Your Pathway into Commercial Roofing with Bryan Mitchell

Nic: And we're live. Welcome everyone to the Roofr Masterclass. I'm Nic here from Roofr and I got an amazing special guest here, Bryan. And, today we are going to be talking about your pathway to commercial roofing, with Bryan, from Service AdvantEdge. Very excited to have everyone here and, excited to get Bryan introed and everything moving and rocking and rolling.

Typically there's two of us here, myself and Pete. Pete is away today. I'm healthy as a horse. I believe that was a horse comment by Joel about  

Bryan: I'm sure.  

Nic: Yeah. The amount of hair I have, that was a personal attack and I'll be contacting HR afterwards, so all good.

If you have any questions, you could always email us at Nic@Roofr.com. That's Nic without the K and pete@Roofr.com. Then also just as a reminder, these sessions are always recorded.

They're always available on our YouTube channel at or at Roofr.com/masterclass. Typically up around a day to two afterwards. And feel free to ask questions in the chat. I already see the chat popping off, which is excellent. I'm hoping that there's a lot of questions here for Bryan and myself.

About commercial roofing. And, Bryan as, you may not know actually, I also am a commercial Roofr and have been doing that for a long time. I focused a lot on residential and commercial, so I, I'm excited, so excited to talk about this stuff here.

Today's agenda ish, there's a lot to get through.

Bryan, so excited for you to be here, my man. I would love for you to give a little intro on you. About, service advantedge, and then we can get into everything.  

Bryan: Cool. Um, really Nic, what we do is we help guys get into commercial roofing or people who are already in commercial.

We help them grow their business.  

Nic: That's a perfect summary of it.  

So tell us a little bit about how you got into commercial roofing. Bryan?  

Bryan: I got in the hard way.  

Nic: Mm-hmm.  

Bryan: I used to build boats. And so it was like a natural progression to get into roofing, right?

I just turned the boat upside down.  

Nic: Yeah.  

Bryan: And now we are working on the other side of it, but, I started at the estimating level and that was in the nineties and that's actually a really great place to start as an estimator, because you gotta figure out how to do all these things and then you can get in the field and burn yourself in practice.

Right. I was fortunate to be vice president of a small roofing company that, over 20 years or so turned into a $70 million roofing company. And, then when I retired, I put this course together so that we could help guys do the same thing.  

Nic: And when you were getting into commercial in the nineties, like it was just starting to pop off then like we always had like the division between residential and commercial contractors.

But what I noticed, like I got into roofing in the early two thousands, 2002, there was always that commercial aspect and it was always kind of like for the residential guys sight unseen. Like it was something a little bit outside of what you would know, but there was always the opportunity for commercial.

I found that like in the early two thousands and going into the, the 2010s and stuff like that, there was such a big emphasis on real estate building up those commercial, buildings. So that must have, you must have seen that boom happen in real time.  

Bryan: Not only that, we also saw the collapse, right? Yeah.

In 2008. We were literally saved by the fact that the owner of our company had this vision of a service business. And, because we had a couple of service trucks on the road when that collapse happened. We became service providers for people who didn't wanna spend money on reroof.

Our service business exploded.

And as soon as the money became available again after that banking crisis, all of those relationships turned into reroofs. So it was, you know, sometimes better to be lucky than good, but if you can do both, that's really awesome.

Nic: When I was running into like the, the commercial aspect there is obviously the attractive, it's super sexy and everyone going to like, I gotta become a commercial Roofr because those are six and seven figure jobs. That's what I wanna focus on. But with that comes a lot of money that you need to float it.

And you mentioned the 2008 crisis and that affects. Being able to float that stuff, right? It's the material costs, it's the labor, it's the time to do the job. You're not looking at a in and out one day situation. You're looking at months and months, depending on the size. So being able to diversify and if anybody's watched our master classes before, Pete and I always talk about diversifying your offerings so that you can withstand any ups and downs in the market.

And typically we talk about that diversification on the retail versus insurance aspect of side of things. But there's the other side of things too, which is that commercial and, residential side. And the third one that you just brought up, Bryan, which I'm so happy you did, is on service offerings, there is full replacements.

That should always be a thing and should always be in your back pocket. But if you can offer a maintenance program, a service agreement, anything like that, not only are you going to have a more predictable forecast and revenue model that you can build out. The other side of the thing too is that you build that relationship with that building owner. That now when they think of roofing or something goes wrong with their roof, their first thought is to call you back.

