Making the Big Move to Commercial Roofing, with Bryan Mitchell

Pete: Alright everybody, welcome back to the Roofr Report. I'm your host, Pete McKendrick, and we are back with another great episode here. We have been doing this Roofr of the month series for about a year now . Some newer companies, some growing companies. I just did one the other day with a company that's been in business 41 years. One of the things that has come up a few times, and has made this podcast so timely, is commercial roofing.

What we're finding is we have these guys on our platform that are residential roofers, and they want to try to branch out a little bit. Maybe they're looking to open a second office. Maybe they're looking to branch out from just doing residential roofing and trying to find another trade to do.

And so the first logical [00:01:00] place to look is commercial roofing. And I think what's happening is a lot of people are finding that a very daunting idea, a very different animal than residential roofing. So I think contractors have a tendency to shy away from it. Very excited to have this conversation today about commercial roofing with my guest Bryan Mitchell.

So welcome, Bryan. Thank you. Excited to have you on. I'll give you a second here to kind of intro yourself and your attachment to the roofing industry, if they're not familiar with you, and then we can dive into the commercial bit.

Bryan: Alright, great. Yeah. Well, lemme start by saying the good news about getting into commercial is you still use Roofr. It's an essential part of commercial roofing. I love it for it. The first thing I'll have to say is I'm old, right? I come from an estimating background. I started in the nineties.

Prior to that I was building boats, sailboats. I actually sailed here from South Africa and suddenly realized why I was attracted to the roofing industry. 'cause a roof is just an upside down [00:02:00] boat, right? So it made complete sense. Very interesting. But anyhow, in my, career, in the estimating world, I was eventually general manager of Estimating Edge.

And I got a couple of clients going in on the commercial side estimating. When I left the company, one of them hired me. He had a little roofing company losing money and we got it going. Started with one service truck and last year he sold it and it was not far away from 200 million.

Wow. So he did incredibly well. We ended up, we had about 30 service trucks. He was doing 60 or 70 million in reroof. So we kind of saw it all, but the really intriguing thing to me, 'cause I was actually with them twice. I took a break [00:03:00] where I actually went into, and you'll laugh at this after you hear me talk for a while, but I was in the ministry, people called me a pastor overseas.

I didn't qualify for it in America. I realized that what we set up as a structure right at the beginning and the owner I worked with was an MBA, and we had a brilliant CPA with us. The structure we set up right from the beginning is the same structure we were using as a $70 million roofing company. It's incredible. So there's a process, there's a structure, there's also a why that we need to talk about. So I don't know, did I do okay introducing myself?  

Pete: You did. And I think you undersold yourself a bit. I know that you worked for a short time with the Sales Transformation guys, right?

I did. Yeah. Yeah, yeah. I reached out to them 'cause I'm good friends with a couple of those guys and I said, Hey, do you know this guy Bryan? And they said when it comes to commercial roofing, [00:04:00] he's the man. They said the guys that are out there on stage talking about their successes in commercial roofing learned everything they know from Bryan.

That's what they told me. So you undersold yourself a little bit, I think, there. Very humble introduction.  

Bryan: I'm probably gonna get some commission from those guys. I'll check the bail after this.  

Pete: Yeah, definitely a glowing recommendation from that group. But yeah, welcome to the show and, yeah, like I said, I'm excited for this one because I just did a ton of deep dive research on the commercial side of the roofing world and, for a lot of us, it's the fact that it's just very foreign, right? Most of our guys come up through the residential side. They start a residential roofing business. That's where their comfort level is. And the commercial side, with the exception of like we were talking about some steep slope things.

Maybe I'm reroofing a church or a multifamily home. That's essentially just a slightly bigger house right? But the true commercial is a bit different and obviously, foreign to a lot of people. And so I think they are skeptical about going [00:05:00] into it and adding that piece to their business.

So I think this will be a really good conversation to make people understand how feasible it is and how successfully they could be on that side of the world.  

Bryan: I'll, I promise you, I'm gonna tell you everything I know. I'm not holding back, and of course it's only gonna take three minutes. But I've got a couple of guys that we've worked with who after six months have multimillion dollar commercial roofing companies. I'm like, oh my gosh, why do these people do it so much better than I did?

Pete: That's crazy. I mean, let's get into it. Let's say I'm a residential roofer, maybe I've been in business a couple years, maybe I'm to that point where we've established ourselves locally in our market, we're looking to potentially expand our offering. So many times we see roofers go into other trades or potentially move into a neighboring market, opening a second office, but there [00:06:00] could potentially be an untapped resource there, right?

