Roofing Success

What Roofing Looks Like in 2030 (You’re Not Ready for This) with Adam Sand

• Jim Ahlin • Episode 280

Share episode

Roofing is about to change forever.
And if you’re not paying attention now… you’ll be left behind.

In this eye-opening episode, Adam Sand from Roofing Business Partner joins me to pull back the curtain on what roofing looks like in 2030. We talk about the 3 big forces changing the game:
1️⃣ Capital markets tightening
2️⃣ Private equity consolidation
3️⃣ AI and tech reshaping everything

Imagine this: Drones doing inspections. CRMs that run themselves. Agents talking to agents to book jobs — without YOU lifting a finger.

But here’s the truth no one tells you…
🏆 The companies that WIN in 2030 are making the shift NOW.
⏳ If you wait until it hits you — it’s already too late.

Watch this and discover:
✅ How to prepare your roofing company for massive disruption
✅ Why private equity is squeezing the little guy
✅ What a “100-year roofing mindset” looks like
✅ Where the real opportunity is hiding for roofing companies that adapt

We’re not here to survive. We’re here to DOMINATE.

If you want to build a company that thrives in the next 5-10 years…
One that’s built on purpose, profit, and people…

Links:
https://www.roofingbusinesspartner.com
https://www.facebook.com/RoofingPartner
https://www.instagram.com/rbpconsulting/?hl=en
https://www.linkedin.com/company/rbp-inc/
https://www.youtube.com/ ⁨@RBPConsulting⁩  

🤖 Have a question? Ask this customized ChatGPT for the answer! Specifically designed for this episode, it’s here to help! https://roofingpod.com/chatgpt-280

Listen to the episode on Spotify & Apple Podcasts (280) 👇
🎧 https://roofingpod.com/spotify
🍏 https://roofingpod.com/apple-podcasts

PODCAST SPONSORS: 
- JobNimbus Marketing: https://roofingpod.com/jobnimbus-marketing-get-started
- Day 41 Thrive: https://roofingpod.com/day-41-thrive
- PowerUp Agents AI: https://roofingpod.com/power-up-agents-ai
- AI Roofing Revolution: https://roofingpod.com/airoofingrevolution
- The Roofing & Solar Reform Alliance: https://roofingpod.com/RSRA

IG: https://www.instagram.com/roofingsuccess/
FB: https://www.facebook.com/groups/roofingsuccess
Join Our Facebook Group: https://roofingpod.com/facebook

📱 Text Jim @ (612) 512-1812 – Say Hi!
💬 Leave Us a Review: https://roofingpod.com/review

SPEAKER_01:

If you're just counting on banging on rules when the storm comes, like directionally correct 2030. That's probably not gonna be a business model you can count on. You can still milk it for what it's worth now, but if you're not recycling that capital into building the roofing company that will be around 2030, you don't deserve to be successful. If you can find out how to make a 25% gross profit margin and still make a 10% net profit margin, the laws of capitalism rule. You you win. Because everybody bought a roof or rather bought a boat. Nobody cares that much about how great the sales guys' teeth were. It needs to be a better pathway for roofers to get that second lease on life that doesn't fly in the face of the culture and the vision and the equity that they've built in their team and in their community. It really sucks when your last name is the name of the roofing company, and now you kind of can't go to church because the copy are squeezed, that they're doing things differently, they're not supporting the local community the way they were because that's just considered frivolous spending the sponsor the baseball team.

SPEAKER_03:

Welcome to the Roofing Success Podcast. I'm Jim Aline, and I'm here to bring you insights from top leaders in the roofing industry to help you grow and scale your roofing business. Adam Sain, good to have you. Yeah, it's good to be here, man. Thank you for the invite. It's kind of crazy to me. I mean, we've kind of we've I don't know, I've known you in the industry. I think you've known me in the industry for years, and we've like have bumped into each other at a couple of events, but we never got a chance to sit down. I'm I'm pushing 300 episodes here, and you are one of the people that that has had a great voice in the industry, and I thought has a like it has really really helped shape a lot of people, a lot of the conversations that happen in the industry from a technology perspective, marketing perspective, even up, you know, operations and things like that. So glad to have you, man.

SPEAKER_01:

I'm glad to be here, and I'm I'm excited to be uh getting a chance to to speak to some new people and hopefully you know make some new friends. That's the the whole idea is just to connect more with the industry that has been such a big part of my life.

SPEAKER_03:

If anyone doesn't know you that listens to this podcast, I think we have a pretty shared audience, but anyone that doesn't know Adam Sand, who's Adam Sand?

SPEAKER_01:

Well, yeah, so I try and keep it short. Uh, I had a guy with a very varied career. The roofing industry loves to be like, Are you a roofer? You know what I mean? Did you do you know did you do roofing? And it and so the answer is yes. I owned a roofing company, but it wasn't because I woke up one day and thought of owning a roofing company, um, or that I ended up a roofer per se. I had a very varied past. I built an app, I owned tenants lawns, sold vacuum cleaners door to door, was a bodyguard, was in the military, worked at oil rigs, sold cars. My buddy was a shingler, and he was perpetually broke. And I was like, wow, you know, you want to go do stuff. You never had any money. And I thought, why don't you start your own roofing business? And so I loaned him some money to get a business license and buy some tools. He got the tools stolen, so I loaned him some more money. And uh I figured out pretty quick that I wasn't gonna get my money back if I didn't help him. So I helped more because I at the time I was a sales manager at a car dealership, and I had sold another business, and I kind of got that entrepreneurial bug. So I started a roofing business with him. And back in like 2016, 2017, when I was helping him, I thought, man, how do we get customers? And you know, back then Facebook was kind of new, you know, it was not new, but it was new to like nobody on home services was really running ads. Like today, you can't throw a shingle off a roof without hitting five guys in the head that are offering you Facebook ads for roofers. But back then, I tried hiring like an agency, they told me that was dumb. I tried, I fired them, hired another agency. They said that they did Facebook ads, but then they told me that was dumb. So then I went off and searched with some kind of Joseph Hughes-like character, right? Somebody who could teach me, there was no one. Then I was like, maybe it was somebody who's home services, there was no one. Brick and mortar, there was no one. And finally I found this guy named Rick Mulready, who had a podcast called The Art of Paid Traffic. And I kind of came to this conclusion that the easiest way to make money online was to sell how to make money online because everybody was selling, and still today, it seems like that's the case. Still today. Still today. I kind of like had a little spaz session in his online chat 20 minutes before cart close on his course that he was selling. I said, You guys don't know how to run ads for brick and mortar, real home services businesses, and blah blah blah blah blah. I'm just a hater, right? And he's like, Well, you're right, and I don't know how you would do it in home services because there's no buy now button and roofing, but I can teach you how Facebook ads work, and if you want to buy it, buy it, but otherwise stop bugging me. So I bought uh and I learned Facebook ads. I spent a lot of money failing before they finally put like ads in the news feed on mobile, and that was kind of the first trickle of success we had. And then they got video and then they got live video, and we started to get some success. And back then, you know, roofers would be like, You're stupid, you don't advertise on Facebook, and like back then it was like if it wasn't referrals, it was dumb. You know what I mean? Um, but then because of the early success, I got interviewed on like 20 podcasts about Facebook ads, not really roofing, but Facebook ads. So like 2018, 2019, if you looked up the words roofer and Facebook ad and Google, there was a lot of interviews in me. So then all of a sudden, all these American roofers started reaching out, and I was like, Man, it'd be cool to have a podcast. And I was like, What do I call it? I'll call it the roofing business partner podcast because I'm a partner of roofing business, I'm not very creative. But then uh we just next thing you know, uh I I just started like I started a course, you know what I mean? Because I thought, well, I paid for a course, maybe someone else would pay for it. And then some like rich roofers said, I don't want to take your stupid course. Can you just run my ads? And I said, Yeah, sure. Then we started getting fired for getting too many leads, which I'm sure is like, how the heck does that happen? Right. And and it's not that I was some Maven. Back then it was just easy, right? Yeah, and uh, because nobody was doing it, you know, and so people were just excited to see a local business on Facebook. And uh and so when I asked them why they're firing me, well, they would say, Oh, we put the wrong color on Mary's house and we didn't get back to George and he left us a one-star review. And I was like, Well, how do you use your CRM? I said, Well, we go on Aculinx, we print off the screen, and then we staple it to this folder and we put it on the wall, and then we move it across the wall, and people take it out and put stuff in, and then we're done. We scan all the pages and upload it to Aculinx. And I was like, that's not how I use a CRM. Let me show you how to so keep paying me. I'll show you how CRM works. And you know, it just I kept building, I kept helping in CRMs, and I was building CRMs, and I was flying to roofing companies and spending my winters, you know, in Hawaii or Texas or Florida or you know, Wichita. And uh and I fell in love with America. I fell in love with with helping people, and um, you know, I had a roofing company in Canada, it's not a great opportunity, and and America is just such a land of opportunity that I just pursued this full time, left the business. And uh, and so yeah, now we've worked with you know a couple hundred roofing companies and built you know 50, 60 CRMs, and it's been it's been a journey.