Bryan: At the end of the day, your goal is a reroof. But how do you be top of mind, you know, how does Roofr stay top of mind as the go-to, tool to use?

And that's by being around and offering services and helping people. It's exactly the same, on the roofing side of the business.  

Nic: A hundred percent. That kind of goes into my next point here. Running commercial jobs in Roofr. Before we dive into your presentation here too, Bryan, where we're gonna start diving into commercial roofing and, business thriving and all that stuff, and building and growing.

A common question that I see on the Roofr side of things is, can you run a commercial business or commercial jobs through Roofr?

Just so people know, like you can still capture leads and use that instant estimator. It's a great way to kind of price condition and price qualify everything there.

You can measure multiple buildings at once, so whether it is a commercial flat or you know, a multi-home HOA kind of community that you're building in upsell with multiple proposals, options. And, maintenance, service agreements create workflows. PDF signer for multiple approvals, all that stuff is directly built in, which is fantastic.

If you do have any questions, hit me up afterwards at Nic@Roofr.com. I can show you about that Roofr side of things. But what I wanna get into is with Bryan.

Bryan: And Nic, I'll mention, I use Roofr for commercial roofing all the time.

I would like to have a Roofr report on every lead I get, nevermind every roof that I get. I'm a big fan. And yeah, so this is just a quick introduction. I guess the question is, if you're in commercial already, is your business thriving? And if not, then stick around.

We can talk about it some. Nic laid it out very clearly. Our goal is re roofs, that's where the big money is.  

Nic: Mm-hmm.  

Bryan: I looked at every single roof as an opportunity for ongoing maintenance.

Like you take your car to have the oil changed every 3000 miles? I had a client in Fort Lauderdale, Florida that had me on their roof once a month. So depending on how leak tolerant your client is.

This isn't an annual event. It can be a monthly event. It can be a quarterly event, it could be a biannual event, but ongoing maintenance is the goal. Even after you reroof. In your reroof contract, when you deliver your final papers, include your ongoing maintenance agreement.  

Nic: It is fantastic advice because this is exactly how I used to run the commercial aspect too.

We had a really amazing partner with the company that I was working with before, and it was a long-term care home company. So they had hundreds of properties. When you have big contracts like that, they have a lot of buildings and they have a really strict budget , especially if they're long-term care that's subsidized by government and stuff like that.

They only have so much money they could spend. And all these roofs were six figures plus to get completely redone. They were inverted roofing, which is big up in Canada because of the weather. So doing anything was going to be very costly to actually put like a regular roof system on there.

Whether it be EPDM, TPO, or mod bit that we'd be working with. And the thing that really was valuable is that we had them call us out. Multiple times a quarter per each one of these roofs. So if you are lucky enough to capture one with a conglomerate that has multiple roofs there, you're being called out for all that stuff.

It was around 7,000 to $14,000 per visit. That's doing multiple of those there, like full replacements on a residential side, compounded through multiple properties per week, per month, and everything else. You're not hiring a full crew to go out there.

You're not having 10 guys as a sub crew going out there and working on that and having to divvy up those P&Ls to cover that. You have two or three guys going out there to do that, to build the inspection, to do the repair. You're making that profit and you're making that revenue on one single repair, compounded for that.

The goal is that full replacement, but you're getting them to that spot because that big budget is only going to be able to cover certain things at a time.  

Bryan: And at 65% margin.  

Nic: Exactly. It's not that 20 to 30% that you normally see in the residential side of things. It's great.

And my dad always had a great line. It was residential roofing is gonna keep the lights on, commercial's gonna put you on vacation.

Bryan: And what's even more exciting is as a $65 million business, our service division paid the overhead for the entire company.  

Nic: Yeah. It's quick. You can do multiple services per day, per crew.  

Bryan: In fact, one of the best things I think that's come recently is instead of doing time and material, you offer a half day full day.

Nic: Mm-hmm.  

Bryan: And one of our clients on the West Coast increase their sales by 30% just by that shift.  

Nic: When you're looking to get into commercial and looking to diversify your options.

It doesn't have to be right away you're getting into full replacements. Build that relationship, build that trust, and build those contacts. You can build a replicable process that can fund your company and keep those lights on while building up for that future state as well.

So Bryan, why don't we dive into, the numbers and everything.  

