you've got a 23% delta that just has evaporated. So now all these roofers are trying to slide over into the retail space. The roofing industry is down 35% this year compared to last year. Wow. Oh, just because that's gone. Because the insurance. Because of that, because of marketing, because of the economy is a little soft, but it's primarily the insurance side. See, because I'm like, because like I'm in Vegas, so we don't have asphalt roofs there. Everything is, is concrete tile. That's what all the roofs are. So, you know, for us, it's a little different. But in the, you know, when I, like you said, mentioned Tampa earlier, when I, I used to live there. And yeah, every roof is that is that concrete. You know, she's. angle. So is it really just, I mean, I would, I mean, I would got to believe that AdWords is going to be your

number one, it's going to be your number one method of marketing this because I mean, it's pretty easy to target. I need a new roof. You know what I mean? But I'm sure that those clicks are very expensive. Those clicks are expensive. We do a lot of AdWords. We've done, we did about $20 million of TV this year. So just national, local TV, um, including ad, ad, The Google Mafia gets you and you drive a lot of brand awareness. That brand comes over to the internet. And then people at agencies, AdWords agencies start to see that there's millions of, or hundreds of thousands of searches for a brand.

So they start and it starts to drive up the click. So literally when your lead cost, it was 25 to 35 percent. The cost of a lead was AdWords because of what I call the Google Mafia. Well, and it's getting worse, man, because now Google searches down 30% because it's all gone to chat GPT. 60%. The zero-click crisis is crushing commerce right now because 60% of people that go to Google don't click on anything. They get their information from the overview, which is the world's worst landing page. Yeah.

And people on chat GPT. but but my avatar my customer is 50 plus mostly not on chat chaggy bt you know they're they're they're they're still going to google they're so they're still looking to the yellow pages at this point some of your customers are right right yeah yeah yeah they're doing so you met you mentioned competition coming into the market right so what changes did you guys make in your i mean you were first to market with this at scale obviously so what changes did you make to your business when competition came in What knobs did you turn? What levers did you press?

Really nothing. There haven't been any real competitors that have come in the market yet. There's a lot of people doing it, whether it be trying to do a competing type of a product, a lot of coatings, a last americ, clear last merit coatings, things they're calling rejuvenation, but it's really not. So, you know, it's a very fragmented industry, just like the rooping industry. Real competition will come. And I even think the competition that's out there, as long as it's a good product and they're treating the customers fair, I think it benefits us because now the consumer starts to go, oh, there is a way to extend the life of a roof.

But our company has done 10 times more marketing than all of the other companies combined. And I'm not knocking any of those businesses. They're just small and getting started and figuring it out. And, you know, kudos to them. So you mentioned that your whole company has run remote, right? You don't have any brick and mortars except for your actual stuff. How do you keep culture in your company when everybody's not in the same roof? Yeah, that's tough.

Easy up to 50 people. Once you go over 50 people, that starts to change. But, you know, my management team have done a great job, COO. They've just done a great job with it. You know, we've got a solid culture. But, boy, things start to change in a business. Once you get to about 70 people, at least my experience over the years, and you don't start to know everybody's name, culture starts to shift.

So, you know, for me, you know, we have every week, we have a Monday call. Right before I came on here, I was on our weekly Monday call. And I just try to stay out front and keep the troops excited with the dealers, with the employees. I don't treat anybody. They're all team members to me. They're all our partners, how I see it. Trying to be transparent, you know, when you screw up. up, own it, and just trying to keep everybody on the same page and rowing in the same direction.

And that's tough. And it's much tougher when you get bigger. It's a lot of when we had 50 dealers and 10 employees. Yeah. My scariest moment of the year happened on Saturday night, which is we have our annual Christmas party. And we've got 585 people that work for me. And I wish that I could say that I knew all of them on a first name basis.

But I don't. There's just so many of them. So I literally spend like the three weeks before that party. We have an internal system on the back end where everybody has her face. And I would go on every day for like the three weeks before and just try to study everybody's face a little bit. Just, you know, it drives me. I made a huge foe paw like eight years ago at this party where some guy walked in and he walked in with a girl that I knew. She didn't work for us, but she was there.

And she walked in and it was late in the party. late, late, late. So I assumed that she had been downstairs at like the casino, was talking to whether people that we knew that was there. And they said, oh, it's late. Come up to this party. That's why I assume they were there. And so I'm talking to her date.

