The Home Service Expert Podcast - How To Assemble Your A-Team With The Three Rules of Hiring

Episode Date: November 15, 2019

Randy Brothers is an expert at all things roofing: from estimating to marketing to recruiting the right people. He founded not just a multi-million dollar roofing company in Colorado, but also The Roofing Academy, an all-online virtual training curriculum for roofing business owners. He has hired and trained over 50 people, and has built systems and processes for nearly every aspect of roofing. In this episode, we talked about roofing, marketing, recruiting...

And our secret sauce, if you will, is we spend a ton of time and energy on building, maintaining relationships with influencers that can bring us business. We have two full-time people that all they do is business development. They're going out to real estate agents, to property managers, to insurance companies, and they're taking them to golf, taking them coffee, doing games and sponsoring events, setting up booths. We do a booth every single month all across the whole state. We're doing some sort of booth where we set up and sponsor an event. That's their job is to just be out in the community, build relationships, and do everything they can to stay top of mind. That way, when somebody does need our services, we're the first person they call. And then back that with a highly trained, highly skilled sales team that's built on character and fits those values.

Put all that together and boom, you get scalability, man. We grew 150% in the last three years. And that's the reason. Welcome to the Home Service Expert, where each week, Tommy chats with world-class entrepreneurs and experts in various fields, like marketing, sales, hiring, and leadership, to find out what's really behind their success in business. Now, your host, the home service millionaire, Tommy Mello.

Welcome back, ladies and gentlemen. And this is the podcast, The Home Service Expert. I've got Randy Brothers sitting here with me. Randy, I appreciate you coming on. He's a roofing expert. He does roofing, estimating. He does virtual training. He's an expert in entrepreneurship, sales, marketing, branding, recruiting, and company culture. As far as his bio goes, the Roofing Academy head coach from 2017 to now, and he's the elite roofing founder and the CSO to 2016 to now. Some of his accomplishments, founder and owner of a multimillion-dollar roofing company in Colorado, founder of the Roofing Academy, an online virtual training curriculum that specializes in helping other roofing business

owners be successful. TRA.R.A. offers a full curriculum on starting and growing a successful roofing company. He's hired and trained over 50 people and built systems and processes for nearly every aspect of the roofing world. So you're in Colorado, Randy. Yes, sir. Thanks so much for having me, man. Yeah, to clarify, we originally started my shell company in 2006. So we've been at it a little while here and we launched the roofing division in 2010 and have built up a pretty healthy company since then. It's been a lot of fun, man. Thanks for having me. I look forward to it. Me too, man. You're like, I think me and you come from the same, you know, cloth because you know, roofing, I know garage doors, but it really kind of amounts to the same thing, except from my understanding and correct me if I'm wrong, but a lot of roofers sub out the actual work, but they handle the sales marketing and a lot of that stuff. Is that kind of how it works or? Yeah, that's a, that kind of how it works? Yeah, that's the majority of large

contractors in my space. They are built on a subcontract model. Yep. Do you find that that works really well? Is that something that's just been killing it? Yeah, that helps you with scalability. There's a lot of demand in certain parts of the country where you have hailstorms and hailstorms damage a whole bunch of roofs and you have to be able to scale up and down as well as the seasonality of it. In a lot of parts of the country, you can't really do too much roofing in the wintertime and it's really hard to keep staff or full-time staff busy all winter. So you have to be able to kind of grow your labor and shrink your labor based on the demand and based on the seasonality of our business. So it just makes sense to have a subcontract model. It gets challenging though, because there's a lot of opportunities out there

and there's a lot of subcontractors out there that are just like roofing crews, so to speak. And you got to have some protocols and processes in place to protect yourself from those guys going out and doing bad work or doing poor quality, if you will. So, you know, I encourage having in-house labor as well as subcontract labor and that in-house labor should be experts that help do quality control with the subcontracted labor. So that's, that's what we have found to be the best recipe for success. I love it. Production. Yeah. Cool. So you're a third generation contractor and business owner with nearly two decades of contracting experience.

You said you kind of fell into roofing in 2010. Tell me a little bit about your journey up through this time of being where you are today. Yeah. I've always known and always had a passion for just construction and building things. I'm just one of those nerds that just, I love the whole concept of creating something from nothing to the point when I did nothing but play with Legos and models and stuff like that when I was a little kid. But when I went to school, I went to college, I knew I wanted to be in business and I knew I loved construction. So putting those two together, I was like, okay, what's the best way to kind of fast track my career in the construction business without having to be on the tools for 20 years? Like our forefathers did, if you will, like my

grandparents did and my dad did, you know? So I was like, you know what, I'm going to go to school as well as go work for a construction company at the same time. And I was able to somehow finagle a job as a superintendent, as an apprentice, and work my way up to superintendent while attending school full time. So I kind of double dipped early on in my career. So by the time I was 25 years old, I already had a half a dozen or even a dozen ground up builds under my belt that I had overseen one leg or the entire process over. So I kind of had a crash course in construction while also learning what I could from the book side of the university side of the business world, which who knows? I learned a lot more outside of that. I mean,

my degree sits behind me, but that's about it. It just has a bunch of dust on it. I really learned what I learned from hard knocks, just being out there and making things happen, trying different things and working at it. I know, yeah, I got a business degree and it did help. I wish sometimes I got, do you ever read a book and then you read it 10 years later and you're like, you just get so much more out of it?