Bryan: Have a look at the next slide there. Roof connect is part of the NRCA and there are gonna be a couple of breadcrumbs from looking at this slide, right? The first one is approximately 80% of roofs are replaced prematurely. So if you wanna be a rockstar. Avoid replacing somebody's million dollar roof for a little while longer.

Yep. Than they expect. That's the one thing. And so there's plenty of opportunity right there. But in the top corner here, what they state, and this is so aggressive, it's more aggressive than I would actually say, but they say an unmaintained low slope roof will last on average 10 to 14 years. Now these are roofs that got a 25 year NDL.

A managed maintenance roof, 20 to 35. So you're talking about a 25 year span that you could protect this asset for, which I don't know if there's another industry where you can bring that much value.  

Nic: No, I don't know. That's insane. And like, one thing I wanna touch on what you said at the beginning, approximately 80% of roofs are replaced prematurely.

When we talk about getting in and building in those relationships with people, what got us in with that long-term care home was, I was asked to go, just take a look. 'cause they were getting a quote for $80,000 to replace a balcony. I went in there and realized that the issue was not the roof itself.

To your point, Bryan, it wasn't past its NDL. The substrate was fine. The flashing was fine. I did like a deep, detailed inspection and everything. What I realized was that the drain was clogged and it was cracked halfway through. So the leaking was actually not coming from the roof, but the actual, drain coming inside the, the property there.

I said like, Hey, I'm gonna repair this for you. It's probably gonna cost around like $800 to a grand. Is that okay? And the conversation to the guy, the property manager who's in charge of it, he goes, Hey man, I need you to jack that price up. I was like, I'm like, I, I, I don't feel comfortable jacking up the price.

I told you I'd come out giving you honest assessment. He goes. I'm gonna look like an asshole 'cause I got them quotes for 40, 60, $80,000 and you're about to do that. Save us a lot. But I need you to do that. If you do that for us, then we, we got the relationship and the rest are gonna be gravy for you.

That's what I ended up doing. I refused to go up to five grand. I raised it up to two. I said, this is my max. Tell the story and then you're gonna look like a rock star, not me. And that's how I got in on there. And that kind of leads into what you're talking about is the reactive maintenance and the focus on all this stuff and preventative maintenance.

Is not only going to get you sustainable work, but it's also gonna build those relationships.  

Bryan: And you have to sell it as ongoing. I'm going to be here, get used to my ugly face because I'm gonna be around.  

Nic: Awesome. Well, let's get into this next one here on all the roofs in your market.

Bryan: So 5% of roofs get replaced every year. In a way, we are looking for a needle in a haystack. Of that 5%, if you were lucky enough to find all 5% in your service area, you now have to bid them against other Roofrs and you're only gonna win about a third.

So this is bringing you down to about a 2% number? Yep. And again, this just reinforces that need for service because if you have a roof on an ongoing maintenance program, you are actually gonna be telling your client when it's time to do a coding. When it is time to re-skin it, when it is time to replace it.

So you're no longer looking, the fox is in charge of the hen house at this stage.  

Nic: Exactly. When you're building in that competition and you're giving a generous 30% win rate on this aspect here.

But I wanna be brutally honest. You're not gonna win at 30%, especially if you're starting off early. Because your competition is the Flynns, the center marks, the tech, like all these massive conglomerates that do billion dollars worth it, and they have the name brand and the marketing and everything behind them, and the relationships building.

The other big thing, and depending on your market, is that you're not just competing about other companies, roofing companies, you're competing with spec builders. You're, spec writers, you're spec competing with manufacturers and everything else that actually control a lot of this market as well.

So if you're a brand new company trying to get into commercial, that 30% would be a godsend. The truth is that it, like if you're get starting off, it's going to be a lot smaller and to get into those markets, like Bryan's saying, let's not focus on the competition. Let's focus more on what we can offer and the value that we can bring to that property owner that conglomerate that's owning the property management group or whatever the case is.

And if you can cut their costs on honest assessments and clean, easy repairable roofs, you're going to get those big jobs down the line and it's building that pipeline, but you're not doing it for free. You're getting paid. That's the best part about it. So you're able to open all this stuff up very easily.  

Bryan: Nic, you've been in the residential game as well, so you know that sales in the residential market are won at the kitchen table, right?  

Nic: Mm-hmm.  