SPEAKER_03:

It's been a it's it's an amazing thing. Like that's or you know, you know, from the marketing agency side, it it's crazy. We ran into a lot of the same things. It's like, well, what do I do next? Like, you know, well, this isn't working. Well, you're not answering your phone, and then you're not answering your phone correctly, and then you're not setting the appointment right, and then your salespeople are not trained well, and then it's i i i i talk to agency owners all the time. I'm like, how far do you want to go into people's businesses? And so you went deep. You before we carry on with the episode, let's give a shout out to one of our sponsors. Roofers, let's get real. You're great at building roofs, but are you great at building a steady stream of leads? That's where job nimbus marketing comes in. They know the roofing industry inside and out, and they'll help you dominate Google, Facebook, reputation management, and everything in between. If you want more quality leads, more book jobs, and more growth, visit the link in the description or the sponsors page on the Roofing Success Podcast website. I talk to agency owners all the time. I'm like, how far do you want to go into people's businesses? And so you went deep. You got deep into my business.

SPEAKER_01:

Because I I saw the writing on the wall. Facebook like ads, man, like back then, like Dimitri. We all know Dimitri, like he was really like mark giving marketers a bad rap, and and you know, and you know, he's evolved a bit in terms of his opinion, but back then it was just like, and back then there was a lot of scammy people, right? I mean, yes, um, and there is still today, but there's there still is, yeah. Yeah, so the so I just like I didn't want to be lumped in with this like scammy group, but when you could actually just say, all right, well, you know, there's this great story that Steve Jobs tells, and he says, Um, you know, it was back when he was trying to explain what a computer was to people. And he was like, Well, if you look at this old like Scientific American um magazine, it it basically did a study on all animals and which ones burned the least amount of energy, thus were the most efficient to travel a distance of like a hundred miles. And he asked the reporter, Well, which one do you think is the most efficient? And people guess things like a fish and a bird, and you know, some people say human, but um, he said it was the condor, it was a bird, right? And then he says, Okay, well, where do you think humans are? We're like in the bottom third, you know. I mean, we're not very gut ranking on efficiency. Granted, we can't fly. So then he said, but if you give the human a bicycle, they become twice as efficient as the condor. So this technology unlocks a level of efficiency, and computers are like a bicycle for the mind. And I and and that always stuck with me because my parents were really big, like my dad couldn't read, you know, the Apple was the Mac was dropped in 1984, the year I was born. And my dad just said he's got to learn how to read good, and he's gotta learn how to use a computer, you know, and so that's what my parents shoved in my face was books and computers. And so I kind of fell in love with them at an early age because my dad held them in such high regard. And uh, and so when I saw problems in businesses, it always just became a natural inclination to say, well, how do we treat this like a bicycle for the business? Like, how do we just use technology as a lever? And I fell in love with the idea of like measuring success in revenue per capita, a revenue per like 85,000 payroll, because it was the only thing that was like that's predictably valid and true that like if you can increase the revenue per employee, right, then you have less people to hire and manage and you know deal with the emotions and recruit and be betrayed by, but your revenue goes up, and generally you're taking away the mind-numbing, soul-sucking, unrewarding, unfulfilling tasks, right? Or removing the opportunity for failure that leads to otherwise good people, you know, being written up or being fired or just being ostracized for making a mistake that costs the company money. And I couldn't do that with a Facebook ad, but I could by getting into the operational infrastructure of the business. And I just fell in love with the level of like, you know, provable impact, right, that we could have.

SPEAKER_03:

But yeah, yeah, that's awesome, man. Kind of moving into the the the core topic today. In in in we wanted to talk to talk about what roofing looks like in 2030. One of the things that I've I I have this kind of thesis now or hypotheses now around we're in a we are in the early stages of labor arbitrage. And it kind of goes along with what you were saying in in in the butt with the bicycle analogy and with what you helped with with CRMs and things like that, and help increase efficiency that the revenue per employee number. I really feel I've had this conversation with a lot of people, I really feel like there are technology creates arbitrage especially for a certain amount of time, right? I don't think that the CRM is creating as much arbitrage as it did back in 2016-17, right? Like the the when when it was more pen and paper. But when it was pen and paper, if you were using a CRM, my goodness, the the the arbitrage, the efficiency that you could create out of your team. I feel like we're in the next wave of arbitrage, the of labor arbitrage through technology with all of the implementation of AI and all of the cool tools and things that are that are being developed, and who knows what they will become. What are your thoughts on on that? I know you're enjoying the episode, but let's give a shout out to another one of our sponsors. I talk to contractors every day that feels stuck. Not because they're not working hard, but because they're missing the structure to grow without chaos, or their culture's falling apart because their team's unclear, unaligned, or just burned out. And when change hits, they're reacting instead of leading because time and priorities aren't under their control. Day 41 Thrive helps to fix that with proven strategies for growth, culture, and leadership that actually work. Ready to thrive beyond the storm? Visit the link in the description or visit the Roofing Success Podcast website on the sponsors page to start your journey today. The next wave of arbitrage, the of labor arbitrage through technology with all of the implementation of AI and all of the cool tools and things that are that are being developed, and who knows what they will become. What are your thoughts on on that?

