Buyers and Builders
00:03:55 · Mikk, Sam Allsopp
[00:03:55] S0: You running a marketing agency, this is interesting because there is another podcast run by Nathan Latka. He's in a software software space, and he started interviewing those folks who are building those software companies. And he has said that he has so much data that one of the best founders are those who... Before founding SaaS companies were running agencies because of all the skill sets, marketing, and sales. And and I've always wondered, like, how... Like, when are we going to see more people like yourself with all the skills and experience getting into those traditional businesses, and here we are today? [00:04:39] S1: Yeah. Yeah. I talked to, like, a pretty serious variety of of home service, you know, business owners all the way from, yeah, a tech background or a private equity background, you know, to, hey, I was building roofs growing up, actually working on the roofs, and then I inherited the company from my my dad and then, you know, and it was a small company and now it's this massive company. So you kinda see it, but I would say to your point, more often, you know, than than previously people are coming from other industries and and not even close to home services. Right? But with a skill set sometimes around just kind of what I was mentioning, the marketing and sales side of things, you're able to really brute force, you know, growth. [00:05:23] S0: Okay. And what about the business a bit like residential, commercial, and and why this decision?
00:05:32 · Sam Allsopp
[00:05:32] S1: You know, I wish I was like, oh, we knew that private equity was gonna get interested in roofing, and this is the mix that we assume that they're gonna be interested in. Not at all. We just kind of fell into residential retail work. If you're in roofing or familiar with the space, there's two paths you can really go down. Some people do a little bit of both, but you've got your your retail, and then you have your insurance. Right? So retail would just be, hey, we're working directly with the homeowners. We'll provide financing. Ultimately, they're the ones paying us to do the service. Then you have your insurance companies. These are typically, you know, big door knocking, sales teams, a lot of $10.99. Nothing against it. They scale super fast, but you turn into, like, a, hey, we can get you a roof and the insurance company can pay for it. They do a lot of supplementing, I believe, and working with the insurance company, and the insurance company pay. So that's kind of a a definitely a distinction between the two different kinds of companies. And then, yeah, you can either go, you know, residential retail, which is just single family homes for the most part, or you can do commercial. We landed probably, I'd say, this year, we're gonna be, like, 90% residential retail and then about 10% commercial. It's just something that we never really put a ton of effort into until the beginning of this year. We actually started building out that division and it's got a pretty solid run rate. You know, I hope to keep it around 20% of our business, but we really do like the residential retail focus.
00:07:01 · Mikk, Sam Allsopp
[00:07:01] S0: Okay. And now the the the co founder partnership, you and Andrew. So what did each of you own when you when you started? Has it changed over the over the years? And maybe you can take me through different stages because going from zero to two and a half to six and all the way to 50, it's it's it's a pretty drastic change, I can I can imagine? [00:07:21] S1: Just to put it in super simple terms, right, I did everything from going and generating the the demand and then selling the job and essentially handing him a packet and saying, hey. Go build this. So he's like the subject matter expert. He's the roofer. I was able to feel comfortable to put as much emphasis on sales and marketing and bring jobs through and feel comfortable building a sales team and selling a product that I knew we were gonna do we were gonna do a really good job on the fulfillment side of things. So that's... Was super important for me in the beginning stages to have a partner who, you know, I could feel... Sales is a lot of emotion, and, you know, I wanted to be able to kinda translate that through to the sales team and the customers that we're we're going to do an awesome job. So he he took that on. So kind of just a a very clean split from production, fulfillment, and then, you know, lead generation. And we still operate that way. So we're we're still very much on the the sales and marketing tech kind of side, building out SOPs and and whatnot. And then he's very much on the the production and fulfillment.
00:08:33 · Mikk
[00:08:33] S0: Okay. Again, can we can we go if if you remember the exact stages, like... Because there are folks listening. Maybe some of them are doing two and a half today. Some of them are doing 15, and they can, like... Whichever stage you are describing, they can they can feel like, okay. That's that's me, and they can they can learn a lot from it. So maybe we can start from from the early first year where where you were able to do, like, 2,500,000, and what were you doing? And maybe you can you can go as specific as you as you want.
00:09:02 · Sam Allsopp
[00:09:02] S1: Yeah. I mean, can kinda chunk it up, like, the 2.5 to the the six. Right? I mean, a lot of that is just making sure that you can make demand reliable and kinda make that sale repeatable, I would say. It's in the early stages, and and that can be hard to do, right, because you don't have a 15 person sales team, you're not diversified through a bunch of different marketing channels, you don't really have those levers to spur, you know, let's allocate spend here because this has a better return on ad spend here. You're you're kind of pigeoned and pigeonholed into maybe one or two, maybe three different lead sources, and you might still be selling yourself, you know, depending on your ticket size. Right? Maybe you have a a sales team of one or two guys, so, yeah, I mean, those early stages, it just feels like a lot of swings. You know, one month you could sell 500, 600, 700,000. Next month you sell a 100, right? So you're looking at yourself, like, how do I make this repeatable and predictable? So you're kind of building out the foundation on on the sales and marketing side and trying to create your IP around how to make that predictable. You know, the six to 14, we had to professionalize a lot of stuff. Right now, we have like a real sales team, and what does our meeting cadence look like, what KPIs are they held to, how do we know when to give someone more leads or let them go and hire someone new. You also are doing a pretty serious amount of... We have a lot of leads coming into the business now. So where previously maybe you had a office manager or your front desk person kind of booking appointments, high intent inbound type of lead sources, you're now having to maybe bring on some aggregators to help fill that schedule. So you have to build an actual booking team, an actual CSR, we call them CSRs, but essentially appointment setters. And it's the same thing, thinking through, you know, how many outbound should they be they be working, what's what's their tech stack look like, right, how do we make sure that they're, you know, that they're set up for for success and and kind of deciding like what their booking rate should be per channel and and marrying that with the the sales process and the sales team and the marketing. You know, this is when a lot of people stop selling themselves. Right?
00:11:24 · Sam Allsopp
A lot of people kinda hold on to the sales process and and still close a decent amount of revenue themselves because they're afraid to let go of that. But this is kinda that mark where you gotta kinda trust your process and what you've built. And, you know, 14, call it 14 to 25, I'd say the main theme here is building out management layers. Some people might have done that sooner, we didn't. It was still kind of me and Andrew as, like, kind of managing everything. Everyone else was was more, like, role based, you know, not much leadership. So that fourteen to twenty five, we started adding in management layers. Right? Think sales manager, think CSR appointment setting team manager, think like a marketing, right, like a a rev ops side of the sales, a marketing manager, and kind of trying to get yourself out of the day to day management of your of your team. And twenty five to thirty six, production starts to become a constraint here, I would say. I think this is where, you know, you've you've built a pretty solid... If you've been able to scale that fast, you've you've kind of proven that you can, you know, really generate demand and sell deals, but production might become a little bit of a constraint. Right? You have to start building out your, we call it business services, right, so your back office, how they all interact with each other, who handles what. Before that it was really like, hey, sales sells it, gives it to a project manager, project manager kind of cradled to graves it. This is where we had to build out different teams for permitting, customer service, accounts receivable, accounts payable, how to kind of build a finance arm in the business, right? So you're, you're, and then field supervisors that report up to the project managers, how do you incentivize them to do volume and do a good job. So I would say the theme there would definitely have been like, alright. We we need to double down on the the production side of the things and really systematize fulfillment. You know? And then the the 36 to 50, I'm kind of in in the weeds with that right now. You know, my day to day is a lot of...