In their own neighborhood, right in their own market. If they were to branch into commercial roofing. So what would be step one? If I am a residential guy and I'm considering this, what should I be looking at from the commercial side?  

Bryan: First of all, let me say you are in a fantastic position to do this because commercial roofing needs a brand that needs name recognition and it needs marketing.

It does not come to you, right? You've gotta go out and get it. The other thing i'd suggest is you keep an open mind about how you run the commercial division because the sales compensation is not the same. The salespeople are not the same. The clients aren't the same. So we do have to do it a little differently, but what I'd suggest to you first is to understand the benefit to your client before you.

We will talk about the benefit to you. Absolutely. Right. Most [00:07:00] people are tuned into that radio station. W-I-I-F-M, you know that one? What's, what's in it for me? Yeah. But the right way to do this is first to think about what the benefits are for your clients, and then I want to talk about what services you should be offering.

'cause most guys think, okay, we're gonna go fix leaks and do reroofs. There are about seven or eight products we really have to be aware of in order to get into commercial. First of all, you can help your clients extend the life of their roofs, right? So let's say you have a million dollar roof or half a million dollar roof, if through my services you can extend the life of that roof five or 10 years.

You're gonna keep most of that half million or million in your pocket for the next five or 10 years. So I like to have the CPAs in the conversation when I'm talking to potential clients. 'cause they like saying that's a no brainer.

You [00:08:00] can also offer them services other than tearing off their roof. A reroof in a commercial building is like a heart transplant in a human being. You rip its chest open and you make a noise and you tear everything off and it hurts for a long time afterwards. Yeah. So, but there are a lot of other things we can offer.

Do restorations to extend the life to get the most value. The commercial side of roofing is a business at the edge of sophistication. we don't have any formal roofing training. HVAC guys way ahead because you can go to a school for that, right?

So we need to just recognize the value of yourself to a commercial building owner. It's enormous. It's enormous value. But people need that explained to them. Because every building owner you know probably has his teeth cleaned every [00:09:00] six months, probably has his oil changed every 3000 miles, probably has his HVAC checked every 30 days, but never thinks of his roof, and that's his most expensive asset and it protects everything else.

Yeah. So we have to be talking to the building owners. So let's just talk about the benefits to the contractor, if that's okay.  

Pete: Yeah.  

Bryan: Okay. So I'm gonna encourage you as a contractor to lead with service, and I tell you why. Under 10% of roofs get replaced every year.

Because roofs last 20 to 25 years according to the manufacturer's specifications. According to the NRCA recently, a unmaintained roof will last 10 to 14 years.  

Pete: Oh, wow.  

Bryan: They actually published those numbers. I'm like, whoa, that's more aggressive than what I say. [00:10:00] Then they say A maintained roof will last 15 to 20, but a managed roof, a roof that's under a managed maintenance agreement, will last 25 to 30 and above.

So that's from the NRCA, an organization that we both highly respect, I'm sure. If you lead with service, a hundred percent of roofs need service, about 10% need to be replaced. While you finding that a hundred percent where you've got an opportunity to do work, you will uncover the 10%.

That service business is very profitable, so we need to take that approach that's gonna give you this consistent revenue. In fact, we put ourselves in a position where we had so many ongoing maintenance contracts. We would open our doors every year with millions of dollars of maintenance work to do.

So we had a backup. We didn't have to send [00:11:00] people home. Yeah. The other thing is you're now the top of mind of contractors, right? What do marketing people say? You can only remember so many of your favorite sodas, so many of your favorite snacks, so many of your favorite scotches, you know, whatever it is.

So who's your favorite roofer? Most people tell me, I don't like my roofer. He doesn't show up when he says he will. Yeah. So it's actually not that hard to take over a lot of business from people. It's highly profitable. It's scalable, it's repeatable. If you're taking care of the roof, you know when it's gonna need to have a coating or be reskinned before anybody else.

We are not in a bidding war here. We are ahead of the game. We know when it needs to get reroofed, and if you take that approach, you're gonna have something that's scalable and proportionally scalable because you'll [00:12:00] find. I'm just gonna talk in millions, and I know guys aren't in the million category here, but just for simplicity's sake, for every million you do in service and repairs, you'll do four to 5 million in reroof.

It happens that way. It happened that way for us for 20 years. Literally, in our case, it was five to seven times.  

Pete: Wow.  

Bryan: So the one compliments the other. So don't think of this as I gotta get into doing a multimillion dollar roof. God's gift to roofers is Low Slope Roofing. The water does not shed, the water doesn't get off the roof.

