Brand Elevation and Reputation Lead to Growth

RCS Influencer Charles Antis says that his company growth in 2021 will be fueled by taking care of his community.   

Editor’s note: Watch the video to see and hear what Charles Antis has to say about growing his business in 2021. You can read the transcript below the video, but we recommend seeing it for yourself.   

Karen Edwards: This is Karen Edwards, editor, RoofersCoffeeShop®, and I am joined today by Charles Antis from Antis Roofing in Orange County, California, and he is one of our roofing influencers. And we're going to talk about this month's question, which is fitting for the last month of the year and interesting in light of the times that we're living in. How do you plan to grow your business in 2021? Charles? 

Charles Antis: Wow, that just hit me right between the eyes. But I'm telling you this, my growth and growing my business, I'm not measuring 2021 in terms of growth by overall sales, and I'm not because there's some things in the market that I don't know of right now. I don't know how the HOA industry that I'm selling to is going to value their product. Are they going to continue to let us sell them complete re-roofs over 500 units for $3 million, or are they going to switch to a format where they're saying, "No, we're going to do maintenance only and get 10 more years out of the roof, and therefore spend $300,000 a year," or whatever that number is? I don't know exactly what the client's going to do. 

Charles Antis: In light of that, and in light of unpredictable economic circumstances, best way I could come up and say that, I believe the best thing I can do is work for market share, work for client reputation, work for brand elevation. And so, the way we do that falls back to taking care of the community. Isn't it awesome how every week, when we interview or whatever, I'm always going to talk about community? But if you think about that, I'm going to give you one reason for that. As me, as CEO of this company, I could spend most of my time in sales. I'm a great salesman. I can spend most of my time running projects, I can run efficient projects. I could spend a lot of my time in a lot of areas, but if I spend my time in community, then I create a balance that attracts and retains the top talent, and that puts me in a great position to be able to survive and thrive in the future. 

Charles Antis: Right now, I'm doing a philanthropic project that's completely new. It never existed before, at least in the world that I lived in. It's called the California Love Drop. And I don't have a logo handy. I thought I did. But the California Love Drop exists so that we can bring Monster Energy, hint water, which I'm drinking right now, it's amazing, and Wahoo's Fish Tacos, and Yogurtland yogurt and all these really main brands. We're bringing it to frontline fire, frontline police, frontline health, and we're doing it almost every day. Tomorrow is our hundredth drop. It's going to have media there. It's going to be really exciting, and we're doing it because it allows us to say, "Thank you," at a really important need that we never saw. 

Charles Antis: But at the same time, hint bottling, Monster bottling, they're keeping crews busy making product, that otherwise, would be home. And they're not getting paid today, but they're smart enough to know they're going to be paid in the future by brand loyalty, by doing something good with their product. 

Charles Antis: And so, when I look at 2021 at Antis, the two most important things that I can do is, number one, continue our giving and make sure it's relevant, because if it's relevant, we'll attract and retain top talent and we'll be adaptable in a new world. The second thing that I'm doing that I haven't brought up in this month's blog yet, is that it's involving training ourselves to be futurist. Now, there's a lot of correct terminology that I won't use, but our brains as human beings, the way we are, we're just not adaptable enough to live in the world that we're about to walk into, so I'm training my team to be more adaptable. Our planning for 2021 is training our teams and our departments to be more flexible, to allow everything to be questioned, and so that we can improve and question everything moving forward. 

Charles Antis: One of the examples of this would be office space. If you look at the office space of all of the roofing companies that have started in the last seven months, they require very little office space. That's who's going to be competing against me, if not now, very soon. If you look at Antis Campus, we have a 20,000 square foot office. We have so much space, we donate 7,000 feet every couple weeks to the American Red Cross for a blood drive. So it looks to me like we're going to have to change that, likely in the future. 

Charles Antis: Is this something I have to raise the change today? No, it's one of the areas we're looking at of possible changing in the future. The use of technology, the use of tracking. Everything's changing. There's somebody that might apply for a job at HR that might not ever need to work here, in the past, they would have, that could live in a lesser expensive environment like Texas or Montana. So there's a lot of changes that are likely to happen, but my focus is on being relevant in the community. That's doing relevant philanthropy so we attract and retain the right talent, so that we can question everything and become futurist, to grow more with the way our market grows and our industry grows. Does that make sense? 

Karen Edwards: Yeah, it does. I really like that answer because that's not at all what I was anticipating. And it's a different way of looking at it because traditionally, we get stuck, and with growth, oh, what's our sales numbers? How are we going to increase our sales numbers? But there are other ways to grow, and I think that you very eloquently captured those. 

Charles Antis: We're a $20 million company, roughly. This year, our sales will be down off the 20 million due to mostly the interrupted period around COVID because our HOA product lost its ability temporarily to sign a contract. But we fixed that. However, we're ending the year much more powerful than we began the year because our brand and market is up. And if we had an algorithm that measured that, we don't know what it would say, but I believe it would show a value of millions more than what we had. That's what it feels like, because future sales much has to do with the way the community and everyone feels about you, and that's something that we work very hard on. 

Charles Antis: So I think this is an awesome discussion and a great place to bring this up because you allow us to go a little bit off track so that we can stand back from this and go, "Huh, yeah." We're trying to help industry companies survive in an industry where three out of five fail every three years, so this is really good thought discussions that your questions bring out. So thank you for such a great question, Karen. You got me so excited, I had to shed my sweater. 

Karen Edwards: I know. And as always, Charles, we love your insight and your wisdom, and thank you for sharing. 

Charles Antis is the founder and CEO of Antis Roofing & Waterproofing. See his full bio here.