Ashley Garcia & Kevin Carfa - Enhancing Efficiency and Accuracy in Roofing - PODCAST TRANSCRIPT

Editor's note: The following is the transcript of a live interview with Ashley Garcia and Kevin Carfa from SRS Distribution. You can read the interview below or listen to the podcast.

Intro: 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.

Karen Edwards: Hello, and welcome to another episode of Roofing Road Trips, from Roofer's Coffee Shop. My name's Karen Edwards and today's episode is going to be all about some technology, which I'm really excited about and we've got Kevin Carfa and Ashley Garcia from SRS Distribution to talk to us today about Roof Hub and some really cool new features, that being the Roof Hub Estimator. So, welcome, thank you for being here, Kevin and Ashley, it's great to talk with you.

Kevin Carfa: Thank you. Great to be here.

Karen Edwards: All right, let's get started. Ashley, why don't you start us off, just introduce yourself and tell us a little bit about what you do there at SRS Distribution.

Ashley Garcia: Sure. Hello everyone, I am Ashley Garcia and I lead the digital solutions team here at SRS Distribution. Our team's passion really lies in understanding our customer's challenges and finding innovative solutions that make a real difference. But for us, it really goes beyond just providing the solutions. We're also committed to working hand-in-hand with our customers to implement these tools and ensure that they are seamlessly integrated into their daily operations to make their lives easier.

Karen Edwards: Excellent, and Kevin, what's your role there?

Kevin Carfa: Yeah, I lead the greater digital team here at SRS and really it's just about that total ecosystem that we have. Certainly, we're talking about Roof Hub here, it's a terrific tool. It's certainly material ordering, things like that, delivery tracking, that's really what it's well known for.

We'll go into Estimator here, which we're super excited about. But it's also just kind of that greater, like I said, that interconnected ecosystem of our technology partners, our measurement partners, weather, kind of everything that goes into it. Then just making that come to life with our contractors. We love listening to them, we love talking to them. We love hearing, "Hey, how can we help you just become better roofers?" And that's what we're looking to do with Roof Hub.

Karen Edwards: I love it, because every day we are working from our phones, right? We have information at our fingertips, in the palm of our hand and to see a tool like Roof Hub and SRS Distribution develop this to help contractors use it in their everyday operations and that they've got dedicated teams to help contractors succeed, that's really impressive. And I just have to say, we were chatting a little bit before this podcast and Ashley, you've been with the Roof Hub team since the beginning, right?

Ashley Garcia: Just about. I came in at about a year in, so about almost four years now.

Karen Edwards: Well, she is so committed to Roof Hub that she got a personalized license plate.

Ashley Garcia: I did, I did my. Roof Hub Mobile, as I call it, so.

Karen Edwards: I love it, I love it. What a great guerrilla advertising and marketing strategy that you've implemented there. That's cool. So the latest feature is this Estimator, and I want to know more. I want to know, how does this work? Tell me all about it and what inspired the development of an estimating piece of Roof Hub?

Ashley Garcia: Absolutely. So we really had an aha-moment when we were talking to our contractors and they were just sharing their struggles with the estimating process. The frustration was that it takes time, there's so much potential for errors, maintaining the pricing. They were really struggling with creating professional proposals in an easy way. And so that was our real clear call to action to develop a solution that would address their needs and make their lives easier. So Roof Hub Estimator tackles those industry gaps head on by streamlining everything, ensuring accurate pricing and helping contractors create those impressive professional proposals that win deals.

Karen Edwards: Excellent. So I'm curious, as it's easy, it's at the fingertips, but a lot of contractors have, there's a lot of different pricing models. Right? So how does the Roof Hub Estimator, does it just know, I know this is your price, so that's what I'm going to use?

Ashley Garcia: Sure. So we do have a good, better, best pricing strategy implemented inside of Roof Hub. And so really, this is about giving our contractors the power to give their homeowners choices that make them feel empowered and understood. So with this structure, our customers are able to offer three tiered packages with different features and benefits that allow the homeowner to pick the option that's going to perfectly suit their budget and needs.

