First billboard up! I will update after we have it going for a few months if I am seeing direct ROI or sales correlating to it.
Even if I don’t this is a brand play, I want to be the dominant roofing brand in my zone.
This brand was a twinkle in my eye just a few short years
Yesterday was not fun.
Hired a salaried administrative exec, he worked for me for 1.2 years, extremely happily for the most part. Let him go a few months ago due to performance issues.
Now as of yesterday he comes after our company out of nowhere, saying we defrauded him of OT
This is a clip of my 24 Y/O sister who sold over 2.5M of roofing last year.
One of my proudest feats as a business owner is the opportunities we create for our team.
Maggie is proof that care factor WINS in sales, she pours her heart into every client, every interaction, every
Huge shout out to my team for hitting 500 reviews on google!
Reaching this quantity and maintaining a 5-star average has been far from an easy feat and very proud of all our staff for their continued dedication to providing an excellent end result to their customers.
A ton of
Sales have been really rough the last couple weeks. 290K followed by 210K.
These may sound like a lot, but these are incredibly BLEAK numbers when compared to our overhead and volume required to keep all our W-2 staff with consistent workflow. We haven't seen any production
Took a bit of a slowdown from the social media grind recently.
Business has been harder then ever for me in the last couple months.
Really has humbled me and I’ve just had my head down trying to put in the work and do all the right things.
Here is a photo of a badass site we
I see a lot of talk about hiring cheap $5 an hour international employees for remote rolls.
We do the complete opposite. We look for the best possible local Tampa Bay in office talent in hopes of giving my clients the quickest and most professional possible experience across any
We made the Inc 5,000 list, we ranked:
- 227th fastest-growing privately owned company in the United States
- 13th in the construction industry
- 23rd in the state of Florida
Huge acknowledgement to our entire team and all of our amazing partners in the Tampa Bay area for
How does my retail roofing company maintain a 5.0 average on google with 412 reviews? Here is the condensed version:
-Get the ENTIRE team rallied around the idea of customer service to an extraordinary level. We operate on the datum that we aren't happy unless the customer is
The bigger you get the bigger your liability gets! We had one of our drivers trailer fishtail and disconnect from the truck, ton of debris on the road, truck totaled.
Thankfully, the driver was not hurt and no one else was involved. I have a very involved, in-house model that
We sold $7.7 million in Q1, 50% growth from Q1 last year. Simply insane.
We did this even though I had planned for minimal sales growth and foundational building of my business first half of the year.
I’m doing 12+ hour days daily to cope with operations to deliver all that
@contractorkeith
Bro I have someone who owes me around 10K and goes around on FB posting new guns and tats etc.
I mostly just ignore him and succeed like crazy. I do remind him about the money and we are in mutual friend circles so I remind others as well.
Honestly, at the end of the day though
Just acquired and wrapped our second Equipter!
These things run $38,900 a pop but here’s why I think they are worth every penny:
-Sales/marketing differentiation tool. When we are working on selling projects where the Equipter would be utilized we pitch it as a differentiator.
How I closed a 300K contract within 48 hours of first call:
Got a call from a new client Monday he knew about me because he fell through on a planned purchase of a
commercial building that we were IP re-roofing.
He called about a warehouse he needs done.
I got him an initial
It doesn't take a flashy business to create generational wealth.
I was with a client today after completing two large roof replacement projects for her, we were getting coffee, and she was writing me a check at the property.
She walked me outside and pointed to two more large
Testimonial we shot with a client recently. This has been my KEY in business, get clients blown away with their experience, and thus create a brand snowball that’s tough to stop 💪!
Newest piece of equipment we brought into our business.
We will use this to improve professionalism and process of our commercial delivery.
More importantly we forecast huge returns from the wrap on this unique piece of equipment and being able to pitch its use as another
I run my operations on the following key principals:
If a client asks for any update or next step of their project, we have failed in our brand promise to some degree.
If an executive or team member has to ask another team member to perform their function on a project or for an
I was invited to do a speaking slot at a roofing conference this month (Win the Storm)!
The conference owner is my FB friend and liked my content and decided to invite me to do a 20-minute talk.
Absolutely mind blown and humbled to have gotten offered something like this
One of my reps and I just sent off a quote for 1.8 Million.
Meanwhile, another rep was in the other room grinding out baby $800-$1500 residential service quotes.
A little weekend hustle opens up a lot of possibilities.
