Greg Hayne, Chad Westbrook, Tracey Donels, and Cody Kline - Live From ServiceCon with Pros - PODCAST TRANSCRIPT

Editor's note: The following is the transcript of a live interview with industry experts Greg Hayne, Chad Westbrook, Tracey Donels, and Cody Kline. You can read the interview below, listen to the podcast or watch the recording.

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. 

Heidi Ellsworth: My name is Heidi Ellsworth, and I'm your host today for this live podcast from Service Con 2025. We are here in front of an amazing audience of service professionals in the roofing industry who have had a day and a half now of amazing conversation. Let me just tell you, I've been lucky enough to sit and listen and be a part of all these conversations. I'm impressed with every single person here in this audience, and I am really impressed with the speakers that we're part of Service Con 2025. So we are lucky enough. Thank you, service Con 2025 for having Roofers Coffee Shop in the house and for giving us the opportunity to visit with some of these amazing speakers who have been here at the conference. So let's get started, gentlemen. Hello. And I'm gonna start with introductions. So we're gonna start down on this end with Chad. If you can introduce yourself, tell us a little bit about your, um, company. 

Chad Westbrook: Absolutely. So my name's Chad Westbrook. I'm the founder of Service Alignment, and we focus specifically on commercial roofing with the niche within service. So I had an awesome opportunity to be able to speak to everybody about doubling your business overnight, putting the right processes in place. We talked a lot about hiring a players. We got the right people, process, technology and goals. And overall, what I focus on is building eight figure service divisions with contractors across the us. 

Heidi Ellsworth: Loved it. Loved it. Cody, 

Cody Klein: Cody Klein commercial roofer.com. And we build, uh, marketing, business development teams, sales teams and scalable commercial roofing businesses where the businesses can scale beyond the founder. 

Greg Hane: I'm Greg Hane with the Haine Coaching Group. I facilitate peer groups for commercial roofing contractors. I also train service departments. And, uh, we also, uh, we talked today about, um, uh, working on yourself harder than you do on your job. 

Tracy Donalds: Yes. Tracy Donalds. I'm with Service First Solutions. We help people start, grow, and scale their commercial service departments. Uh, we say we're gonna take your food truck and turn it into a Chick-fil-A drive through. And that's what we really do, is we focus on operations. 'cause great customer service sells itself. 

Heidi Ellsworth: I love it. And hold onto that microphone there, Tracy, because we are going to start, we're gonna start at a little bit higher level. So we've, we've really gotten down into the why, the how, the whats, I mean, it's, it's been so amazing. But I wanna, from this amazing panel, I wanna first start out with what we're seeing. I mean, I've been in the industry now for over 30 years and I, I think I was telling somebody this the other day. This used to be called negotiated work, that that's what it used to be called in the old days. But now the growth of service and maintenance, the trends that we're seeing, um, it is, it's just taking the industry by storm. So I'd like to start with you, Tracy, on kind of why, what have you seen around the growth of service and maintenance and really what, what is fueling it? 

Tracy Donalds: Well, unfortunately, I think one of the things right now fueling it is the economy. Um, and, you know, service and repairs are important in a good economy. 

Tracy Donalds: And in a bad economy, they're vital and they become really necessary. So I think that's one of the things that's really pushing it right now. But think of just the growth of service that we've seen in the last, I mean, I'm gonna give you all the credit in the world. When did you start doing this? 12 years ago, 14 years ago, 15 years ago. To see the, the growth of service in the last 15 years and think about what we are learning that we didn't know. 

Tracy Donalds: Our clients, our building owners, they have no idea of all the things they need us for. Yeah. And we're just 

Heidi Ellsworth: Learning. It's really true. Yes. And I mean, when you think about the growth of national accounts, they've always been there, but communication has also ramped that up. And there's a lot higher expectations than I think there ever used to be. Greg, what are you seeing along that lines? 

Greg Hane: I think the, uh, I noticed a difference in I, um, interest by contractors in building a service division that changed, I don't know, maybe four or five years ago because I've been speaking at the IRE since 2013 and all of a sudden the, the, the number of people that would appear, the types of quality of questions being asked, the number of people that would stop at my, um, booth just all of a sudden ramped up. So I see that difference. And I think the other thing is that, um, as businesses, our customers have gotten more sophisticated, uh, they become more demanding. And so there's an expectation that when they hire you to go out and provide some sort of service for them, that they're gonna get the ca same kind of service that, that they get when they go to Chick-fil-A or when they, they, they rent from Hertz rather than budget or whatever. And if they're not getting that, they're gonna be unhappy. And that puts pressure on all, uh, everyone in our industry to perform better. 

Heidi Ellsworth: Yeah, I agree. Agreed. Cody, what are you seeing? I mean, especially from the cons contracting side and you've all been involved in contracting, but you had a couple businesses in there and now with everything you're doing, what are, what's fueling everything? 

Cody Klein: Yeah, definitely agree with Tracy on the economy side, but more in alignment with what Greg said. It's just the necessity for differentiation of your company within the market. And so, over the past couple days, we've talked about, you know, the average lifecycle of a roof being about 25 years, right. For give or take for a commercial roof system. And we know that if that's true, then about 4% of our market at any given time is ready for a replacement. But we have all of, all of our competitors along with us chasing that 4%. So it's like, how can we differentiate ourselves to create that blue ocean and chase the 96% of roofs that are not ready for replacement? And so I think that's also fueling the growth for service. 

