Latest / RoofersCoffeeShop / What's Holding Your Roofing Business Back?
Transcript
- Adam Cabrera: Welcome to Roofing Road Trips, the podcast that takes you on a thrilling journey across the world of roofing. From fascinating interviews with roofing experts to on-the-road adventures, we'll uncover the stories, innovations, and challenges that shape the rooftops over our heads. So fasten your seat belts and join us as we embark on this exciting roofing road trip. Hello and welcome to another episode of Roofing Road Trips from Roofers Coffee Shop. My name is Karen Edwards, and today's conversation is going to answer the question, What's holding your roofing business back? And joining me for this conversation, Denny Blair and Brian Orham from Job Nimbus. Welcome to the podcast. It's great to see you. Thank you. It's great, great to be here. Great to be on. We're excited for the combo. All right. So let's start out with some introductions and tell everybody who you are, a little bit about yourself and what you do at JobNimbus. And Denny, why don't you get us started? Yeah, for sure. ⁓ my name is Denny Blair. I am the director of event marketing here at JobNimbus. I leave the strategy and execution behind our event portfolio, including our Job Nimbus Solutions Summit, or what we often call JNSS. My role is to create experiences that bring contractors together, help them grow their businesses, and reinforce our mission of making contractors heroes. Excellent. And Brian, how about you? Yeah, I'm Brian Orm. I'm our chief revenue officer here at Job Nimbus. ⁓ my role is to oversee customer experience, sales, and marketing, as well as business development for the company. So if it is customer-facing, it is in my world and I'm obsessed with it. Our our mission. To make contractors heroes, we we live it and breathe it every day. ⁓ and we try to get better every day at delivering value for contractors in this industry. I we believe that it's the backbone of America and that roofing specifically is is a market where it's historically been underserved by technology. And so ⁓ yeah, we we believe it's our mission to deliver the best, most up-to-date, easy to use. software in the in the industry to help roofers with their businesses. And when we say become heroes, that's like a cliche, whatever. But we we mean that we're helping them in their daily lives get time back with their family and friends, execute in their business to hit their business objectives and then have have the means to give back in their community. And we we actually find that roofers are actually very charitable. They care about the communities that they serve and live in. And so If they have the means, they will give back in their communities and we we love ⁓ forwarding that mission. Yeah, yeah. The roofing industry has typically been underserved by techno from technology providers. And I think it's one of the most important trades out there, right? Everybody needs a roof. Every building has a roof and you know, is ⁓ keeping people and their families and businesses safe and and dry. Yeah. So when when you look at the roofing industry today What do you think is the biggest thing that's holding contractors back from reaching that next level of growth? Yeah, I I think well, I there's probably a number of things that I could say. I think most contractors they they think they have a growth problem. Like, ⁓ man, if I could just be doing two more million in sales or something like that, right? But but I don't think that most contractors have a a growth problem. They have a repeatability problem in their business. They they can do a great job. ⁓ They just can't do the great job the same way four hundred times without it living in like one person's head. And that's the business owner, right? Like the business owner, everything is going on in that person's head all the time. And he or she has one one heck of a time delivering that same customer experience that they're known for across every job. And that's where I think technology can really enhance ⁓ a roofing contractor's experience. But But yeah, I would say right now ⁓ it's it's their their systems, not necessarily their expertise. I think they're this industry, more than most actually, has absolute experts in the field that care about their customers. But yeah, their their systems is is often what lets them down. Yeah, definitely. ⁓ so ⁓ what are some of the differences that you see between contractors who are are continuing to grow and scale and those that just are stuck. And, you know, we we w we don't want to just blame the owner, right? Because everything's in the head. But let's talk about that a little bit. Yeah, I think a couple things. So so 60% of roofing companies have no consistent performance tracking ⁓ or like training system. And ⁓ nearly half still keep customer communication in personal like inboxes or personal phones. So it's it's really tricky for roofing contractors to to scale because it's often built on manual processes. And that only gets you so far as a business owner, because again, it all lives in my head or on my personal phone. That can't scale across multiple cities, states, regions. And so as you start taking on more jobs, taking on more crew, your the the process that made you successful breaks down when you try to repeat that 10 times over with the salespeople you bring on board with the additional office staff. So