And no matter how big or small the deal, we know if we
Why we run in house dump trailers! Most roofing companies do all 3rd party. Nothing wrong with this, but I have found a lot of benefits and wanted to share why we are working to run our own:
-Roll off/dump trailer rental companies are in business to turn a profit on each
This is one of our commercial crews. We have over 90% of our labor output in house W-2ed.
In home services, I see a lot of emphasis on sales and marketing which is of course vital
Sometimes though I feel not enough attention is put by companies on the actual technical delivery,
This gal was literally threatening to sue my company last week over some small workmanship complaints (my project maneger did not do well with this relationship which we are correcting).
My manager managed to step in and using a framework of full ownership and responsibility
Why company culture is so key.
I was in my office today working away. At about 8:30 AM my salaried production coordinator showed up to put in some work, I didn't ask her to. Then at about 9:30 our AR gal showed up to put in some work, same thing, no one asked her to be in
Here’s an example of a challenge we faced as a company and how we resolved it!
Our first roof for this customer was installed but came out showing ripples at the verticals plywood seams in certain lighting which is NOT what the aesthetic the customer is paying for when they use
This gentleman is starting up a roofing franchise and reached out to shadow me for a day.
Was a total blast to be able to show some of what we have been able to figure out and also where we still need to improve, extremely cool guy and I can’t wait to watch his progress building
$15 million and a desire for more:
Spending my day shadowing the owner of a $15+ million roofing company.
By all means crushing it.
The first 3 hours of his day has been spent meeting on what they need to be doing better. Pushing for more.
Proud of where he's at but laser
How my rep turned a $12,500 shingle roofing replacement into $20,160 of revenue?
We achieve this by offering valuable optional upgrades that clients actually want.
As a company we are big on this and in offering valuable optional upgrades every time to every client.
We
The first photo below is in May of 2022 me on a roof I was installing a mobile home with my team.
At that time we had 7 employees which comprised of one in house crew, we operated out of my personal house/garage, the name of our company then was T and G Roofing. Up until this
Relationships and sales!
My COO just closed a 260K tile deal yesterday, simple roof GREAT margins, and these are 2 of 25 or so roofs in this community.
This deal came from a property manager he met earlier this year, we have taken care of her clients above and beyond through
Got our core values up in our reception!
Have another big 4' by 8' going up in one of our warehouses as well.
If you told me a few years ago to come up with core values for my business, I would have cringed. Some people told me to, and I ignored them. The concept of them used
We just completed work on a 480K commercial project.
I had quoted this one 3 years ago.
I won it after continuous follow up, and continuous work in my market on building and maintaining a reputation that empowered us win a bid like this.
I have long term follow up stories like
This is an example of some of the crazy kind of s*** that I didn't know I would go through with a scaled small business:
Ex sales rep we let go about 7 months ago went ahead and created a copyright infringing landing page and was running a very small budget FB campaign to it.
How we took a 250K hit early and stayed in business:
In Summer 2021 we had about 50K liquid saved up and a plan worked out to invest it in our company and start on a scaling journey.
I remember one night I was working on all the logos for a rebrand from "T and G" to "Trust"
I have been a big proponent for all digital in my sales process since starting I never used physical promotion outside of business cards.
We have been generating beautiful sleek digital proposals and presenting them on tablets and emailing.
My biggest competitors in the area
FIRST epic billboard result:
Had a realtor drive and see our brand-new billboard.
Then saw my post about the same billboard on X. I reached out fast, and we connected, and I am going to do my best to help with 3 properties of his.
This is the power of multi-channel marketing
Why I don’t sub my roofing work out?
90%+ of my labor is completed by W2ed employees.
Subbing is easier, it’s less expensive for me, less headaches and management, not to the mention the difficulty of finding the talent that can go on payroll.
I still won’t do it.
I want to
We buy all our accessories in bulk, pallets at a time.
I was just going through some supplier invoices and found that my supplier had billed me on bulk coil nails at a rate more then double what is agreed upon.
Wrote an email. It will get fixed, just saved us $2088 on that
How did I start off in roofing?
This is a photo of my first work truck, loaded with trash post TPO job when I was 16, late 90's manual ranger. (still my favorite truck I ever drove)
I grinded the physical labor of this trade for over 7 years, I know it so intimately.