And I'm like, hey, so, you know, Lara dragged you to this Christmas party. It's so random, blah, blah, blah. And I'm glad you guys came up. You know, does she always drag you to weird Christmas parties? And he goes, I've worked for you for three years. And I was like, oh. And so now my wife has programmed me the only thing. I'm allowed to say at that party is it's good to see you. That's it. Because that can mean it's

the first time I'm ever seeing you or I see you every other day. That's all I'm allowed to say. It's very awkward, right? You want to respect your people. I mean, they're the ones that do it. You know, a company exists because of them. Yeah, it's awkward. You know, at our conference, this last year's conference, because we didn't do it at the first one. I'm like, I want name tags. I want the first name huge because I can't see it without my glasses. And I want it on both sides of of, you know, the lanyard. That way, when I walk up, I can see as I'm walking up, John, good to see you. Yeah.

And what market they're from because, you know, for the dealers. So, yeah, but I think a lot of people realize, you know, it gets to a certain size. They just understand that that's just not how it works. But I also think, Pete, it's so important to people. And I love that I study because it paid off at like four times this party because there were some people that I saw that I've never, I did, I've never met, but just from my little study sheet, I knew who they were, right? And I was like, oh, hey, Nicole, nice to see you. And she's like, I haven't met you yet. I'm like, I know. She's like, you know who I am? I'm like, yes, I do.

And like that, that is stupid as it seems because, you know, who my- give a shit? Yes, but who am I in the greater scope of the world, right? I'm not, I'm not inflating my own self-importance. But in that moment to that person, it was a huge deal. It was a huge deal. It was a huge deal. It was a huge deal for them. I always wonder that question, you know, because like Simon Seneca said in his book, you know, the magic. is always in the hallways and how to keep people connected in a way where you still get that magic when it's remote is incredibly difficult to do and i'm always so in awe when i see people that does that does that well um so you have a convention once you have a convention once a year in person

yep and then you do we you said you do weekly calls or weekly calls um with the dealers and then of course management and and every layer within the company's having different meetings i'm not meeting with all of our team, our corporate team every week. You know, we do quarterly updates. And we operate under EOS. I'm sure you're familiar with EOS. Love it. Yeah, yep, we do EOS.

So every quarter we kind of do an update from the past quarter. But you're never going to beat the hallway. But our second year in business was COVID. So we really hard launched late 18. So call it 19. We had 12 months. Boom. COVID came in.

And thank God we were virtual. And I'll be honest, I'm almost 60. I'll never go back to an office. I have no desire. I can go see the dealers. I can, you know, go to different locations. And, you know, I've got great relationships with the dealers. But I don't have great relationships with all 380 of them.

You know, our dealers early on, my brother and I, Roof Max University, which people go through now, was FaceTime. Right? Call me when you get to a roof. I don't walk you through it. Yeah. We had to build all these tools out, all these assets out. It was me, my brother, and my sister, me and my brother, when we started quickly,

my sister started with us. And it was the three of us on my kitchen table. So, you know, it just, there was, and when we launched, it went quick, you know, we really grew quick. Was it always the dealer model? Did you come out of the box dealer model or were you guys just trying to make it go yourselves? Yeah. A friend of mine, um, help design the dealer model for renewal by Anderson,

if you're familiar with them. Renewal by Anderson, Anderson Windows. And they did it under a dealer model. And when we talked about doing this, he's like, don't go the franchise route. He explained to me his reasons.

He had helped renewal by Anderson. He said, most of these companies are now going a dealer model. I researched it. And we just made the decision. Let's go the dealer model. Now, it's funny,

you mentioned Ruth Max University on that. So obviously you guys have a full training platform that's built out now. What did you, if you mind me asking, what would you build that out on? You know, it's an LMS. I'm not even sure, to be honest. I'm pretty removed from a lot of that stuff. And after the first few years, we started bringing on, you know, the team. We've got a big tech team and, you know, and a pretty solid, very solid management structure in place.

So, but I'm not sure what our LMS system is. I think we've been through a few of them. Okay. Well, let's talk about you being removed. You moved to Puerto Rico. I'm guessing that had some tax advantage when you. you moved there? Was that the only reason? No, my wife and I, I was a late bloomer. I got married at 53, and my wife was a school teacher. So we were going to go to Florida in the winters. As a roofer,

I always would go to Mexico in the winter and to get out of Ohio. And you can't roof as much in the winter. So we were going to go to Florida for the winter. And I heard about Puerto Rico. I've lived in Mexico twice. I love Latin culture. And I heard about the opportunity. in Puerto Rico, we went down and visited and fell in love. We were going to be there seven months a year, five months in Ohio. And within the first 12 months, we're like, why in the hell are we going back to Ohio? Other than to go see family and visit, we've been there full time for almost seven years. I'll die on the island. We love it there. Are there a lot of expats there? I mean, what's the, I mean, yeah, probably 8,000 in my community. We live in a community called Palmas Del Mar.