Ashley Garcia: And the really neat thing too, is it's tapping into the psychology of choice. By presenting options, we're helping our customers shift their homeowner from whether to buy from them, to which option is a perfect fit for them. So this is empowering the homeowner and making them feel more in control of the process. And so Roof Hub really has this built in to make it incredibly easy to generate these beautiful, professional proposals with those good, better, best tiered options.

Karen Edwards: So the proposal format, what does that look like? Is that a PDF, is it customized for the contractor's brand?

Ashley Garcia: So for the proposal, it does generate a link. So at this point, this could be something the homeowner is able to actually look digitally on, maybe from the tablet of the contractor. And then they're also able to print this out as well, and give it to the customer as a PDF to grab that signature as well.

Karen Edwards: Okay, so Ashley, I'd like for you to walk me through what this process looks like. Say, from the time a contractor gets a lead, to them putting the estimate together. What is that process?

Ashley Garcia: So what we've really done is designed this with efficiency in mind. We understand our contractors are on the go and they're often out of the office and their truck really is their office, right? So we wanted to create a very easy experience that allows them to be at a homeowner's house and generate the estimate on site. So in order to do that, all you have to do is log in and click create new estimate. From there, you're just entering in the basic job information, but here's where the real time savings comes in. You're able to create templates for good, better and best and preset the Estimator settings on the front end. So that way when you're out in the field, you're not having to redundantly enter this information over and over again. It becomes a real fill-able form type experience to alleviate the redundancies.

Karen Edwards: So as a contractor, you can predetermine what your good, better and best scenario is and it might not be the same. It might be different manufacturers, it might be different systems. It can pretty much be contractor's choice, right?

Ashley Garcia: Absolutely. We've really created it to be completely customizable to that customer's good, better and best process that they're able to put in there.

Karen Edwards: And is it mainly asphalt shingle based? Are there other options for products, such as metal or other types of materials?

Ashley Garcia: Sure. So we do also have a brand new feature as well that's kind of just slid in right with Estimator, and it's the ability for custom line items. So customers truly can, maybe they have a metal shop, maybe it's a scope that's outside of what SRS can support and they need to add these additional items. What they'd be able to do is put whatever it is in there and add that manually.

Karen Edwards: That's a great feature. I love the customization, that's really important. I do want to ask, because you said you want to give the contractor the ability to generate this while they're sitting in a customer's home or maybe outside of the customer's home in their truck. What's that speed look like? How long does it take to get that estimate?

Ashley Garcia: Sure. So right now, if everything is set up on the front end, it really does not take that much time at all. I would say maybe you're looking at, depending on your... It takes time to get used to a new process, but you're most likely looking at about 10 minutes, five to 10 minutes to-

Karen Edwards: Wow.

Ashley Garcia: ... start from finish with this.

Karen Edwards: That's impressive. So let's talk a little bit about the pricing, and you're using real time pricing in the development of these estimates. So, how does that benefit the contractor?

Ashley Garcia: Great question. So this is actually another one of these things that came up so often with our customers. The real-time pricing is really a game changer because I remember talking with a customer at an industry event and they were sharing their estimation and proposal process, and they were telling us the amount of time that it takes to keep all the pricing up to date in their estimate proposal experience was just painstaking. You have different packages, you have different markets and this becomes an extremely difficult thing to maintain and yet we have the solution at SRS. We know the pricing, we're able to feed this in, right?

And so I think that's something that's really, really powerful. So no more manual entry or outdated priceless that can eat away their margin. It can also cause them to lose business as well. So this is just something that I feel like is a huge benefit is that live pricing always being available to create more accurate and successful proposals.

Karen Edwards: Yeah, I was just going to say that's got to make a big difference in the accuracy, right? Because it's technology doing the job and we don't have manual entry errors, right?

Ashley Garcia: Absolutely.

Karen Edwards: So I just want to know some of the feedback. One, I don't know, how long has Estimator been available and what are you hearing from the folks that are using it?