Yep. It's like now that these credits and debits and understanding of balance sheet and income statement, I mean, I've taken all these classes and I've got a master's degree in accounting and business management. And I'm like, but when it's not in context, it doesn't mean the same. And trust me, I learned just like you, the hard knocks, you make a lot of mistakes. The goal is not to make the same mistake twice, but you learn from your mistakes. And I could tell you a million stories about that. You know, it sounds like you've trained a lot of people and a lot of the people that listen are between the 500,000 to 2 million range. And it's a great range to be because I feel like that's

right as you're about to ignite. There's like a catalyst moment of your first, you grow out of that small business into something a little bit greater. What was it, if you can remember that far back and you've trained a lot of people that what, what's some of the struggles, what are some of the stuff that gets in their way? They get in their own way. It's the shifting from the one man band of me controlling and owning and doing everything to empowering and letting somebody else make decisions on behalf of my company. I think that's really what it comes down to is you're the leader, but we have a really hard time separating ourselves and allowing someone else to

step up as a leader within our organization, letting the other person learn, let them grow, let them make mistakes. We want to control everything. We want to prevent mistakes. We're playing offense or defense all the time, just like doing everything we can to try to have everything perfect all the time. But ultimately what we're doing is just bottlenecking our growth of our company because, you know, you just said it, we learned the most from our mistakes. But as entrepreneurs and as contractors that are trying to build businesses, we're so afraid of letting someone else make a mistake that we just have to control everything and we never allow other people to do anything outside of our little control arena, if you will.

I think that's one of the biggest challenges we face and why so many people hit that ceiling and can't really get over it because you got to just trust other people. I love that. And what I would say on top of that is the fact that I go meet consultants and I've spoken a lot of events. And what I find is, and this is from an employee perspective, but a lot of time the owner leaves and it's like, we got a lot more done because somehow they do bottleneck and they go, well, it's not done the right way. And most owners I know say, if I don't do it, it won't get done right. And me, I'm like, I want to find someone that's better than me at this part of the business because I could find somebody that's a master. For some reason, I've learned to go after masters of the, take a business and then split it up into eight. And I find a master

of this master, a master of this, master of this, master of this, because when you're 1 million, $2 million, you need to be kind of a Jack of all trades. You fit in where you get it, you know, and you get it where you fit it. So when you get this master controller and operations and sales and marketing, and you start to put it all together, all of a sudden it's like, we could do a couple hundred million. I mean, literally there's nothing stopping us because you figured out the equation and you have accountability, right? And how important is that word to you? Oh man, it's everything. We have, we've completely compartmentalized our company. I mean, we have multiple divisions, managers in each division. And in order to do that, you said it yourself is, is you got to find people better than yourself. You know, going back to the college thing,

that's one of the, if there's one thing that stood out to me the most out of every entrepreneurship class I've ever took was some guest speaker came in, you know, guest entrepreneur came in and he said, that's what he said. He said, you know, in order to be successful, you've got to find people better than yourself. Correct. Just listen to that for a minute. It makes sense. If you can effectively do that, that doesn't mean you're less than. It just means you need to find the one thing that you're really, really good at and build an infrastructure where you focus in your lane and put other people in all the other

lanes. And at that point, that's when ultimate freedom. And that's when you get to that point of scalability where your company just starts taking off because everyone's in their lane and you have experts within their fields. And it's kind of like, you know, you talk about the eight quadrants or whatever.

I talk about the five pillars. It's kind of like our branding is there's five pillars. You know, you got the entrepreneur, you got the manager, you got the bean counter, you got the carpenter, like the expert carpenter, and you have the expert salesperson or the sales leader. If you can put all those five components together and have someone who's really good at each one of those, the rest, you can just accelerate growth all the way across the board. You know, you've read the e-myths. I talk about it a lot.

Yep. There's the technician, the manager, and the entrepreneur. The entrepreneur is the one who created the business, but then we shove him in a corner and we become the technician, 70%. Me, I've always been the entrepreneur. I'm a visionary. I am where we're going. I don't like operations because operations is managerial. It lives in today and it lives in the past. Technicians kind of do the work today. I'm so busy trying to figure out where we're going and then I inspect what I expect. So you're right. Although I have people that are better than me, I make sure to keep my eye on the ball and make sure that, because I'm the glue,

you know, I really believe that if the owner can't be the glue to keep the COO happy and the technology and you got to be kind of, don't have to be the glue to keep the COO happy and the technology. And you got to be kind of, don't have to be the cheerleader necessarily, but I love sales and marketing. I'm fortunate because those are my two favorites. There you go. But typically the owner needs to find out a way to be the glue and make everybody kind of win. And what I've noticed, and I don't know what your thoughts are on this, but this is, I'm doing a pretty big speech in January about compensation structures that are built on, basically it's a performance based structure for every single role in the company. And I found that hourly does okay, but I'd have like my CSRs are hourly, but one of them made $27 an hour last week,

but she only makes $11 an hour, but the bonus out more than 125%. What are your thoughts on the way that we should pay people that you use to really get things done and push people forward and give them some type of ownership? I'm a firm believer in that, man. I feel like people work at their best when they feel like they have some sort of ownership as well, some sort of skin in the game, if you will. So how do you empower your team to have ownership is tiered or incentive-based pay structures. We pay on the sales side as well as the commercial side. And even my commercial production side, I allocate a certain percentage of the profit and they split that. So they're focused on making sure that

every job is profitable. If it reached certain profit levels, their bonus goes up. And from all the way from the sales guy, all the way to the person production and coordinating materials and making sure that everything's being done right. If they know that if they can work as a team and execute that project, that they're going to get a bigger bonus, boom, you created a team atmosphere. They love it. And when they get those bonuses, they're ecstatic. And then from a managerial perspective, you got to come with KPIs, key performance indicators, and pay people based on their performance within their lane, if you will, within what their role is within the company. And I'm a big believer in everybody should have some sort of upside or incentive based pay, you know, even to the point of, you know, we're like maybe a service technician.