Heidi Ellsworth: Yeah. Don't mention that book. That's great book. But it's so far <laugh>, Chad. 

Chad Westbrook: So what I see is an entirely different buyer coming into the market that's pushing our industry to be better. Right? We're talking about ultimately kids that are coming out of college that are taking the positions of property managers that aren't necessarily experts that have been up on the roof, that understand what's going on. So it's forcing our industry to be able to level up not only inside our expertise, how we're doing repairs, but in how we communicate to our customers, the experience that they have. Uh, you know, it's, it's evolved to a point that we can do beautiful work and we can still get fired. Right? We can still not get the next job simply because the experience that they had was underwhelming. 

Chad Westbrook: <affirmative>. Right? Sales, sales makes a promise. Operations has to deliver on that promise. And that is really what's pushing everything above and beyond. 'cause the technology, I mean, you said Chick-fil-A, I mean, you go to Uber, right? Like UPS will tell me it's two stops away. Now our customers wanna know how many stops away are our truck. Right. You know, and that's naturally leveling us up, making the expectation higher, but pressing all of us to be able to take this to the next level 

Tracy Donalds: Disney land fast 

Chad Westbrook: Has, there you go. 

Heidi Ellsworth: Yeah. You know, I I, to that point, I think there is a huge change that is going on when we really look at the, um, purchasing agents. To your point, and I can remember talking about this in the past, is that, um, purchasing agents now are kind of a how to or YouTube, you know, they go onto YouTube, how does this work? How does roofing work? And if you aren't taking your company to that next level of really communicating and showing them and being in front of them, they're gonna be looking in a lot of different places that they never had a chance to look before. 

Chad Westbrook: I remember having a training with my sales team, this was probably 2018 and the sales training was about how our customers can go on YouTube and actually find out more about the roof system than our salesman actually understand about it. Right. So it's, it's going into the point that our customer has the ability and the resources to get the information they need, right? So we gotta influence that experience and ultimately what the end result is. Because a lot of times it's more than a roof leak, right? It's more than a roof replacement. It's, it's, uh, investment into their business to be able to get them a longer term vision. 

Heidi Ellsworth: Yeah. And with their tenants and the equipment and everything else they have there. You really, roofing and roofing respect, I feel, as I've seen as you gentlemen have over the years, is we now, we are a profession of craftsmen and women. We are a profession of business owners. And that is the expectation that everyone has out there. We just had a great, um, presentation on branding and how important that is to this market. So chat, hold on to that because a lot of, um, first of all, I wanna say to everybody in here, um and if there's anybody online on YouTube right now, if you have questions, please put those into the comments or the chats and we can get those to you. But if you have questions, this is all, this is a podcast, it's about you all. So if you have questions, just raise your hand as we're going along and we're gonna stop, we're gonna take those questions and ask these gentlemen, see what they think. Um, what I would love to do, especially for everyone in here, is a little bit of a recap and everyone who's watching on YouTube right now, is to talk about kind of your three top takeaways, Chad, on what contractors and so maybe your takeaways that you gave, right? Mm-hmm <affirmative>. Your top three. Take takeaways on, on what contractors should really be thinking about on service and maintenance going into 2025. 

Chad Westbrook: Ooh, specifically related to my topic? 

Heidi Ellsworth: Yeah. Or, or you've been listening to everybody else, so you have to wanna throw some other stuff. Greg <laugh>. Yeah. 

Chad Westbrook: Yeah. Look on yourself. That's what he took away. 

Heidi Ellsworth: Um, 

Chad Westbrook: No. So there's, there's been a lot of really cool things. And the part I love about all of us up here is that we all have an extremely unique way of how we got up here, right? Whether it was, you know, Cody and and your story, Greg's, Tracy's, I mean, everybody has their own unique spin on it. Uh, but I'll say one of the great conversations that I had, um, outside of this is that everybody here can say that you have a great business, but to me, that doesn't mean anything to me. The only way that I know that I have a great business, or do you guys should know that you have a great business is if your customer says it's great, right? Because we can do everything all day long. We can have the best processes, the best people, all that kind of different stuff. 

Chad Westbrook: And if we don't have a customer that's raving about what we're doing enough to be able to give us the next job or even more work, that's one of, I'll say, the best conversations that we took away. Um, couple other things that I think, uh, I spoke about that had some, uh, some noise around the room was Saturdays. Uh, so we talked a lot about, um, house accounts and different things like that and how we just, we just feel these customers are just gonna give us work 'cause they like us and that they just give us work. That's how it is. And in a really aggressive sales, uh, approach that we had is that when we would call a customer and they said, uh, you know, Hey, I got a roofer, I'm fine. Or I'll give you a call when something comes up. We would place that, that follow up in the CRM on Saturday. So as soon as we got any type of rain that would come into Atlanta or whatever metro it was, we would put calls directly in there. 'cause I knew if I could get to that customer faster, right? Just like what Tracy was saying, the faster that we can get to value was the more likely it is that we can, we can get a job. So, um, putting that customer experience first, you know, the Saturday thing, I know we talked a lot about 

Chad Westbrook: Mm-hmm <affirmative>. Uh, and then I think the other thing was that a player profile, right? It's not about hiring someone that you think is good, it's about knowing exactly what that position needs to perform for the business to be able to get the end result. 

Heidi Ellsworth: Yeah. No, that's great. I love it. And I love how you just said, and I think that's great. This is what buzzed after, after, after I talked and this is what people were asking about. I love that, Cody. Yeah. What did you hear out there? 

