Jim Bush - PODCAST TRANSCRIPT

Editor's note: The following is the transcript of a live interview with Jim Bush of Weather Shield Roofing Systems. You can read the interview below or listen to the podcast!

Megan Ellsworth: Welcome to Stories from the Roof, the podcast that brings you tales from the most unexpected vantage point, rooftops. I'm your host, Megan Ellsworth, and on this show, we'll ascend to the top and explore the world through the eyes of those who live and work above. Join us on this unique journey as we uncover the stories, perspectives and histories of roofing contractors. Let's begin our ascent onto the roof.

Hello, everyone. My name is Megan Ellsworth here at RoofersCoffeeShop.com, and you are listening to another Stories from the Roof podcast episode. And today I am with Jim Bush. Hello, Jim, how are you?

Jim Bush: I am well. How are you?

Megan Ellsworth: I am doing just dandy. I'm so excited to hear all about your company and your story. So let's dive right in and have you just introduce yourself and tell us a little bit about your company.

Jim Bush: So, I am the CEO visionary of Weather Shield Roofing Systems. I started the company when I was 19 years old. That was back in 1980. I had kind of an entrepreneurial seizure is how I term it. I had worked after my freshman year of college, worked for a summer job as a commercial roofer for a local contractor. After my sophomore year, got married and then went back to work for that roofing contractor for a few months.

And in 1980, you're probably way too young to know or remember this, but the economy was terrible. The interest rates peaked at 20.5% in late 1980 and that pretty much killed all types of construction, roofing included. So long about Thanksgiving of that year, I unsurprisingly got laid off, but I'm not wired to be laid off. And I thought that would be, I suppose, a great time I thought, my little 19-year-old head, to start my own roofing company.

I thought, well, I've got at least six months of experience working summers, I should be able to do this. And young and dumb, there's the entrepreneurial seizure part. I decided I would start a company. And I remember sitting down at my living room table because honestly I didn't own a desk and sat down with a legal pad and a 10 cent BIC pen and started thinking of names of names.

What will I call this new company? And came up with the name Weather Shield. And that has really served me well for these past now 44 years. One of my better decisions was the choice of name.

Megan Ellsworth: Wow. I love the name, because I mean, that is what a roof is. It's a weather shield.

Jim Bush: I hadn't really thought of exactly those terms, but yes.

Megan Ellsworth: Well, I think it's great. You were ahead of your time. I think it's so brave of you to have started at 19 your own company. That is in itself a feat. So can you tell us a little bit about the career, your career in roofing, how it went from there?

Jim Bush: Sure. First, just a response to your comment about brave of you, I hear comments like that, similar to that quite often where people will say, "Oh, that's so amazing. You started your own business. You've run your own business." And what I say to people often is getting in business is easy. We could start a new business 8:00 tomorrow morning literally. What's hard is to get out.

Not hard to get in, it's hard to get out or more specifically, to get out well. But I think I'm just wired to be an entrepreneur. It's just something that God seems to have put in me, how I'm built. And I feel like for these last 44 years, I've really just been doing what I was born to do, what I'm wired to do and built to do. We're a little better at it today than we were 44 years ago.

Megan Ellsworth: I would hope so.

Jim Bush: Yeah, right. So I started without really anything but a name. I had very few tools. I didn't own a pickup truck. Truth be told, I didn't even own a ladder. I owned a '68 two-door Chevelle Malibu that my wife and I shared and I bought that car for $200 after we got married after our sophomore year of college. And I would dress nicely or as nice as I could at that time, take my two door Malibu and I would park someplace where there were a lot of flat roofs in a neighborhood or in an area.

And I would just go and knock on doors up and down the street. Because I really couldn't afford a lot of gas, so I would walk from one business to the next and just knock on the door and say, "My name is Jim. I've started a new company called Weather Shield. Do you have any roof issues or problems I could help with?" And eventually if you do that enough, somebody would be stupid enough to say, "Yes, I do," to this inexperienced young kid. Or maybe they felt sorry for me, or maybe they saw something in a young man who clearly was a hustler.