My
Sitting here putting some Sunday time in the office on my birthday, and this is an email I just opened up from my newest rep that made my day, I was able to help him close his second deal yesterday:
"Thank you, Robin, for all the assistance especially on the weekend.
I love
Why are we so passionate about our in-house production process?
We are working toward control in every step of our production process, from permitting, warehouse, crew to project manager to dumpsters to equipment, etc.
This isn’t the cheapest method, and it certainly isn’t
Why I wear my company shirt every day.
I wear a Trust Roofing shirt almost every day, even weekends. Kind of lame I know, but I get BUSINESS from wearing this shirt, it's an awesome branding exercise.
This weekend I was in line to get a coffee and had a commercial realtor
Happy Sunday! Grinding out some much needed SOP’s today.
Scaling a small business is lots of unsexy, diligent and consistent effort and work.
At our scale anything we don’t have a written SOP for costs the co. time and money and it’s my job to either make sure others put them
I posted a reel on my FB today of me talking about our services, within five minutes I got a text message from a personal friend asking me about our solar attic fans, and we now have an appointment to do a consultation for an attic fan next week.
I see contractors who are still
This is a FULL circle weekend for me. As I write this my sales/exec team is enjoying a weekend retreat at a lavish beach front house.
We got badass meals lined up, boating, activities, etc. My COO gave an inspiring speech.
Unfortunately I was not able to attend, came down with
Leveraging video content has such incredible potential right now. I make quick simple videos like this constantly, I upload them to my social media to stay top of mind to my audience.
Other times I just use them to send to my commercial clients. In situations when people pull
How my company sold 4.6 million in the last 5 weeks!
We have had our greatest sales volume in company history. Literally off the charts compared to anything we historically have done. Here is the largest catalyst I see:
Thinking LONG term, building brand equity.
-A lot of
Very special episode of our podcast just launched. I am going to start posting notable episodes directly onto X.
This is me speaking with my brother
@MattDRion
who is a small business savant and has been HUGE in helping me grow Trust Roofing. Matt has been instrumental
@sweatystartup
So true. Respond to emails instantly, texts instantly, when you need to call someone call them now, when you need to have a meeting have the meeting now!
People who communicate now and do the work now will be ahead of vast majority.
What does a CEO do?
I saw a post today that a 10 million Dollar CEO should NEVER do hiring or firing at that size.
I am pacing for 20 this year and I still do almost all hiring and firing (I don't fire often).
I am in the people business and people are my biggest asset. I
How I deal with BAD people in business.
Someone responded to us taking no down payments and asked “Don’t you get a lot of cancellations by people who go and still shop for a lower bid?”.
Its a fair question.
My answer is that if somebody signs a contract with my company, and
How a roof leak mid project turned into a signed six figure quote!
On one of our commercial jobs there was a small leak in an overnight rainstorm.
My project manager and foreman immediately responded, they opened the roof up removed any wet insulation and got a dehumidifier
Out here crushing it with my team this Saturday!
Part of my success as an entrepreneur is I disagree with many thought processes that are thought to be “normal”.
Example: Work isn’t fun, work is tough, work to make ends meet, weekends are for play.
It’s considered normal by
How do we build value to win deals with the highest price?
We train to sell on value not price and it pays off!
One of my sales reps had great success salvaging a deal and posted about it on her Facebook, I wanted to share here so just copied what she posted along with the
Saw an INCREDIBLE post today by
@STLChrisH
sharing an SOP on 1 on 1 meetings. I thought it was excellent so got inspired and created one for my company. If anyone isn't following him I recommend it, incredible insight.
There is UNBELIVABLE information out there. There are
How do I capitalize on a breakthrough in business?
I would say recently in my business we had a breakthrough.
Sales have simply skyrocketed, almost 4M in the last month, team is firing on all cylinders.
In my experience the KEY at seizing these moments is to avoid changing
My day in business!
8:00AM
We find out someone broke in from a neighboring lot, created a hole in our back side gate at 1:00AM and stole $17,000 worth of underlayment stock from our yard.
This is always kept inside our warehouse as a rule, it was just delivered Tuesday of
Enjoyed the heck out of a quick weekend trip to Costa Rica!
This was my first time traveling to another country and my biggest takeaway:
A reaffirmation of how freaking GOOD we have it on average in the USA. This is not to say things are bad there, actually the opposite, it’s
Offering optional upgrades in business!
Something we have found a lot of success with is offering optional upgrades. Most prominent example for my co. has been solar attic fans.