it's kind of this scale versus plateau conversation that I think is critical for for roofing owners to think through, right? The plateau isn't necessarily a wall, it's more a mirror. ⁓ of themselves. And it's the point where the business finally reflects back ⁓ how it actually was built and how it can create repeatability. So the you know it that that's I think that's the headline for me on this one is ⁓ there's there's not necessarily a plateau, but it it it's trying to find ways to to create repeat repeatability. And Den and Denny and I see this all the time. in in roofing contractors that we work with. Again, we work with, you know, 8,000 plus roofing contractors across America. Yeah. And so we see this firsthand every day. So there's really four things that we see in the industry. And ⁓ I think one is, you know, 18% of roofer roofing companies don't set sales quotas at all. So they don't know the benchmarks, what their team is marching towards, teams with Clear targets ⁓ outperform both revenue and predictability. Plateaued companies measure revenue. Scaling companies measure leading indicators. So they know their business cold. They know not just their growth rate. They know what it takes from an individual employee to be successful to hit their quarterly or annual objectives. They also know their profit margins. They know their EBITDA. They know ⁓ their ⁓ They're they have good accounting principles. Like that's what separates good roofers from great roofers and plateaued roofers from scaling roofers. And really so so I have conversations with companies that are getting looked at from private equity all the time. Okay. Right. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And and that's obviously a big thing. You you can be on one side or the other right now in roofing if private equity is good for the industry or not. But it's happening either way. Private equity is coming in, looking at roofing companies. They are not looking for Roofing companies that have plateaued. Their root, they're looking for roofing companies that are scaling. And that doesn't mean scaling from a top line. That means the bottom line is scaling. And when I say top line, bottom line, I don't mean just growth rate. Roofing companies are going to be valued by their EBITDA, not necessarily their 20% growth rate, because you can fuel growth by hiring a ton of overhead, hiring a ton of salespeople, getting more trucks, what have you, more office staff, and shrink your profit margin to get that growth. That's not efficient scaling, and that's something that no private equity company is going to want to buy. That's not something that you're going to want to pass on to your kids one day because they're going to take it on and think, well, how the heck do I make money doing this? We want to create businesses that last. So you got to know your numbers. ⁓ you got to set targets for quarterly annual for your team members to hit, do the ⁓ the backwards math to get there, and then diversify your offering deliberately. So high value companies, you know. l lead industries in certain categories, but it's often diversified offerings that help them get the edge. So I was I was having a conversation with this roofer yesterday and they said, you know what? You know, two years ago we realized we had hit a plateau in our business and we needed to diversify. So they actually went the route of adding commercial roofing to their to their offering, which is That's a that's a roll dice scenario if you if if it if it fails, it fails big. For them, it took two years to climb out of it from a profit margin standpoint. And now they're more profitable than ever. They've got growing revenue because they diversified from just retail residential into commercial retail as well. Right. Yeah. And so you know, knowing your numbers and understanding your business are key for when private equity calls and they will call. Because like you said, whether you like it or not, it's happening. So how does JobNimbus help contractors get that information and understand exactly where their business is? That's a great question. So Job Nimbus is a platform that runs everything from lead all the way to collecting payment and everything in between. So Job Nimbus handles automating workflows, it handles ⁓ creating the estimates, actually submitting orders to your supplier, ⁓ sending invoices out, collecting payment. It does all that. So we're in the inner workings of the entire business and we see all of this data from 8,000-plus roofing contractors. And we obviously create trends. And we actually have an annual report that we release publicly to the market called Peak Performance. And in this peak performance report, we talk through what makes great roofing contractors. versus what's the average like median for a roofing contractor. But what we see in terms of owning your numbers as a roofing business, there's really ⁓ there's really just a few things that you need to know. You've got to know your profit margin on every job. You need to be offering good, better, best proposals to increase your close rate with homeowners. And then ⁓ you need to have some sort of back and forth between your financial system and your CRM. So that you're getting the best, most accurate information possible. So for example, a lot of roofing companies are on QuickBooks. And QuickBooks is a solid system. But if it's not talking to the rest of