I think there are 1,200, I'm sorry, 1,200 families, 800 Puerto Rican families, 400 U.S. families. But, you know, Puerto Rico is different than Mexico. In Mexico, I have wonderful friends from Mexico, but I'm still a gringo. Puerto Rico, I'm a second cousin. There's more Puerto Ricans that live in the U.S. than there are on the island. My tax attorney's sister lives in Dublin, Ohio, which is a suburb in Columbus. you know so there's a very close connection my buddy played tennis for indiana university so there's such a tight connection um it's it's you're not really an outsider you're more of a second

cousin so culturally there's a there's a great fit um and and and i love the latin culture so it's it's an amazing place it's got its challenges but far outweighs the good far outweighs the bad have you been there for a hurricane yet that would be the bad i haven't i haven't hit that yet so no yeah i have category one but that doesn't count yeah now well you know i'm floridian by the by birth and i lived in florida for much of my early life and it's just so funny people don't understand about hurricanes like like the world just kind of stops when it happens and it's just a very that's a very odd thing um yeah because i well i there are you doing a lot of what you do in puerto rico is that is that a place where you can do it down there no no no asphalt shingles yeah yeah no no that's tile down there

Yeah, tile. Yeah, tile and flat all concrete. Tile and flat roof. So where do you see the company in like five years? Where do you see it going? Just continue to do what we're doing. Right now we're going through a bit of a pivot because of the challenges with marketing has been very difficult. 60% zero click, right? So that's driving up cost per lead. Everybody I'm talking to and, you know, within the large companies, even medium-sized companies are getting hit by it. regional and national companies have an AI overview. When you search roofmax or roofmax reviews, it says reviews are mixed. We have 19,000 reviews, 4.9 stars. They're not mixed.

Yeah, no. Right? But Google is trying to be fair and balanced. And then they have the pros and the cons. So like it's on a scale of one to 10, it would be about a three if you were designing a landing page, maybe a two. And so people stop at that and they don't make their way of the landing. page. So our CPL's gone up. So cost per lead has gone up considerably and it's putting a lot of

pressure on the company. So what we're making pivots. We're early stage testing with lows. You know, we'll see how that goes. I'm very optimistic that could be a great thing. A lot of our dealers are pivoting to door to door to more guerrilla marketing tactics. You know, we spent $20 million in TV marketing this year. I don't know. We'll probably spend half of that next year because CPL's too high in a lot of markets. We've got markets that were that were $300 CPLs and now they're $800 CPLs. The break point is about $4 to $500 depending on the deal of their close ratio, what they charge their level of skill. So, so it's, but it's that's happening to everybody. I mean, everybody's getting hammered. I'm not just,

I don't believe just in home improvements. I believe it's affecting the broader economy. Oh, it's, it's every, I mean, you know, I can tell you this, you know, we're in the real estate space here. That's what we do. And my, my lead cost used to run $13, $14. Not granted, it's real estate. So the close from the percentage is very low. It's like two and a half percent on internet leads. But now, you know, my lead cost is up to $23, $24. Yeah. Yeah, it's, it's dreadful. Now, luckily for us, you know, housing is, is, keeps going up in Vegas. So the more expensive housing gets, the more we can make. So it definitely offsets the cost. But yeah, it's not good. I mean, we've shifted so heavily into going from pay-per-click into AEO,

which is feeding chat GBT, what it needs to return us as is the only good result. Because a lot of people think chat GBT is just, you know, it's super smart and knows everything. The results is returning are just what it's fed. And so we've gotten pretty good at feeding it what we want to. putting out the content, becoming a real content machine, not SEO machine, a content machine. Yeah. Google will read, the algorithm will read what's put on YouTube, what's streaming now on these podcasts. So yeah, everybody's retraining the algorithm.

What we found especially is become one of our best friends is Reddit for ChatGBT. Getting as much information as we can about us, you know, in keyword dense search stuff onto Reddit is really, that's been a huge game changer for us. 25% of Reddit, Google AI and chat, but primarily Google, about 25% of all of their data was coming from Reddit. They just took it down to 6% because of the challenges of nobody's verified. If you put a bad Google review on my website, on my Google GMB page, a Google listing, I can go in and say, no, he wasn't a client.