SPEAKER_01:

I I like where you're you're taking this, and I I agree with you in the sense that um you know there's enough conversation going on about this that we're even discussing like post-labor economics, like not just like labor arbitrage, but a realistic post-labor economics, like how what's going to happen when enough jobs get displaced that like a 10% unemployment is like people coming for people's heads. You know, there's fear amongst the wealthy that like this could create uh another like let them eat cake moment, you know, and we don't really want that. And so, I mean, to kind of zoom out, right, to to try and like say what does a roofing company look like in 2030, we have to understand like what in my what is my opinion based on? It's based on um there's three tectonic shifts that are really affecting the roofing industry specifically. Um, the one is the is the capital markets, right? Just the general flow of money, right? Capital markets are constrained, interest rates are kind of stubbornly high. We're dealing with all these um all these disruptions in terms of of uh of tariffs and and and you know a reshaping of the global you know economic model, right? That is having kind of like this this it's again, it's it's not something you feel walking around day to day, but the tectonic plate is moving nonetheless, and there are points where friction causes earthquakes in this whole situation. The second is um the private equity disruption of our industry and and just the general nature uh of the invisible hand of capitalism. The problem with roofing, uh just as a as a business model as it relates to capitalism, is that you have roughly 300 companies that are over 17 million in revenue. You have 60,000 between three and eight million in revenue. Those three to eight million dollar roofing companies all have a marketing agency they're paying somewhere between$2,500 and$7,500 a month for. They have a bookkeeper that they're paying$2,500 to$4,000 a month for. They have a receptionist they're paying$2,500 a month for. They have uh they're all paying for the base level cost of things like a CRM and a subscription to Hail Trace and an Xactimate license and so on and so forth. Um, and a lot of those, a lot of those things create this froth in the market, and they're selling the same shingles, right? They're buying the same six or seven, they're installing them the same way because it's manufacture spec to get your master elite warranty, right? You're using the same tools, everybody's got a metabo nail gun in their hand. It's the same group of six Hispanic dudes up on the roof or Amish dudes, or we know the last great white roofer retired a long time ago. So it's whatever, like they're pretty much nobody's putting waitresses on the roof to create an experience, right? They're installing it more or less the same out of time. No one's found a way to do it twice as fast, despite what every proud roofer might want to say. Um, you're not, and you're and you're doing it for more or less the same price, right? Like in the case of insurance for the exact same price. So, what makes these companies different? They have to continually pay for$20,000 websites and and things to try and stand out. And the homeowner is left to look at you know, 35 roofing companies in Denver, Colorado that have a 4.9 star rating or better and 100 reviews or more. Where do you what does the consumer pick from that? And so the operators that create efficiency will like will create um the ability to drastically reduce the froth, the the extra expenses that add to the gross profit margin needed to operate a roofing company. As you consolidate that, the rules of capitalism dictate that there will there will be a reduction in price. And we need to save America, we kind of need some deflationary pressures. So, like that's going to come from the productivity per capita, the GDP. And this is what lends to the third test tectonic plate, which is the AI, right? This concept that there's a billion PhDs that just came on the labor market and they're willing to work in roofing for pennies, and they'll do, and you can pay for it in a results as a service as opposed to software or access as a service. So you can, you know, everybody in their uncle right now has some kind of voice receptionist agent thing that will answer the phone. And, you know, some of them are coming to the conclusion that rather than paying for minutes or monthly access, you can just charge per appointment booked and result-oriented. We have one, you have one, same day's got one, everybody's got one, right? Everybody's adding a sparkle button to their software because every CEO is having to answer the question what is our AI, what is our AI um motion, right, for our business? Because every CEO has got to get that AI multiple for their VCs and for their shareholders. So, and there's probably a bubble that's going to rear its ugly head eventually around that. So those three tectonic shift plate shifts. So then now, and though those are ubiquitous across many industries, you know, private equity is especially in roofing, more so than others, but but those three tectonic shift plates are the kind of the globe that we operate on. And then we have to think like what are the buildings on top of this foundation? So, two particular buildings that I find interesting, I call them Billionaire Tower A and Billionaire Tower B. Okay. And in Billionaire Tower A, you've got an insurance company, right? And they're making gazillions of dollars in profit. You know, there's this whole debacle of the Veris Gask acquisition, right? They're making tons of profit, and they're sitting on the 80th floor of Billionaire Tower A. And every time a storm comes through, they got to pay out some claims, and it's annoying, right? But in Billionaire Tower B, right, they look up and they see on the 82nd floor is a shingle manufacturer. Because every time a storm happens, GAF or Owens Corning or ICO, I'm not gonna, you know, nobody's better or worse in this scenario. But when a storm happens, they're smart enough to every couple of years make their shingle one millimeter smaller and one millimeter taller, and now long, it's no longer matching, right? And when they'll go and put a wind warranty that's unlimited, you know what I mean? God himself for the first 15 years could blow your roof off and we would cover it. But then the minute a windstorm blows a bunch of roofs off in Hawaii, the first thing they do is send out one of our roofing industry's pundits about claims management and supplementing and send them out, rent a hotel conference room and say, Have you taught people about claims? They're like, wait, but doesn't my customer get a warranty for those shingles to blow off? Ah, you don't want to do that because then we're gonna look at your roof. And if your nail pattern's wrong, you might lose your certification that says you're the best, and like you wouldn't want to. We don't want to like have I have have you met Becca? She'll teach you all about insurance claims, you know? And so billionaire tower A guys looking up being like, you bastard. Well, what do insurance companies usually have a pretty close link to the finance industry, right? And where what do we know about private equity firms? They're usually leveraged, right? So where are they getting their money? The banks, who's in with the banks, the insurance. So this is a little bit of a tinfoil hat moment, but I think that what you're going to see, right, is large roofing companies that are private equity backed, then start to decrease the nuclear arms race between the roofer and the insurance company. Because it's kind of ratcheted up. It was like, oh, you gotta some damage, call a roofer, get a quote, we'll pay for it. Oh, wait, you didn't actually do your roof? Okay, now we're gonna give you two checks. One after you prove you did it. Oh, the roofer said it's damaged, we don't believe it. We're sending an adjuster. Oh, the adjuster says it's damaged, but your roofer talked about the policy. Let's create a law that says they can't talk about the policy. Oh, so now they got a public adjuster and the claims 25% higher. Well, we're gonna send, we don't believe it should cost that much. Okay, well, now they hired an appraiser. Well, now he agrees cost that much, but now we're gonna fight it in court. And then, oh, and what's this assignment of benefits thing? Let's shut that down, right? And so this arms race has progressively gotten higher. What do we see? It's it's hurting the policy holder, the customer of both of these businesses is paying 3% of the home value of an inflated home that's gone up 37% in five years. They're paying 3% of that real estate value to get the roof insurance. Like it's crazy. And so, you know, insurance companies have the right to waive a deductible. And this is not some like magical recipe. We see this in healthcare, we see it in cars, and like the people who ran Boyd Auto Collision are running a roofing company now. So, like, this is not hard to draw the line between what is the what is going to be the eventual outcome. Um, I imagine a future where a large private equity-backed roofing company is going to just get 300 Xactimates sent over to them from an insurance company, and they're gonna schedule a drone pilot, not a salesperson, a drone pilot to go to the house. They're gonna fly it, they're gonna use a software like Level and Innovations or Roofhawk or any of these other tools that come out. They're gonna use AI-powered image processing to create a standard of measurement for what is and is not damage. That AI report is gonna say this is damaged this much, and then this is what it costs to fix it. Both of them are gonna agree to do it. And if you agree to let the insurance company's preferred vendor do the roof, you they're gonna waive the deductible and squeeze all the competition out of the market. And ultimately, they're gonna do that because the goal of the insurance company is to keep the monthly recurring revenue coming in. And there's a provable, there's a provable KPI that after a storm, depending on homeowners don't change their homeowner insurance until they have a reason to change their homeowner insurance that generally comes after a storm, depending on their own personal perception as to how the experience was. They're gonna vote with their wallet and they're gonna go from state farm to all state and have the same exact experience over there, too. But it was their way to say, I didn't like the way you handled that. And when you ask a homeowner what do they want after an insurance claim, they want no money out of pocket and they want to get the roof fixed quickly and they want to be a painless experience. And the roofing company just wants the work, they want the 30%, 40% gross profits that and if they can do that by eliminating the need for adjusters and salespeople and public adjusters and appraisers and court cases and all this stuff, one side's gonna give up a little bit of gross, right? And what and and some of the supplementing gain, right? And the other side's gonna give up a little bit of the maybe approvals that they could have avoided. Both sides are gonna decrease the people that they need through this AI powered technology lember that creates uh labor arbitrage. Um, and then that's gonna leave a lot of the market you know unable to play the recipe that they did. So, like in a in a 2030 perspective, I think that we would be directionally correct to assume that the escalation of the arms race on the foundation of these three tectonic shifting tectonic plates shifting, that uh there will be a new way that roofers who aren't a part of the large insurance restoration pipeline are gonna have to make money. And to kind of your point about the the CRM and whatnot not having the lever, I had this I'll say this and then I'll I would love to get your thoughts on what I said, but I just kind of want to get this like whole complete thought. Um the I had this idea that I posted in Slack in this like Adam's brain channel, it's basically where I just dump ideas that I think about when I'm half asleep in bed or jumping out of the shower. And I had this like idea of like the things I have to do CRM. It was like T I H D CRM. And the the idea was that you know, I saw when HubSpot integrated with ChatGPT. Basically, like in HubSpot, you can just click connectors and click HubSpot and sign in, and now ChatGPT is like in your CRM. So then you can go in there and just ask it questions or make it do things or send it, send an email, or drop draft me an email and then send it to these three people. Like, you know, you could do that. And I thought there's the I've gone on this this every time a roofer asks what's the best CRM in the Facebook groups, which is like every third day, I have this like couple of different responses that I have can that I just post because it's good for business, and but it was always focused around this one cardinal statement at the beginning the best CRM is not is the one that you use, and you know, that's one thing that's cycled by everybody at this point, and uh and I probably learned it from somewhere else. But the the new world is like the best CRM might be the one you don't have to use. Yes, right? If it used to be that my job as a person building a CRM, the ultimate measure of like what made people happy was that if they went and did a thing, they didn't have to go on the CRM and also say they did the thing, they could just do the thing and the CRM knew that they did the thing. That just meant that like when you ordered the material order, it moved to it checked a box that said material orders and removed that tag off something, you know. But now it's more like oh well, when jobs install date is seven days out, it just orders the materials. It's a CRM you don't have to use. And the when we look at that earlier point of the froth in the roofing industry, if you can find out how to make a 25% gross profit margin and still make a 10% net profit margin, the laws of capitalism rule you you win because everybody who bought a roof would have rather bought a boat. Nobody ever sinked.