Cody Klein: Yeah, same deal for me. So the conversations have kind of expanded outside of this room. And last night I went to dinner with 22 guys and got to, well and and girls and I got to have the conversations around, um, what's actually happening in their business. And I feel like there's two main points that I would like for everyone to leave here with. And it was like, um, kind of a, a topic of conversation last night. It was like, Hey, this isn't quite happening for us. Or, Hey, you know, we're, we're feeling the re repercussions of X, Y and Z, where, you know, maybe their first quarter didn't go the way they thought it would. 

Cody Klein: And I think the, the point to remember is that everything that everything that happens in your business is the outcomes. We need to remember that those outcomes happen from the inputs 

Cody Klein: And so we need to measure the inputs. So if we don't have the opportunities, if we don't have the leads, if we don't have the roofs to walk, we need to take a look at what are we doing to generate those. And so that would be point number one for me is like, measure your inputs. And point number two. And part of my, you know, one of the topics I spoke about yesterday is really understanding the problems better than your competitors. So what are the building owners or the facility managers or the property managers, like, what have they dealt with in the past? What are they dealing with currently? Why are you there? And what is their desired outcome? And when you can bridge the gap between what are they experiencing now and what would they like their de or, you know, what is their desired outcome? You can, you can be the bridge from point A to point B. And then honestly, the, my favorite takeaway, which was not my topic, was really what Greg spoke about earlier. Just, you know, really focusing on the business man over the business plan. 

Heidi Ellsworth: So, or 

Cody Klein: Woman. Or woman. 

Heidi Ellsworth: Thank you, <laugh>. Um, those are awesome. I, and I, I wanna make one point to that, Cody, I just, sorry, but it came to my mind right now. We're seeing a lot that is coming to fruition from all that work in January and February, and I think that is a hundred percent spot on. It may seem like you're just on that, you know, bike trying to pedaling as fast as you can in January and February, but nothing's really coming together. And then all of a sudden March hits and all of that starts blooming, which will come to yours too. Yeah. 

Cody Klein: Yeah. It could be that, or it could be the, um, opposing view of that where it's like, things are not happening now in March and we need to look back and say, what did we not do in March exactly in January or February that we need to do in March and April to ensure we have a good strong May, June, July. 

Heidi Ellsworth: Yeah. Yeah. Greg. 

Greg Hane: Um, my first takeaway, um and it's not so much what I said, but I think that Will, has done a great job of assembling, uh, an agenda to equip all of you to get better at service. I, I have been really impressed with all the presentations and I think everybody's done a great job. And I was thinking about this last night and I said to myself, you know, I wonder how many people are gonna walk outta here feeling like they've been drinking out of a fire hose and they really aren't sure how they're gonna go about getting all this implemented. And one of the things I focused on today, the main thing I focused on today was the, as I said, the container, not the beings. It's working on yourself as a human being to build the capacity to address these things. And, um, so I got a lot of nice feedback from people on that. Um, but I do see when I'm working with and these guys see this too, okay, they may not put words on it this way, but, but when we're working with contractors and they're not making progress, the problem is not, you don't know what to do. The problem is your unwillingness to do it or your inability to figure out how to do it. And that is a you problem, not a process problem. And, um, I think you all need to keep that in mind. Now, that's not three things, but that's a major takeaway for me. 

Heidi Ellsworth: Actually, that was a major takeaway for me too. Um, so working on myself self and also, I like what you just said is it's, sometimes it's, I'm the and not, sometimes, more often than not, I am the one who's in the way, right, of my business growing. And so I think that is a huge takeaway. 

Greg Hane: The one of the, I read some research that by someone that said that when you have a problem, 80% of the solution is inside of you, only 20% is, um, outside of you. And, uh, uh, if, if I can elaborate just a little bit. So there's a contractor that came up in conversation earlier. Someone mentioned Rackley Roofing, and Curtis Sutton has built a wonderful organization there and he's really great about having people come in and he'll talk with them about how he does service. He's very generous about that. And when people do this, most of them do it wrong. They walk in and they ask him what he does. That's the wrong question. The correct question is, why are you doing this? Because we had some con, someone from over here asked a question earlier today, I believe about whether dispatch should be centralized, if you have multiple offices or if it should be, uh, localized. And if it rackley may do it one way one year and do it the next way the next year and be successful either way because of why they are doing it. So it's not what you're doing, it's why you're doing it. And that falls back to working on yourself. 

Heidi Ellsworth: Yeah, that's great. Tracy. 

Tracy Donalds: Uh, I talked a lot about operations and especially the internal operations of an organization. Um, I see it all the time where owners have no problem, uh, employing technicians and building trucks. Uh, but they have trouble building the internal operations to support that staff. And so much of what we do in service is not roofing. It's communication. It's all the stuff that lies within the office. And so what we really need to remember is we deal in an industry of need, not of an industry of want. And like I said earlier, we're not competing for work. Think about how much roofing jobs there are out there. We're competing for people. Now think of how much service work is out there. Every market has maybe three or two contractors that really, really care about service. So there is so much opportunity out there, but you have to have the internal operations to do the work. You have to support your team. You can't expect your team to work 120, uh, miles an hour all the time. And I talked about Chick-fil-A a lot, and if you count the number of people working in the Chick-fil-A, they have twice as many people working then the place next door. 