I don't know what their motivation was, whether it was stupidity or pity or they liked something they saw. But eventually somebody would say, "Well, as a matter of fact, I do have a roof issue or some roof issues you could look at." So I would immediately drive home. Our next door neighbor was a widow lady who was a very wonderful older lady, and she had an extension ladder left there by her husband who had passed away. And she would let me borrow her ladder. I would tie it to the top of my Malibu, tie it to the front and rear bumper and drive back.

But of course, I can't drive up to the place and let them see that this kid doesn't even own a pickup truck for goodness sakes. I would park a few doors away and carry my ladder through the back parking lots of the neighboring businesses and sneak up on the back of their business and put my ladder up hoping they didn't see me carrying it in. And I'd get up on the roof, I would look around, do my best to figure out what the issue was and what the fix was, whether that was a repair or a replacement or whatever.

And literally having not one other lead, there was no jobs in my... If somebody said yes, I have a roof issue, they got the best service in the world from that moment because I would literally drive home, change my clothes, come back, look at the roof, drive home again and I would figure out what it would take, what it would cost and type up a proposal and drive back there. So I might be back there three hours later, "Here's my proposal," and walk through it with them, "and here's my price."

And again eventually, whether it was out of stupidity or pity or they saw something they kind of liked in this young man, they would say yes. Eventually somebody would say yes. And I would immediately... That was my next thing to do. Rinse and repeat, rinse and repeat and one job at a time. I love the concept of the flywheel, just the flywheel effect and that comes from the book Good to Great by Jim Collins, where you think of a giant metal flywheel and you push and you push and you push and it moves an inch.

Well, that would be me winning one little whether it was a repair or a replacement. And that would be what my wife and I and now by this time our first little child, that would be what we ate on. You eat what you kill. And you push and you push and it moves another inch. But eventually you push and you push and it makes a rotation. And then you push and you push and now there's a little bit of inertia and it makes another rotation. The only real difference is now it's a lot easier to push. And when we push, it goes faster, right?

Megan Ellsworth: Yeah. You have the inertia, the spirit, the passion and the tools to keep it going. So who would you say taught you about roofing? I know you seem pretty self-taught, but anyone that you think of?

Jim Bush: I learned some things from my summer job twice, but that was right at the transition where the marketplace was starting to move from built up, at least in Michigan where we're located, the marketplace was starting to move from built-up to single ply. And we had just started to work with single ply. We had done maybe two or three roofs with single ply at the company that I worked for. And these were small roofs. But I looked at that and I thought at that time, this is the future.

This is where roofing is going to go. And it happened to be that that company had chosen to start with heat weldable PVCs as their single ply of choice. And there, again, I thought, this is where the marketplace is going to go, because it seemed to me at that time that heat welding had a lot of advantages versus then glues. So, we started right in with PVC roofing and there really wasn't anyone to teach me other than reading the spec book for the manufacturer.

But the manufacturers in 1980, '81, this would've been probably '81, they didn't have come to school and get trained or we have the training trailer that we'll bring to your company and we'll train your people on technical skills. We'll teach you how to estimate. None of that was available. So you read the spec book, you tried to figure out how to do it and make it look just like the...

In that time, they were kind of line drawings in the spec book. They weren't even computer generated. And then the inspector would come out and look the roof over and maybe he would offer some, "Your corners are on upside down. Do them like this. Not like that." But you had to be self-taught really. And that's how we started.

Megan Ellsworth: It's just interesting because it feels so different from today's day and age, but also kind of similar in the sense that people just go to the internet to teach themselves now. They have that resource. But also in the roofing industry, there's so many resources now for, like you said, certifications from manufacturers and different associations. So it's interesting.

Jim Bush: And it's better in many ways. I wish I had had a video tutorial of someone to say, "Here's how you do a corner." And in fact, the first roof that I ever did was PVC membrane. There was no unreinforced membrane that you could use to mold around a corner. There were no prefabricated stacks or corners or anything else. It was literally reinforced PVC.

That's what they sold you. Now go figure out how to turn that into a corner or make it weld around a four-inch stack, which was hard, just difficult to do. We were all just pioneering the products and the industry. So in many ways, it's way better today. The teaching is better, the products are better, the accessories are better.
Megan Ellsworth: And we have podcasts like this for people to listen to and learn from as well. So kind of going off of that, what were some of the most valuable lessons you learned about roofing during this time or at any point in your career?