Yeah. It's finding places to get off the roof and it's usually not the drains because they're not sloped properly. The thing about residential roofing, it's steep slope. water gets off that roof, so you need something to slow it down so that [00:13:00] it'll go into the building like a hole.

You know, commercial roofing, you don't have that issue. It just stays up there. And while I'm on the topic of God, there are probably only three things that cause roofs to fail. And the first one is God, right? Acts of God we call it in legal terms. And I'm not talking about tornadoes and hurricanes, I'm just talking about the sun.

You leave that thing outside all the time, don't you?  

Pete: Yeah.  

Bryan: In addition to that, we do get wind, we do get debris, we do get tree limbs. So acts of God, God is still in charge, that roof is gonna deteriorate quickly. And like the NRCA said, you just spent a million on your roof, maybe 14 years you're gonna get out of it.

The second thing is acts of idiots. Now forgive me for calling them idiots, but these guys are literally walking around your roof with like golf [00:14:00] spikes on them they're dropping things, they cigarette burns, the HVAC guys aren't putting the panels on tightly, the wind rattles them off and now they roll across making holes.

Those people are just another gift because another reason that you have to be up there keeping an eye on the roof. And then the third thing is lack of maintenance. And if you put a roof under a managed maintenance program, those other two things are gonna get taken care of as well.

'cause you're on the roof on a regular basis.  

Pete: I can say that I, when I was a contractor out in the field, I experienced all three of those. We weren't roofers, we were general contractors, and we remodeled the house that had a big flat roof section on the back, and I experienced all three versions of what you just said.

We had an act of God, a tree that had hit it. We had a lack of maintenance, which caused an entire reroof. And then we had the roof reroofed and we had a guy go up there to do some work, and he threw [00:15:00] supplies over the wall onto the roof and put a huge dent in it that had to get fixed. So I experienced all in like a matter of a week.

So I can, I can definitely agree with you on all that.  

Bryan: You could have written my course for me. Yeah. It took me 20 years to learn that.  

Pete: I think it was four days I saw all that happen. So yeah, it was crazy. I find this very interesting because the things that you're mentioning, I've seen help contractors find success even on the residential side.

Yes. One of the success stories that I tell is a contractor that I worked with years ago. One of the things that he had done to help his own business was set up maintenance agreements with his homeowners, and he would sell it as part of his reroof package. And so he would say, Hey, called us to reroof your house.

We're gonna go ahead and do that, but we're also gonna sell you this package that's whatever, $250 a year let's say, and quarterly we're gonna come out here and check on things. And so it kept him top of mind. Like you said, he's the guy to call. If you have an [00:16:00] issue with your roof,

he's in the neighborhood all the time, so everybody else is seeing him and super smart. It's recurring revenue for him. Like you said, he's opening his year with a stack of these maintenance contracts and he's banking thousands of dollars before he's even scheduled his first route. Genius. And I had another contractor that said, we're adding probably a half a million dollar to our bottom line with two repair techs that are just running around doing repairs.  

Bryan: Absolutely. In fact, stop the podcast guys. Go do that. Do do what he said. Yeah. Because, that's absolutely true. That is the way to build it. Now on the commercial side, there are a couple of other things that you need to take into account, but just to go back to what you said, all of the guys who are teaching you how to build your residential business, talk about when you gotta reroof to saturate that neighborhood.

Right. You have an opportunity to saturate that neighborhood four [00:17:00] times a year now with that agreement that you just got.  

Pete: Right? Exactly right.  

Bryan: Yeah. So much better. But now on the commercial side, I want you to consider about six different products that you need to be offering. On this maintenance and repair and service end of the business because most people think we are gonna go fix leaks.

Now you absolutely are gonna go fix leaks and you need to be very good at it. If you get called back to fix it again, you don't make any profit. And you will not get the third call. Your competitor. Yeah. So you gotta be good at it. That's not difficult to do. We'll even talk about that a little bit today. But the first product I think you should offer is what we would call time and material.

The better way to do this is like a half day, full day opportunity. So someone calls you, I got a leak. You say, do you want me to come and fix it, or do you want a quote? They say, I want you to come and fix it. You say, this is our rate. It's a half day rate [00:18:00] or a full day rate, and that's the way we go if you want to split it into three.

But time and material is so complicated to manage and bill and what have you. That's a simple way to do it. However. Your goal needs to be getting that time and material turned into a quoted scope of work, because I would want your average job size to be between five and $7,000 up to $10,000 for service.