If they get a certain number of five-star reviews or something like that, or positive reviews from a client in a given month, boom, they get a bonus, you know, those sorts of things. So yeah, we try to build that some sort of upside into every position that we have I think that's a direct correlation to the culture and to a very very very low turnover rate that we have low attrition. Yep so What's interesting about that whole thing is I feel like when I was Small I kept a lot of things internal. We've grown to several a dozen states

And I started letting them take ownership in that state. And then what I realized is we were getting different results. One guy was interviewing different than this guy. One guy was recruiting completely different than this guy. And you know what? We were doing okay. But then I said, we're going to take the recruiting back. We're going to take the interviewing back. We're going to take all the marketing back. And what it does is it helps create an expected result. Because I always say, I've had a burger in China. I had one in Brazil. I've had one in Canada. I've had one in Mexico, all from McDonald's. And they all tasted the same because they all got the same machines and they've all got the same processes. And I love giving ownership and letting them own it but i always

keep an eye on it just because i give a lot of trust my mom says to me all the time i don't know how you could still trust people i'm like because trust has brought me here yeah you have to yeah we've all been screwed man i've lost thousands of dollars with just people doing unscrupulous things i've lost millions yeah hundreds of hundreds of thousands, if not millions. And it's like, you can't let that hold you back. You know, you got to trust, you got to continue to trust people. But like you said,

you still got to keep your thumb on it, right? You got to micromanage to an extent. You got to micromanage in a sense of not like looking over someone's shoulders, but holding them accountable to their numbers and to their expectations. And like what you were talking about, how the different interviewing

in different parts of the States or whatever, you streamline that because ultimately you want to have the same burger or the same customer experience whichever state you're in. So we try to duplicate that as well. And you too, we're sales companies, right? Ultimately in the home services spaces,

roofing, garage doors, whatever you're doing, you're ultimately a sales company that happens to be really good at whatever it is, whatever service you're selling. And that sales process has to be dialed in and streamlined, the training, the accountability, the ongoing meetings, the ongoing stuff to where you can duplicate that experience as much as possible with that homeowner. So that every homeowner, you as an owner, as a leader, right? You can kind of anticipate the experience of what every homeowner is going to get. And that's the same thing as that every homeowner is getting that same burger, right? Across the board. So taking some of those things in-house or creating a really detailed training program

around it is the best way to execute that strategy, I think. I completely 100% agree. And I think the thing that I find most companies fall off is consistency and frequency. Is when you get somebody onboarded, they come out great. You go through your training program, the 50 people you brought through, I'm sure they went through their honeymoon phase. They did exactly what you said and they freaking killed it. Then they got cocky. They skipped a step. They stopped. It's like when you go to a seminar, you come back, you're like doing jumping jacks, rah, rah, rah. You start your diet, you brush your teeth every day. Then all of a sudden they go back into their

own habits. And that's the worst thing I see. And I'm sure you've dealt with that. You see something change and it's amazing. And there's a new process and your CRM's dialed in and then all of a sudden kind of just falls back into the old way. Have you experienced that? Yeah. So yeah, we have over a couple, over 50 employees now, all the way from office staff to supplement staff to service technicians to our sales team, a pretty large sales team. And obviously, there's different nuances all the way across the board, but we have training in place for every single position for all of them. We have employee agreements, we have standard procedures, key performance indicators

for every position within the company. So when they come onto the company, they know what their expectations are. But if you don't have a process to hold people accountable to that and ongoing, absolutely. People will come in on fire and then they'll fall flat, right? So what we do to combat that is I try to incorporate what's called GS&R, I'm sorry, from a goal setting and review with every single meeting. Every single department meeting, every person in the You know, every single department meeting, every person in the company sets goals every week. Mine are just a primary and a secondary goal. And it has to do with something that they're working on

and correlation with their big picture objectives of their department or of the company or whatever. But as long as your people are setting goals and giving them kind of like having a little bit of a self-evaluation along the way, it kind of keeps people challenged. It keeps them focused on not only maintaining what they know, but pushing themselves to learn and grow and to know more. On top of that, I mean, ongoing training, we're always, always, always looking for opportunities to train our people further. I just went to a seminar with my leadership team just a few weeks ago.

It was a refresher on financial statements. You know what I mean? It's just like little things like that. And the great little tip is, do you guys have Fred Pryor where you're at? Fred Pryor Seminars? I don't know. I don't look into it. And I think they're pretty much all over the country.

And it's a nonprofit, but they have a whole gamut of different business training. I don't know. of things. So we're always, always looking for ways to continually educate and continually train and challenge our team. That way they don't get stagnant. That way they don't just level out or plateau, if you will. I like that. You know, they come there too. They could expect that. And, you know, it's not about what we expect our employees to do. When I turned it around and said, what can I do for them? All of a sudden, they started to flock to me. And a lot of leaders, our goal now is to build leaders. We have five direct reports, each person or anywhere from three to seven. And they come in and they spend an hour going over what they got done this week, what their goals are, how they felt their performance was, where they could have done better, some interdepartment

difficulties and accomplishments. And it's an hour long of a presentation that they're actually growing into a leader. And then we ask the tough questions, you know, what could you have done differently when he called you? Could you have directed him to a manual instead of giving him the right answer? Things like that. So it's just so funny hearing the commonalities. I mean, it's all the same stuff. It's just, we're selling something different. You know, one of the questions I have here was, this is twofold. What was the biggest obstacle and what was the low point? show, right? I was working out of my basement and garage full of tools, a truck loaded up to the gills with tools and doing everything I can to provide construction services, doing remodeling and that sort of thing. And just trying to do it all on my own and not paying attention to the

market around me. And when the market crashed, I was left holding the bag. I didn't have enough time to sell new jobs. I couldn't produce the jobs I had. And then all of a sudden, everything just dried up. The banks stopped lending and I was left with just a crap load of debt and no market. When the crash happened in 2007, 8, 9, that hit me really hard as a guy who's just kind of getting their business off the ground. And I ended up getting to a point where I lost everything. I lost everything. I even went bankrupt the whole nine yards.

So that was definitely probably the lowest point of my whole entire career is when I couldn't even afford to go out for beers on, on Friday nights. You know, it was sitting at home playing video games, trying to figure out what my next move is going to be at avoiding the debtor, the collector calls, you know? So I'll never forget that. And looking back, I think that was, yeah, it's the

lowest point, but I'm grateful that I went through it because it's made me into who I am today. The great points are good, but those bad points define who we are. You know, I'm dating a gal right now. I'm a little old to be dating, but I'm 36 and, uh, and I've never been married. I don't have any kids, but, uh, I always tell people that like, when do you know? And I'm like, you know, every relationship I've been in has been great, but the times that times are bad is when we're truly tested to see how things are going to be. And when I said, start with why it's figure out how bad are you going to treat that other person when things are really, I don't care if they're the death in the family or you're just angry or whatever it is. And the true colors come out of

those bad, dark, low times. And when people could remember is success comes on the other side of heart and it struggles. And you know, this is why I kind of don't love trust fund babies is because I didn't have a lot of money growing up. We weren't poor. We didn't eat like ketchup, you know, soup every night. But we weren't like super wealthy. We weren't like begging for. Same here. We got by. We got by. I mean, I wanted to play sports. You know, my mom did everything she could to try to get me into the sports. And I didn't get the new equipment. I got the used equipment.

