Chad Davis & Jackie Hart - Industry Collaboration Means Contractor Success - PODCAST TRANSCRIPTION

Editor's note: The following is the transcript of a live interview with Jackie Hart of Estimating Edge and Chad Davis of Duro-Last. You can read the interview below or listen to the podcast. 

Speaker 1:
Welcome to Roofing Road Trips with Heidi. Explore the roofing industry through the eyes of a long term professional within the trade. Listen for insights, interviews, and exciting news in the roofing industry today.

Heidi Ellsworth:
Hello, and welcome to another Roofing Road Trips from RoofersCoffeeShop. I'm Heidi Ellsworth, and I am here today with two leading companies in the roofing industry that I am really excited to visit with. We're going to be talking about collaboration and strong family values. So I am here today with Chad Davis of Duro-Last and Jackie Hart of Estimating Edge. Welcome to the show, you two.

Jackie Hart:
Thank you, Heidi. Good to see you again.

Chad Davis:
Yes, thank you very much. Glad to be on.

Heidi Ellsworth:
I'm so excited. Jackie, you and I have done so much together over the years with National Women in Roofing, and Chad, you and I have visited a little bit and I've been super involved with Duro-Last over the years. So I think this is just going to really bring some important information to all the contractors and the industry overall out there. But let's start first with some introductions. So Jackie, can we start with you, and can you introduce yourself and Estimating Edge?

Jackie Hart:
Yeah. Hi, my name is Jackie Hart. I am with Estimating Edge. We're headquartered in South Florida, Boynton Beach. And I also live in South Florida. I've been with the company for about six years, but selling software and technologies to construction for about 25 years.

Heidi Ellsworth:
Wow.

Jackie Hart:
I sell all over the country now, and a lot of what I do is collaborative efforts, whether it be with other companies, when I'm selling to a customer who want to use the Edge but use other softwares. And so it's really high consulting, high energy, getting involved and getting to know people. And that's what the Edge is all about and that's what I do.

Heidi Ellsworth:
That's awesome. I love it. I love it. And just a little bit about Estimating Edge?

Jackie Hart:
So we are a takeoff and estimating solution all in one. We've been around about 36 years, maybe a little bit more than that. We have a fully loaded, pre-populated database of manufacturers' roof systems. We have a comprehensive database of all the Duro-Last products. So it's a turnkey solution for commercial roofers who want to take a project off and have their bid built automatically.

Heidi Ellsworth:
Wow, very cool. Very cool. Chad, can you introduce yourself and tell us a little bit about Duro-Last?

Chad Davis:
Yeah, my name is Chad Davis. I've been with Duro-Last for almost 27 years now, so it's been quite a good ride for me. I've worked in various roles and facets throughout that time, but currently my title is the customer service manager, and my role or my side of that would be focusing on engineering and estimating. So Duro-Last, very good company to work for, very family centric. It's really reinvested in itself a lot throughout the years. Lots of sister companies, we've spread quite a bit throughout the US. So it's been a fun ride so far. Very cool.

Heidi Ellsworth:
That is awesome. And tell us just a little bit about the Duro-Last products.

Chad Davis:
Single fly PVC, that's our main focus. Very much in the last couple years we've offered a lot more different products as we continue to expand, try to meet customer demand. So again, that's kind of where we've been coming from and it's something we continue to strive for as we move forward.

Heidi Ellsworth:
Yeah, I love that. And you mentioned family and a strong family culture. I see that with both companies, and I would love, Jackie, just kind of start us out on how important is it to have that strong culture and really when it's based with such strong family ties.

Jackie Hart:
So a little secret I shared with the powers that be back when they hired me six years ago was that I would've taken the job with no pay. Of course, I shared that with them six months after I was hired, because what moved me so desperately was that this was a team of people who were passionate about one another and passionate about customer success. And that kind of culture, we're losing in our country and our world today. So when you come across a company like that who really is deep down passionate about, hey, we want you to succeed, we care about your success, we are a family who work together to make sure your end result is successful, again, you don't find that a lot.