So I'm not talking about a thousand dollar repairs, right? That call that I took a minute ago, the guy said, come and fix my roof, right? He didn't want a quote, I would explain to him immediately, sir, the reason your roof is leaking is probably not an isolated incident.

Now it could be that a guy threw a can over the wall and made a big hole in the membrane. But I absolutely, as a professional, can guarantee you that there are other issues [00:19:00] on your roof that you should know about. And what I'm gonna do after we fix your problem,

i'm gonna inspect your roof. Thoroughly. And I'll give you a list, a prioritized list. Of what you should fix first, what you should fix second, what you should fix next. If you do all of that work, your roof will actually qualify for my ongoing maintenance program because I cannot maintain a roof that's got deferred maintenance, right? Between you and I that what are we gonna do? Yeah. Right? This bit or that bit. So we need to get it up to speed.

So, every time you answer the phone or you contact someone about a roof problem,

I just told you what to do if they just want to come and fix it. Guess what you do if they need a quote, exactly the same thing,

That's gonna be your primary driver of business and that is gonna feed your ongoing maintenance agreements that we spoke about earlier. [00:20:00] Every reroof is gonna feed an ongoing maintenance agreement. You're gonna accumulate those ongoing maintenance agreements and your grandchildren are gonna thank you for it.

Mine are.

You should also work with manufacturers to do their warranty work. That's just a no brainer. There's so many contractors that don't wanna do that, that your manufacturer is gonna love you. And guess what happens when your manufacturer loves you? You get work, right? Yeah.

And then another area that's a good place to look for business is big cold storage areas, big grocery chains, people that are making changes to their roofs on a regular basis. Malls, strip malls, cooling, cold storage, that kind of thing, because those are bigger contracts.

And you generally get to give them a price, and so you can just act this out exactly like I just described.  

Pete: Yeah. Schools I think are a good one. [00:21:00] We had what's interesting here in Kentucky, we had some big storms earlier in the year and we've had a tremendous amount of residential roofing going on.

But what happened is as soon as school ended and the summer came, all of the schools got new roofs. I watched the high school down the road here. That project's been going on for probably a month, and like you said, it's probably a million dollar roof.

It's a massive building, multiple levels, all kinds of cut-ins and air conditioning units up there. The labor involved in it, I've watched them do it, has been tremendous. They're still up there. School has started and they're still up there finishing it,

There's just a lot of opportunity there.

Talk a little bit about, maybe I'm a residential roofer, maybe I'm established in my area. How do I find these jobs? Is it a cold call situation? Do I go out and say, Hey, I'm a commercial Roofr now, and hope somebody calls me? Do I offer inspections to get up there and start the ball rolling on these service contracts?

What's the best [00:22:00] method to break into that side of the business?  

Bryan: Private schools don't have money to reroof often. If you take care of them, you will get those reroof. 80% of commercial roofs get reroofed prematurely.

How about that for an opportunity?  

Pete: Yeah.  

Bryan: It's incredible. So we've gotta get that message out, right? We've gotta educate those people. So we've got a very small group of people we are trying to reach.

People who make building decisions. Building owners, property managers, facilities guys, people who influence decisions on the roof, and we need to find them. Just take an aerial. And look at which roofs you would like to work on. So there are some great products out there. I happen to be looking at a name of a great product in those aerial, but, so yeah, let's say I identify a hundred roofs that I'm like slobbering [00:23:00] at the mouth, like you said, that's a million dollar roof.

I need to find who's the owner and who's the tenant and I can reach out to them directly. And then we can say, when was your roof last inspected? Do you have any roof problems? You know, a question that I started asking that got me a lot of good responses was 'cause the receptionist takes the call, right?

And I just said to them, if you had a major roofing issue right now. Your roof collapsed or it was leaking terribly onto your head. Who in your company would you run to to help you? And a lot of them would say, my gosh, what a great question.

Why don't we know that?  

Pete: Yeah,  

Bryan: yeah. Exactly. So that's one way. And by the way. I just wanna remind your audience. Only 20% of your service business should be reactive. 80 percent's gotta be proactive. Quoted work. Only [00:24:00] 20% of your commercial roofing business should be service.

80% should be reroof and restoration, right? The old 80 20 rule. That Italian chap knew what he was talking about. People who make roofing decisions belong to organizations, right? Certainly property managers, certainly facilities companies. You need to put yourself in a position that you can educate them about commercial roofing. So we know the message we wanna give them, but nobody knows anything about commercial roofing because how do you learn it?