SPEAKER_03:

And the other side of that is from a business perspective, especially a big business perspective, a PE perspective, that temp they're willing to take that 10%. They want that 10% over a large amount, right? Like they'll take 10% on a lot of a little bit of a lot, right? They it's it, you know, the the grocery store model, right? There's a lot of products that get sold in a grocery store, but there's no margins in those things. But the amount that gets sold, that's where the that that's what they're looking to achieve is at that scale, it still maintains that. And I love where you're going with that. So let's start, let's let's dig into that side a little bit. Billionaire A and billionaire B, the insurance industry, the manufacturers, eliminating the uh a lot of the roofing companies. It do you think hasn't hasn't this been tried a little bit over time already? The managed repair programs and the and things like that, like there's been instances where it's been tried. Where do you think that changes with this? Do you think that they just get into bed together? Before we carry on with the episode, let's give a shout out to one of our sponsors. If you and your team aren't trained on AI yet, you're already falling behind. Competitors using AI are generating more leads, closing jobs faster, and running leaner. The AI Roofing Revolution gives your team the training to implement AI so you stay ahead, not scramble to catch up. Don't wait until you're losing. Get trained now at the link in the description or the sponsors page of the Roofing Success Podcast website. There's been instances where it's been tried. Where do you think that changes with this? Do you think that they just get into bed together? Or what and that's the difference? What's the I think Acolynx and Verisk is a big one.

SPEAKER_01:

I think that you're going. See that be the preferred software, kind of like how Dash did it in water restoration mediation. I think that you're gonna see that. I think you'll see it from Service Titan. I think you'll see integrated platforms, right? Um, more of an API type connection or an MCP type connection. Yep. Um, but the other piece of it is like you got to be able to get the work done. I have a client in Hawaii who's successfully been the exclusive provider for island insurance for like seven years, but that it was because they have 130 in-house installers and their their entire market is you know an island that's 42 miles across. So it's easy to solve the problem because what they care about is can you do the work? Can you get the work done? Well, as the labor market is getting kind of like more legitimate as as the as the immigration problem, right, with the fact that there's a lot of undocumented workers, which create carries a huge liability, is that kind of gets cleaned up, you know, and large companies can lobby for a temporary foreign worker program or a labor market investigation study that turns into some kind of pipeline to solve the labor problem because not a lot of kids coming out of college want to be roofers. As I believe that again, being directionally correct as robots get on roofs, right? That's right. Um, I think that the can you get the work done problem will be solved, right? And because previously that's mostly what the moat was around the small roofing company was the sheer difficulty of hurting the install capacity because you're you're dealing with America's forgotten sons, you're dealing with technology averse communities like the Amish, right? That they're not allowed to have a phone, you know what I mean? So someone else has to handle the logistics. Um, or you're dealing with the you know, undocumented or Hispanic, or even just the migrant community that is looking for the opportunity, and whatever pipeline of those is coming into the country and falls into the roofing trade. That has been that that is a logistical nightmare. And it previously the only way to do that was you had to have a lot more people to throw at the logistics of running that. But like trucking, right? They you know I get that like a lot of people don't love the fact that like we're bringing in people from other countries that don't know how to drive and giving them trucking jobs. But the fact remains that the trucks will soon drive themselves, and this is just the middle stop, right? Which is a flood of immigrant truck drivers to create these massive logistics and shipping firms, and eventually the trucks will just drive themselves. Yeah, and the rules are that's what I see a lot.

SPEAKER_03:

That that that's what I that's where I see it a lot too, and and that could be 2030. Like there there is some there is an argument to be made that it's already there in 2030. Like Elon gets that hand figured out on on his bot, you know what I mean? Like, that's what he like boy, it's there's going to be the the the labor gets the the labor can go away. And I love uh the way you put that. What happens? This is the insurance market, right? So what percentage of I've never actually looked at this set, what percentage of roofs replaced in the United States or in Canada or north, you know, maybe the two of them or whatever, how let's just call it the United States, maybe wherever you find a stat on there, no a stat on it. What percentage of roofs replaced every year are replaced through an insurance claim or through a retail transaction?