your systems, if you haven't set up those integrations, then you're going to be flying blind from an operation standpoint. And then when it comes to the end of the month and you're closing the books, you're not going to realize it, but you're going to be off on your profit margin pretty substantially. So it's getting that information in front of the face of your employees. ⁓ every day, early and often, with okay, what is our margin on this job? What can we quote? What can't we? What's the accurate measurement for this bid? And then placing the orders from the right supplier at the right time to make sure that you're maximizing profit on every job. Wow. Okay. So ⁓ you know, I always say ⁓ technology doesn't solve bad processes, right? Like, okay, I'm I'm struggling, I'm having issues. I'm gonna I'm gonna get a new software that's gonna do all this amazing stuff for me. Well, but yeah, right? It it it it doesn't work that way. And how does job nimbus then help contractors learn and, you know, implement better processes and understand what they might be doing wrong and what they could change in their business to be successful? Karen, that's That's it right there. I mean, that right now in twenty twenty six, there are more software options for roofing contractors than ever before. And in the age of AI, you could spin one up tomorrow. And and there's actually a lot of companies masquerading as CRMs right now that are creating, you know, a makeshift CRM overnight and starting to to offer it to to roofing contractors. And then there's this other pool of of roofing contractors spinning up their own version of software with AI. And which they think is going to solve their problems. At the end of the day, if it's not integrated into everything you're doing as a business owner, in your business, with your supply house, with your ⁓ financial data, with your estimate, with your measurement, if it's not fully integrated there, you're you're actually gonna create more blind spots for your business, more technic technical headache, and less efficiency. So you've got to be really careful. ⁓ just thinking that software is gonna is gonna fix everything. You've got to look at it deliberately. So when I said the the plateau is more a mirror for your business, ⁓ you've got to look at your s at your business very carefully, look in the mirror and and and understand, okay, what has made us successful as a roofing company? What's what can we create that's repeatable? Okay, and then how can software enable that repeatability. That's what you're looking for so that you can go do what you do best, which is customer service, fulfillment, and the actual roofing project. And then software fills in the gaps. If you're looking for software to take over and run your business, I I think you're ⁓ I think you're going to be in in a bit of trouble. So our goal at JobNimbus, our big vision is to be the contractor operating system. Like we we fundamentally believe that in this age of AI, There's going to be a lot of tools that ⁓ that they're that are going to be spun up. And we're seeing that in 2026. The problem is if there's no backbone of or source of truth with your data, then it's ⁓ it's wild, wild west. ⁓ nothing talks to to anything else, and you can't create repeatability or processes. So job nimbus can be that ⁓ brain for your business because we are connected to everything. That's one example. I don't want this to be a job nimbus pitch. I'm just explaining that like For roofing contractors, they're going to need ⁓ an operating system, a brain, whether that lives in a spreadsheet for a small roofing contractor or in a big CRM for a large one, there has to be a source of truth or you're gonna get into a lot of trouble. Yeah, definitely. ⁓ I do wanna make sure because Denny's here and she is in charge of the events and the experiences for contractors. I wanna make sure that we spend a little bit of time talking about the job nimbus solutions summit. And this is something that ⁓ contractors and users come to do what? How would you explain that? ⁓ so many things. ⁓ it's it's honestly it's really exciting. This is our about our eighth year doing it and our fourth year doing it in Cabo. ⁓ we chose a destination location to try and help the contractors get them out of their element, ⁓ kind of get them to a nicer place during the winter months where they could actually get away from the day to day. focus on their business and actually implement all the things that we're constantly talking about. You know, ⁓ a lot of the times ⁓ when we're when we're running feedback through multiple user events that we run throughout the year, a lot of the feedback we get is just the fact of getting out of the office, being able to focus on what needs to be implemented. So ⁓ that's why we created JNSS. It's a little different ⁓ and it's designed to be one shared experience for the whole entire group. It's a lot of you wake up, you have one on one time with account reps that can just ju genuinely zero in, focus on everything that you're wanting your account to be able to do. They'll sit, walk you through it, they'll sit and they'll do it for you in ⁓ some instances. So a lot different than just kind of going through walking through the trade show floor. This is a lot more implementation and focus directly on your account. So, ⁓ and ⁓ in addition to that, we actually ⁓ We noticed the first few years