You have to go take a roofing license. Yeah. Yeah. So what I did, I put together about 180 slides teaching people about what are the different type of roof decks, what are the different types of insulation, what are the different types of membranes, you can have samples of all of those.

People love to play with those things. Oh gosh, is this what a membrane looks like? I thought it was like a tar truck that you came and poured, you know? [00:25:00] So get into those associations, get into educating people, and then get into the committees of those associations, because that changes your relationship with those people, right?

Because if you're on a committee or on a board, or even the president of the association, people start coming to you with questions, you're no longer chasing them. As a roofer trying to get business so you just get yourself into that position.

People often say to me, man, that's expensive. I say, do you have a local college? We went to the local college and we said, Hey, do you have any like marketing students who would like to see how a real business works?  

Pete: Hmm.  

Bryan: My last quarter in business, I had 10 interns in my office. Oh, wow. Now, if you know anything about property managers and facilities companies, those guys have a cocktail party three times a week and then a golf tournament on the weekend and a fishing [00:26:00] tournament on Sunday.

I could not keep up with those, but guess who else likes to party. College students. I actually got to a point where I would send roofs birthday cards.  

Pete: That's funny. We actually have had that suggestion from another person on the residential side. He said, how often do you communicate to a person when it's the one year anniversary of their roof?

Bryan: Exactly. You gotta be reminding them that thing is getting older. It's like you, now you're wearing glasses, and then your hearing aid.

Pete: No, but I do think this is a very interesting angle of it. How are you getting in front of these people? And then how are you staying top of mind? As you're saying these things, I'm thinking these are the same things we tell people in residential roofing, right?

It's like these are some things exactly you could be doing in your business. To give you a competitive advantage. And it's the same things that you're preaching on the commercial side.  

Bryan: Could I add there are a couple of differences.  

Pete: Absolutely. [00:27:00] Yeah. I know for a fact that there are some considerable differences.

Like talking with one of the roofers that we have that uses our product that does both, he said, the biggest challenges for him on the commercial side are the lead time to signing a contract is much more involved. Could take six months, nine months to a year.

Yeah. To land a contract as opposed to, you know, a week. And then obviously the production time, like I mentioned, I've been watching these guys roof this school for over a month. Yeah.  

Bryan: And guess when you get paid.  

Pete: Yeah.  

Bryan: When you're working on the Roofr or sometimes when it's finished.

Pete: Somewhere down the road. Yeah.  

Bryan: That's why we gotta lead with that service side.

The sales side is different, the compensation side is different, the estimating is different. Some of the administration tracking stuff is different, and I'm pleased to say the profit is different.

Positively.  

Pete: Yeah. Talk a little bit about the estimating 'cause I think that's where people [00:28:00] lose sight, think a roof is a roof. I'm gonna quote it the same way. So what's needed on the commercial side that potentially is not needed on the residential side in order to sell a job from an estimating standpoint.

Bryan: Yeah, so you win your work at the estimating table. In the commercial business, that's where you're gonna win your work. Yeah, because you are gonna value engineer, you're gonna come up with the best system for that roof and the most price effective system, and very often the question you're gonna ask your owner.

How dry do you wanna be? You know, do you wanna be a million dollars dry or do you wanna be one and a half million dollars dry? 'cause I could do either roof system for you. Which one do you want? Now I come from an estimating background, right?

So I might have a little bit of bias here, but I want to know down to the screw what's going on that roof. Because if I truly know my cost. I can adjust my margins.

[00:29:00] But when I'm starting to guess without knowing my cost, it's gonna cost me probably more than it should. So it's gotta be detailed, it's gotta be accurate.

You've gotta get a Roofr report, you've gotta get a core sample. You've gotta do the diligence in order to estimate the Roofr correctly, which means you've not only gotta have a good estimate, you've gotta have a really good takeoff.

What Roofr did for me, which I absolutely loved, is I got all the dimensions. I did not have to sit and try and draw this octagonal building on a piece of paper. But I still needed to go up there and core it high core it low. What are the walls made of? If it's a concrete wall, it's gonna take you a lot longer to get your membrane up there than if it's a wood wall.

And that's gonna affect your price. I've been sort of touching on the labor side, the production rates. How long does it take a guy to do a wall [00:30:00] flashing? Now the good news is a guy in Oregon and a guy in Kentucky and a guy, a sober guy in Kentucky and a guy in North Carolina are gonna do it about the same rate, 15 to 20 foot in an hour.

But you need to know those rates in order to be a good estimator.