SPEAKER_01:

Well, it it changes every year. So sometimes it's 40%, sometimes it's 70%, because sometimes, like, you know, you pull time and money forward. I I just spoke with a guy, um Brian Ward from Quality Roofing Solutions, and he kind of said, Look, you know, this year is kind of a down year. We're up on market share, but we're down in total volume. But the the uh, you know, we probably pulled a lot of roofs forward with the storms that happened in not common storm areas, like Tampa, which doesn't frequently get hit by storms, did last year. And so Tampa's market is probably down this year overall. So it is the number fluctuates, and those fluctuations are something that that can be managed, um, larger when you have a large roofing company that can move labor force around and and kind of respond, like kind of like FEMA, right? Like, why do you have to have FEMA? Because sometimes one state needs help and another state is just fine, so you gotta be able to send them to California for a fire, and then you gotta be able to send them to New Orleans for a flood, and then you gotta send them to Texas because they got snow for the first time in 10 years, yeah. So, you know, the same will exist where the means of production will kind of flow to the larger companies. And this is, you know, to speak to the Elon thing, like there's a company by Brett Adcock called Um Figure, which is like arguably further ahead than him. Than him, yep. Um, you're seeing like in large industrial machines, the yellow iron, you're seeing another massive tech company that is basically wiring in machine learning and AI and algorithm sensors, all this kind of stuff. The biggest thing is the sensors. You have to create the sensors. That's what allowed the military to get ahead. That's where Palantir came from, is because that's where um scale.ai got big was the in the the photos that they could take and the image processing that they could do and how that impacted manufacturing. The sensors are the biggest, the biggest way to measure like where something is going is if there's sensors being applied to a particular mode of work, then you will see uh an eventual disruption. And so the sensors aren't really in roofing yet. You got some guys trying to make a little robot that crawls across a roof and install the shingles, but they don't have sensors, they're just trying to mimic the work. But when you can sense it, and that's where the humanoid robot thing comes in, because now the the the sensor is kind of applicable to anything that a human can do because the whole world is designed around humans. Designed around humans as wide as a car is a car is as wide as a car is because a train was tires were wheels were that wide, and that's why roads became what they were. And so they could just there's these uniform measurements that start to that start to make it easier to apply the next thing. I think an interesting concept might be to see where warranty claims come in. Because if an insurance if a roofing company was to take the approach of, like, you know what, maybe we're not gonna go get in bed with the insurance company. Maybe we're going to have a warranty department. And if those shingle manufacturers want to offer these unlimited win warranties and make these bold claims, we're gonna hold them to that instead of having to fight the insurance company because insurance, finance, finance, private equity, private equity, roofing. Maybe they say, you know what, we're gonna start holding the manufacturer to their claims, and we're gonna create a warranty department rather than trying to get a customer to pay a$3,000 deductible, we're just gonna get the roof covered under warranty, right? And we're gonna have a warranty department, kind of like how the manufacturers have dealerships and those dealerships call warranties and they navigate that process. Um but it can you know it all comes back to, you know, well then what can you do as a roof?

SPEAKER_03:

What what can that's what I was thinking? Like now you the if the insurance game gets played in a different way, right? Which it which it already keeps evolving into and it will continue to evolve in a way that probably won't benefit the average roofing contractor. How do you how do you maintain that? What do you what do you do? Yeah, that's where I was go that's what exactly where I was thinking. I know you're enjoying the episode, but let's give a shout out to another one of our sponsors. As a roofing marketing agency owner and coach, I've seen it all. Great marketing wasted because no one follows up fast enough. That's why I built power up agents, not just a receptionist, our AI handles the entire customer journey from answering the first call to booking the job to post-job surveys and reviews. 24-7. Inbound, outbound, even multilingual. If you want leads followed up instantly and customers nurtured automatically, visit the link in the description or visit the sponsors page on the Roofing Success Podcast website. Your full AI team is ready. How do you how do you maintain that? What do you what do you do? Yeah, that's where I was go. That's what exactly where I was thinking.

SPEAKER_01:

I think that the cool thing about AI is that as it re redefines, like as AI becomes better at most human things than humans, it redefines what it means to be human. And where the moat is for the smaller contractor is going to be things that are not like the things that by definition do not scale, right? So specialty materials, commercial roofing, you know, um, specialty, like specialty projects, you know, like hockey stadiums and historical buildings and stuff like that. The beautiful part about our industry is that no matter how much AI comes out, no matter how many robots come out, we're still gonna want to sleep undercover. You know, we're still gonna want a roof above our head. Um, so there's a certainly a moat in going to the things that are not attractive to the invisible hand of capitalism's desire to consolidate and make efficient, because there are things that just can't be made efficient. Um, the other thing that if if I was a roofer today, and by the time this comes out, this might actually be public. Um, but like my thing has been for years, I've kind of looked at what I do. And I work with these roofing companies, I come in, I do this, like changing your CRM when you're doing 20 million a year, let's just say, it's like change, like it's trying to do open heart surgery on a football team while they're trying to win the Super Bowl. Like if you had a donut shop and you were like, you know, you had Jim's donuts, and you saw, you know, half a mile up the street, a Dunkin' Donuts is lined up for breakfast, it's lined up for lunch, it's got a full restaurant, and then supper, everybody's driving home, and still got some people trickling in at nine o'clock, and you're like dead most of the time. You know, you get a lunch rush, right? Uh, people come to you because you put more meat in a sandwich and for the lower price, you're making your costs are higher and your rice prices lower, and that sucks. So you go to Dunkin' Donuts, you're like, hey, can I be a Dunkin' Donuts? And they're like, Yeah, sure. But this one register needs to be two. You need to have a clear donut case in the middle. You got to make some room on a counter for a slushy drink. You need an oven that makes them twice as fast and it's twice as big. So you're gonna knock that wall out, put that in. You need a drive-thru. So we're gonna knock that wall out, and we're gonna put a pylon sign up front and a microphone. You need a better point of sale system, you need a baker, you need a sandwich station, and you have tables of six, you need tables of two and tables of four, and you need a bar along the window because then you can stuff twice as many people in here, and you need to use these recipes. If you don't do that, it's gonna take you six months. You're gonna shut down your donut shop and be under construction for six months. You talk to a roofer about changing the CRM. They're like, So you mean I can't just like install the CRM, turn it on, and the next day my business grows? It's like, no, James, you're gonna have to like do some major change management and like, yeah, it's gonna be a bicycle for the mind, but you're gonna be it's and it's very unreasonable. So I quit changing CRMs to like you're changing out the central nervous system of your company. The risks are super high. If you wanted to, the amount of times that I've taken a 10, 12, whatever, 50, 100 million dollar company through this change, it's like climbing Mount Everest and coming back down. Someone's like, I want to go up Everest and get some pictures from my Instagram. You're like, sure, no problem. And you get them down, you talk to them like a year later, and they got the pictures, but they're like, Yeah, you know, it wasn't it wasn't great. It wasn't funny. Like they would like not necessarily relate to the experience to something they would tell other roofers to go through because climbing Mount Everest sucks. And you don't they don't necessarily realize the amount of life-saving measures that we took to keep them alive. They'll complain that like they got frostbite on their nose and they didn't get the sandwich they wanted on the second day of the trip, you know? So this process of of going through change, right, is difficult for a roofing business, but we have to be we have to be kind of prepared for it. So I I've done this all these times, and it's kind of a thankless job. And I thought, you know, if I made one percent of my clients revenue, I would have made more money than I've made today. And that kind of like sits there and doesn't sit super well with me because again, I got people up to Everest, took their pictures, and then they're on stage being once corning contractor of the year because they doubled revenue and they look fantastic. And I'm like the unkept secret in the back, and like I've kind of always said that's okay. So what I'm seeing, you know, I talk to a lot of these guys who've been bought by private equity. We all do, you know, we know them. They're our social media darlings, right? They're the people that everybody wants to know, and half of them are coaches now, right? And uh, and so we talk, and I see like a situation where one of our social media darlings, his like how do I say it, his uh sidekick, right? Right, quit the company, and all the salespeople quit the company, and his sidekick start a new company, and then he gets to like a position where he doesn't have to be with the firm anymore, so he leaves, right? And there's this concern that like the culture is gone, right? And the problem I see in private equity is that it's what private equity always does. It buys the company, cultures get squeezed, there's there's a desire to always hedge the bet that they need to be able to flip this thing at any given point in time. So there's this EBITDA pressure and this multiple arbitrage. And I thought, is there a better way? And about a year ago, I was complaining about this to uh a person who worked for me who we met through a business broker that was doing a deal with one of our clients, and that business broker introduced me to this really smart kid who had a lot of bright ideas, a little rough rod, but you know, bright ideas. And I kind of just told him about like this one percent problem. And he said, Why don't you take a stake in the roofing companies? I was like, I wouldn't know the first thing how to do that, you know. And we're putting together this thing called a special purpose vehicle, and essentially it's just a legal structure, right? A vehicle, right? And my contention is that a better way to row in the direction that the water is flowing, which is that consolidation is gonna happen, right? And that the invisible hand of capitalism wants that to be. But how do you but eventually who it's like the US national debt when it comes to this like multiple arbitrage? Like, who do we owe this money to? Like the Decepticons? Like, where are we gonna who do we owe$30 trillion to kind of thing? Well, if you keep buying companies for 3x and flipping them for 10, and then someone buys them for 10 and is gonna throw somewhere in and sell it for 13, like how many years of net profit are you gonna buy roofing companies before before the like it stops making sense? Yeah, and I thought eventually someone has to have a hundred-year roofing mindset, like a Ford Dodge and Chevy of roofing, like a Delta and United, or a Verizon and a T-Mobile, or a Chase and a JP, uh, an American what you have um USA Banking America Bank of America, right? Um yeah, like when like when do you have a hundred-year minds around roofing? Because it's a hundred-year industry, right? And so this special purpose vehicle, like we're taking approach where we're going to partner with roofing companies, and I've put together a board. I'm not the mastermind here. I was just lucky enough that what I realized is smart, like dumb money looks for smart ideas, and then there are so I had a couple of people who understood maybe a smart idea, and then we've we're raising money in Austin right now. Um, but there's this concept that we're gonna partner with roofing companies and we're gonna do an IPO. We're gonna get publicly listed roofing companies. So you can keep your shares and leave, you can sell your shares and stay, you can sell some of your shares, the employees can buy shares, the public can buy shares, but then you trade at the true multiple of what the company is worth, not what one private equity company is willing to pay to acquire the platform and what what they think they can do with the EBITDA in the next two to four years, because private equity's design is to use their equity to make their money worth more and then liquidate it, right? That's the job. But I don't plan on leaving this industry, so how do I have a hundred-year mindset? And I thought, you know, I've been playing in this like service business thing for a really long time, and it's a bit of a slog, you know, and I've been taking a level of almost ownership mentality over my clients' businesses and problems without the benefits of ownership. And so we've created a structure in which I can finally do that, and we're literally meeting the like the main the main partner, like the main, the the primary investor. Uh, the two people on the board are down there in Austin, Texas, just basically finishing that up today as we speak. Um and then the idea is that we're gonna then go and join a bunch of RBP clients together, and then we're gonna go for a public listing and then use that to bring more into this partnership. But then we don't have to try and squeeze the multiple for the sake of a of a set date that we plan to sell the platform. It's selling and being bought every single day on a on a on a public market, and I think we'll end up buying another private equity platform, but again, with a hundred-year mindset.