Ashley Garcia: So Estimator rolled out on October 17th. So far the feedback has been overall very positive. We have gotten customers coming back and saying they love the ease of use. One of the items that they really mention is that ability to flip the estimate after the fact. So once the estimate is closed, the customer has signed, everything is good to go, they're able to essentially just flip that estimate directly into an order. So they're eliminating double entry, they're eliminating potential errors that can be in that translation portion and they're getting the material that their customer has actually signed on.

Karen Edwards: So, this is really amazing. It's great to see this technology coming into the industry that really helps contractors be more successful, streamlined, be more accurate. I'm just curious, this right now is impressive, but what does the future hold? What can we expect to see coming?

Ashley Garcia: We have some really exciting updates coming soon, and one of those I feel like fast follows that we're going to have is E-sign. So this is going to allow our customers to close the deals on the spot, no need to print a piece of paper. And what we found is studies show that customers are three times more likely to sign a deal when presented with an E-sign option. So this is going to be an incredible boost to our customer's ability to offer what their homeowners are looking for.

Ashley Garcia: We also have itemized pricing and photos coming, so that gives the customers even more flexibility and transparency. These will be optional of course, so they don't have to be included. They're also able to expand out the details line-on-line in the proposals, and then maybe those photos they're uploading the customer's home and the damage. Right? So this level of detail is going to help build trust and ensure that everyone's on the same page.

Ashley Garcia: And then lastly, we're also planning on including spec sheets for manufacturers. The ability to have customers' testimonials in there to build credibility. And we're partnering with ProFund to provide financing options and detailed property reports. So, all of this is really designed to empower our customers to win more deals and increase the average order value and provide exceptional customer service to their customers, right? The homeowner.

Karen Edwards: And how long does it take to set up these customizations? Because I know a lot of times contractors like you say, we're busy, we're working, I don't have time. Is it pretty easy? Does your team assist with this? What does that process look like?

Ashley Garcia: So we have created a very easy avenue to be able to translate current orders and invoices into templates, right? Because they've ordered this from us before, this is your baseline and it makes it incredibly easy to go into those orders and invoices, find the invoice that best represents what you're selling your customers and click save as template. So that again, really alleviates a lot of the building process.

From there, you're tweaking, right? You're adding a little bit of customization or maybe there wasn't this ventilation type that you also know that you provide on certain jobs. So there's also a duplicate. So once they have that template set, they're able to just copy it, make a few tweaks, boom, you have your better.

Karen Edwards: I love it. That's, yeah, just taking what's already there, they've already placed the orders.

Ashley Garcia: Totally.

Karen Edwards: Using that to pre-populate. It sounds super easy. Now, Kevin, you're here, you've been smiling and nodding and agreeing with a lot of things, but I want to hear from you. What excites you most about the new Estimator?

Kevin Carfa: Yeah, I think the beauty of this is that it is just built right into Roof Hub. Ashley touched on some of this with real-time pricing. We even have that template integration. These are all pieces that kind of make Roof Hub, Roof Hub. Works great for material ordering. But what's really neat about this is the seamless flow, and so it starts with that template, like she said and it goes all the way through that kind of one-click order at the tail end. The measurement piece, I mean, that's kind of the neat thing about being able to build this into an existing platform that has all those kind of tentacles out there. And so I think that's really the beauty of this product, is it sits right in the middle there. We're able to assist our contractors in that selling stage.

Kevin Carfa: You'll even start seeing some things like sales academies and what makes me a better salesman? How can I become a better salesman? So it's not just a piece of technology, it's going to be kind of these assistive things that really help them win more deals as well.

Karen Edwards: Yeah, I think that one of the things that contractors might get out of this is a lot of powerful data about their business. Have you guys considered that? When you mentioned the proposal tracker, Ashley, about how many days has it been? Maybe they can look at that and say, "You know what? We're letting these proposals sit out there way too long and we need to make some changes." Have you had much feedback along those lines about the insight that it provides into their own business?