Tracy Donalds: And they're making three times the amount of money because their, their cus or their, uh, employees can actually do what's expected of them. They have the time to get the customer's issue turned around quickly. So remember your internal people and give them the tools and the capacity and the time they need to keep your customers happy. And your customers will keep coming back to you day in and day out. 

Heidi Ellsworth: Okay. I'm gonna remind everybody, if you have questions, just raise your hand. You can. Uh, I'm, I'm looking and I'm interrupt, but I wanna go just a little bit tactical. So one of the things I love is when, um, contractors as we're we're talking out here and they say, this is one thing I would would've liked to hear about, right? This is one thing, and I think they've already probably are going to will saying, we wanna do this next year. Um, which is a, I think a responsive, a great conference when you're like, I'm coming next year, can we do this? Um, and that is, we had them talking about what, how do you put together a service truck? What products, how do you decide on the products in the service truck? What, what kind of goes into that? And I don't know if any of you had some of those questions thinking about all this and how to put it together, but let's, um, let's just give some of your thoughts on that. 

Tracy Donalds: Well, I think it probably goes back to your region and your customer base and what kind of work you do. I mean, obviously in service we need to prepare to or be prepared to tackle a bit of everything, but that only goes to some extent. 

Tracy Donalds: Um, so I think a lot of times instead of, would you say it's not what it's why or maybe it's not what you carry, but it's what you carry it in 

Tracy Donalds: Right? And are you, do you have the right vehicle enough to carry enough product of whatever it happens to be, but you know, your area, you know what material you're of. And as far as which material, just like there's tons of different ways to be successful in roofing. There's tons of great repair materials out there. And we were having a conversation yesterday about, uh, coating and repair products. And I chose my coating and repair product the same way I would choose my service department who helps me the most, who helps me train my people, who responds when I have a question, who's gonna go explain something to a client that I don't understand? Who else? Uh, yeah, 

Cody Klein: Sure. I think Tracy had the advantage of being able to go first. And, uh, it's, it's hard to say much else outside of that. I agree with everything he said. The only thing that I see kind of changing, uh, here recently is that the evolution of coating products and liquid applied, um, products to be able to carry less on a service truck is definitely evolving. And I see that more and more so with the guys in the commercial roofer university and community. It's like they're able to go from a box truck to a van. And I had some, one of the guys told me at lunch today that they just, um, condensed down to a utility bed. So, ah, um, you know, leveraging those liquid applied products, 

Tracy Donalds: One comment on liquid applied, uh, one comment about the liquid applied, I think it can be, tend to be overused a little bit. Okay. Remember what I said? Treat others the way you want to be treated. Provide the kind of service you want receive in the, in the fu in the future. If I have a 2-year-old car, I don't want somebody to make a repair on it with something that doesn't match or is gonna avoid the warranty. So repair products definitely have their place, but don't be out there avoiding somebody's warranty or putting a green patch on a red roof or anything like that, because you wouldn't want that. Right? 

Heidi Ellsworth: Yeah. One second. 

Chad Westbrook: So Tracy, um, 100% right. So one of the biggest things that I run into, especially with contractors who are growing and bringing in new foremans, new trucks, different things like that, is all the different ways that they could have learned what they do. Uh, something as simple as an open seam on a TPO roof. How are we gonna fix it? One person's gonna tell me cover tape, the other person's gonna tell me they're gonna clean it and they're gonna heat weld it back down. Someone else is gonna tell me they're gonna put liquid, uh, some type of liquid membrane over it. All three of those are different products that will be on the truck. There's different labor associated with it. Is it warranty approved That roof is less than 20 years old? I'm gonna assume that there's some type of manufacturer warranty connected to it, right? 

Chad Westbrook: So like for like, is is one of the biggest things we put inside there. Um, the other part is if you look at the invoices that you guys have over a duration of time, you'll see what materials you are using, which will tell you what materials you either a need to stock within your shop or b stock on the truck. One of the hardest things that I had to come across is I, I did a lot in self storage, which basically meant they bought anything with four walls and a roof on it. <laugh>. Uh, I didn't know if I was going to a brand new, uh, prefab metal building or I was going to a, a, you know, old tore down, um or half tore down most of the time, <laugh>, uh, you know, uh, warehouse. I had no idea what I was getting into, right? So anytime I had, uh, variables like that, I had leak diverters on the truck because at the end of the day it was about my customer being able to run their business. And my guys, as soon as they got on site, they're assessing it. But I am stocking my truck based upon what I'm consistently using. And you said regions absolutely right. We're gonna carry, you know, EPDM down inside Florida, probably not. But if we're up in Chicago, I'm gonna have more modified than anything just because what the roof systems are up there and how those territories, uh, ultimately grew. 

Heidi Ellsworth: Excellent. Excellent. And we have a question over here, Stephanie. 

Stephanie: Yes. Um, obviously the repair maintenance service industry is great. And talking about our, um, our techs on the roof, what can we do in the industry and what is maybe the NRCA doing to make sure that when we hire new employees, that we are training them to be an excellent roofing contractor? 'cause it's, 
Stephanie: Everybody is able to become a, a roofer, but so what can we do, um, locally and n nationally to make sure we have great employees coming into the industry? 

Heidi Ellsworth: Great. So for, um, everyone out there just in case, make sure they heard Stephanie, she's asking about training and how are we training our next, um, our employees coming in, what are some things that are happening with the NRCA and what are some things you can do locally? So I'll go ahead and start real quick on the NRCA start part of it, um, I recommend everybody look into their track program, which is all training and pro certification, which is actually a certification for installers in the field. Um, great stuff. You can find all of that on Roofers Coffee Shop, but we can also get you that information. So those are some, that's one of the big things that we're seeing right now with NRCA coming through there. 