We offer one as an option on the signing page of every residential quote.
We price them at $1100
Very grateful to have just hit 1,000 followers on this platform.
Huge shout out to my brother
@MattDRion
for convincing me to stop being a WEIRDO and get on here.
(This man is a small business savant btw! And his advice has been instrumental in what success I have achieved
Just wrapped up in the office at 8:55 got in at 5:15AM.
I don’t normally put in near that many hours but today the work needed to be put in today.
People ask me all the time how we grew so fast, wouldn’t have gotten it done as quick as we did without some long days, that’s for
My old compared to new office, coming together!
Old location was a bit small, so I shared a tight office with my marketing manager, production manager and office dog, which also quadrupled as a supply closet 😂! There were people in and out all day long, and our office dog
@STLChrisH
I loved this and went ahead and created one for us obviously hugely inspired by yours. Writing up a SOP on it
and implementing bi-weekly 1 on 1s for all managers with it starting next week.
Incredible the value you are bringing here I appreciate it immensely.
Surprised at all the traction this is getting, I super apreciate all the feedback and constructive criticism.
I put this billboard up Thursday and already have an insane result to report:
I just got a reach out from a local Tampa Bay realtor who needs my help with three
Learning and improving from a $7,500 mistake:
We do a lot of "hurricane straps/clips" upgrade for or homeowners here during roof replacement.
Long story short: Crew made a very minute error in a strap installation that rendered the entire install not able to count as a "strap"
I see lots of talk about "morning routines".
Mine is: wakeup, eat/shower quick. Get in the car and get to work.
I woke up this morning at 5:00 and was at my office beginning work by 5:40.
From my experience the quicker I can sit down and start actually doing the work that
How we sell with authenticity.
I was at a condo board meeting this evening pitching a huge roof replacement.
We just about have the deal sealed.
Someone on the board asked us what happens if we caused damage to something. My sales rep jumped in and brought up a crazy story we
SPEED is key in running a business.
I went through an absolute flurry of phone calls last hour of today making things happen. I was curious so I went through and looked at my call log for the day.
I checked and between 5:00-6:00 I made or received 25 phone calls to team
Today my company signed a contract for 110K for an iconic 100 Y/O local theater. Heres how we won it:
I took a call over a year ago from the maintenance guy who needed emergency assistance to stop a leak. It had just appeared and they had a children’s play that night with more
How I built an $18 million dollar roofing company with ZERO down payments:
People are often MIND BLOWN when I tell them we don’t take any down payments, here how that works and why we do it:
-Under $30K we take payment upon completion. Above that we are taking first payment
Why I am all in on BRAND building:
Brand has nothing to do with my name or my logo.
I tried to choose a name and logo that I could build every other piece of my business on. Culture, systems, policies, etc.
If anything we do isn’t building trust for my employees or clients
How my roofing company WINS with intentionally short lead times?
-Society overall has moved to the age of the internet which is the age of FAST and NOW. This applies to me as a contractor and to most other lines of work. The quicker you can produce a high value product for your
This was the view from an inspection I did today!
I don’t run sales calls for my company hardly at all these days.
This was for one of my first 10 customers, we have since done 4 properties for him and he needed a quote for his home.
Il never forget his first project, we
This month in business has been brutally bitter sweet
We did our highest ever in sales this month by far.
It has also been one of the toughest months ever in terms of production related hiccups.
Got to keep my head down and go full bore at perfecting our production processes!
I am working to intentionally improve my leadership skills.
I realized that the person I was that brought my company to this point was NOT the same as the person required for the next levels of success.
Any company, mine included, will only rise to the level of its leaders!
Someone asked me today what I was up to I told them “getting some work in”, they told me basically “remember to live a little!”
I personally have a ton of fun building my business. More so then I do playing golf, fishing, partying, etc. I do love lots of those other things also.
Take great care of my clients, take care of my employees, the rest will take care of itself.
Have to be as profitable as possible or won’t be able to take care of either.
Sometimes business can get really complicated but everything we do should fall into one of those.
We constantly try to improve our clients end experience. Here is one small example.
We share a live job timeline link with our clients that allows them to see every step of the roofing process as it happens. They also get automatic updates at varying stages of the job as well as
How we sold a 1.3M condo project as the highest bidder.
We signed the largest retail contract in company history last week and it was sold at a good margin.
