High-Altitude View of Roofing's Future - PODCAST TRANSCRIPT

Editor's note: The following is the transcript of a live interview with Piers Dormeyer, the CEO of EagleView. You can read the interview below or listen to the podcast.

Intro: Welcome to Roofing Road Trips, the podcast that takes you on a thrilling journey across the world of roofing. From fascinating interviews with roofing experts to on the road adventures, we'll uncover the stories, innovations and challenges that shape the rooftops over our heads. So fasten your seat belts and join us as we embark on this exciting roofing road trip.

Karen Edwards: Hello and welcome to another episode of Roofing Road Trips from Roofer's Coffee Shop. My name's Karen Edwards, and today I'm really excited to be welcoming Piers Dormeyer, the CEO of EagleView. Piers, welcome.

Piers Dormeyer: Hi Karen. Thanks for having me on.

Karen Edwards: It's great to see you and hear you. So today we're going to be talking all about EagleView's new podcast. So it's a podcast about a podcast. And well, first of all, before we dive into that, why don't you just do a quick introduction, tell our listeners a little bit about you and what you do.

Piers Dormeyer: Okay, sure. Thanks, Karen. Piers Dormeyer. I'm currently the CEO of EagleView. I've been with the business now for going on 12 years, believe it or not. So been on this technology ride in the roofing industry for quite some time. And before EagleView, I spent some time in tech startups and in manufacturing in the roofing industry as well.

Karen Edwards: Wow. So fun fact. Piers and I worked together at EagleView many moons ago, kind of toward the beginning of the journey. So yeah, you've been there a long time and you've seen a lot of changes.

Piers Dormeyer: I have.

Karen Edwards: So I'm curious. I know a couple of months ago you guys sent out a press release. You rolled out your podcast, called The Altitude Podcast. Great name by the way. I love it. It's fitting. Just curious, what inspired you to want to do a podcast?

Piers Dormeyer: Sure. Well, I can't take credit for the name. That goes to Marcy Comer, on my team, but I did think it was pretty apropos. And I think the inspiration for the podcast was really, we spend just a ton of time talking to customers and tech leaders and operations leaders across multiple industries. And what we tend to find is a lot of the stories are just incredibly interesting, and we find ourselves just wanting to communicate that broadly across all of these different groups that we interact with every day.

And one of the really interesting things, whether or not we're talking about a roofing contractor or somebody in public safety on the government side of the business or a utilities customer in oil and gas, is that there's a lot of the same themes that keep coming up. And at the end of the day, what our job really is is to educate our customers and clients about how they can save time and gain efficiencies through tech. And we felt like this was a really good way of getting some of those stories out there.

Karen Edwards: Yeah, it's interesting because you mentioned some industries that are very different, right? We're government, we're roofing, we're oil and gas, infrastructure. But you're seeing patterns.

Piers Dormeyer: Yeah, absolutely. I mean, at the end of the day, there's this one zero-sum game that we all have and it's we can't get any more time. And I mean, you can find a way to do more with less money and stretch people and expand and all of these things, but you can't get any more time. So if there's certain things, certain pieces of technology, certain quote-unquote, the kids are saying hacks, that you can put into your business to help things move along just a little bit smoother, then you owe it to yourself to explore those solutions. And we find them particularly in these areas where you have some type of a field service component where you're going to look at a house, you need to get on a roof, you need to inspect some piece of critical infrastructure. This is really where EagleView shines, and we can deliver just incredible savings in time. And that's kind of a running theme that we see across all of our customer groups.

Karen Edwards: So being in the tech space as long as you have, what are some of the biggest advancements that you've seen? Let's talk in the roofing industry, throughout your journey.

Piers Dormeyer: I think that... There's just been a ton, and I think there's a ton more to do. When you start thinking about tech and roofing, you go back to EagleView, I mean 15 years ago now is about when EagleView came on the scene and you started getting property measurements and data like that. That was just really easy to adopt and implement. You can take people off roofs, especially the real steep ones.

But since then, I mean the business process tools, some of the CRNs, some of the products that are home owner facing that are helping roofing contractors close more jobs. So proposal tech, like what Sumo quotes, developed ways to better keep track of the company cam, right? Tools that are just incredibly helpful for just organizing your data. You're running a business just a little bit more smoothly. All the CRM's, [inaudible 00:05:38], the job nimbus, those platforms we've seen become something that 10 or 12 years ago only the largest contractors were engaged.