Tracy Donalds: And track is free if you're an 

Heidi Ellsworth: NRCA member and track is free if you Yeah. As an NRCA member. So if you're not an NRCA member, very, I think one of the most important memberships for your company. Chad, thoughts on training? 

Chad Westbrook: So first I would, I would always go back to process, right? There's a very specific experience that your company delivers to your clients, and you wanna make sure that stays exactly where it's at. So having that journey or something along that side that, that I shared within mind. The second part is you have hard skills and you have soft skills, right? Uh, one, do I know how to put a patch down? Do I know how to do it right? We've, I think we've all mentioned the NRCA, uh, repair guidebook for low slope. It's beautiful and it's consistent, uh, to where everybody operates the same way. The most beautiful part, it's a PDF that you can put on the phone. So there's never a question of how do I do this repair? So you don't run into the same issue, right? We have an open seam and how are we doing it? So consistency, the soft skills is something that I'll say hasn't really been, uh, addressed to, I would say my liking just within the industry. So checking in, checking out, right? Which you can, uh, lean a lot on if you have technology providers or something like that to help you with the, um, automation that you might have. But that's something you would need to figure out for your business, right? Within your journey to be able to say, this is the experience I want my client to have. So these are the things that I'm gonna do. 

Heidi Ellsworth: That sounds great, Cody. 

Cody Klein: Yeah. Two parts to my answer. And so this is right up our wheelhouse. This is exactly what we do. So we look at every business as having four main functions, right? We have, we have to generate opportunities with marketing. We have to convert those opportunities with sales. We have to produce whatever our sales team promised through production, and then we have internal operations. And for all four of those functions, we look at getting everybody on the same page as three levels. Okay? So level one is systemizing the business. And so when somebody comes into our organization, you have to show them what you do. We love visual representations with flowcharts. So flowcharts for the marketing process, for the sales process, for the production process, for all the different types of things that you produce. But when you can show people what you do, you have the playbooks for how to do it and who does every single step of that process, it's a complete game changer and and a culture shifter for bringing people into your, into your world. 

Cody Klein: And then I think the second part to my answer is really, I'm gonna lean on what Brian Mitchell said in his virtual presentation the other day. He said, um, you know, it doesn't have to be this fancy, you know, uh, mockup, a roof mockup in, in a, in a huge facility. It could be two pieces of plywood out in the, uh, you know, in the parking lot. Yeah. And you, you're just, you know, uh, I don't know, putting down a cap sheet or I, whatever his, you know, actual reference was. But yeah, I don't think it has to be overthought. I think it's just building that culture of like, Hey, we're here to get 1% better every day. And, um, continuing to instill that throughout the organization. 

Heidi Ellsworth: Ah, very cool. Is it okay if I Yeah, go ahead, <laugh>. 

Greg Hane: Um, I'm gonna tackle this a little different way. I think the ideal way to handle training, um, is to have your field staff train the field staff, which means that in a service truck, the foreman's, one of the foreman's jobs is to train the helper. And he should be, we've heard a lot about scorecards. Okay, you gotta have a scorecard. And so what you do is you go to the helper. Is he, is he teaching you stuff? No. Okay, then that's, that's not Okay. Alright. So that's a piece the service superintendent should be responsible for making sure that the crews have the training they need. And I have no problem with relying on the NRCA or any other organization, but ultimately the service superintendent is, in my view, the guy that's ultimately responsible for the quality of what happens in the field. And that means he's ultimately responsible for making sure that the training work that they need gets done. 

Tracy Donalds: And to kind of tackle onto that. It needs to be repetitive. Um, I don't like the word training. Training means we kind of went through it one time. I like the word practice. We're having service practice today. What are we, are we practicing the fancy stuff? No. When football teams go to practice, they practice the basic stuff. That's what we need to be practicing the basic stuff, the soft skills and the hard skills, right? Put 'em through a role play training where they have to come in through and pretend the leak's in your building, right? So that's one thing. Second thing, I think the last question kind of ties into this question a little bit, because who's teaching us how to make repairs? Is Manville gonna come in and show you how to do repairs? Is Carlisle gonna come? I love 'em. They're great companies, but they're here to sell you truckloads of material. 

Tracy Donalds: The repair companies and the, the coding companies are the ones, unfortunately the only ones who are training us right now in office. So that's how we're learning to Chad's point. So you have to take control of that. You have to build your own programs to practice the basics. And last thing, pay your foreman to do it. I had a bonus for every one of my foreman if their technician gets the foreman job $2,500 immediately. So then I combine my training program with my compensation program. Now my foreman are picking a little bit better technician <laugh>. They're not gonna pick their dimwitted nephew. 'cause I can't make any money off that kid. <laugh>. I'm gonna pick a little bit smarter person. And if you needed a foreman today and I told you, Hey, I got this guy that's been with you for two years. He's been vetted, he knows his way to the bathroom. You trust him. He knows how to make repairs. 2,500 bucks. You might say, Hey, do you have three of them, <laugh>? Because I take 'em right 

Heidi Ellsworth: Now. Excellent. Hang on. Okay. Hey, we go. 