But I did play sports, right? So I get you there. If I wanted the finer things in life, I had to figure out a way to get it myself. And you can never take that away. And there's something different between guys like us and gals like us that have actually been to the bottom. And we've seen it. And I just decided that I never wanted money to ever get in the way of my future family, kids, what I want to do, want to do what I want to do when I want to do with who I

want. But what I've started to realize as the money's been there is the relationships are starting to come. And the relationships were always tough because I didn't have the money. And now I'm like, that's done. Physically, I'm almost where I want to be. That's done. And now the relationships is like, it's the most best thing in my life. You know, I've got a little bit of consulting I do here and there. And we're forming this program. And I just realized the other day, I said, you know, what means a lot to me is when I get a text message on this or a Facebook message or whatever it is. And someone says, you know what? I listen to your podcast. I follow you and I've got a better relationship with my kids and my family.

You literally saved me 20 hours a week. My business is doing good again. That shit to me is worth more than anything to anything. I just love it. You know, nailed it, man. When I had a client who just brought onto my, I have a program as well for roofing contractors and we just onboarded a new client and he was saying, man, I listen to podcasts all the time because we have a podcast as well. So let's flip this and get you on mine as well. But ours is called the Start Build Grow Show. We film it live on Facebook and then it's on

Spotify, iTunes, the whole nine yards. And he was like, when he comes to you and says, your podcast, I look forward to it every week. They listen to a bunch of them, but he wants to listen to ours above all of them. And it's like so inspiring. And it's helping him change his business, change his life, change his mentality. And that is more rewarding than any dollar amount,

any contract, anything you can sign. Nothing is more rewarding than when you can inspire and empower someone else to become a better version of themselves. That's why I do what I do. And it's so rewarding to do that, man. It's awesome. That's why I love the podcasting space. I love sharing our information. So one more thing to what you're talking about, the relationship side of things, when you're talking about when you know, I've been with my wife 10 years now and she was kind of with me right as I was coming out of that really dark time. And right as I was getting my business going, man,

I was broke. I didn't know what to do. I didn't have a pot to pee in, you know what I mean? And she said, you know, regardless of what happens in life, we can live in a cardboard box. I'm going to be with you. That's when you know, you know, when somebody is willing to be with you, regardless of money, regardless of anything like that. And they're with you because of who you are. That's when you know. That's my answer to that. And we're 10 years later, this great life.

We have two kids, you know, garage full of cars and we travel all the time and she stays at home. She's a fitness instructor. It's, you know, garage full of cars and we travel all the time and she stays at home. She's a fitness instructor. It's, you know, we live a great, great, great life. And she had no clue of that before when we first got together. And I'm grateful every day for the blessings that we have because of the purity of the relationship that we've built over the 10 years. That's impressive, man.

That's amazing that you have that to share that with somebody. At the end of the day, I drive 2012 truck because I don't want to be flaunty about stuff. And I think it's important though, because it's so much greater when you get to share it with somebody and your family. How old are your kids? Five and two. Boy, girl? The older one's a boy, the younger one's a girl. They're just a bundle of joy, man. They're awesome. That's great, man. I just guess on the podcast, but I just love doing this. I learn so much. I have so much fun. And you're in Denver? Yep. Okay. I'll come visit. So let's see here. You've described the Roofing Academy as an endeavor where it took all the things you learned from growing your business in the last eight years, nine years now, and putting them basically in an online course. Tell me a little bit about

how that looks. So someone wants to learn about roofing. Let's go through A to Z here. Yeah. I mean, the long and short of it is we wanted to be able to take 10 years, essentially, what we did in 10 years, it takes a lot of companies 20, 30 years to execute that or never to be able to grow the way we did. I mean, we 10X'd in seven years after the first couple of years of fumbling. And we've built an amazing organization. And we did that through systems, through process, through hiring, onboarding, creating a great culture, having a system for absolutely everything. And we wanted to figure out a way to duplicate that. How do we take all of that experience and put it into a tangible, step-by-step, work-at-your-own-pace platform to teach others. And it's built in a way that whether you're someone who's literally just starting your company day one, you want to start from scratch. We literally have a startup checklist. You can start from there. Or if you're a company that's already been doing it and you want to go to another level or start branching out and figure out how to make that transition

from working in your business to working on your business, we can help you through that as well. So the idea is build a platform that can help contractors along the entire spectrum of growth from startup all the way to scalability. Not only do we have the virtual training, which currently has 12 different courses, we have a document vault with pretty much every document that you're going to need for your business, as well as we do coaching. So myself and I have my executive team, we also help coach others and help coach others' executive teams as well to provide that one-on-one coaching

and mentoring consulting as well, along with the partnerships. And we have industry partners, software partners all the way across the board that literally we feel that we are and are striving to be a one-stop shop to help any contractor that has the right integrity and that's really wanting to take their business to the next level, we have something for you. That's awesome, man. So have you guys developed a buyer's group for roofing? Well,

as far as to try to get economies of scale to purchase for materials or... For example, Train does one for example train does one goodman does one a lot of the companies ajak plumbing electrical kind of built these groups to start out 20 years ago but what they do is they'll give a kickback so if you're part of your group you might get a one percent back and split that you take it to part of your group for your stuff and then give them that back but it's hard I'm building one right now and it's hard to get vendors on board. Well, we have a whole list of vendor partners that we've built relationships with and the majority of them have some sort of incentive for being a member. So if you're a

member of the Roofing Academy, they're going to give you some sort of discount or some sort of kickback based on using their services. So long and short of it, that sort of thing isn't as prevalent in the roofing space as it is like HVAC and some of those industrialized and new construction-based business models, where ours is more of a re-roofing type of model. It's not as prevalent because the manufacturers are heavily involved. So the manufacturers, if you want to get in, they all have contractor programming. So that's kind of your route you want to go if you want to leverage those sort of relationships is to connect directly with manufacturers and suppliers. So it's not as pertinent in our space, but to an extent, yes, we definitely have relationships built to where there's a lot of cool benefits for being a member of our program. Nice. I want to jump into some of the stuff I love the most. Marketing is just my passion in life.