On the repair side, I pre estimated the entire NRCA repair manual. I pre estimated it. Because if you and I go up and get on a TPO roof, we're gonna find the same, like I'll give you a list of 50 things. It'll be one of those things.

Or some of those things. Every time.  

Pete: Every time.  

Bryan: So if you pre-estimate it, you're putting yourself almost into more of a residential roofer framework here, because now guys can go sell it knowing their numbers. And I want to have a salesman selling commercial roofing. I don't want a roofer.

Because there's no formal roofing training. You dunno what you're gonna get from a roofer, right? [00:31:00] Who taught you, your grand pappy? Well, we are not doing cold call pitch anymore, yeah, estimating is critical. And on the reroof side, you need a lot of estimators to be successful because your closing ratio is gonna be somewhere around 30% or probably less. So if you wanna do a million dollars, multiply that by three in estimates. If you wanna do 10, multiply it by three or five.

And those estimates you don't do them in five minutes, some of them take several days to do them accurately. Now the good news is on the repair side, if you follow my suggestion and pre-estimate it or just call me, you can have my pre estimated list. Then you don't need a lot of estimators.

You might need one. 'Cause how big a mistake are you gonna make on a $5,000 repair? I often talk about estimating as the hourglass, right?

If you think of an hourglass, up [00:32:00] here is all that stuff that you're looking at for the takeoff, all those things. How many penetrations, how long are the curbs, how many pitch pans are there, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. What's the deck?

What's the thickness of the insulation? How are we gonna get on it? How, how are the walls? All of that. And then it comes down to the middle of the hourglass, which is that. Dollar number you give for your bid. But then if you win that job, first of all, you're gonna be thinking, oh man, what did I leave out?

Why did I win that job? So good estimate helps with it, but now you gotta break that all out and produce it. And then job cost. So doing a detailed estimate from the beginning is really how you're gonna make your money in the long run.  

Pete: I love this because on the residential side, we obviously see a lot of proposals, a lot of quotes come through Roofr, right?

Even today with all of the tools that are available, [00:33:00] we still see the predominant way of quoting as being scope of work, which is just very general. A very simplistic way in theory to quote. Unless you have come up with some magic formula to figure it out. You know, your, you big tile, it's eight 50 a square.

Yeah, you're essentially you're averaging a number. So yeah, some jobs you're probably making a little bit more, some jobs you're probably making a little bit less and just hoping at the end of the year it kind of pans out. Where, like you said, being super detailed now allows you at the quote, more or less to know where you're gonna be at the end.

Bryan: Run the job.  

Pete: Yeah. That's true too. Like it definitely plays into how your production runs, right?  

Bryan: Yeah, exactly.  

Pete: Yeah, very interesting. And I think that it's a method that should be applied on the residential side, probably more than it is because we just look at the roof, it's this many squares.

Multiply it by a number that we've figured out over the last five years of doing business, and we run with it, [00:34:00] which that's great. It does make it easy to quote, and makes it easy for me to train somebody to quote. But how accurate is it really?  

Bryan: Right, and if you start dabbling in multifamily, suddenly it turns out those things have got these vent pipes and these exhaust fans, and then there's a little low slope area where they've got the air conditioning units and then, yeah, it's a different ball game.

Pete: Yeah, the complexity obviously plays a much bigger part in it. The amount of obstructions and penetrations on that roof is incredible. Like just looking at it from the street, I can see so much stuff up there. I was thinking like, that's a nightmare.

Bryan: Like yeah.  

Pete: Of stuff there.  

Bryan: They can still work because sometimes the school says, okay, you can start after four. I've gotta keep my guys busy before you're not paying me for that time.  

Pete: So I love this. This is some great advice, like if I'm looking to get into it, obviously step one that makes the most sense is let's go the service route, right? It's easier. Now, how do [00:35:00] you handle the production side of the service? Are you having dedicated techs?

If you have dedicated techs, how many are you putting into play? Explain a little bit about, if I'm gonna go that route, I'm listening to this and I think, you know what? He's right. Let's do it. Let's go into commercial service. From a production side of things, how do I handle that?

Bryan: Yeah. So first of all, we need to think about our audience again. I don't really wanna be calling guys who've got a gas station with two pumps. When I go and look at their roof, they've four tins of plastic cement that somebody else poured or they poured or you know, I'm looking for people who want to invest in their building or thinking of it for the long term.

These are people with a budget. So let's select those roofs like I was saying earlier.  