And now I think it's really not optional anymore. I think if you're really going to scale and you're going to compete in this much more competitive environment, you've really got to adopt some of those tools.

Karen Edwards: Yeah. And I think we're seeing that those tools are all starting to integrate a little bit better with one another.

Piers Dormeyer: Yeah, I think that's a key requirement. If all of these parts and pieces can't connect and they can't seamlessly fit into your business workflow, and all of your employees can interact easily, because that's really what the expectation is. I mean, at the end of the day, we're all consumers and we're all used to technology being very easy to access, limited number of clicks. So integration into your business is absolutely a requirement. But the other piece is, is that if it's not incredibly easy, we all tend to lose focus. We get pissed off. We don't want to play anymore. It's not only critical, but it's also much more difficult for I think these businesses to make it work. So design's getting better just because it has to.

Karen Edwards: Right. Yeah, that's very well said. So I want to go back to the Altitude podcast and talk... Tell me a little bit about some of the guests maybe that you have, and some of the topics.

Piers Dormeyer: Yeah, so I think it's a little bit of a work in progress. We really have maybe a different charter than some podcasts that you listen to. I mean, today our favorite podcasts or podcasts that might come out once a week or sometimes even a few times a week or even daily in some cases, we're not that. Really the goal here was to really think through, who are some folks that we've talked to that have some particularly really salient points that we think needs to be to be heard, needs to get out there into the world? And the first few episodes, the first, call it season if you will, we were focusing on some leaders across a variety of fields that had some specific expertise that we thought was really important. And I think some of this came up just because we kept getting a lot of the same questions.

So we had folks in the solar, like leaders in solar and in marketing and how they're being successful in a very, very difficult and very rapidly changing environment around solar. And that was really important because we just had a lot of customers that were coming to us every day and saying, "Hey, how should we be thinking about this? Should we be getting in? Should we wait and see?" So we really wanted to highlight some people, and frankly introduce some of these personalities to the rest of our customers so they could go interact and engage on their own and get some of those questions answered for themselves.

I know Scott Rioppele, who we all love. Scott was mentioning to one of my colleagues that he got a lot of inbound questions from folks in the roofing industry about his story, and that was great. Marcus Weidner at Pennoni, probably completely unknown to roofing contractors. He's a engineering firm in Pennsylvania, but had just great ideas on AI and how to implement generative AI and how to be thinking about things like large language models and the fact that you don't need a ton of data and a giant data lake. You need a data pond, maybe a puddle, in order to be effective.

So we were thoughtful kind of about what it is we wanted to get out there with that particular set of episodes. And it wasn't one of those things where we just need to go find somebody for this week. We were really trying to cherry pick some key people. And the next season, which we're working on planning out right now, is going to be very much the same. We have a theme and we're going through a painstaking process of deciding who we're going to invite and what we're going to talk about.

Karen Edwards: Well, I know at the beginning of the podcast, the question in the introduction I, "What if," right? So are you looking for what if there were no limitations? What if? I mean, are you saying, "What could be"?

Piers Dormeyer: Yeah, I think that is one of those key questions and maybe it's "What if, what more? What more could you do? What do we need to see? What is the change that we'd like to see in the industry?" I think as we go forward, one of the areas that we're really interested in is, within this period of volatility that we've seen in the recent years and months with the increasing interest rates and the election year dynamics and are we in a recession? No, yes, no. And we're really looking at how have some of these leaders been able to not just adjust to that, but thrive in that type of environment. How do you plan? What if this happens, then I will do X, y and Z. Scenario planning is one of those kind of key themes that we're really looking at exploring in the next round.

Karen Edwards: Yeah, I like it. And you mentioned two things: solar, which caught my attention, because that seems to be... We've dabbled in solar for a long time, but it feels like we're finally to a place where it might be more accessible. What do you think?

Piers Dormeyer: Yeah, I think so. I don't think solar's going away. I think that that industry, particularly around residential rooftop, solar has yet to reach kind of an equilibrium. So it was fueled by just a ton of growth, a ton of inexpensive capital. There's been lots of ups and downs as legislation shakes out. You've got California's net metering laws. You've got subsidies: yes, no, maybe so. You've got large federal bills, legislation that we don't necessarily know how that's going to land just yet. You've got the potential threat of additional tariffs affecting material coming from primarily Asia looming.