SPEAKER_03:

And that's what there's a couple of private equity firms that I've uh in in in seeing the you know a couple hundred private equity firms that are in roofing now and talking to some of them. Like, yeah, it's crazy. Um I've seen a couple that do have a long-term mindset. Now I've seen them execute and not execute the way I along with that vision, you know, both both sides of the coin. I'm like questioning some of them, yeah. That's right.

SPEAKER_01:

They're made on capital deployed, and then and then they're left, they're leveraged to act to pay that leverage off. So there's a sales pitch, right? Something you put on the masthead, but the org structure and the capital structure could flies in the face of whatever the messaging is.

SPEAKER_03:

And so and the and in the way like what you're talking about for people that are listening that don't understand the private equity cycle or or or the cycle is you know, you start with consolidating some smaller businesses at a lower multiple of EBITDA, and then once you have a higher EBITDA range, then you're able to get a higher valuation for that. So you said, you know, 3x and maybe 6x. Now this company's flipping it for 10 and maybe 15 and what however it goes down the road. So you're paying for 15 years of net profit.

SPEAKER_01:

That's right. At what point that's right, is that a gamble? You know what I mean? At what point can you borrow enough money that you can say, I'm gonna buy this package of companies for the next 15 years of net profit? Like that's like the Hulinx Verisk thing. Like ICU Links has not innovated a whole lot, it traded for 34 times the net profit the next 34 years.

SPEAKER_03:

It does. That's the same thing. So here's the the end goal though ends up being to go public, and the the highest multiples are achieved on the public market. So that's where that's where you know, if you look at, I mean, some of them are outrageous, right? Like I don't know, I could probably pull up a list of like the PE ratios of you know, or the the ratios of companies that are traded, but you know, you think of like a Palantir that's trading on some outrageous multiple right now, right? Nvidia, because they're people are betting on the future of the industry in a more standard way. You're but let's say you get to a 25 multiple, 25, 25 times multiple. That's what it's publicly traded at. So what what I heat what I'm hearing from you is that the idea is, hey, let's get it to that publicly traded type of multiple as fast as possible. And then as we grow it and add to it, it will just maintain that, maintain that multiple, or we'll we'll already be in the best place to achieve that multiple. Or it's I know you're enjoying the episode, but let's give a shout out to another one of our sponsors.

SPEAKER_00:

Stop going at it alone because growing a roofing company today is not what it was like even three years ago. Not with the economy, not with private equity, not with AI taking over the world. Let's not forget insurance rewriting the rules. Join the community of roofers who don't really like roofers. We share our winning secrets to help each other dominate in today's fast-changing and unpredictable times. Click the link in the description to apply to join.

SPEAKER_03:

So, what what I keep what I'm hearing from you is that the idea is, hey, let's get it to that publicly traded type of multiple as fast as possible. And then as we grow it and add to it, it will just maintain that, maintain that multiple, or what will already be in the best place to achieve that multiple, or is that kind of what you're gonna do? A little bit of the mindset behind it.

SPEAKER_01:

Yeah, and so then when you buy in, you're getting sh you're getting shares, right? Yes, it's not the roll your you roll your sale money to in into the equity of this platform that might sell someday if you meet qualification XYZ that we DOS is the number, right? That's right. It's what's the market paying for an industry that's recession proof, pandemic proof, likes grows with the rate of the population growth, backed by the insurance industry, backed by the mortgage industry, and nobody wants to do the job, and it has huge implications in terms of profitability as a term of results from AI and results from robotics, and just the general market effects of efficiency. You know, we already saw it in the suppliers, right? I mean, QXO traded it like got an 11x multiple when they bought um BD, but like you know, where we saw that that they got 11, right, when they sold to QXO. Then the first thing Brad Jacobs said was robotics and automation uh and uh and AI, right? So I but I but I don't when I talk to the CTO at a private equity company about what technology they want, and they heard that I was this guy that did technology for roofers, and so they're like, This is what we want, and I'm like, Great, you and I see eye to eye, that should exist, and like you have the money and I have the capability, so let's make it. And they go, We don't want to make it, we just want you to make it.