Jim Bush: Honestly, the most valuable lessons I've learned probably were not about roofing, but they were about business and about people and the value of people. I had an experience really early in my life. So I mentioned that I had done commercial roofing for a couple of months and then back to school, and then a couple more months. Well, in between there, I had gone to work for a home builder, worked there for maybe two and a half months, but my crew was comprised of what I would call today red ants.

And red ants are people who love to sting and bite and pick and crawl all over you really just for the sheer joy of picking on you or making you feel miserable or trying to eat you for lunch basically. And in those days, it was almost a test of valor. It was almost a rite of passage or an initiation. If this punk kid can withstand our hazing and not bail out, then he's fit for our company. Well, of course, today if you do that, you simply won't have any employees. It would literally be death to your company.

Megan Ellsworth: Yeah, game over.

Jim Bush: Right. But I learned a lot about what not to do, and that might be one of the most valuable lessons I ever got in my life. I remember thinking, and at that time I would've been 19 years old, and I remember thinking, if I ever get the chance to lead people or to manage people, I want to make sure... I wouldn't have called it culture. Today I would call it the culture.

But back then, I would say I would want to make sure that this is a place where people are valued, where they're treated with respect, where they're lifted up, not pushed down, where we help people to thrive, not purposely pick on them, where we try to keep them here, not see if we can drive opposite of everything that they did. And literally the whole red ant mentality, they did that like that was their real job and the carpentry was just a side gig.
It's almost like they delighted in it. So, one of my greatest lessons and takeaways was the value of people, how important it is, how you treat them and the decision of, boy, I'm going to make sure if I'm ever in a position of leadership management, that I do the opposite of this. And we've really built our company culture.

I was going to say a lot of our success, by far most of our success, and I could even go so far as to say maybe all of it, is based on the fact that we first worry about valuing our people, building into our people. Because what we've learned is if we take care of our people, our people will take care of our customers.

Megan Ellsworth: Yeah and take care of the company too.

Jim Bush: Absolutely. Absolutely. That's how you get loyalty. That's how you get extra effort. That's how you get great customer service going out to your customers because your employees understand that you care about them, you value them and you're literally putting them first. And I hear there's a great debate, should you put your customers first? Should you put your employees first?

And I would say it is impossible to put your customer first without putting your employee first, right? Because business is people. I don't care what anybody says, business is people. You're selling to people. You're dealing with people in all things at all times, and how you do that matters. So the core of our business has grown out of that value for people. We simply want to do business as blessing, and business as blessing starts at home.

It starts with our team and our people so that they can take business as blessing out to our customers, also to our vendors because they're part of it, also to our community and hopefully to their little corner of the world. So that when they go home, they're becoming a blessing in new and better ways to their family, to their spouse, to their kids. They're better husbands, better wives, better parents. I call that the spillover effect, or maybe better, the spill up effect of doing business as blessing.

Megan Ellsworth: I think that's so powerful. And what a good role model and business tactic to... I mean, putting your people first really is the most important thing. And I love that you said by putting your people first, you're putting your customer first and the people you work with and your partners and your vendors. Because if your employees feel like they're being taken care of, they have the space and the energy to take care of your customers. I think that's well said.

Jim Bush: Thank you. I appreciate that. I've worked on a set of I call them laws, the laws of business. They're really directed at your team. They're built around this idea of business as blessing. And business as blessing, as I said, starts at home and then it carries out from there. So if we want to truly bless our customer, if we want our customer to have a great experience, it starts with being a great business.

And so we have a set of 12 laws that we live by, that we measure ourselves against. And when I say we, we actually every quarter survey... We have our people, our team members measure us as a company in how we're doing in each of these 12 areas of the 12 laws. And they're all built really around people.

Megan Ellsworth: Oh, that's so cool.

Jim Bush: If you're interested, I can share them.

Megan Ellsworth: Yeah, I think that'd be great also if we could put that in the show notes for people to enjoy as well so they could maybe implement it in their own companies.

Jim Bush: Yeah, I can give you a document that's the 12 laws of a great workplace.

Megan Ellsworth: Love that.