Google will run through their algorithm and kick it out. Reddit, can't. So Reddit is valuable and we're doing the same thing. But I think that ultimately they're going to figure this out, but does it take a year? Does it take the marketing landscape is shifting so much and how much damages does it do before we settle into what a new market, what marketing looks like, which is what drives the economy. You know, the U.S. economy is bigger than Europe's economy because we're better marketers. It's that simple. That's it. No, I don't disagree with that. Let me back up a little bit because you mentioned Google reviews being very important to your business.

Do you guys have a strategy for dealing with one-star reviews other than just challenging them? I mean, is there a customer reach-out plan? Is there, if they're legitimate customers? How do you handle that? 100%. My brother is still involved at the level where if there is a review that's a bad review, our team reaches out. We talk to the customer. We talk to the dealer.

Make sure it gets fixed. And if it doesn't get fixed, the dealer knows does they have to deal with my brother. and you don't have to deal with my brother because he's always going to say, why the hell aren't you taking care of the customer? Because that's always the answer 99% of the time. Yeah, it's a lot of people don't do that. And like, for example, I have all of our Google My Business accounts for all of our businesses are hooked directly to me. Because if every review, if I get a bad review, I want to know instantaneously that happened. So I can personally get on the phone and try to get it off.

Because I, you know, sometimes you can't win. Sometimes you can't get them off. people are just stubborn with what they do. But, you know, I'm able to probably get them down. I'm going to go probably 70% of the time I can get them off if there's a problem because a lot of times people just want to be heard and they don't know who to, they don't know how to get through to somebody that can hear them. So they just do that.

And then when they go to the company calls. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Most people are logical. So, but, you know, we are the number one rated roofing company in the country with the most reviews and the best reviews. Average roofer is going to be four, three, four, if they're taking care of their customers.

For a roof, now, in their defense, it's a hell of a lot easier to go in and treat a roof. And it's not as, you know, you're not out there for three days replacing the roof. It's not a messy job. But, but yeah, taking care of the customers, everything. And it's more important today than ever because of the transparency of the internet. But we've always treated business that way, just take care of the customer. How long does it take to do this to somebody's house? Is it a one day process?

That's hit? Yeah, two hours. and out in two hours. So not a big of the truth to deal, which is crazy. All right. So where do you see again, I know we talked about like five years. You've already exited one company to PE. Is this something that you guys would exit at some point in the future? Obviously, you love what you're doing now. Yeah. With the kind of market share you have, they had to, they're already knocking. I know they are. They're already knocking. I don't think I'm going to go to PE. I don't, you know, we've, we've gone back and forth with that, the partners. I really want a

strategic partner. Somebody is going to take care of the dealers that sees a longer term commitment. PE's always spinning up to the next up the pyramid, right? There's nothing wrong with that. But, you know, PE's, there's a really good side and there's a really dark side to PE, as you know. And, you know, and again, it's everybody's looking for something different. For me, it's not just what we get for the company. There's going to be plenty here.

I think what's more important is what what is the outcome for all the people that believed in my brother and I and this company to build their lives around it. So that's going to be more important. Yeah. And from the outside looking in, I mean, dude, you're living in Puerto Rico doing Zooms. I mean, were you going to retire, live in Puerto Rico and just not do Zooms? I mean, how much different would your life even be if you're at? I'm at the stage in my life where I don't spend nearly the money I did when I was younger. Yeah.

I mean, I mean, just what would you even do different? it, right? You just, I mean, I just, you're already, you're doing it. You're living the life. You're doing exactly as you should. Yeah. If there was anything else we haven't touched on about you or the company that you would want people to know, what would it be? So let me explain what is roof rejuvenation versus restoration. There's some confusing confusion in the market. And I think it's important for people to understand. So I talked about the product. And that is taking that old shingle that's dried up and bringing it back to life to near. like new condition, right? The coating, the protective coating, we can't get that back on. But before

we're doing that, we're also restoring the roof by repairing or replacing damaged or missing shingles. We're repairing flashings, right? There's other work we're doing cleaning the roof if it needs it, if the customer wants it cleaned. So we're really restoring the roof. Part of restoring the roof is rejuvenating those shingles with our treatment. But we're doing a lot more work. Basically, let's call it a tune-up. Some tune-ups are minor, some tune-ups are major, and then we treat the roof. So it's a really a holistic approach that we take. And because there's a lot of information and this information on Reddit and other format, you know, places where the roofing contractors want to come back and say, well, they're not taking care of the roof, right? It's not, roof max is not

fixing other things. Well, the product itself is not fixing a nail pop or missing cocking, but the rest restoration side of it, the tune up side of it does repair that. I think it's important that people understand that. Yeah, the human that's actually up there is fixing that stuff. Yeah, right, we're doing all the other things. And of course, part of that is the rejuvenation portion of the treatment and what it does to the shingles. But we're bringing that roof back to life. 90% of roofs don't need to go to the landfill. They can get five more years. And in today's economy, that helps a lot of people. 80% will take out 10 years, 60 to 70% we can take out 15 years. And I see this is about a $10 billion new niche industry over the next decade.