We did this by building value in our company and our processes, not just in this sales cycle but in the years, we have
Throwback photo several years ago me and my friend Baron doing some 3 course repairs for a good client and friend of ours.
My most proud statistic in business BY FAR is that 5 members of our original FL roofing crew who started in the beginning still work together at Trust
Why I never have my sales staff sign non competes:
I spoke with another service industry owner and this subject came up, he has all sales reps sign non competes.
He was surprised when I told him emphatically I don’t and never plan to.
My mindset on this subject is probably
One of my suppliers asked me today "how we get big commercial contracts" at my company, so I figure I would post it here and hopefully it brings value to someone. Here are a few of the avenues we are working!:
-We specialize in commercial flat roofs so brand that fact on
Small business video content!
I posted about importance of video for small businesses yesterday so wanted to highlight one that we put onto our FB last week.
-Highlights a beautiful and challenging project we completed.
-Highlights one of our sales staffs professionalism, we
I hope this can be a lesson that we as a country need to work hard to STOP dishonest and divisive political tactics
The amount of times I see people painting the entire “opposing” side in totally broad, irresponsible strokes is really unacceptable and it works to urge on evil,
@theharrybeadle
A lot of the “pop” music that we “arnt supposed to like” is some of the best… I still love my classic rock the best but I will throw on some T Swift or Katy Perry any day 😂😂
@gvh41
The ultimate strategy on this is to door knock in the neighborhoods that you already are doing one, and then you are just introducing yourself and letting them know that you are in the neighborhood making some noise and to let you know if they need anything during the project
Cats in a dumpster?
We are in the middle of a huge condo project. The HOA president is on the project like a HAWK and points out every little thing.
My PM told me a story that yesterday a dumpster swap delivery came in and the empty roll off had two stray cats in it 😂. One
This condo project was a match made in heaven for our telescoping mobile trash chute.
It allowed us to reach up over the tile mansard, protecting the tile and sending debris right into our dumpster.
Investing in equipment like this isn’t cheap but it pays off in the long run!
Did a podcast with the CEO of my roofing co’s marketing agency. We talked a lot about niching in business, as soon as he went from generic marketing company to exclusively roofers, his company skyrocketed.
He’s a good reminder for me that less can be more in business.
Everytime
What goes into building a brand of excellence?
TLDR: The little things are the big things, take care of your clients above all else :)!
I posted earlier today about our record sales numbers and tied that into brand building.
Here is a micro example of what that looks like.
Maintaining a great reputation in business is not an easy task, I get asked often how we manage to maintain our reputation at my company.
The truth is we are far from perfect and make our fair share of mistakes.
Often times your reputation has to do with how you respond and
Happy Saturday! Started playing guitar again a few months ago for fun! I played from age 13-16 quite a bit. Picking it back I was really rusty, just in playing around 15 minutes a day I have seen a solid improvement.
This is comparable to lots of things in life, how consistency
My last post illicited quite the response. Here are a few screen shots being accused of my employees hating me and not paying enough.
This reminded me of this quote:
“Hard times create strong men, strong men create good times, good times create weak men, and weak men create
@jcolesimpson
My advice not that you asked 😂! I have a team of 10 sales reps and have been running my sales team for years.
I would fire this person immediately. Let’s say that one got detained for something silly, etc, they usually should have a phone call pretty rapidly and would make
Why I am doing a podcast ever week this year!
- Weekly opportunity to tour another local business owner and potential referal partner through our HQ and make a lasting impression.
-Puts out steady quality content that builds my personal brand and the companies, not to mention
How I learned about the importance follow up!
I learned it mainly from my mom, I observed her follow up game for my dads roofing biz at a very early age.
She was relentlessly persistent while at the same time completely wanting to help and remained really interested in the
@NoRiskNoParty
Devils advocate, you guys don’t have to be enemies you could easily be allies who would be best off transparently helping one another rather then trying to figure out each others business models in secret. There is plenty of roofing material business to go around :)!
Hes a
Retention has been so key for us.
How do I retain people? I take extremely good care of them. I work to make sure the companies' goals, values and mission are worthwhile and are kept true to in the day-to-day operations.
I take on the mindset when I hire someone that I am
I wrote this company purpose in November 2022 and went over it at an all-staff meeting. I set the goal in that meeting for 20M revenue in 2023
At that time we were at about 600K revenue a month. We have 3Xed in short order since then, we were 2M short of our 2023 goal.
The