Jim Bush: Law number one is life giving. Work should be a life giving place where people flourish and grow. And we believe that a business cannot truly thrive unless its people thrive first. So that's law number one. Law number two is noble purpose. Our work must have a higher purpose that contributes to making the world a better place. We're not really here to do roofs, even though what we do is roofs, but what we're here to do is, in our case, bless people.

That's our noble purpose, our higher purpose, is we are here to bless people. We simply happen to do that through doing roofing. So roofing is what we do in terms of our task, but our purpose is always to bless people in and through it. Law three is well run. Everyone deserves to work for a business that works it should. A truly good business should be a place of order amidst the chaos of the outside world.

We live in times of uncertainty, of high anxiety and part of this is because our society has become very unstable. There are very few things that are that still point where we can find solid ground. It's almost as if many parts of our society in our world have become trying to stand on shifting sand. So a truly good business, a great workplace needs to be well run. It needs to be a place of order, a solid point amongst the chaos of the outside world.

Law four is really simple and self-explanatory, and that is everyone deserves great leadership. Great leaders are servants for their people.

Megan Ellsworth: Yes.

Jim Bush: Great leaders are there to pour into their people, to take them where they would not go on their own, to call them up to be the best that they can be. But all of that is in service to people, and everyone deserves that kind of leadership.

Megan Ellsworth: Agreed.

Jim Bush: Law five is do what you love. Everyone should do what they love to do and are best at every day. And when they do that, work is play. When they do that, it's really easy to bring their best self to work every day because the endorphins literally are nature's God's perpetual motion machine. And when I get to do what I love, it just comes out of me. It flows.

Megan Ellsworth: Exactly.

Jim Bush: Law six is professional development. So we as employers have a privilege and also a responsibility to continually pour into our people so that they grow in skill and advance professionally. And if we're not doing that intentionally, because it doesn't just happen, it requires thought, investment, energy, effort, but part of what we need to be great at is making that investment in our people so that they can grow. I believe the most underutilized resource in just about any company is the people who already work there.

Megan Ellsworth: Yes.

Jim Bush: Related to law six, professional development, is law seven, and that is personal development. We believe the workplace is the perfect place to help people grow in wisdom and character and good habits to help them become better people in all areas of their life. And that's what I referred to earlier as that spillover or that spill up effect. So we're interested in helping people with their values, with core behaviors.

We have a list of 26 core behaviors that we teach people, and we repeat those trainings that are simply helping them to say, in terms of character, who am I? But also in terms of behavior, who am I? And they're usually simple little things like practice blameless problem solving or get better every day in some way. When we have a Christmas party or a company event, I will have people come up to me. Usually it's wives or significant others of men who work for us.

And I've had this several times where these women who really I don't know them well, I may have seen them in a company function, but they do the same thing. They come up to me and they'll put their nose right here in the crook of my neck and shoulder, and they'll hug me. And very often they'll just burst into tears and they'll say, "I don't know what you're doing to my husband, but thank you, because he's a different person."

Megan Ellsworth: Oh wow.

Jim Bush: And I live for that because I know then that it's working. That's the best evidence to me that what we're doing... We're not just trying to build better workers, we're trying to help build better people. And it goes back to that noble purpose, to help them be living a noble purpose in their life as well as at work.

Megan Ellsworth: You mentioned blameless problem solving, and that just stuck out to me because I love that. It's so nice to just come into a situation where you need to problem solve and people aren't pointing fingers. I had never even thought of that phrase, blameless problem solving, but that's so good.

Jim Bush: And we treat that, that’s simply a core behavior where we try to teach our people, we're not here to try to figure out whose fault something was. Now, there may be a piece where we need to identify the source of an issue so that we can train, so that we can correct, so that we can get better and learn and grow. Sure.

Megan Ellsworth: Exactly.

Jim Bush: But it's never about blame. It simply is we have an issue and... We love to say it's just an issue. No matter what it is, it's just an issue. So let's focus on the issue. Let's figure out the cause of the issue. Let's figure out what can we do about it. Let's figure out what we cannot do about it, and then let's figure out what we're going to do about it. And that's really the four-question matrix.

When somebody comes to you with a problem, and rather than being their brains and solving it for them, if you simply say, "Please identify the issue clearly for me. What exactly is the issue? What is the root cause? Okay, what do you think we can do about it? What do you think we should not do about it? What should we eliminate? What would work out badly if we tried to address it that way? And then what are we going to do about it?"