Bryan: Reroofing projects are won at the estimating table and the repair estimates. Are won at the conference table. Just to dig into that a little bit, on the reroof side, what you need to bring to the table is some value engineering smarts. You've gotta look for ways to get the best roof system for your client. My friend Greg, the owner of our company, used to say to people , how dry do you wanna be?

We got a roof here that we could reroof for 500,000, or we could reroof it for 350,000. Do you wanna be $500,000 dry or do you wanna be $350,000 dry? Because that can be the difference between, you know, fiber tight and a, you know, four five TPO. They're both gonna keep you dry. It's just what are you gonna do with that building?

If you estimated and estimating is really the key to the reroof business, right? You need to have an accurate estimate. And what you guys do at Roofr is phenomenal because I can walk into a client's office and I already know the dimensions of the roof.

Now you've added an estimating component. I've got a nice picture of the aerial of the roof. When I say the repair jobs are won at the conference table, I would like to suggest that you never inspect a roof without first meeting the decision maker, and that's a hard thing to do, right?

Baby needs shoes, we gotta get some business in, but eventually get yourself to this point where that's a rule. Because that meeting is so valuable that a couple of our clients pay their account managers hundreds of dollars, literally $200 per meeting, regardless of where they get anything out of it.

Nic: And I love getting in front of the decision maker. It's super important because you wanna understand their pains, you wanna understand their needs, and you wanna understand. Their budget. Classic sales acronym that, some of you might know, is bant, BANT.

Budget, authority, need and timeline. You need to get all four before you dive into this, especially at something like this. 'cause it's a commercial building more times than not, you're not going to be, I'll never get over those slides too, kill me every single time.

But, you'll never be able to get in front of them if it's not on the conference table. So you need to find out their budget. You need to find the authority. As Bryan's talking, you wanna be in front of that decision maker. And the needs is finding out the problems. The need is not always I got a leak. Is there need to repair and maintenance or are looking for a full replacement and everything else? And what's the timeline on this? Is it asap this thing's leaking and I need to get help, or I wanna create a long-term fix so that I can slowly build everything up while we've regained that budget.

Without having that decision maker or that authority figure there, you're not gonna get a correct answer and it's gonna be broken telephone, and you're frankly going to be wasting your time nine times outta 10.

Bryan: Cool. All right. How you structure your businesses key. And the fact is that you have to be great. Getting leads. At the end of the day, you are really a marketing and sales company that happens to do roofing. Mm-hmm. There are a lot of things we have to be good at at roofing, and it's hard, it's not an easy business.

This is one thing you've gotta be great at because you can't sit and wait for somebody to make a decision.  

Nic: Mm-hmm.  

Bryan: You need to have a hundred people in the decision process. So that one of them is gonna come through. Let's say your annual sales goal is 2 million. Your gross margin on reroof is 30%, right? Mm-hmm. And your average job size is 225,000. And your appointment ratio, in other words, the number of people you reach out to or reach out to you, you get a 20%, return.

Right? You would love to have 50 or more, but good luck, right? And if your closing ratio is 30%. Like you said, early days, it's not gonna be that. On the top right there. You're gonna need 150 leads and 30 estimates to get nine contracts. Now, most likely your average job size won't be 225 at the start, but then look, if you want to get to 5 million now we need 385 leads.

77 estimates to get 23 contracts. There is a lot of work to do, and you need a lot of leads to work with in order to achieve these numbers.  

Nic: When we're talking about the instant estimator and marketing tools and everything else that we've done on the previous masterclasses, not all leads are created equally.

You need to be able to price condition and price qualify them. 'cause it's going to help you be a little bit more direct.

Bryan: One of the beauties of Roofr is I know what that roof is.

I know how big it is. I've got a nice aerial of it. If I look at an aerial, and this guy's got seven low slope warehouses, I'm making sure that I'm gonna do a lot of homework on this before I go and visit this client.

Our short term goals, long term asset strategy, leak tolerance is a big thing. You know, I've got radiation equipment under this roof, or I've got bricks under the roof.

Those are two completely different issues, right?  

Nic: Mm-hmm.  

Bryan: Budget and planning cycle and some of the others that you mentioned, but look at this next slide. This is what I would ask you guys to consider doing before you go and visit your first appointment. And included in here is your Roofr report.