Greg Hane: So when I was training the service department, working with the service department at K Post and Tracy was the service manager, I walked in there one day and I saw something that was happening in there at that time every day. And what I would call it is training. They're in the morning and they're, he and Heath and the superintendents are sitting down with the techs and they're reviewing all the paperwork for the purpose of teaching the, the techs how to do a better job of doing the paperwork they were training every day. Now, that didn't go on forever, okay? And there were people that already knew how to do the paperwork and they didn't have to do that. Okay? They're gone. But everybody else, were getting trained every day. So if you think this is a once a month thing, you're a kid in yourself. Now, it doesn't necessarily have to be an everyday thing, but it has to be very regular. 

Heidi Ellsworth: Excellent answers. Excellent question. Thank you. More questions? Okay. I happen to have a few more. Okay. Um, okay. I wanna talk about, and uh, Greg, you're gonna love this one. You have the microphone, so this is perfect. Um, pitfalls. What if, if you were, as you're talking to everyone here and everyone out in YouTube land, the biggest pitfall that they need to be careful not to step in 

Greg Hane: To, to do what? 

Heidi Ellsworth: To not to have to have big problems with their service department. So pitfalls of service. 

Greg Hane: I think that, um, the biggest problem I see that contractors have in building a vibrant sales organization is lack of proper engagement from the owner of the company. When I used to train and I would walk into K post, which at that time was a 60 or $70 million a year company, Steve Little, the president stopped what he did and spent time with me. When I walk into Rackley Roofing, Curtis stopped what he did and spent time with me. And when I told Curtis, or I told Steve something needed to happen, it got attention. Now it didn't always get done, but it got attention. Okay. But when I have worked with people where they delegate service to somebody else, okay and the owner's not actively engaged, service does not normally grow nearly as fast or at all. 

Tracy Donalds: Excellent. So that's Tracy. Yeah, I would, I would say to that point, almost on a broader general or a broader view, what the boss cares about. Everybody cares about. And one of our peer groups, we go and tour other contractors' offices. And when you take a, a tour through Rackley Roofing and you talk to Curtis, you see why every single one of his people eats, sleeps and breeds service. If you go through, we just went through, uh, Belden Roofing. Brad's one of the four most safety experts in the world. And every single one in his organization eats, sleeps and breeds safety, right? Steve Little, every single person at KO is a salesperson because Steve is a salesperson and he eats, sleeps and breeds sales. So remember that speed of the captain, speed of the crew, what you care about, they're gonna care about. 

Heidi Ellsworth: That's a takeaway. I'm taking that home. Speed of the captain, speed of the crew, just saying. 

Cody Klein: Same <laugh>. Yeah. The, uh, for me, um, I thought about it a little more esoterically. So I think we have to have a vision that is transparent to our team. And so if they can't understand what the North Star is and where we're headed as a company, people run out of runway. And so when they, if you're losing people, if you're, you're losing people and you're feeling like your, your service department isn't humming along, like things aren't clicking, it's probably because they don't understand where you're going and they can't see the vision for that. And so there's been a couple tools that have been mentioned in almost everybody's presentation and one of those being the scorecard. And I think there's two linchpins to a successful service department. There's, there's probably more than that, but two that I'll share with you guys. It's the scorecards, which like I said have already been spoken about, but having a scorecard for every single conversion that you want to see, Hey, is this happening? 

Cody Klein: Well, that's a conversion, right? Are the, uh, bids that are going out or are the calls coming in actually getting bids? Are the bids actually getting, uh, you know, sold? Are the the sales getting to, you know, how fast are we getting to those? And so having those scorecards to tell the actual story of what's going on and then having a consistent pulse where it's like, hey, every 90 days we're re-imagining what is the, what is the north star for this 90 days? Checking on that every 30 days. And then even, you know, looking at the scorecards on a weekly basis to make sure that you're always rowing in the same direction. And not just that you're rowing in the same direction, but you have everyone behind you or working alongside of you rowing in the same direction as well. 

Chad Westbrook: So I'm gonna take a, a slight variable pearl, uh, variable probably to all of your guys is, so one, um, it was really quick for me to be able to say people, uh and Greg, when you say, uh, leader not involved, to me, that comes down to employee clarity. Um, I've, I've had the opportunity to have really, really involved leaders and I've had really disconnected leaders. But the difference between my success inside those two was I knew exactly what I needed to, what exactly what I needed to do. Where when that leader was not there, I was crystal clear on what I needed to accomplish in order for me to be able to hit my goal for him or the company to be able to hit their goal. Now as that works its way down, that's where I, I feel everything falls apart. So in my presentation, I, I said, does your helper know how he is a part of the business? Does he truly understand how tied into profitability he is? And most of the time I see a helper show up, he works 40 hours, he gets a check, he goes home and he comes right back. But truly the difference between, you know, let's just say five to five plus points on work orders can be helpers correctly executing their spot to be able to improve the GPM on every single ticket. 

Heidi Ellsworth: Oh, excellent. I have one more. Okay. 

Greg Hane: There has been a lot of conversation from many of the presenters about the importance of processes and procedures. And I think one of the things that I see, one of the mistakes I see being made is that you design these processes and procedures around what is easy and most effective and efficient for you. No <laugh>. You design your processes and procedures around what's best for your customer and if that makes your life more difficult, tough. This is about taking care of your customer, not taking care of what your boss thinks is important because, because he doesn't know. Okay, you gotta, so an example of this is and we were talking about this in one of the peer groups the other day, is that when you have a major rain, you gotta take people off your production crews, okay? And train them up to get out there because they need to get their leaks fixed. Okay? And when the, and when the boss says, oh, we can't do that because it's gonna screw up our production schedule, what he's really saying is he doesn't care about that customer's leak. He only cares about his production schedule. And that mindset goes through the whole organization on a, on a subtle level, okay, you design your processes and procedures, there's nothing wrong with making it easy for you, but does it make it easy for the customer? 