As more players come in and we educate the market, it's, you know, the roofing industry is huge. It's nearly $100 billion industry. Well, especially now that I would think with insurance slamming the door on that, you're going to need people looking for a cost-effective solution because state farm right in the check anymore. Nope, they're not. And, you know, I don't know where you stand on the economy. me, I think that we're coming into some headwinds with AI. I think it's going to have its good side. It's going to have its bad side.

I think we're coming into the early stages of layoffs. We're seeing that. This year was the biggest in the last 20 years. And October was the biggest October ever in layoffs. And a lot of that is due to AI. So I'm not afraid of AI. I think it's going to be beneficial over time. But I think we're going to look at a decade of some turmoil in the markets,

It's just no other way around it. But I think there's opportunity in there for the business owners and people that see, try to always see the opportunity and everything. There's massive opportunity in all of that. Yeah, I just literally right before you today in studio, I had a gentleman named Sean Callagie. He's a billionaire. Yeah, okay, there you go. Sean was just on the show today.

And we were talking about, you know, because his new AI company is pretty amazing. And they're trying to win the race. And I'd asked him, you know, what are your thoughts? thoughts on where are we headed with people becoming unemployed and because of this. And he, of course, mentioned the universal basic income, which I think is probably the route that it's headed to something, which brings up the next concern, which is, okay, now you're going to have a whole swath of the population, which is unmotivated and unsatisfied. And that normally for societies tends to be a bad thing. Well, yeah, I mean, you can kind of see what's happening with the youth

around the world look at you know if you want to see and i want to get into the politics of it but if you just see what the direction of world's going all you have to just look over to europe to see where maybe we're at in another five or ten years um i think that uh i think that i think that i is going to speed that up you know when 30 year olds don't have the opportunity or there's a lot less opportunity for them to buy a home have a family right thanks change are the ones that that that uh that raise hell as i was when i was 30 so we are an interesting times, that's for sure. Yeah, I mean, you look at every, every great civilization in history was toppled because a large percentage of the population became disenfranchised. And so let's hope that

we can figure this out in a way that allows people to still have hopes and dreams and still have things that they can chase. Yeah. Do you watch the All In podcast? I do. It's a great podcast, right? And I love that there's four different, you know, four different perspectives there. But I, you know, you can see. We're going to figure this out, right? Humanity always figures it out. But this is in a very compressed time frame. And governments are reactive.

They're not proactive at all. I don't think that they can be. But there's definitely our work to cut out for us. But I would say the blue collar is a better place to be. Housing is going to be a great place to be. I think the white collar jobs are definitely the entry level. We're already getting hit pretty heavy. Yeah.

But I think it's going to work its way up the food chain. I think a C-O and a CEO and they're always going to have a place at the table, but it's going to be that metal management that's going to get cooked. Yeah, no, I'm not going to disagree with that at all. I'm not going to disagree. All right. Well, if they want to find you, how do they find you? Roofmax.com, 2-X, M-A-X-X, Roofmax.com.

My email is M-F-E-A-Z-E-L at roofmax.com. And, yeah, we're easy to get a hold of. Somebody's interested in a dealership, roofmax dealers. They're interested in our business opportunity. And we're always looking for great partners. Yeah. I mean, look, if you're out there and you're looking for an opportunity, I mean, you know, blue collar is not going away.

I mean, up all the things that, you know, can be replaced by things, blue collar is not going to be one of them. So this is definitely something that I would take a look at if that was you. All right. Well, thanks so much for joining us. I appreciate you, Mike. Enjoy Puerto Rico today. I'm sure it's a beautiful day, right?

Yeah, it is. it is. Great to meet you. Hey, Merry Christmas. Happy New Year. Take care. All right. Everybody. All right, everybody. We'll see you next time. What's up, everybody. Thanks for joining us for another episode of Escaping the Drift. Hope you got a bunch out of it, or at least as much as I did out of it. Anyway, if you want to learn more about the show, you can always go over to escaping

the drift.com. You can join our mailing list. But do me a favor. If you wouldn't mind, throw up that five-star review. Give us a share. Do something, man. We're here for you. Hopefully you'll be here for us. But anyway, in the meantime, we'll We'll see you at the next episode.