Jackie Hart:
And that's one of the things when I talk to prospective clients, they sense that, they feel that, and they sense that we are different than the next company out there. And I think that's why with Duro-Last, when we embarked on this relationship four years ago, maybe a little longer, that was one of the things that really resonated between the two companies. The culture, the cultural similarities, the passion, the true desire to help someone succeed and do the very best that they could do. So it's just a great match for us to work alongside and with Duro-Last and with common customers.

Heidi Ellsworth:
Yeah, and who have a lot of the same culture and beliefs. Chad, I've met the family from Duro-Last, and what a strong history. Just share a little bit about that family culture.

Chad Davis:
Again, being a family owned company that's been around for over 40 years, you end up working side by side with a lot of the family, doing a lot of different things, and to see them grow and to see the family grow and to see the next generation come up and come through has been a great ride for all of us.

Chad Davis:
But our culture is very customer driven. It's customer service, customer service, customer service is what from the beginning is the principles of what Duro-Last was built on. So there's that, the culture for everybody who comes in, you want to maintain that and teach that, and it takes the veterans and leaders to continue to say, hey, this is what we're about, this is what we do. And we're very, very dedicated to that kind of stuff. Very dedicated to core principles, with the goal of allowing our customer all ways always. It's one of our internal slogans. And we're very sales driven, very customer focused, family and company.

Heidi Ellsworth:
I love that. And when you have two companies who have that same culture working together, it becomes pretty, I mean, it just, it's natural.

Jackie Hart:
Yeah, it's very symbiotic. And I always say that you can certainly hire on aptitude, aptitude and skill sets as a company, but if you're looking to hire on culture, you can't teach culture. You're born with that. That's inherent to the person you are. And so that's absolutely what separates us, and I think why we work so well with the Duro-Last team.

Heidi Ellsworth:
Yeah. So Chad, I'm really interested, how did Duro-Last start working with the Edge?

Chad Davis:
I think, like Jackie said, it started roughly three or four years ago. I got involved with it maybe a year and a half, two years ago. When the Edge came into Duro-Last, we'd been doing quotes a very specific way for quite some time. It entailed AutoCAD drawings and a great deal of individual work and calculations, which were both very time consuming.

Chad Davis:
It didn't take long for us to realize the potential that Edge offered us internally. In the beginning it was different, but also unlike anything else we had trialed in years past. We put a team together. It took some time to work our way through it, and to build it to our specifications. It became obvious very quickly that it was a tool that would greatly benefit us.

Chad Davis:
So I've been working side by side with a lot of our veterans who've been in the department for quite some time, and they're all in on this product. They really like it. They love the features. And IT support's been great for us. Especially as you're learning a new product and a new process and there's so much that you can customize for yourself, that in and of itself is a big project. So the support was really great we got from them, too.

Heidi Ellsworth:
Yeah, I mean just what you were saying about how manual your process was before and now you've been able to automate that. Talk a little bit more about that benefit and some of the other benefits of making that switch.

Chad Davis:
So a couple of them stand out for me. One of them was accuracy. Again, you have pre-programmed product calculations that you built in that takes away risk of human error, and that's big. When you're estimating, errors can be costly. So the more we can dial it in and take away somebody pressing the wrong fat finger in a number, pressing the wrong decimal or miscalculating something, that was big for me.

Chad Davis:
It also was both efficiency and speed. We had much quicker turnaround times, even for large projects or buildings. The process itself was pretty simplistic. Again, depending, the size wasn't a factor anymore. It didn't matter if it was a million square feet or a thousand square feet, the process was the process and it could still be done very quickly.

Chad Davis:
So we are now actually starting to operate Edge as teams. So I have two people at a time working as a team, and again working from home, this has really helped build teamwork and some comradery and getting people to Zoom together and work together. And so that's been another good kickback for us internally, is just getting them to watch each other and make sure they don't make a mistake even though you're using the Edge, and make sure everything the contractor or customer wants is happening. So that's been another good side kickback for us.