SPEAKER_03:

Yeah, we don't want to make it, yeah.

SPEAKER_01:

So that was the biggest brain shattering thing for me. I was like, wait a minute, you have the opportunity to revelize revolutionize the industry and create one order of magnitude, more efficiency in the industry, and it's gonna cost you like 700 grand. Why would you not do that? Because no, they just because that's gonna kill the EBUDA. And most of them who've tried it, have failed. They've spent a million dollars on dynamics and two million dollars on Salesforce. They also aren't very good at it.

SPEAKER_03:

That's a skill, that's a that's a different business. Development is a different business.

SPEAKER_01:

They're not good at it and they don't want to do it, and it would and it flies in the face of what they do. So then that was when I was like, they have the money, they have the vision, they have the talent, and they still don't do it because they don't have a hundred-year mindset. And I just thought, I have a like this is the industry that's taking care of me and my family. This is the industry that allowed me to travel the world, it allowed me to fall in love with America, my child's American. I mean, I fell in love with American dynamism. I felt I I've appreciated the like the friendships that I've built in this industry. And I was just like, there needs to be a better pathway for roofers to get that second lease on life that doesn't fly in the face of the culture and the vision and the equity that they've built in their team and in their community. And it really sucks when your last name is the name of the roofing company, and now you kind of can't go to church because the entire company quit, got fired, the company got squeezed, the they're doing things differently, they're not supporting the local community the way they were because that's just considered frivolous spending to sponsor the baseball team. That's right, you know, and that doesn't help the Ibada multiple to play, you know, do the hockey thing for kids or to buy the sign at the at the soccer field or football field for the local high school. That's not that's not a Ibadah thing, you know what I mean? That's a community thing. But so to answer kind of the question was I think that moving companies need to just be thinking about where what are they building for and what is their what is their exit plan? Like assume that most roofers didn't choose roofing, they ended up in roofing. So why is it that you feel like you need to be forever cemented to it? Most people, after getting out of roofing, you know, they go do something else. There's probably something else you wanted to do. You know what I mean? The whole like Mr. Deeds speech, you know, you wanted to be a veterinarian, you know, like you want to help puppies, save the dolphins, be a farmer, you know? And it's like, what else do you want to do? And if you could build a great roofing company, what would that look like when you're done? Is it an ASOP, right? Employee stock ownership program, is it selling to private equity? Is it selling to private equity, becoming the vice president of production for the Western states? You know, is it doing something like RSPV and being part of a company that goes public? Is it focusing on extremely specialized materials and being the craftsman roofer, staying small, using AI and automation to become incredibly profitable, you know, being a three million dollar roofing company with two employees and doing a million revenue per capita? Is it um focusing on commercial state and federal, becoming the best roofer in the country for installing like there's this thing called a Veda vent, a vent-assisted design, like basically a thing that it's like crazy this Veda event. The guy who owns it is super smart, but he can't somebody needs to go buy Vadavent from this guy because like he's a cool salesman, he's a he's an engineer, he's super smart, but he pisses everybody off because he's too smart. But his technology is patented and it's crazy and it's simple, but it's really effective. But like maybe they become the national Veda vent installer for those specific types of roofs that worked for that, or the Castagra product, you know, becoming the official, like becoming the nationwide installer of that Castagra coding and putting on all the United Airlines like uh things, data centers. Data centers is like massive, massive, massive, massive opportunity in data centers. Like you look at the size of the data center in Texas, it fills up Staten Island, like massive roofs, so like all of that that's where roofers should be focused. Because if you're just counting on banging on roofs when storm comes, like directionally correct, 2030. That's probably not gonna be a business model you can count on, but you can still milk it for what it's worth now. But if you're not recycling that capital into building the roofing company that will be around 2030, you don't deserve to be successful. You're going to you're like, and it's you know, you have an obligation to your team to help create a vehicle for them to accomplish their personal, professional, and financial goals at a rate that excites them. You have to have a vision that fits all of those people's visions inside of it. And you know, business rewards people with vision. You have to be looking out five years and say, what does our industry look like in five years? The government's spending$500 trillion supporting AI. You don't think that it's gonna impact your roofing business? Anyways, let's I've got off my soapbox.

SPEAKER_03:

But no, that's uh it's a lot of good stuff, and and and that's the I think to to summarize it a little bit, the thoughts are and I think people are already there, or a lot of people are already there, that the storm restoration market is not gonna be what it is. There's going to be a very big shift in the way that that that that roofs are gonna be installed probably in the next five years. There um but that craftsmanship is not going away. I was just I just noted I heard someone talk about it today. You know, there's still these things called newspapers, Adam? They still they you could still buy them. I didn't even like you could still go and buy them, but they're like four bucks or something. They're like four or five dollars or something like that. Like, but they're it's a unique experience that some people want. They want to read a newspaper. There's a there, you know, there's still people that advertise on the radio and on, you know what I mean? Like there's still things that these things that we felt got antiquated, and you know, that that's not the we're looking so close into these new technologies in the future that a lot of these things still exist. The custom cabinet maker, the custom, right? There are still craftsmen that do these really cool things. So figure out who you You are right. Also, I another thing I heard is you could play you could play the game the way it's going. So you could become a version of like what you're working on, right? Is become a version of that model, the a a better version of the private equity model, a better version of utilizing the capital markets in your roofing business. Now let's talk about what tech looks like. Um I sent you a video and I don't know if we got a chance to look at it or not, but like you mentioned to me is kind of the exact same philosophy or kind of the same the same way that that video was framed is that, and this is what it so I I come from web development. So I I I my degrees in management of information systems, so I'm like half computer science, half business administration. So I'm not a 100% geek, I'm only half geek. Um, you know, like but I remember sitting in college in the early 2000s, and 2001, 2, 3, 4, I graduated in 2004, and this was like this this cell phone thing was crazy. Like we were talking about what if this was all in in kind of this was a dream of a device? Like what would it look like? And what would it be like? And what is this, you know, if you had all of the information at your fingertips like that? That was then it it, you know, what does the next iteration look like? Because for what when I started, it we were building the websites, right? And you had to go to the websites to access the technology, or you had a uh a localized application on your computer to access technology that didn't talk to anything outside of your computer, right? Then we moved on to things that are in the cloud and they're all talking to each other and it's all web-based and it's really cool, and then all of a sudden that moves to the apps on your phone and everything's integrated. Where does this go? What is a what does a CRM look like? What does the tech stack look like in 2030?