Heidi Ellsworth: Right? So good. 

Tracy Donalds: Back to Chick-fil-A, is it easier for them to put three people out in the snow or in the heat of the day to take your order? It'd be easier for them to just let you drive up to the machine, right? And order. But no, it's better for you. And so it's harder for them. 

Heidi Ellsworth: Yeah, that's so good. Okay, I'm gonna ask another little tactical question, but this is kind of a summary 'cause we talked a lot about this through all the presentations and that is preventative maintenance selling prevent preventative maintenance. Greg, let's just hit on that topic. 

Greg Hane: I asked her to ask this <laugh>. So does anybody here not wanna sell preventive maintenance? I didn't think so. You all do. Okay, so I think there's a piece missing. I've listened carefully to all these presentations. First of all, let's understand that selling preventive maintenance is one of the most difficult sales that you can make because you're trying to get people to buy something for a roof that's not leaking. Okay? But putting that aside, I had an interesting conversation many years ago. So I got a call from a roofing contractor who probably all of you would know by name, whose name has not been mentioned here, but he's a large contractor, well over $50 million in revenue. And he says, I need for you to talk to my VP of sales because we're having trouble selling our program. Well that is his preventive maintenance program, right? And so I got on the phone with the preventive, with the, uh, the vp and I said, well, I said, explain to me what's going on. And he said, well, we're having trouble with selling our program. I said, how many of them are you selling? He said, well, not very many. I said, okay, why are you trying to sell, sell these things? And he said, well, first of all, he said, when we sell one, we get extra money. He's exactly right about that 

Greg Hane: Okay? Number two, he said, when we go up and inspect that roof, we find other stuff. And he said, that's higher margin work. Hmm, no, it's the highest margin work. Okay, great. It's absolutely true. He said number three, he said, it's a way for us to have contact with the customer. Absolutely correct. I said, anything else? He said, no, doomed to fail. My God, he has no chance of being successful. And if you're not sitting there laughing at the absurdity that came out his mouth, you're guilty of this too. Everything he said was about what was in it for him. He didn't mention the benefit of the customer once. And when your people go out to sell this stuff, if they're trying to sell it, you're gonna lose. Figure out what that person needs, needs and give them that. If that means, if that means service, give them service. 

Greg Hane: If that means a new roof, give them a new roof. Don't go in there. I'm gonna sell 'em this or I'm gonna sell 'em that. Give them what they need. Now here's the other piece of this. I used to work as a roof consultant for Kroger, and this was 20 some years ago, but when I did that, they had a policy that they did not do preventive maintenance on their roofs. And so they hired me to be their roof consultant and we were doing preventive maintenance on their roofs within a month. Why? I didn't call it preventive maintenance. They call me on the phone and they say, Hey, we've got this problem. And so I went and looked and I said, well, you could do this and this and this. And they say How much? I said, oh, about $15,000. They said, fine. It was preventive maintenance. Okay? So don't call it preventive maintenance. What you say to people is, we wanna show you a way to save money on your roof. They all wanna do that. None of them wanna buy preventive, but they all wanna save money on the roof. And then frame what you're going to be sharing with them around how it can save them money and your closing ratios will skyrocket. 

Tracy Donalds: Right. To that same point, I want to show you how you can spend less money with me. I used to go into people's office and say, Hey, if I sell you a roof, guess what? I, I don't make any money whatsoever. I make the most money I can possibly make. If I can push off you getting a roof for as long as possible and save you the most money. That's how I make money. And that's really a big door opener. Uh, second thing I would say about this is, uh, the more of these you have, the more of these you can figure out how to sell or even give away for the first two years, it really will help your scaling issue. I think at K post now they have about a thousand buildings on their preventive maintenance program. That's a thousand work orders that they get to go do at any time really that they want. And now if I have a bunch of work, I could do whatever I want. I'm not so concerned about my backlog, now I add another truck, now my speed of service increases and my level of trust gets even better than it was before. And now they're gonna listen to me when I try to do a recommended work or I talk to 'em about preventive maintenance or something like that. 

Chad Westbrook: <laugh>, I was just gonna throw, throw you a shout. Um, Cody, uh and in your presentation you were talking about the compound effect, right? And being able to start each year with those preventative maintenances already in place. Um, that was the, the world I ran, right? So on the national account side, I had accounts that, uh, you know, were four or $5 million a year inside service, but they didn't start at zero. I already had three quarters of a million already done, right? Whether it was through preventative maintenance or I was doing capital budgets or even operational budgets, all that stuff was already set. So as you grow the business, I mean it's a huge, huge part behind it, but the compound effect will be a, a huge impact to the success. 

Heidi Ellsworth: Is this all coming together? 

Tracy Donalds: And one more note Yes sir. About the scope. I see far too many preventive maintenance plans that are far too complicated. Far too complicated. I stole his idea and he knows it. Far too complicated. Easy to understand is easy to sell and it's easy to carry out when we go get our oil changed. They change the oil, they check the lubricants, they may take the tires. They don't do 87,000 things. They do six things and they do it well quickly. 