Heidi Ellsworth:
That's excellent. Jackie, as you've been watching this transformation of Duro-Last bringing the Edge on and really making that transition, what have you seen?

Jackie Hart:
It's like full circle. So we work with the contractor, who also works alongside Duro-Last, and Duro-Last now having that knowledge of how the Edge works can really support those contractors who maybe are looking at the Edge, beginning to use the Edge, want to understand what it's all about. They can say, hey, in a deep dive way, we use this product. We've set up all the Duro-Last assemblies in here with details, and we have proven out that this product is tried and true. It can be streamlined. It's, like you said, precise, it's accurate. It speeds up the whole process, and the technical support is bar none.

Heidi Ellsworth:
Yeah, I just think when you really look at that, and I love that part, Chad, that you're talking about working remote, I mean, talk about good timing on your part of bringing the Edge in. Because it was two to three years ago and that was right when everything was happening. So you've really been able to enable your employees to work in a lot of different places, too.

Chad Davis:
Right. One of the things we said was if there ever was a time to change, now is the time because there was so much changing just throughout the world, and work and eating out and entertainment, everything was changing. So it was a good opportunity for us to take a step back and say, well, let's try and change this and see what happens too.

Jackie Hart:
And to add to the question that you asked just moments ago of me, also, is that because the Edge is a cloud based program, I as a contractor could be working remotely in my cloud, in my version of the Edge, and I can either give Duro-Last, Chad and his team, access to my [inaudible 00:12:10], my version of the Edge, or I can work on something and save those reports off and just quickly email them in whatever file format that I want to get buy-in from his team, if they were going to support me and help me in that fashion. Because they're all doing the same thing, they're all working with the same product.

Jackie Hart:
The assemblies, the details, the calculations, I mean they're going to change from contractor to contractor, depending on how they look at labor and things like that. But the product line, the basis of the product line, is going to be the same that Duro-Last, the manufacturer, Chad's team uses, and me, the contractor, that I use, because we're rolling that out to the contractor from what Chad and his team put together. So they're really looking at the same data sets. So I think wouldn't it be easier for your teams to be able to support then that contractor, knowing what they're looking at because you all put it all together?

Heidi Ellsworth:
Yeah. I mean, and Chad, I mean, just what Jackie's talking about is that reporting feature, I mean that's one of the top ones. What have you seen with being able to work with your contractors and also internally using that?

Chad Davis:
Yeah, first of all, Edge is very user friendly for us internally. We have some guys that are really techy and IT type people, and we have some people that aren't. And I myself kind of fall in the middle there. But the fact that it's user friendly, could be edited, it saves us a ton of time. Within it, there's like templative reports that you can select, which they have, I don't know if it's 10 or 15 or whatever the numbers in there, of templative reports that hey, this is what we can pull up for you, but there's also some that can be modified to your needs.

Chad Davis:
So we spend some time looking at a lot of them, assessing what do we want to give our contractor in comparison to what we used to give our contractor. So again, you can send out some very basic type reports, or if you wanted to, you can get very detailed within them, meaning right down to the accessory products needed for each master part. You can say for this wall or this parapet, it would take you X amount of this and X amount of this. I mean, it can break it down very, very detailed for the contractor if they want that. It just depends how much you want to dig deep into it. But yeah, it's very user friendly.

Heidi Ellsworth:
And I kind of want to take that one because Duro-Last has such a unique and impressive offering with pre-fabrication. And that's part of this, too, when you're talking about the contractors. Some of them may want really intense detail, where others, it's all right, we've worked with Duro-Last a long time, we don't need that. How do you, working with the Edge and working with your contractors and kind of figuring that out, that's a lot of customer service, like you said.

Chad Davis:
Right. And one of the things that Edge allows is you to build master files for quoting [inaudible 00:15:11] templates, if you will, for your different applications. And it took us some time in the beginning to build those in and get the calculations built in. But once you have the masters built, you simply can go in and select what the contractor wants quoted, what material type, what mill, how they want it applied, and then that gives you a base, I guess a base quote or a base start for an estimate on all the products that would entail. So that's helped us out.