So I don't know what's going to happen. I do think that the industry's maturing. I think you have a handful of companies that have figured out how to manage growth a little bit more effectively. They've become much more, the industry I think is a little bit more resilient and the businesses that are there are there for the long haul. And I think they're able to, I think, manage through the ups and downs a little bit more effectively going forward.

Karen Edwards: So I also want to ask you about AI and drones. How is our industry going to be able to leverage AI? And maybe the answer is, listen to that episode of the podcast. Right?

Piers Dormeyer: Well, I mean AI, it's just the trend. It's not a thing. I mean, I think that writ large, this story's yet to be complete or fully written on this subject. But it's already there, and it's been there for quite some time. I don't think that the threat of generative AI coming into an industry, really any industry in the sense that it's going just to eliminate all of these jobs, is a true threat. I think that that was something that a couple years ago when ChatGPT hit the scenes, it was going to be the end of the legal profession and it was going to be the end of financial services. And I don't think that's going to be the case. I do think that that threat is very, very limited to industries like roofing, that we're a long way away from AI being able to engage with a consumer and ultimately eliminate that human to human interaction in the sales and planning process. And certainly in the operational side of side of the business.

I think that some of these tools, implemented in the business wisely to help you navigate through things like contracts and understand the legal aspects and compliance and codes, I think there's going to be a lot of opportunity to de-risk your business and implement some solutions that frankly, were costing you a lot in just hiring lawyers and professional services firms. So I think that's really exciting. I think that the ability to interact with data to market more effectively, so we're talking about property data that's going to be much more available, that's generally extracted from things like aerial imagery like EagleView and understanding what potentially is a great area to invest marketing resources in or how to engage a customer for a particular project. Lots of opportunity in that space.

But yeah, we'll see how it all evolves. I mean today, even with EagleView, you can in a matter of seconds understand whether or not a house can produce enough energy for it to make sense from an ROI perspective in installing solar panels. And frankly, our drones can help you identify damage on a roof from hail and really, really speed up that whole claims resolution process. So it's already there.

Karen Edwards: And people just, maybe they just don't realize it, that it's being aided by a little bit of AI.

Piers Dormeyer: Yeah, and I think that kind of goes back to the podcast too, right? I mean, it's almost impossible to know what's out there and it feels like for just a lot of folks, where do you even start?

Karen Edwards: That is a good question. Where do you start? EagleView has been really a game changer in the roofing industry and the pioneer. And people were really skeptical at first. Are you seeing more roofing companies embracing technology quicker, I guess? Is there's still that little bit of resistance out there?

Piers Dormeyer: So I think from the early days when we were talking about measuring a roof remotely at that level of accuracy, I think there was a lot of reticence to trust the tech. We don't have that anymore. That's not an issue. I don't think that's the problem. But the question you asked is one of the favorite ones, one of my favorite ones, I get. The kids these days don't know what a 12 o'clock flasher is, right? So that whole VCR that was always flashing 12 when you walked in the living room? So in my house we had a VCR, and that clock was never set. And it wasn't because you didn't want to set the clock on the VCR, it's because it was too damn hard to figure out how to set the clock on the VCR. So when the power went out, you weren't going to go try and relearn that again.

So the reason why I bring that up is, there was always this and you remember this from the early days, but there was always this idea and people would say, "Oh, well this is a, roofing contractors are tech averse, they're not going to adopt technology. This is a waste of time. It's going to take forever to get these guys to use technology. They don't even use email, they don't do this, that and the other thing."

And I think that, I never bought into that. I think that's completely false. And I think it's not just the roofing industry. I think it's all industries, and I think it's consumers and it's people. I can't get my mother to answer the phone, but she'll text me. That VCR was never the right time. The bottom line is that we didn't design tech that was easy enough to use and implement and get a lot of value out of.

So I think that continues to be the challenge, and it kind of goes back to what we were talking about before. It's the integrations. It's making this stuff easy to get the maximum amount of value out of. And when you start designing a cell phone that's more powerful than a supercomputer 20 or 30 years ago, and it has one button on it, I mean it's pretty cool. Or no buttons. Maybe you've solved that problem. And I think that's on all of us on the technology side of this business, is as these capabilities and as these technologies become available, how do we make it really easy to use and get the value out of?