Tracy Donalds: <laugh>, this is this, this is exactly, we work together. This is how it was. 

Greg Hane: So as, as a roof consultant, I would go to a contractor and and say, give me a proposal for and I would give him an idea, but gimme a proposal for preventive maintenance on this property. And I would get it and I would get out a red. Yeah, yes. It's gonna be 52 pages and I get out a red pen. I'm going, we're not doing that. We're not doing that. We're not doing that. What was he thinking? We're not doing that. We're not doing that. And so just what, what you, what you guys all do, it's like going to the, to the auto dealer because you have a scratch on the right rear quarter panel of your car that you want to get buffed out and you get out of the car and you throw the keys to the guy and say, I'll be back in a week for the quote and then leave when you get back. 

Greg Hane: He's gonna give you a price for painting this, painting that new upholstery tending the windshield, putting, that's what your scopes of works look like. You have to have in intelligent conversations with the building owners to understand what their needs are, what their situation is, so that you can frame what you're going to be presenting to them in the context of what they want. Okay? Because when I get, I have, I got a quote for $35,000 on a shopping center that had not leaked in three years. Okay? And so we eventually awarded it and guess what? It wasn't to that roofer. 'cause he doesn't understand. I'll get off my soapbox now. 

Heidi Ellsworth: Okay, 

Greg Hane: Good. Treat others the way you want to 

Tracy Donalds: Be treated. 

Heidi Ellsworth: Exactly. We have one more question that I wanna make sure we get to and upfront. I wanna say, um, for Service Con, there have been some important sponsors and I want to mention they're up here. Um, SRS thank you, center Point Connect, all of these gentlemen, roofers Coffee Shop, we have it proactive. That's one I'm looking up there. I was making sure we didn't miss anybody, but I wanna just say thank you to all those sponsors who helped make this possible. But I also want to end, I want our last question to be about technology. And that really made me think about the sponsors. It made me think about Center Point Connect, it made me think about Roof Hub and SRS. It made me think about the importance of technology to all of you. So advice and then from this panel advice, you people are out here going, what should I be using? What should I be doing? What is some of your advice is gonna be our last question. 

Tracy Donalds: Don't think that the software is going to, you'd have to do work the way the software does work, make the software work the way you do work. All of the softwares are adaptable enough to integrate to your workflow or your service journey like Shadow was talking about. They can all be molded to do work. How you do work and the one you choose is the one you can get your people to use just 'cause you think it might be the best. If your people don't use it. It's worthless. 

Heidi Ellsworth: Culture, culture, culture, culture. 

Greg Hane: On the other hand, <laugh>, I agree with this, but on the other hand, many software, uh, technologies have the ability to do things for you that you can't do with paper and pencil. So it makes sense to consider changing some of your processes to take advantage and leverage some of those things. But my advice is this, you cannot solve people problems with technology. Stop trying to do that. It won't 

Cody Klein: Work. 

Cody Klein: So Tom was up here doing his standup bit a little bit ago and I think he was, he mentioned AI and he made a joke about, you know, next year at Service Con we're gonna have seats full of a bunch of robots replacing us, right? And so there's a lot of conversation. AI came up in conversation at lunch today or um, I'm sorry, at dinner last night and lunch yesterday. And I think for the next interim, I won't put a a time stamp on it, but for the next five to 10 years, we don't have to be worried about AI replacing us. It's more, it's not us versus ai. I believe it's you and AI versus you and ai, right? And so it's like we don't wanna sleep on AI because the the next, our competitors, the next guy is, you know, they're gonna overtake us, but right now it's not us versus ai. And so when it comes to technology, that's my advice. 

Heidi Ellsworth: That's great advice. Great advice. 

Chad Westbrook: Their are four parts to a business. And what I've found throughout my time, uh, building businesses, being a part of and leading it as number one is people, uh, Greg, to your point people is number one, you have to have a players and you gotta make sure that they're in the right roles. Two is processes. That's how those people work together. I do not allow technology when we create this technology comes in third and it has to be third because it should make everything that you guys do better, easier and faster. That's my rule with it. Now to Greg's point inside there, there's stuff that technology can do that we can't do on pen and piece of paper. I a hundred percent agree. The automation, all that beautiful stuff, it can make your customer experience so much better, but you have to have the right people in place. 'cause even the greatest technology in the world, if you don't have the right people using it, it's gonna fail. You can have the best technology inside the world if your process right does not follow it, and you, you buy this technology and you change your entire process, everyone of your employees are gonna hate it. People process technology. And only when you have those three do you put goals for efficiency and profit in place. 

Heidi Ellsworth: Excellent. Um, how about a round of applause for these gentlemen? Yes. So beautiful. Thank you. Thank you very, very much for being on this panel. Thank you for your great wisdom and your presentations at Service Con. Um, it's just been phenomenal. Thank you again to all of our sponsors and thank you to everybody here in the audience. Thank you for being live on Roofing Road trips with us. Um, as we bring this great information about service and maintenance going into 2025, exactly what we need. And for everybody out there, thank you. Please visit the SRS and the Center Point Directories on Roofers Coffee Shop, find out what's out there, plus a lot of other great information that you can get On service and maintenance, be sure to check out all of our podcasts, all of our roofing road trips under our RLW section of the site and be sure to subscribe and set those notifications for everybody out here on your podcast so you can listen to us every morning on your way to work. And we'll be seeing you next time on Roofing Road Trips. 

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