Me too, man. I've never been able to hit the gas in marketing because I just, right now, I think next year will be the first year I get to pump the gas. Because I know we already do 7,000 customers a month and they're all brand new. because I just, right now, I think next year will be the first year I get to pump the gas. Because I know we already do 7,000 customers a month and they're all brand new. So wait till I hit the gas and then you'll be amazed. But give me some secret sauce. Tell me what your plan is

when you go infiltrate a market. Tell me what works. Tell me direct mail. Let's talk about online reputation. Let's talk about the review sites. Let's go into all of it. Home advisor. Let's just have a discussion on marketing. Love it. And I love that you said that too, because my degree is emphasis in marketing. I figured if I'm going to go into business, what avenue within business is going to give me the

best chance for success? And I was like, might as well do marketing. I can hire finance people. I can hire all the rest. I want to be able to learn marketing and be able to have an input on the marketing and branding of my business. But I think instead of just marketing, I think it's really about branding. Our goal when we first launched our roofing division was to build a household name. And that's been a long drawn out process. I mean, sure, you have your standards of great colors, great logos, great print material. All of our trucks are wrapped and all that stuff, which that's all great. But really, to take that to another level, I think it really comes down to your core values as a company. So we established our core values. We use those as part of our brand message,

part of our corporate why, our corporate mission statements and stuff like that. Incorporating all of that with all of our marketing and all of our branding, I think really has helped us establish that household name. But what it really comes down to, I mean, I know this is cliche, but it's relationships, man. You can spend a million dollars on branding and TV commercials and radio ads and all the different things you want to spend money on. If you don't find a way to connect with your audience

and build relationships, it's all for loss. Our claim to fame and our secret sauce, if you will, is we spend a ton of time and energy on building, maintaining relationships with influencers that can bring us business. We have two full-time people that all they do is business development. They're going out to real estate agents, to property managers, to insurance companies, and they're taking them to golf, taking them coffee, doing games and sponsoring events, setting up booths. We do a booth every single month all across the whole state. We're doing some sort of booth where we set up and sponsor an event. That's their job is to just be out in the community, build relationships, and do everything they can to stay top of mind. That way, when somebody does need our services, we're the first person they call.

And then back that with a highly trained, highly skilled sales team that's built on character and fits those values, put all that together and boom, you get scalability, man. We grew 150% in the last three years and that's the reason. So community is going out there meeting the people and relationships will get you through those tough times because whether Google penalizes your website, the relationships never leave.

Whether if a mailer goes out of business, you know what's crazy is I'm bringing on an event coordinator and our goal just in Phoenix next year is to do 800 events, just in Phoenix. That's a lot of events. Is that even available? Is there that many events? You know what's crazy is it's literally,

you got four teams going out all the time. So an event for us would be like a high school football game in a certain affluent area. So I met somebody about a month ago in this guy. He only advertises in 10 zip codes in Dallas and he makes over $8 million in those 10 zip codes, 2 million in other ones just because of his Google Yelp presence and stuff. So he said, Tommy, what I've realized is my biggest mistake was I used to, and just shit all over the place, basically, and just do my advertising.

And what he did is he just said, I said, well, that's interesting. Tell me a little bit about that. He said, well, I found out square foot over 3,500, which means they always have two units or more. And then I looked at the average income and then I did this and I got my 10 zip codes and I became a household name in those areas because I don't, the frequency, I'm there, there, there, there, there. And to where I get more calls, I own those zip codes. I own them. They're my trucks. My signs are all over everywhere.

And I said, man, that is really, really interesting because I always know I want a lot of frequency on a certain radio station to own that crowd. But I never thought about just going after a certain zip code or a certain neighborhood. And you see realtors do it all the time. That guy specialized in your area, this five blocks around here. So

I think that when you're small relationships help you get through things, but you're only one person. So if you're a five person shop, I'm a big fan of dude, build your life around Google, get the reviews on Google, make sure your website ranks it loads fast because that's low hanging fruit. Those are free leads. If you get it organically ranking number one, number two is go after all the low hanging fruit, like deal of the day. And when you get a deal of the day, do a great job and ask them for a next door review, a Yelp review, a Google review, Facebook before and after. And it's just more of a, it's cheap. And I'd get on next door and I'd get on home advisor and I'd make sure to go after all the low hanging fruit because I know that me

as an owner trying to do the work because you were the owner doing the work is it's really hard to say well tonight honey I'll be marketing and networking when I'm not doing the work and sometimes you get burnout you know and I've never really experienced people talk about burnout all the time and usually they're young millennials like oh, oh my God, I'm taking 18 credits. I'm burned out. I'm like, I have no idea. Yeah, they don't know what an 80-hour work week actually is. Your life isn't that hard. You know what I mean? But I think you really said a lot

because one of the things I noticed about the empires is they go for market penetration. Is they really try to penetrate a large percentage of that market. And a large percentage in most industries is, I mean, you're lucky to hit 7% to 10%, but that's monster in a big sense. That's huge.

I mean, there's over 4,000 roofers in my market alone. 4,000? 4,000. Like 4,500 actually is the last number that I heard at a big conference in Denver, right? The Denver metro area. There's a ton of roofing contractors. But here's a challenge. And I love that idea of the specific zip codes. But with our business

model, it's highly impacted because of the weather. Yeah, I was going to say that. We get a hailstorm. We never know where that hailstorm is going to be. So it's really hard for us to have marketing in specific areas of town until a hailstorm hits. And what everyone does is just goes and knocks doors and that's for a particular neighborhood, which, hey, that's the low-hanging fruit. That's the barrier to entry. We all do it. I had to do it. That's how I got my business going. But year-round, when we're just penetrating the entire market with all of the influencers. The way I look at it is theoretically, a particular part of town gets hit with hail, 100,000 homes get damaged.