Karen Edwards: Yeah, I think you're probably seeing... A lot of roofing companies are family businesses, right? And as the person who starts the business decides it's time to retire, it's usually their kids, the next generation that are coming in. How do you see that changing the way contractors use technology? I think we're just going to see more of it, because the young ones have grown up with it, right?

Piers Dormeyer: Yeah, I think so. But I also think that over the last 20 or 30 years, technology has also gotten to that generation prior as well. And that generation has become net adopters of technology. I mean, you start thinking about, Microsoft Windows has been around for a long time now and everybody runs their business on these rectangles on our desks and has for years and years. I think the big shift is where the consumer's going. So you absolutely need the next generation of business owners. It's almost a guarantee that they're going to be engaging, they're going to be more comfortable with Instagram and social media and even TikTok and they're going to be engaging with all these channels because it's how they grew up and it's what they know. I think the key thing here is, are you matching how you're going to engage with your consumer?

And the consumer is also growing up, and baby boomers are actually selling homes to Gen Xers and those Gen Xers want to be consuming differently than the baby boomers were. And they're willing to buy things online and they're willing to engage via text and email, which is kind of crazy to me because I'm a little bit old school that way. But they don't necessarily want somebody in their house for two hours talking to them about ridge vents. So, "Point me to the YouTube video where I can learn about a ridge vent in five minutes, then come here and tell me why I should engage with you. Give me some of those options for financing or how can I..." Those are some of the trends that I think we need to be really thinking about.

And I think that when we start looking at areas where I think tech can really grow and expand and solve more problems within this space, it's really focused around, are you giving the homeowner what they need? Do they understand how the project is unfolding? Are you communicating enough? Are you sending imagery? Are you sending pictures? Or do they understand how to interact with you in an efficient, effective way? Because now homeowners want to be able to talk to you in seconds, so your expectations are also shifting quite a bit.

Karen Edwards: Yeah, there are even some contractors that are selling roofs online. People are buying cars online. They're doing it at nine o'clock at night while they're sitting in front of their television. They just want to know, "What's my roof going to cost? Give me a couple of options," and click to buy.

Piers Dormeyer: Go on Tesla.com and just, you don't even have to go the whole way, but go see how easy it is to buy a car online. I mean, it's a crazy few number of clicks. So you know, it's a brave new world.

Karen Edwards: Okay, so while I have you, before I let you go, what's next for EagleView?

Piers Dormeyer: Oh, wow. So EagleView is never, just like when you were here, Karen, we've never met an idea that we didn't absolutely love. Not just like, love. We continue to double down on imagery capture and just getting the highest quality data set that we possibly can. So when we were capturing six-inch imagery, which was great for the time, these days, we captured the hurricanes in one-inch, right, [inaudible 00:23:25]. And so the level of detail and data, and when we do the data analysis work off of that really, really high quality rich imagery, the things that we can extract in the data and all of the information, the accuracy of the roof reports are incredible now, just unbelievable.

But then the things that we can see from a change detection perspective, the work we're doing with drones, looking at anomaly detection, using different types of AI, really just continuing to double down and work on the art of the possible with what we can get from the geospatial data that we capture. So there's lots of different areas that we're going into, but continuing to just kind of push the envelope on the part of the possible on that area.

Karen Edwards: Excellent. Thank you for sharing. So Piers, this has been great. I'm excited. I did listen to an episode of the Altitude podcast before we hopped on here, and I've got about four more I think, to go, to catch up. But yeah, it was very good. So I'm glad that you guys are doing that and sharing information that needs to be talked about and that people need to know.

Piers Dormeyer: Cool. Well, we'll have some more for you here in short order.

Karen Edwards: Excellent. All right. And you can listen to the Altitude Podcast wherever you listen to your podcasts, whether that be on your phone, on your computer. I know you guys have it up on your website as well, so EagleView.com, you can find it there. Thank you again, Piers for being here. And thank you everybody out there for listening. And please follow us on social media. Be sure to check out EagleView. Their directory's on Roofer's Coffee Shop. You can find the podcast there, too. And we hope to see you on a future episode of Roofing Road Trips.

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