SPEAKER_01:

So there's uh Darmesh Shaw, who's a pretty smart guy, um, you know, initial investor in OpenAI, founder of HubSquad, smart dude. Um, he had this statement he said from stage, and he said, like, he posted something up. I can't do it because he had the benefit of a slide, but he said, What do you think when you read this statement statement and say, How do you compete with AI? And I tried not to inflect my words, but it says like 50% of the room sees how do you compete with AI? And other people see, how do you compete with AI, right? Um, and we're in this weird phase right now where there's the tip typical technology resistance. Um, but again, we have to be directionally correct. So for right now, when you have an AI voice agent, problem if you get into this business, and I like I know you do too, you you listen to the recordings and you get people who are like, I don't do AI, and they hang up. When they see an Amazon robot delivering a package to a door, someone's gonna trip the thing. The CEO of Waymo says that they have seen so much data at this point that they can tell you which regions of which cities have a higher propensity for people to jump on the hood of a Waymo coming to a stop and try and pull like an insurance scam on it. It's like they got 27 cameras on the thing, but that's how dumb people are. The Waymo hit me, and it's like, no, you jumped on the hood of the cock and then rolled off into the crosswalk. But and then people mess with them and put traffic cones in front of them, right? So you're gonna see this like ebb and flow of businesses experimenting with it and then kind of getting smacked in the face, but you have to be durable and you have to go through it. And I think that the future of roofing, especially in the retail market, is going to be e-commerce. I think you probably heard the stat 57% of Google searches now do not result in a click. So people don't want 10 blue links, they want the answer. And so I think as we go from seeing companies um put AI on us as a um like, oh, like right now it's like, oh, we're being we're having AI pushed on us, right? And they're they're resistant. But then when AI starts to work toward them, right, and Google figures out how to deal with the fact that pay-per-click is being crushed, right? And how to how to kind of respond to that, you're going to see people go, oh, I can use AI to help me, right? And then it's going to be, oh Alexa, I have a roof leak. Can you book a roofer to come look at my house? You know what I mean? And then it's gonna be like, I got three quotes, which one should I pick? People are deferring their intelligence to this thing. The fear is that this thing is gonna stop us from knowing how to think, and you have to, if anything, you have to count on people to be lazy. So, in a world where you count on people to be lazy, what is the laziest way to buy a roof from you? And so I think that uh you're gonna see zero-click websites, right? Like you're gonna have there's two technologies that came out that kind of justify my theory so people can Google it. And like, this isn't just me being like some you know utopia nerd, but two technologies came out. One last November was MCP, model context protocol. Think of it like API 2.0. It's essentially if you want an AI thing to do something, you had to tell it like this endpoint is add a contact, this endpoint is created note. You had to like teach AI how to use the software, and depending on how good you were, you would be like your AI agent would be good or bad. Well, then they came out with this thing called MCP, model context protocol. And all it is is giving the large language model, right? The chat GP, the open AI, LLM, or Grok or Gemini, is it or whatever context of how this of the protocols in which you interact with a particular software. So software can say, here's the MCP. Now anybody can connect an agent to it and it knows how to run the software. The second thing came out in April from Google. So the first one was Anthropic, the makers of Claude. The second one was Google in April, something called A2A, agent to agent. It was a protocol for agents to be aware of other agents. So what does this look like in real life? Well, if a sales rep at a roofing company goes to his sales manager and says, Hey, what's my commission? 10%. Um, when do we when when do we get paid? When we get paid. Uh, what is the best shingle that I should sell to this customer? Owens Corney. What is the pay date for my paycheck? I don't know. What is our 401k plan? I don't know. But if you go two doors down the hall on the left, you can talk to Brenda. She's the HR manager, and she can tell you that. So the sales manager agent, human, knows where the other HR agent, human, is and knows how to send them there to go deal with that thing. So the only difference is the AI, you'd have one input-output mechanism like a chat window or a voice call or website, and that agent would be aware of the other agents that exist on that network to say, Oh, I can't answer this question, but that agent can. Let me ask that agent and answer you. And so what that means is that when your personal agents, as people, get their own agents, which is their Alexa, their Siri, their Google, whatever the Google one's called, right? They'll just say, I need a roof, or call the roofer and tell them that I want to buy the roof, right? Or I need to call the roofer and tell the repair that they did is leaking, right? Or all of a sudden, you're gonna see, just like we have robots.txt on our website, we're gonna have agents.txt or some agents.json on our page that just says, hey, if you're visiting this website from Chat GPT operator or perplexity comment agent thing that they have in their comment browser, if you're visiting this website as a robot, let's just work together and I can take care of your user's request. You don't have to navigate all the pretty UI that gym and the team built with the bubbles that float and the mind, the things that glow, and what you don't have to deal with all that. If you want to just book your boss an appointment with my boss, the roofing company, I can just handle that for you and let's just work that out. When is your homeowner, your boss, when are they usually home? Well, they're usually home after six. Is the wife usually home? Because it's usually good. Actually, I can see that yes, his wife is usually home, but on Thursday, they take the kid to gymnastics, so the wife won't be there. The best time for me to actually do this if you need the wife there will probably be Friday. And then this homeowner is just gonna end up with a calendar booking because they asked their agent to book them an appointment with a roofer. So it will do all context protocol, agent to agent, human beings, homeowners, consumers in the world starting to see agents as helpful to them, and they start to be empowered to have their own counterbalancing effect. Because right now, if you call the roofing company, you have to talk to the AI, depending on how good it is, you might tolerate it. But if you just said, hey Siri, phone a roof, phone three roofers and get me some estimates for a roof, then now those two agents don't even need to speak English to each other, they can just speak JSON. Yeah.

SPEAKER_03:

And they and then they can take, they can initiate the conversations, take the information, uh, evaluate the estimates, and just schedule the thing for the homeowner where the homeowner doesn't even need to be involved at all. They don't even have to make a decision if they don't want to. If they have said, agent, make a decision for me on which company to go with, it just makes that decision. Um it that that's that's the thing. It's the the the way you won't see tech. I mean, there's so much tech in our world right now that we don't see, but it will become accelerated in a in a in a great way, man. This is awesome, man. This has been a lot. Yeah, it will work for us. It'll it's gonna be there's some exciting and scary times ahead. We'll see how it goes, man. Um we'll we'll get to look back at this and see if any, you know, how right or wrong we were. Um, or we'll just have our agents look back and and determine if we were right or wrong. Adam and what uh how can people get a hold of you, you know, get in touch with you, you know, communicate with you, get you know, start to be involved in in your content that you put out, um, and then what what's a final thought that you can share? Like how do uh you know, if you were that, you know, if you if you were like, yeah, I really I I really need to move in the direction of this, of what roofing looks like in 2030, what's that what's that simple advice that you could give?

SPEAKER_01:

Make decisions on the longest possible time horizon. That's awesome. Cool man, how can people get a hold of you? Yeah, so um Adam Sand on Facebook. I'm very, you know, the roofing community is there, so I'm there. Uh and of course, just reaching out through our website, roofingbusinesspartner.com. Uh, I host um free webinars four hours a week. So I'm always there to just ask a question for free. You know, like I like to continue to hear the voice of the customer and the voice of the industry. And so I do those. There's no gate behind it. You just go to our website and join one of them. So there's one almost every single day. Just join one. Those will be the three best ways to like get in touch Facebook, go into the website, or just join a webinar and bring your question.

SPEAKER_03:

Awesome, man. Thanks for your time today. This has been another episode of the Roofing Success Podcast. Thank you for tuning in to the Roofing Success Podcast. For more valuable content, visit Roofing SuccessPodcast.com. While there, check out our sponsors for exclusive offers, shop for merchandise, and sign up for our newsletter for industry updates and technical. Also, join the Roofing Success Facebook to connect with other professionals and take updated on the latest Facebook. If you enjoyed this episode, please subscribe, like, share, and leave a comment. Your support helps us continue to bring the top industry and stuff. The website link is in the description. Thanks for listening.

Head Shot

Jim Ahlin

Host