Ashley Garcia: So we do have a concept inside of Roof Hub, that is called the owner's dashboard. And really, this is the analytics place that our customers are able to come to. It's not there today, but it is something that we are definitely exploring, being able to have this data-driven approach to even jobs lost, jobs abandoned, seeing close rates, things like these are all things that we hope to one day be able to provide in a very digestible, easy to view way.

Karen Edwards: Yeah, yeah. We just are running a contracting business, we want to put on some roofs and now there's technology and there's data and there's decision-making and there's analytics. And so I feel like the easier that you can make that, the better it is for the contractor.

Kevin Carfa: What I think would be really neat there too is, how can we start pushing some of this out? They don't have time always to go in, find the data, glean the insight, derive the action. And so you'll even see things like automatic notifications. We have that dwell time in there if it sits in a certain status, maybe it's an unsigned proposal that's been presented, you'll start seeing things like automatic notifications. Let's actually just push that out every Monday to the sales guy and say, "Hey, here's everything that's dwelled for over seven days and is presented but unsigned." And so that's where we really want to push it to say, "You know what? We know you don't always have the time to go kind of figure out what the heck to do. Let us help you there. We'll push that to you, and then you really just have to have that operational rigor within your own company to keep up with it."

Karen Edwards: Yeah, yeah, I love it. I love that you're taking the power of technology and making it easy and digestible and actionable. So, it might seem like an obvious question, but how does a contractor get started with Roof Hub?

Ashley Garcia: Yeah, that's a great question. So we are able to on the registration page, if they go to RoofHub.pro, they're able to go in there and register utilizing an invoice. So they're able to click register and enter in some key bits of information about that invoice and get logged in.

Karen Edwards: Wow, that's simple. And there's an app for the phone, smartphones, any smartphone, right?

Ashley Garcia: Absolutely. You can also download the app and have it on the go.

Karen Edwards: Okay, and in terms of training, resources, best practices, what does that look like for a contractor? Or is it just that intuitive that people figure it out?

Ashley Garcia: It is very intuitive. I would say though, for any of customers that are maybe struggling with something or just want some guided or best practices, right? We do have them completely covered there. We offer a whole range of resources. We have web page tutorials that are built in, so they can actually follow along with a guide inside of Roof Hub.

There's the video trainings that we put out, live webinars and then of course, the DSS team is also able to support customers, their territory manager, their branch. This is everybody, this is an entire support system that we want to put around their customers to know that we're there to help them.

Karen Edwards: Excellent. Wow, this has been fantastic and exciting. I love seeing technology in the industry and how it is helping contractors and the industry as a whole be better. Because ultimately at the end of the day, their homeowner, their customer is used to having that instant information. They're used to having everything digital, and they're used to doing business that way. So, I love that you are providing at no cost, right? To contractors to use these services?

Kevin Carfa: Correct. Yeah, I think that was a key piece of this. Roof Hub comes at no cost to SRS contractors, and we want to make sure that as we kind of integrate and bolt on these value-add services like Estimator, it remains at no cost as well. We'll see when we add additional services, E-sign, especially ProFund, that's our financing solution, you'll start seeing a far tighter integration there. So you can actually offer homeowner financing directly through Roof Hub. What would that looks like, but we're just so excited that this base package of Estimator is going to be a tool that you guys can use for free.

Karen Edwards: Yeah, and I know we're heading closing in on the International Roofing Expo and SRS Distribution always has a big presence there. So if anybody's listening that is on the fence still, awesome time to check out the offerings and the services in the SRS booth when you go to the IRE this year.

Karen Edwards: So Kevin, Ashley, thank you so much for being here and for sharing about this awesome new feature in Roof Hub, the Estimator. I love it.

Kevin Carfa: Thank you, Karen.

Ashley Garcia: Thank you.

Karen Edwards: And thank you everyone out there for listening. We encourage you to follow us on social media so that you don't miss a thing, and listen to future episodes of Roofing Road Trips wherever you prefer to get your podcasts. Thanks for being here today, and we hope to see you on another episode.

Outro: 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.