Hundreds of roofers are going to go in there knocking doors trying to get that business. What are those homeowners going to do when there's literally a line of roofers at the door? There's 10 different roofers at the door. What's that homeowner's next option? They're going to do two things. They're going to either go online, search Google, or they're going to call their insurance agent. So we put all of our eggs in those two baskets. We are the number one rated company in Google, 4.9 stars with nearly 300 reviews, crushing that. I mean, no one else can even take a stick at that. And that's very strategic and very intentional on how we were able to execute that process. And then we have a great relationship with hundreds of insurance agents. And that's how we penetrate the market. And that's how you

differentiate yourself in a highly competitive space and deal with the challenge of marketing when you don't know where the storms are going to be each year. Yeah. One of the things, and I don't know if this will work for you, but I look at the builder and when I go into a neighborhood that I know is by D.H. Horton, and I know the age of the garage or the age of the roof, and I know I've done three of the neighbors in that area based on the age and the cracking and the oxidization and whatnot, is I say, I just did your neighbor's house. So what I'm working on now is affiliates. So who's a good affiliate partner for me? Well, did you know the number one entryway for bugs coming in your house is your garage door

bottom rubber and it's not working properly? And do you know how many painters are out there that go paint a funky ass door that's got cracks and dents and the trim's all messed up? So we built a landing page on our website for every company that if they book it, it's got the capacity where they can book the job. If that job gets sold, they get $40 for a bottom rubber. And it is a special. Same thing for garage doors. When we replace them from a painter, they'll get $100. So now we're also doing it for a great

price because we're not paying for marketing. We're trying to keep this person with the best reputation possible. As a referring partner of ours, we care about their reputation just as much as our own. So if you get a painter, let's just say I got 10 painters per city. I'm in 17 markets. That's 170. Let's say they sold two doors a week, which I'm working on. That's 340 doors per week. That's over 1,300 a month. Now, these are two small referral partners, and that's not me even penetrating. Every mover is going to start putting stickers on the door when they move, my stickers. When you move in, you're going to have a special to reprogram your transmitters. Here's one for you. I'm sure your neighborhood has this,

but there's companies out there that are like a neighborhood welcome packet. Oh yeah. Yeah. So we bought this house a couple of years ago and we got this packet and people just gave us this little packet and it had all these different coupons and all these different, like welcome. And they're all home services. And not only, not only did they give us this packet, they literally called us and was like, Hey, we're calling to set up your free inspection. You just moved into this house, blah, blah, blah. It's like a, and I was like, you just bought a new home in this particular neighborhood. Here's your free inspection. Next thing you know, I bought a $7,000 water filtration system for my house. And that was how they marketed to us.

And I was like, that's brilliant. If you're in a home services space, everybody who buys a new house should be exposed to your company and your brand. You know, so find that company that's local in your market that is like a welcome marketing packet for new home buyers.

It's data. I mean, look, I could get that data for anybody. Here's the thing. I think the biggest mistake I see is that roofing's tough, garage doors aren't as tough, HVAC is easy, but taking advantage of the relationships you already have. I have 250,000 customers in my database. Now, my buddy does gutters. And I said, you got to come up with a maintenance agreement. And it takes time because no one wants to buy maintenance for something they never heard of it before. But what's the reasons why? Well, leaves fill this thing and this and that, and then it comes loose and this, but he's trying to sell them.

And the cool thing is, it's so much easier to keep an existing customer if you could come up with a reason. And I love what you said about these insurance companies, because how can you go out? So really, and I'm a big whiteboarder, get in front of a whiteboard and start writing down and going through every referral partner you could think of. And start with smaller ones that you could just get a meeting with. Fix the process because me and you are systems process guys. I believe in, so Marcus Lamone from The Profit. Oh yeah, I love that show. He goes, people, process, product. I say, nope, just process. The process, the process tells you the people you're going to get and the process determines the product. The process in which you pick your products, there's a process. And the way you get your people, I hope you've got a way of getting the best people in. And I hope it's just not fart in the wind and whoever can fog a mirror and shows up, gets the job.

That's a great thing to kind of transition is I think the hardest thing I hear, at least right now with unemployment rates so low, is how do we get great people? So what's the secret? Well, it correlates directly with marketing. If you're branding yourself really well, you should also be branding the experience of your staff. So we're not just putting Facebook ads out, telling people to call us to buy roofing. We're putting Facebook ads out that show every time we have a company event,

every time we do something cool with the company, we're putting Facebook ads out that show every time we have a company event, every time we do something cool with the company, we're putting Facebook ads out, sharing that experience. That way we're top of mind when we need somebody, people have already seen our company like, oh man, that's a cool company. That's a great company to work for by publicizing our company culture. So it's all part of the marketing strategy. And this is for salespeople, Facebook ads. So in my space in roofing, there's a big push, there's a big whole buzzword of using Facebook ads to generate business. And so many people are just posting pictures of themselves in their truck and whatever else. Forget all that post pictures of your staff enjoying themselves of you doing cool things for your community of you helping your customers post pictures of your customers and share those sort of stories tell that brand story because you're not only going to attract other customers right it's about donald miller with building a story brand and not only are you going to attract

other customers but when the time comes to grow your business and hire more salespeople, what business are they going to want to come work for? Are they going to want to come work for the guy that all he does is post pictures of his big truck in front of houses? Or the guy that posts his pictures of his amazing culture and his company and his staff enjoying themselves and having fun and taking care of their customers? So you got to think about your marketing strategy. You're not only marketing to customers, you're marketing to future employees. Yeah. And that's a big piece of it. As I always ask people, I'm like, you know, I spend $300,000 a month on clients. And I look at these companies that spend more than I do. And then they spend $200 on ads on ZipRecruiter. And I'm like, wait a second. If you were to top grade your top producers,

one of my guys will do 1.4 million. My worst guy will do 200,000. That's 1.2 million more than my best guy. If I was able to replace 10 of those guys, that's $12 million. So my mind works differently as I say, and I'm not a big fan of just only top grading. I'm a big fan of top grading, but I try to move people up. And I met a very, very, very, very wealthy man once. And he said, Tommy, I've never had to fire anybody. So what do you mean you've never had to fire anybody? He goes, I harass them. I am on their ass and I'm up their ass so much that either they quit or they get better. And it happens really quick because they got to check in with me 10 times a day. I mean, it's so annoying to work for me if you're not living up to your key performance

indicators that I bug the shit out of them and they quit. Or they say, I'm never going to deal with this again. I'm just going to make sure I hit my KPIs. So, and you know, I'm just not a micro guy. I'm such a macro guy. I don't have the time to go. I love doing what we're doing now. I'm not going to go, you know, I'm like, fire him.