Pete: It was interesting that you said you're looking for a repair that's five to $7,000. I mean, that's essentially the price of a lot of reroof in some markets.  

Bryan: Yeah, exactly. We are not going [00:36:00] to haggle with the gas station owner.

When you find those guys, first of all, they got money. It makes sense to them. They wanna maintain their buildings. They're probably protecting, I've got a client who just flooded a building's costing them $15 million to fix it. Wow. We are looking for that kind of a client who'll at least talk to us, right? Now that kind of a client is not gonna be happy with your sub that you use who you say, Hey, get out there on Tuesday and fix that roof, and they don't even bother to ask you, which Tuesday, it will be a Tuesday, I promise you.

As soon as possible. Get yourself two techs internal to do that and a truck. Now the good news about that truck running at capacity can make you about $750 thousand dollars a year at about 60% gross margin.  

Pete: Yeah.  

Bryan: I've got clients who are running a truck at a million a year. We've got guys at 500,000, [00:37:00] pick a number around there, but you think about two guys working eight hours a day and the markup and the materials that's where you're gonna be at, so it's worth it.

Another thing that's really helpful about having that, and by the way, I like box trucks or a cargo van because I want really a rolling warehouse. The way I got my best clients was probably from referrals, that's a company I wanna do the roofs for. That's someone who's got a couple of roofs, right? Yeah. And what I would do in my area, if we had a weather system come through, I would just call him and say, Hey, this is Bryan the roofer again.

Do you have any roof problems? What's gonna happen when we have a weather system come through, all roofers get busy. And their roofer is gonna drop the ball at some stage. Hmm. So either they're gonna drop the ball or they'll just appreciate the fact that Bryan always checks up on them after a weather [00:38:00] system.

And if that guy says, yes, I've got a problem, I want a truck, that's ready to fix it. Yeah. Right. So I wanna be there. I just have to call my guys and say, make sure you close up that job. I don't want it leaking and go fix this one. You've got everything you need. And now I've got a client who thinks I'm a rock star.

Right? Yeah. And I'm also gonna be saying to him, by the way, while we were up there. My techs noticed a few issues. I'm gonna come and personally do a full inspection of your roof because as a professional, I feel it's my duty to let you know what else is wrong with it.

Pete: No, and I think this is super smart, right? You mentioned HVAC earlier and how they've kind of got it figured out, but you think about it like when those guys come even to do general maintenance. They're always looking. They come back with a list of recommendations, but they also have the parts in their truck.

Yep. So if you say, you know what, yeah, just go ahead and fix it since you're here. They're able to do that. It's not like a, oh yeah, okay, we'll schedule you next Tuesday and we'll be [00:39:00] back. They're ready to go right there and they're closing that deal on the spot. It's interesting too, 'cause I just did a podcast with another individual and we always talk about speed to lead.

Like how quick can you get in contact with the lead? But he said, take it one step further and we call it race to face. Yeah. And so, like this is a perfect, example of that, right? Is if you call that guy and he says, yeah, I do have an issue and my roofer's dropping the ball. If you can get there, you just took that job away from that other guy.

Bryan: Exactly. And then the next race you into is getting that proposal done and delivered professionally. On a reroof situation. I want to be very attentive, very alert, but I'd like to be the last guy to present. Because by that time, my client has learned a whole lot of things from these other roofers who are, presenting against me, and I can answer all those questions.

On a service situation 24 hours to proposal. Inspection to proposal 24 hours. Non-negotiable. [00:40:00] Means you're gonna need some good software, and I happen to notice a name.

Pete: I need like one of those foam fingers, right?  

Bryan: You can just point with your head.  

Pete: Well, this has been fantastic, Bryan. I think a lot of great information, and I think there's just so much opportunity there that is potentially being left on the table right in your own backyard. On the residential side, you tend to saturate a market and then you gotta move out, expand or grow or move into the next market,

everybody for the most part has, unless you live in some of the small towns in Kentucky, you probably have big box stores with flat roofs down the street from your house. Yeah. I can tell you here where I'm at and we have an endless supply of them. You could probably do years of work here and they all just got hit by hail.

It's like a whole nother avenue and like you said, service could be your ticket in the door. And then you just grow from there.  

Bryan: Exactly, and you know, I love what you said about the local market because let's just take a company I happen to know that 80 million in a very limited area where there [00:41:00] were about 8 million people.

So if we did the math, and by the way, we have proven this in other areas as well, but I just wanna use this one example.  

Pete: Yeah.  

Bryan: You could do 10 million out of a million people. You could do 5 million with 500,000. Yeah. So, you don't need a huge market. Yeah. You just need to be a good service provider.