So we can identify the decision maker who's got the authority. We are gonna sit in front of this person. But before I sit in front of him, I'm gonna give him the respect that I've researched his property. I know who owns it. Permits to see what the history of this roof is, or you can just slide the picture in Google Earth and see when it changed color. Right?

I'm gonna bring a Roofr report in with me because one of the things that I found presenting to building owners for. Probably too long is they don't get on their roof very often and after all the work I've done on this beautiful presentation, they actually spend more time looking at the nice picture of their roof or the nice dimensions that we've produced.

But you've gotta bring that in and then you've gotta show them that you actually know what roof system they have right now. And, we give our clients a sheet that'll allow them, if this is an EPDM roof, this is the typical 40 things that you're gonna find wrong with it if this is a TPO roof, et cetera.

And then you wanna show your presentation about your company. So you gotta be prepared with that. And a lot of people don't know anything about commercial roofing and it's not their fault. There is no formal training for it really. Bring something that you can educate the guy a little bit on commercial roofing.

Nic: If you're looking at someone who owns multiple buildings, oftentimes they have a property manager in there. Property managers are, and how do I say this politely? Jack of many trades, master of none. They know a little bit about plumbing, electrical, roofing and all that stuff. And in our job here. Educate them on what's happening with the roof, what's going on with the products, what the lifespan is, and what options are for that.

Where you need to kind of separate yourself from the competition is that education.

Hey sir, right now what you have on there is you have a TPO roof. It's a single ply membrane. It's normally put down, with hidden fasteners, you could have that glued on, but it's typically around a 20 year lifespan. These dark spots that are building is where water is pooling, which means that it's either not sloped properly with the tapered iso, like, this is just examples on how you're building that out, and you educate them on number one, what's going on with the roof, what's going on with the material, and what's going on with the problems that they're happening.

It's a very easy step-by-step guide that you've laid out here that is going to help you crush that first meeting every single time.

Bryan: So can we humbly suggest that you lead with service, right? Based on everything we've spoken about so far. 'cause otherwise you're gonna leave 90% of your opportunities on the table. Maybe 95%. I'm talking about we wanna go after the a hundred percent and then let's get a percentage of that.

How much money we can make in the service business. This is where I worked and this is a $12 million service company operating at over 60% gross margin. So there is money in the service side. So yeah, we talk about win, win, win.

So let's talk about the building owner for starters, right? This is a Canadian guy. You can tell.  

Nic: What the hell Bryan!!  

Bryan: By the head. You know, the difference between you and him. Nic, is he combed. And

Nic: you know what, Bryan, we were gonna report Joel to HR. You next.  

Bryan: You're gonna be on these shows on your own in future,

but, so look at the thing. You maintain a manufacturer's warranty. If you go right now onto John Manville website, GAF. Carlisle. Verico. Look at all of their warranty documents. Every single one of them says you have to maintain your roof, otherwise your warranty is not valid.

A lot of them say keep records. So you can also do that for your client. The other thing we touched on earlier is if I've got half a million dollar roof, everybody's telling me I've gotta replace it, and I say, no, no.

I can extend the life 10 years. I've just kept half million dollars in your pocket for 10 years, and it is probably gonna cost you five or six grand a year if that. So it's, and a huge, opportunity. And then you've got a menu of things you can do to keep this roof in good shape.

You can allow that property manager to have an easy budget. What's your budget for roofing next year? Well, I use Nic's company and I know it's six grand and he's already told me when we're gonna have to replace it. He's told me what sort of capital investment we've gotta think about because he's projected the life of the roof.

He's actually extending the life of the roof. If your building owner has a tenant. The tenants may not pay their rent. They may pack up and go home and send you the bill.

There's a large auto dealership in town here. All of the mechanics were out and all of their tools were out. I don't know what that was costing them an hour. But I got on the roof. I said, you guys need to clean your gutters. And I said, why don't you just let the maintenance guy do it? And he said, Bryan, you do it. And while you're up there, I want to replace those 11 skylights, you know, turned out to be a good thing.

And he used me forever. So we talk about that peace of mind. We talk about minimizing downtime.

Nic: And that's a big part about extending the life of the roof. That bullet point there with coatings, recovery and reroof. Being able to give a good, better, best, a best, better, good upgrades. Options, so on and so forth. This is a perfect breakdown of it right there.

Providing those options are going to be very important, and provide the easier budget for the owner and the property manager there.