Chad Davis:
It took a little time to build it, and we're still tweaking it. We're still tweaking it. There's still lots of room for internal improvement on our end to use this product to its full capabilities, and we see that. So every time we get our group together, we are like, what about this? Can we try this? Can we do this? And for the stuff that we can do ourselves, we do. But again, they've had a great supporting system for us, and they don't usually tell us no. They're like, "Let us look into it. Let us figure it out for you. We'll get you something." And it's a great support system for us, to continue to make it better for us.

Heidi Ellsworth:
And isn't that the beauty of digital? It can change and things. But one of the things that just blows my mind here, kind of thinking through this, is you have a 40 year old company, and until three years ago you had very set ways of doing your estimating and communicating with the contractors and such. And then you bring in technology.

Heidi Ellsworth:
A lot of roofing contractors have the same experience, where maybe some of the people have a hard time adapting to new ways of doing things and to new technologies. What was some of your experiences with your team and your department in the adoption of the Edge and also then how that led to the consistency that you've been talking about?

Chad Davis:
Again, for us, consistency was key. And that's from individual to individual. It's easy to give a building to four different people and a pencil and some paper and say, "Well, what can you come up with here," versus saying, "Here's a template, everything's built in. The calculations are behind the scenes. You're outlining it, you're drawing it, and the numbers that come out should be almost on top of each other."

Chad Davis:
So that variation for us was key because it does bring consistency to the department as a whole, not from individual, to individual, to individual. And that's big time important when you're estimating.

Heidi Ellsworth:
And it sounds like some really strong acceptance of the department overall, too, to make this change.

Chad Davis:
Yeah, for sure. And again, change can be difficult, especially for veteran employees, myself included, but I'm big into continuous improvement. So it's always keep moving forward, keep moving forward, keep moving forward. If something doesn't work the way you want it to, you take a step back and you fix it and you go forward again. And that's another feature I love about this product, is it's allowed us to do that kind of stuff. Even though we might hit a roadblock, we find ways around it, we come up with better ideas to fix it.

Chad Davis:
So that's been, again, change can be a challenge, but at this point a lot of people are on board with this because they have trialed a lot of different things and this was right up their alley for what they wanted. Especially, again, being Duro-Last and prefab specific and that kind of stuff, that always seems to be a challenge for us when new partners come in and that kind of stuff.

Heidi Ellsworth:
That's cool. Jackie, actually I'm going to have two questions. First of all, your experience with the department and adopting the technology, there's a little bit of a cultural shift that goes on with that with Duro-Last, but then also how do you compare that to, it seems like you'd be very familiar with onboarding and bringing on contractors because they have to go through a lot of the same changes.

Jackie Hart:
Absolutely. I mean, really what Chad is saying is not unique to Duro-Last. That applies to every company I talk to, every roofing organization. People say to me, "What's your biggest competition?" My biggest competition is change, because if it's not broke, don't fix it. Or why would I want to change after I've been doing something for 30 years?

Jackie Hart:
I mean, so really that's what you battle, and you really have to break through those barriers to prove out the value of that change, which I think, Chad, you've done a remarkable job in your own department doing that, because Duro-Last was a crawl, walk, run, Okay, we're going to crawl with this thing, and we're going to set some milestones for ourselves and some benchmarks, and it may take us a few years to get there, but when we get there and arrive, we then are at that point where you can prove out how successful you've become with the Edge, which is I think a lot of what you've been saying.

Jackie Hart:
The Edge is a permission role based system. So when I speak to contractors about it, not everybody necessarily accesses the information at the same levels. I always speak to these master roof systems that we talked about you setting up, Chad, as a sandbox. So you set up the sandbox and with controls inherent to the program, you determine what people can see and do. And I always say estimators are like artists. You've got to give them latitude to create within a bid they're working on because no two jobs are ever going to be the same. The details are always going to vary. Even if they vary just this much, they vary this much. So you've got to give people the ability to make those changes inside the bid they're working on.