I believe in the concept of, you know, I have kind of three rules of hiring, if you will. And I talk about this a lot in different seminars and stuff. But, you know, the first rule is pretty cliche. Everyone knows this, but it's fire fast, hire slow or hire slow, fire fast. Which means when you're hiring somebody, do your due diligence. Make sure you not only understand the personality traits that you need to fulfill that role and make sure that they match your values and match your company, what you're trying to accomplish before you hire them. Not just hire somebody that has a pulse and that shows up and is ready to work.

Do your due diligence and make sure to hire people the right way and take more time up front. So hire slow, fire fast. If they're bad, they don't work, let them go. They got to go. You're doing them a disservice by holding someone on that's not performing. Yeah.

Pill the band-aid. And I pill the band-aid a million times. But you know what? I feel like they, you know, here's the thing. And tell me if I'm wrong, because I want to hear your other two reasons. But people should know that they're about to get fired. I don't believe that unless they lie, cheaters steal. If they lie, cheaters steal, they're fired. If not, I put them on a

performance improvement plan and then they get written up three times and they're gone. Usually I try to protect myself. I'm not worried about paying unemployment, but some people's strategy is to get unemployment. And I'm just like, oh, hell no, not with me. If you're a good person and we just disagree, I'm like, dude, go ahead and collect it. But just try to get a job. You know, you're a good guy. We just didn't get along. Some people will take you to here, but they can't take you to here. And it's important to realize that and move on. But what were your other two ways? Because I think this is very fast, fast, fast, slow. So the next one is higher character and trained skills. Yeah, 100%. Be really heavy in looking for

the right people that match your company values. They don't have to have the skill set necessarily. You can train them how to do their job. You can get them training. You can teach them the skills to be successful. You can bring them up. But if they don't have the right character and the right attitude, what's the point? So make sure they have a good character. And the last one is all about culture. And company culture is built through hiring, not through teaching. Culture is hired, it's not taught. You hire people that fit your culture

and fit within the culture that you're trying to build within your company. You can't just take a group of people and change them all to fit into a particular type of culture. If you have a really bad company culture, it's because you put the wrong people in the wrong positions. And that's why your culture is bad. So change your culture by hiring people that fit the culture you want to have. And the best way to do that, and this is my idea. I've stole this from Dave Ramsey, but I take them out to eat

with my managers. And if we get along and their wife's there, we're laughing and we're like, and whatever that looks like. But if we're like, holy cow, this is tough. You know what I mean? What do you do to know if they fit that culture? And you know what? It's the barbecue test. Ooh, the barbecue test. Right? You ask yourself, is this person somebody I would be willing to have over to my house for a barbecue? I always say drink beer, but I'm a beer drinker. I like beer too, but you know,

candid. Not everybody drinks beer, but so it's a barbecue test. Beer and barbecue test really is what that is. Am I willing to have someone over to my house on a weekend to drink beer and barbecue at my house? To take that to another level. You want to take that to a whole nother level? Vacation test. Is this somebody I could see myself on a vacation with at some point in my life? That's a tough one. Well, you know, and do you say every person from the CSR through the company needs to be,

and I don't mean to be negative and I'm not needs to be, and I don't mean to be negative, and I'm not trying to be, but if you got a position that pays 14 to seven, everybody in my company's performance pays. Let's just say they average $70 an hour versus a manager that's making 70. I really feel for a C-suite level, you got to spend a little bit more time for the culture

because some of the time, I like bottom up, but really it is, I fit the culture, it's top down. If I come in in a bad mood and my desk is always messy or whatever, I realize everybody thinks it's okay to do that. It's all about leadership. Yeah. Leadership is where it starts. But do you ever notice that I'm not as involved as I once was in maybe hiring the CSRs and I'm not mad about it, but some of the time, and I don't mean to pick on any particular group. It could be warehouse guys. It could be whatever it might be. It could be a janitorial position. I don't know. I don't want to be condescending, but do you do the same test on every single person?

No, this is going to be a key influencer in your business. You know, like from a labor perspective, our market's tough. Both of us, we us. Everyone listening to this is in the construction, home services space, right? So we all have the same challenge of hiring labor. So yes, you want to do everything you can to follow these rules and really hire for character and that sort of thing. But at the end of the day, a warm body that is capable of executing the job and doing a good job. They don't necessarily have to be somebody you're willing to go on vacation or

have over for beer. But if you're going to build a business with somebody or, or hire a position that's, that's going to be like an anchor, then yeah, you want to have somebody that, that you really feel that you're going to be able to get along with on another level. So yeah, there's different tiers to this for sure. So I want to go into a few last questions, but we were talking a little bit about recruiting and there's two things that I found in the last

six months that are just absolutely game changers. There's number one, using your existing customers with a quick email to thank them and say, I hope you enjoyed Daniel while he was out at your home. We're looking for another great all-star and here's the path. If you know anybody, friends, neighbors, family, nephews, whatever that looks like. We got 60 interviews when I put out an email the other day in Oklahoma. So your customers can be a great resource because they know good people.