Bryan: Yeah, so this is a South African guy  

Nic: South African.

Bryan: Yeah, he does. It's not wearing a tie, but,

It is really all about your client, right? Because that's what's gonna keep you in business. But the good news is it's also great for you. You are going to create an environment where roof work is not only reactive. We actually had 1500 ongoing maintenance agreements. I had, we had five trucks that, that's all they did was ongoing maintenance.

And guess what? When it didn't rain, we probably had 12 trucks doing that, but we didn't have to send people home. We had this income, that was all, we would start the year with $3 million in sales because that was our maintenance portfolio. So you've got this consistent revenue. You can spread the load in lower times.

You're the top of mind guy, right? You know, what's your favorite soda? The marketers say, we can only have. So many favorites of each thing. You're gonna be the favorite Roofr. It's very profitable. It's scalable, it's repeatable. These guys are gonna refer you, and like I said earlier, you're gonna be telling your client when he needs to do a coating, he's not gonna be telling you.

And then very important is this proportional growth because Nic, as you were saying earlier, you come into this business new and you're not gonna be well recognized.

So we wanna show you how to proportionately grow your company so that your overhead does not kill you.  

Nic: And that's a huge part there. When you're building a company and scaling a company, whether it is for a legacy brand that you wanna pass down to your family as you go along, or if you're looking to get acquired by PE, having predictive and honest and forecastable revenue is going to be very important for either side of those things.

What I love that Bryan said is that he had that company that they started in January with $3 million in sales. Now, if I can relate that back to what happened in 2025. There was a lot of things that happened that made it a tough year for a lot of Roofrs. Number one, the macro's outta whack. There's like the stock market issues that affected did trickle down, to those homeowners who are wanna hold that money a little bit tighter and not fix it for right now.

'cause the interest rates a little high. Number two, there weren't any storms. It was the first time in, I think it was like 15 or 20 years that we had no storms hit. So that kind of stuff could really affect you growing and scaling your company.

And if you continue to diversify with reroofs or residential, whatever you want, it is a scalable business now. Nothing is better in business than having something that is forecastable and repeatable. So this is going to help you do all that stuff. And my favorite thing to talk about as well is that generation of referrals and upsell opportunities.

This is not just a one way street where you're looking to get into commercial, and that means you're going into full replacements. You need a big wallet for that, and you need a big name and you need to take some time there.

Bryan: What I'd like you guys to think about is your business in a couple of categories. What's your service revenue? What's your construction revenue? What's your overall revenue? But there's a very interesting trend here as the service revenue increases, the construction revenue increases above proportionately.

This is the actual truth, and this is a company that the reroof business was between four and six times their service business consistently over a 20 year period. So the one builds the other. The service builds reroof.

But if you are thinking forward, every reroof is an ongoing maintenance plan, right? Because that's what the manufacturer requires. So reroof is building service. The one builds the other. If you're just going after the big whale it's gonna be a long haul.

Nic: There are whales out there, but building that way of getting to those whales is important. I use that story from my experience where I had the long-term care home and that was a whale I wanted for a long time, and I knew the people involved. I knew the project manager,

I knew all the authority figures, and I knew roughly what their budget is. But to get in there, it took a service agreement. If it took that lead by service aspect there, and that's going to help you get through a lot of these things as you go along. Snails before whales.

So I'm gonna pause this for a bit. We are gonna do a part two, part three for sure on this stuff, Bryan, but we got some q and a here to go through as well. Talking a top down view. Where do you begin when you want to learn the basics of commercial flats?

Is it go to work for a company and learn it, or go take this course? What would you suggest there, Bryan?  

Bryan: So Nic, I just. Created a 10 video series on getting into commercial for this exact reason because it's just not out there.  

Nic: Mm-hmm.  

Bryan: And so what I did is I took, okay, what are the different deck types?

We've got metal, we've got tectum, we've got gypsum, we've got concrete, we've got lightweight, concrete, and what are the features and advantages? Then what are the different vapor barriers and fire barriers and why? I can't recommend that more strongly and it is not expensive.

And the reason I built it was because we had 300 people in our roofing company, and I knew that probably 70% of them didn't know anything about commercial roofing.  

Nic: It's a hard thing. It's completely different. What's that substrate? What's that? Are we dealing with scuppers or drains and all that stuff there? So. I think Mason, it's great to kind of do both is what I think we're getting at here. If you go to work from a company and learn it, that's great but that's a longer term thing.