Everybody has a roof.  

Pete: Yeah, like you said earlier, the flat roofs ultimately require more babysitting. More maintenance than your residential roof is ever going to need.

Unless you're in some type of crazy storm market, you live in tornado alley or something and then it's hit or miss. And then like you said, acts of God there, but here it doesn't matter.

Everybody sees the sun. Everybody's got degradation going on.  

Bryan: And even a market like California or New Mexico, I tease those guys and I say, okay, well you don't actually do roofing, you make shade. What happens is those roofs get so much time to [00:42:00] deteriorate when it does rain, guaranteed leak if they're not maintaining them.  

Pete: Yeah. Interesting. Well, this has been great Bryan. We'll probably have to have you back for a part two of this because I feel like we'll have to be quick. 'cause look how old I'm, you'll have to do it next week just to be safe.

Bryan: We sort of spoke about the structure of what your business should be, and we didn't touch all of it, but we should also talk about the process of how you should run that organization, and I like to talk about it in four phases.

Contact to contract, what does it take from finding someone to getting a contract and hopefully a deposit. Project preparation. 'Cause I only make money when they're on the roof, so I wanna prepare really well. Project execution. How do I make sure I execute well? And actually execution involves marketing again, which is a really awesome thing.

And then how do I get paid quickly? The other half I hope we're [00:43:00] collecting, not all of it.  

Pete: Yeah. And that's a unique piece to commercial too. How is the whole financial side of it handled. A great opportunity here for us to do volume two of this, for sure.

But thank you Bryan, for jumping on. This has been incredible information. This is top of mind for a lot of our residential roofers that are using our platform is how do I get into that? We're not really sure how to break into commercial.

And if we do, what do we do? I think honestly the thought is I have to go learn how to reroof right away, right? One of the things that I was thinking too is, for someone that maybe commercial roofing is still fairly foreign, service is a great way to learn the ropes too.

Bryan: Absolutely.  

And you've got time, you've got a lot of help. And I want to talk to every one of your clients that are interested in this. Nice.  

Pete: How would they get in touch with you, Bryan, if they were interested in having a conversation with you?

They're looking to go into commercial roofing a bit. What's the best way to contact you specifically?  

Bryan: Believe it or not, I'm gonna give you my cell number 'cause I answer my phone. Right? There you go. Now we do have a [00:44:00] website. It's Service AdvantEdge. I teased my partner. Let's start a company and spell our name wrong, right?

But it's serviceadvantedge.net. And honestly, I will answer if I'm on a call like this, you'll get a message. Leave me a message and I'll call you back or you can text me. It's 9 5 4 2 6 8. 6 9 3 8. And that'll give you a clue as to where I learned my roofing.

We still keep an apartment down there on the beach. Nice. And now you're in the mountains? Yeah, I'm in the mountains.  

Pete: Well, thank you Bryan. I really appreciate it. Like I said, this has been a ton of great information. We've just tip of the iceberg here. I think there's a ton more we could talk about.

We can get you back on for a round two of this and we could dive a little bit deeper into the back half of it and the structure of how we wanna get set up. But one thing I think that we should note here though , even though we're [00:45:00] talking about a different process and maybe a slightly different structure of how we're building this thing here in the last couple minutes, I just wanna talk about how you can very easily run this in parallel to what you're doing on the residential side.

Bryan: Absolutely. And that's really my most successful clients who've come from the residential side. You do not give that up. What am I adding? If you're a reasonably sized residential company, I'm adding one truck and two techs, right?  

Pete: Yeah.  

Bryan: And we are going to continue our marketing, we're gonna continue our branding.

We can grow it that way. Yeah, so it's not a huge stretch. Once you're in the game, there's a lot of help you can get from manufacturers. There's a lot of help you can get from the NRCA. You can get help from us. I put out training all the time, I'm actually doing one right now, a 14 part series of getting into commercial, just talking about what you're getting to, what are the different roof decks, et cetera.

So there are plenty of resources. And [00:46:00] then all those guys that you said I trained.  

Pete: They're running around all those commercial experts, right? Learned everything they know from Bryan, so take advantage of his cell phone number there that he gave you. Thank you Bryan. I really appreciate it.

This has been a great conversation and like I said, hopefully we can do it again here soon. Thank you everybody for listening. Hopefully you got some good nuggets out of that. And, look for hopefully a round two here with Bryan as we continue to talk commercial. Thanks everybody for listening and we will see you next time on the Roofr report.