Jackie Hart:
But as a reviewer, somebody who approves an estimator's bid or a junior estimator's bid, I get visual aids that tell me that somebody's changed a price, or they've changed production, or they've swapped out a material line item with another. So I can see how they're making changes to the sandbox that I've laid out for everyone to use, at least from the get go, the same way.

Jackie Hart:
And I think when we explain it that way, people have a better warm and fuzzy, like, okay, I'm not just giving somebody a paintbrush and say go to town. I mean, you're really controlling it. And the fact that all of this when laid out for a Duro-Last contractor has come from the Duro-Last team, who are the professionals at it, that's the strength here, is that it's just being passed along, streamlined down to a Duro-Last contractor to be able to use.

Heidi Ellsworth:
Use it. And it just seems to me that when you talk about that streamlining, really it's streamlining communications, which is so critical so you don't have mistakes. Chad, what have you seen with that, the ability to streamline communications?

Chad Davis:
Well, big picture for that is it's really allowed us to get our quotes out in a much faster time, which significantly increases our turnaround, and overall it allows the contractor to get them back quicker, which could get them on the next project quicker. Which, again, you just use that speed up process, and logically thinking, you should be able to do much more with a lot less work, to be honest with you.

Chad Davis:
Overall we are still in the, I'll call it the infancy stage still, because we still have, even though we're running with it, we're doing really good, there's still internally a lot of room for us to make it better, quicker, faster. So it's exciting. And I've only got right now about maybe a third of my team trained in it. So we're still learning as a department, but we're still able to really push a lot out already. So there's a lot of potential there for us to improve in the future. And I'm pretty confident to say that even at this point, I think our turnaround times increased, I would say 40 to 50%. That might even be on the low end.

Jackie Hart:
Wow, I was going to ask you that. How much faster? Yeah.

Chad Davis:
Significant, it is really significant. So I'm looking forward to the future to see really how much, when we open it up full gate and let everything out, see what happens, what we can do with it. So it's exciting. It is.

Heidi Ellsworth:
Wow. So speed, communications, accuracy, I mean, it just keeps going. It really delivers to the contractors through, by Duro-Last using this, and then by contractors using it, too, that whole almost an ecosystem of everybody thinking the same way and the delivery and the accuracy and everything coming to it. So what have you seen, Jackie, overall from your contractors and Duro-Last kind of altogether? What has been the big picture of that that you've seen from your side?

Jackie Hart:
I think probably the number one really is the streamlined communications and the speed with which you can get everything pushed through. Because it just seems like we're living in a fast paced society. We're doing a lot more with a lot less. Isn't that kind of the tagline you hear all over the place, that I used to wear three hats, now I'm wearing five, but I'm expected to do it in half the time.

Jackie Hart:
And so if I can use and leverage a product that helps me get there faster, more precisely, in a streamlined process, and then the kicker is getting the support from my manufacturer, who's also using it and understands what I'm doing and what I'm submitting, it just becomes a win-win all over the place. With the Edge, what we were saying with these master templates, when we bring on contractors, like Chad said, it takes time. It's a crawl, walk, run.

Jackie Hart:
But because we've worked with Duro-Last directly and we've dropped in these master templates, I'm not going to call it a plug and play from day one because we do have to tweak it according to each individual contractor. But it's a jump start where you're already at 50% to complete the race. I mean, it's a big jump in that direction. So I think there's just a lot of things, but really speed, accuracy, communications, everything we've been saying.

Heidi Ellsworth:
Yeah. What's some of the feedback you've been getting from your contractors, Chad?

Chad Davis:
Well again, in the beginning everybody's like, "What is this? What are we getting now?" You're so used to something and then you get something different. We had to kind of educate a lot of people just because it was different. So once they understand the report and they go through it and we say, "Hey, we've sent you three different reports. One is just a generic, kind of a generic number estimate. The next one details every part with every sub-part and every nested part."