that we were doing it, a lot of people we lost them throughout the ⁓ end of the day because everyone's in Kabo. They don't want to be sitting in a stuffy breakout session room. So we pulled it into the actual pool side. So all of our breakout sessions in the afternoon, they're all pool side, they're all thought leadership sessions that we bring in some of our top influencers, some of our top ⁓ users that can actually give that. first hand experience, not just on our product, but just even business case scenarios. So what I love about GNSS is it's the anti-trade show. Like we've all been to trade shows. We all know the game. You walk the floor, you talk to a hundred vendors, you get all the squishy balls in the world. And then you leave and you forget all of those conversations. So what we wanted to create was the exact opposite. Like you're you're At a resort, you're poolside, you're relaxed, and you're talking with other roofing contractors about how you can scale your business, maximize profit margin, learn from industry experts. Like that was the goal of it. And ⁓ I think Denny and team have absolutely nailed it. It's been a ton of fun year over year. Yeah. And you know what? I was looking on the website ⁓ before we got on here to to record. ⁓ it's it looks like you've set up different tracks. So it's not just for owners to to come and learn. It's for no matter, you know, very several different roles. Yeah. Can you talk about that? Absolutely. Absolutely. Yeah. We ⁓ just year over year have the request. We our our goal has always been like, how can we make an event a better event? How can we make a great event a perfect event? So always trying to scale up and we take all of the feedback that we get from our ⁓ past attendees. We take that very seriously. And this is the first year we've had the request come through that was like, ⁓ this is great, but I would like something super focused on ⁓ I'm an office manager. Can you tell me how to streamline the production side of it where I can really focus on ⁓ just excelling in my role? And so we took that to heart and we are leading those tracks through ⁓ really like kind of kind of more based around roles. So we have the owner role, we have ⁓ production ⁓ and in office. So It's gonna be really, really exciting. About how many people ⁓ do you expect to be there this year? ⁓ typically we have right around two hundred and fifty people because we do want to offer that firsthand experience with our ⁓ genius team, which we call our one on one with our account reps. We want to make sure that everybody has the same opportunity to work with them and get a good experience there. And these are users that are coming from all over the country. So it it c kind of could be like a little peer forum, a peer group, right? That's you know, you you meet folks from different parts of the country who are ⁓ maybe excelling in one area that you're struggling and you can sh have those conversations and really build those relationships and that network. ⁓ absolutely. Our best practice session is actually led by contractors around the ⁓ around the US and it's one of the top rated ones because people absolutely love getting just different points of view, different ideas that they can take back and implement in their own ⁓ backyard. So Yeah. ⁓ that's fantastic. All right. So we're you're I wanna make sure we get the dates out there because we're we're recording this in September and your ⁓ summit is coming up ⁓ late late November, early December. Yes, November twenty ninth through through December second. Excellent. Okay. And I'm sure yeah, I know we have information about it on Roofers Coffee Shop. And I'm sure you have information on ⁓ your website as well. Absolutely. Okay. I'm gonna look ahead to twenty twenty-seven and see what you think some of the biggest opportunities that job nimbus is focused on helping contractors capitalize on. Cause there's gotta be, you know, 2026 is winding down, you're at the summit. People are gonna be talking about what's twenty twenty seven hold for us. So can you talk about that a little bit, Brian? Yeah, totally. I Twenty twenty six was all about adopting as many random AI tools as you possibly could as a roofing contractor to see what sticks. Like I it was it was a fun year. It was a wild year. It was also a hard year for a lot of roofing contractors, especially in the South. Like we did not have a great storm year down in the in the southeast, which is obviously where, you know, ⁓ a lot of the roofing industry is concentrated. And so it was ⁓ for a lot of roofing companies, it was a harder year than ⁓ we typically see. So They had to figure out how do I become more efficient. And a lot of people toyed around with different AI tools. I think 2027 is is all about ⁓ AI adapting to your business and you adopting the right tools to again optimize for ⁓ proper sh workflows, streamlining your business. So ⁓ knowing your jobs, your crews, your your numbers well enough. For AI to then tell you something you didn't already know. That I think is what's coming in 2027. So, for example, one of the things that we did in the year of 2026 that was incredibly painful, honestly, for ⁓ for our ⁓ developers, our engineering org, was we had to create a completely new data layer that AI could read so that it could. Take action for roofing contractors. It could actually tell them things about their business they