And then number two is, I've been able to find honey holes. Discount Tire is a little honey hole of people that are really great in this industry. Church ministers, they know a lot of good people that are obviously, they're trying to, you know, whether you're religious or not, they're trying to do the best they could in their life spiritually. Coaches, coaches at high schools that know all the alumni for the last 10 years, they know the people there. It's usually guys that are the technicians and women. I love a woman technician,

but you just don't see them very often. But usually they know the guys that are out there that they're doing great, but they're only making $35,000. And they're a team player. They're a go-getter. There's just not a lot of opportunities. And then you give them a plan for moving up and building a career. So I find these little honey holes. And if you could get a brand, I know a guy that pays everybody $12 an hour and he's got people lining up to work there. I don't know how he does it. It's impressive. I got to get Austin on here. But one thing I wanted to ask is if you had three books and the first thing I'm going to do is obviously get started, build it, grow it.

I'm excited about that. So get the book. What are some other books that you find that really served you to be successful? I think the age old book that I try to actually listen to every year is Seven Habits of Highly Effective People by Stephen Covey. And that one, if you haven't read that one yet or haven't read it in a while, I mean, that's just such an anchor for success from yesteryear as well as this day and age. I think those habits are just, I try to live that day in and day out. So seven habits of highly effective people are definitely, that's definitely probably number one that comes to mind. Don't even say the eighth habit is number two. No, I can't. I'm not going to be that cliche,

but there's a number of them up here. Here's one that's off the cuff that has been a game changer as well. It's called Chop Wood, Carry Water. It's a short read. That book is a game changer. I read it twice already this year. We had our whole staff read it. Our management team read it and we did a whole session on it. That's another really good one. And then the one you can see behind me here, I read by Keith Cunningham. It's called The Road Less Stupid. That's a good read for business owners, man. It's all about avoiding the stupid mistakes that the majority of us make and getting in our own way. So that's a good one as well, The Road Less Stupid. I got two ones to get. So Start, Build, Grow is your podcast. If someone wants to reach out to you, what's the best way to do it?

Well, obviously you can download the podcast to listen to us. And if you want to just reach out to me directly, Facebook is usually the best. I'm on Facebook Messenger all the time. Just friend me there. Or you can email me at randy at the roofingacademy.com. Cool.

And then one last thing I do to close is kind of give you the floor Or you can email me at randy at the roofingacademy.com. Cool. And then one last thing I do to close is kind of give you the floor to kind of talk about whatever you want to leave the listeners with as maybe something to start today or just something to think about going into this new year. Yeah. And I appreciate that. I love being on the spot with it too. We'll come up with some off the cusp here. I'm a big, big fan of John Maxwell.

I study him. I read his books. I'm in his training now, become a John Maxwell certified coach and speaker. And one of the things that really resonates with me about what he does and his philosophy in business. And for those of you who are trying to either start a business or take your business to the next level and are afraid to take that leap, just do like John Maxwell says, and you got to jump and build your wings on the way down. Yep. I love that. I'm going to go tell my COO that. I love that one. My interpretation is dive in the water and build your boat while you're swimming. You know what? I think he's helped me out kind of slow down.

Sometimes I grow to grow to say I grow. And there's an old expression. Brian K. He wrote this book. If you get a minute, check it out. It's called Seven Secrets to Becoming a Wealthy Contractor. But what it says in here is revenue is for vanity and profit is for sanity. I thought that was the coolest thing

because so many of us, Brad, 40 million, 10 million, 3 million. And then I look at these people's margins and I've looked behind the books and I'm like, first of all, most businesses' books look like shit. They've got to come receivable. Their inventory is worth five times what their actual usable inventory. If there's one thing I can tell you,

it's freaking clean up your books because your business isn't worth shit without clean books. But the first thing I do is when I walk into a business, I say, where's your manuals? How does somebody know if they win or lose the game?

What are they supposed to be doing on a daily basis? You want me to play the game, but you don't even have directions on how to play it? Then I'm going to win every day because how do I know if I'm winning or losing? But I got to tell you, I just think I got so many notes here. And I think we're going to talk for another two hours, Randy. I know you're a family man, but I'm going to get the book. I'm going to

start listening to your podcast and then we'll get you back on and talk about the book. And I really appreciate it. And I'll be in Denver probably in January. So we should go have an apple juice or something. Yeah. I'm all with it, my friend. You nailed it on the head. We could probably go on this forever. I love this stuff. This is what I live for. And what I do is just try to share knowledge. And it's been a great conversation with you. Really natural. And I think the users are definitely going to get a lot out of it. And I second that. Get your shit together. Get your books together. You've got to. And as a closing example, we scaled the crap out of our business. And last year, we ended up at just under $20 million. And we went from seven to 20 in three years.

And then this year, we're actually going to fall below that, but it's actually been a great thing. It's not about the revenue numbers. We actually have more cash, more profitability. Our team is happier. Our systems are more dialed in than they ever have been in a year that we have less revenue. So it's not all about revenue.

It's all about efficiency and profitability and quality of life. So focus on the important things, not just trying to be the biggest swinging, you know, what in the neighborhood. Dude, we got to end it there because that is the best piece of advice is, man, you took a step back with 10 steps forward in your life. So well done, Randy. I appreciate it, brother. All right, man. Take care. You too. Hey, I just wanted to take a quick minute and thank you for listening to the podcast. You know, most people don't understand this, but the way that the podcast has grown is when people

subscribe and they leave a review. So if you would please, please, please, Wyatt's top of mind, take a quick minute to subscribe and leave a quick review. It'll help me out so much. If you just took a little bit of time right now, I can't tell you enough how much I appreciate the listeners and the feedback. And also when you subscribe, what I'm gonna do is let you know the next guest coming on the podcast. And I'll let you email me anything you want me to ask

that next person coming on. All the pros I have on here, I want your feedback. I want you to subscribe so you can start giving me the questions you want me to ask and help us grow together. Also, I'm giving away my book for free now. All you got to do is go to homeservicemillionaire.com forward slash podcast. You got to cover the shipping and handling, but I'm giving the material out for free. It's 200 pages. It's a hardcover book, homeservicemillionaire.com forward slash podcast. I appreciate each and every one of the listeners

and thank you for making this Home Service Expert podcast a success. I hope you're having a great day and thanks again.