Chad Davis:
And it was an educational experience for both sides because we're trying to figure out what do you guys want to see? Because you can ask 10 different people and they want 10 different things. So we try to come up with generically what everybody wants to see. So we are feeling our way around the reports, figuring out which one works best. But the feedback's been great, really, so far. And a lot of people are starting to buy Edge for themselves and we're starting to get more and more calls about, hey, it's the setup and the pricing and all this kind of stuff. And so it's exciting to see them see the opportunity, as well.

Heidi Ellsworth:
And you're helping them grow their businesses all over again. And it kind of seems like you two like working together.

Chad Davis:
We do.

Jackie Hart:
It's been a while. Yeah, it's been a while. I think I kept Chad going. What's going on? What's going on? Are you using it? Are you using?

Chad Davis:
To be honest, it took me and my team the dedication to say, hey, we're going to commit to this. We got to a point about a year and a half ago, we said, okay, we're going to get in this every day for three hours, two hours, and we're just going to block a time out and we're all going to be in here. I think there was three of us at the time, we said we're all going to be in here.

Chad Davis:
And first of all, we tested it, we compared it apples to apples. We took our old quotes and the quote of that building and see where we came at. So we'd make sure everything started tying in. So it was a process. It took us some time, but we dedicated a lot to it.

Chad Davis:
And then for me, as far as continuous improvement and learning, a big key for me is repetition, repetition, repetition. The more you do it, the more you make yourself do it, even though it's different, in three weeks, it won't be different anymore. It will be kind of what you do now. So that was my big rallying point to the troops. It's like, we will get better at this. And they saw it.

Chad Davis:
After three weeks, four weeks, six weeks, whatever it was, we all started getting better at it. So [inaudible 00:28:02] key, because we start questioning, what else can we do with this? Oh, this is cool, but can I do this? Or, that was pretty nice, but what if we could do this? And then that's when we start contacting Jackie and her people and say, "Hey, can I do this? Can I not do this? Because we've got some good ideas." And again, a lot of feedback's been really great.

Heidi Ellsworth:
That's great. I love it. I love it. I love how this all comes together. And in the end, the real winners are obviously the end users, are the consumers, the building owners out there who are getting such accurate, fast bids, and with the manufacturers, the technology company, and the contractors all working together. So I would say win, win, win, win across the board.

Chad Davis:
Truly, for sure.

Jackie Hart:
Well, and again, our core values, really wanting the best experience for the customer. You know, you can shut your lights off and turn off your computer at the end of the day and say, "I did good. Somebody's really happy. It really worked for them." I mean, that's the name of the game.

Heidi Ellsworth:
Someone has a safe and sound building that they're living in or working in, with a strong roof above that was done in the most efficient way. So you can't ask for more than that.

Jackie Hart:
Absolutely.

Heidi Ellsworth:
I love it. Well, both of you, thank you so much. This has been great. I mean, I just love the collaboration, and I also want to just say thank you for sharing. There's a lot of people who maybe would think, oh, we've got to hold this, we can't share. But I love the fact that you're sharing this and helping contractors out there to take their business to the next step also.

Jackie Hart:
Oh, you're welcome. Thanks for having me.

Chad Davis:
Yeah, thank you very much.

Heidi Ellsworth:
Thank you. And thank all of you for listening. This kind of information is what really brings it home for the contractors. I hope you can take this and apply it to your own business. You can get ahold, you can find all the information on both Duro-Last and Estimating Edge, of course, on RoofersCoffeeShop. They both have directories, all kinds of eBooks, information, you name it, on how you can start incorporating both on Duro-Last and the Edge into your business.

Heidi Ellsworth:
And be sure to listen to all the podcasts that are out there. They are on rooferscoffeeshop.com, underneath the read list and watch navigation. You'll find them under Roofing Road Trips, or on your favorite podcast channel. Be sure to subscribe and set those notifications so you don't miss a single one. And we'll be seeing you next time on Roofing Road Trips.

Speaker 1:
Make sure to subscribe to our channel and leave a review. Thanks for listening. This has been Roofing Road Trips with Heidi from the rooferscoffeeshop.com.