didn't already know. It took a monstrous amount of effort to recreate our back end. I mean, we we've been in the industry for 13, 14 years now, and that's a lot of code base to rewrite. ⁓ and in I think our customers felt it this last year too. There were some times where our platform was slower than we would have liked, but Having done all that work, it's really exciting because we believe that ⁓ you know, we're ahead of where the industry is headed. So I think twenty twenty seven is all is is going to to be about ⁓ you know, AI adopting the processes, workflows in your business to make you better, smarter, more efficient. Not just AI that writes copy for you or, you know, ⁓ it's gonna write my customer comps. No, like it's gonna do work for you. ⁓ you know, marketing AI adoption is predicted to jump from thirteen percent all the way up to to thirty percent and beyond. And ⁓ the real leverage is is is in your operations because marketing's one thing, but if it can actually get into your work stream and ⁓ and help you become more efficient to deliver that job, to do more jobs, to close more jobs, and to optimize your profit on each job, that's when I think you can really ⁓ scale as a as a roofing contractor. So that's what I'm seeing ⁓ from my armchair. Right. and and then the other I would say is, you know, retail and financing. So that's technology aside, let's talk just business now. So a lot of roofing contractors in twenty twenty six realized that insurance work wasn't going to get them to where they needed to go. It wasn't going to help them hit their growth targets. So a lot of them shifted to retail work. And ⁓ that created different workflows than some of these roofing contractors had seen before. ⁓ as well as some some things happening in the homeowner landscape. So because deductibles are rising, it's harder for them to to pay their deductibles when when they do need a new roof. What what's a homeowner going to do if it's a retail job or even if it's an insurance job? Like they don't most people don't have 20 grand cash sitting around to pay for a roof. So how are they going to do it? Well, they're going to need financing options from the roofer. And ⁓ and I think the roofers that are winning more jobs right now are one, offering ⁓ or or creating retail opportunities for themselves, but two, they're offering financing more than they ever have. ⁓ and it's it's in their closing workflow. So it's not a separate workflow where you're trying to get the customer to adopt, you know, or to to qualify for financing. It's actually in their proposals and in their estimates where they're able to qualify the homeowner for financing. Give the the homeowner several options to choose from ⁓ and enable that homeowner to make a wise decision for their family. So that's the other trend we're seeing in twenty ⁓ late twenty-six and into twenty seven is an increase in the amount of jobs that'll be financed by consumers. Yeah. Yeah. No, all very well said. And I'm glad you mentioned about all the work that you were doing ⁓ to ha let AI be able to ⁓ read the data ⁓ because I think it's really important ⁓ for Because there's so many out there right now and you're being bombarded. So contractors need to have somebody they can trust, like a job nimbus as their partner who's going to, you know, help them manage it and utilize it in the best way and safest way possible. And, you know, definitely. Yeah. And you you mentioned the safest way possible, and you you could not be more accurate. I think data, data privacy is so important. And I don't think enough roofers realize when they open up their books to a to just random AI tools, the risk that they're running as a business. So you have to tr you have to go with trusted software advisors, trusted AI companies that have been doing this for a while, that know the not just industry regulations, but privacy ⁓ policies and regulations as well. And then the other is like ⁓ you know, we see a trend even with some of the the roofing the long term roofing brands in the industry that are trying to sell data. And we're not about that. I think that's awful to try and monetize the the data that we that you get from a a roofing contractor. Your job should be to make them a hero. And ⁓ and that's just fundamentally what we believe at JobNimbus. Yeah. Wow. Yeah. I mean we could just keep talking. There's so many topics here, but we're we're running out of time. So we're we're gonna wrap it up. ⁓ I do want to thank you both for being here for the conversation. It was great. And for more information on the Job Nimbus ⁓ solutions summit, like I said, head on over to Roofers Coffee Shop. You can hit up Job Nimbus's directory. We have ⁓ ads running. ⁓ click on one of those ⁓ or go to Job Nimbus's website and learn more ⁓ about, you know, learning and growing your business and ⁓ getting some sun. Well, you know, in the middle of winter. Wow, who doesn't like that? All right. Well, thank you both. Thank you everybody out there for listening too. We encourage you to subscribe on your favorite podcast platform because we want to see you on a future episode of Roofing Road Trips. We'll see you next time. Bye. If you've enjoyed the ride, don't forget to hit that subscribe button and join us on every roofing adventure. Make sure to visit rooferscoffeeshop.com to learn more. Thanks for tuning in and we'll catch you on the next roofing road trip.