If you want to understand, go to Bryan's website, we added at the link at the bottom there, and you can learn a little bit about what you need to do for commercial roofing as well.  

Bryan: And then you've also got the manufacturers Mason, so they love to teach you, right? Because they see in you their future multimillion dollar Roofr that's gonna use their product.  

Nic: Go talk to your supplier. They'll have those courses running.

And also, like trade shows will help you a lot too. Go to those IREs, those roof cons, those, smaller ones there. And typically those larger ones will have that training built in. All right, for the next question here, this service package, do you do a month subscription?  

Bryan: So generally I want to offer an agreement that either of us can cancel at any time, right? I want some flexibility there.

But I am gonna recommend the number of visits to that roof based on how leak tolerant they are. So it's certainly gonna be seasonal, right? Because we get issues with temperature changes and climate changes. But then if it's an older roof, we're gonna probably be on there quarterly.  

Nic: Will Roofr link to ABC, QXO, SRS commercial materials? Yes, we do. So you can link both your residential and your commercial options in there so you can get live pricing updates, live material orderings as well. And that's gonna go directly into their online ordering platform with,

those Roofrs that are in here, that's what the suppliers are pushing you to do anyways, so just use Roofr. You'll get live pricing and we'll go directly into that as well.

I wanna touch on what Justin asked here. He asked, for you, Bryan, those six to 12 K jobs, were they just repairs?  

Bryan: What we didn't get to today is how we start building this service business. Right. And Nic, I know we'll get an opportunity to do that for these guys down the road.  

Nic: Mm-hmm.  

Bryan: But if you think of it in these terms, we wanna take that roof off the street. Now as a professional. This is how you need to operate.

If you think about the other professionals in your life, your doctor, for instance, will check more than just your temperature, right? They'll probably bang on your chest and what have you, but you get to my age, they're putting all kind of instruments on to see why you're still alive. Mm-hmm. Your, mechanic is gonna do, about a 200 point inspection of your truck.

Right. What I'd like you to do when you get on a roof. Is inspect every single thing on that roof. Everything, because it's very rare that a roof leaks in isolation. I almost guarantee you you'll find another 20 things that are potentially gonna cause a leak.

So inspect the entire thing,  

Nic: and that's a huge thing if you're coming from the residential side and going to commercial. 'Cause on residential it's pretty easy to find the point of entry and the cause of it. You just follow where the water goes. But when you're dealing with a flat roof, especially depending on the substrate that you're working with, is it inverted?

Is it single ply, double ply? Whatever the case is, water is gonna do some magical stuff. And where that entry point is here, nine times outta 10. It's not being caused from something right here. It could be across the entire roof there as well. So you really have to take a look at the entire scope of things and understand where anything can go.

Bryan: And then prioritize them as well, Justin, because not everybody's gonna buy everything, right? Mm-hmm. Some people have a budget, so prioritize, next time it rains, this is gonna leak.

You should fix it. These pitch bands should be topped up. You know, there's nothing in here. Birds are barking in them, so that's a maintenance item, but it's gonna cause the leak. So prioritize them so that your client can make a good, educated decision.

Nic: Bryan, this was fantastic. We had a lot of people coming in, so if there's any other questions, feel free to reach out to myself at Nic@Roofr.com or Bryan. Bryan, can you say your email real quick?  

Bryan: It is Bryan@ServiceAdvantEdge.net.  

Nic: That's, you can check out his website below as well, so feel free to reach out, but I would be remiss.

If we didn't offer out that sock draw.

While it's spinning, take a look at Roofr.com. You can sign up for free. We have a starter plan now that is $0 a month, gives you access to a bunch of stuff as well. And congrats to Jay Raley here.  

Bryan: Spin that again Joel. I didn't get anything.  

Nic: Exactly. So, hit us up.

Check us out on the next masterclass. We're gonna be doing it in two more weeks. Brandon the winner gets sweet socks with my cartoon face and Pete's cartoon face on. Scares everyone that I know, but they're really comfortable.

Thank you Bryan. It was a pleasure having you here. I can't wait for part two and part three, and next time we'll have Pete to mediate it. He is the beacon of hope and I, am the robin to his Batman. So  

Bryan: Happy Patty's day.

Nic: Thanks so much, everyone. Have a great day.