And as a leader, as a manager, what you'll find is probably 98% of the time, they'll get themselves to exactly the same place that you would've gotten them if you tried to do their thinking for them. But now they're learning, they're growing, they're empowered, they're energized. It's theirs. They own it. And you do that because I'm not focused on placing blame.

I'm focused on get to the solution. So that's just one example of a core behavior where we're trying to be prescriptive in saying, do this practice, blameless problem solving. Another example of that, a small example that seems to really resonate with people is clean your plate every day, every week, every month. Clean your plate.

One of the most effective people that I've ever worked with was a woman who said, "I'm going to leave work at X time every day, but I'm going to discipline myself that everything that I need to do that day is completed, taken care of. It's off my plate." Now, there are some tasks that we have that are weekly tasks. Okay, same principle. There are monthly tasks, same principle.

Clean your plate every day, every week, every month. And a couple of things happen. The first thing that happens is we become way more efficient. Because when we go back to something, we have to now get back to the place we left and we're losing time. We have to spend time to remember, what was I doing? Where was I at? Number two, you tend to get one or two more things done every day.

But number three might be the most important one, and this is one that I don't think most people think about. If I don't clean my plate, most of the time what happens is I left my dirty dish to someone else to have to clean. Is that fair? Is that healthy? So don't leave your dirty dishes. Your mom doesn't work here. And you shouldn't do that to your mom either.

Megan Ellsworth: Yeah! Justice for your mom.

Jim Bush: Pick up your own, clean your own dirty dish. Clean your plate. Those are a couple examples of core behaviors that are prescriptive. Simply do this. But they spill over. They spill up. And I think the reason people will sometimes come up to me and say, "Thank you for what you're teaching," is because they see at home, wow, I'm not getting blamed. It's just an issue.

We figure it out. We solve it. Or I don't have to pick up the dirty dishes, whether that's literal or metaphorical. But those are ways that personal development get legs. Those are ways that we can make it real, and it changes people.

Megan Ellsworth: And that's so important because we spend so much time at work. We spend so much time with our coworkers. So if you're in an environment where they're fostering professional and personal development, I mean, that's what everyone wants.

Jim Bush: And those two are so related.

Megan Ellsworth: So related.

Jim Bush: If we foster personal development, if we help people grow in wisdom, in decision-making, in responsibility, in the way they think and approach problems, it also blesses us as their employer or as the home team because they're getting better for us too. So it's hard to separate these two, but again, you hit it. We believe the workplace is the perfect place to help people grow in these personal areas because literally we get them probably longer than their wife or their church or their school or wherever else.

They're a captive audience for 40 or sometimes 50 hours a week. It's the perfect place. We have the right setting, and it's one of the best ways that we found to truly bless our people. And we have a long way to go. I'll say to our employees who hear this, you know how hard we work at this. But we also see a whole lot of runway to grow and become better and better at this, which really excites me, because the benefit to all of us, our company, our customers, our people, their families, their communities, their piece of the world, business as blessing.

Megan Ellsworth: Well, you should be a motivational speaker, Jim. You're killing this podcast.

Jim Bush: I don't know if I'm killing the podcast, but I have heard that once or twice.

Megan Ellsworth: You're doing great. I'm going to pivot. What is the best thing you've ever done for your business or for your career, or both?

Jim Bush: Wow, that is a big question.

Megan Ellsworth: I know, it's a biggie.

Jim Bush: Probably the most... I'm going to answer two ways. So the best thing that I've done is take real action to implement the things that we're talking here around the 12 laws. These are, they not only change your business, but they change people's lives and they change people's experience in the business, from the business and all around. So that's probably the most important thing.

The best thing is probably shifting to EOS, some people call it traction, the traction system or the entrepreneurial operating system, to begin operating our business on EOS, because that gave us the organizational framework to enable us to do all this other stuff that we've talked about with True Consistency and to do it top to bottom, side to side for every single person in our organization.

Megan Ellsworth: That's awesome. EOS, RoofersCoffeeShop also uses it. It's a real game-changer.

Jim Bush: I often say, I've seen Gino Wickman, who's the author of the book and who started this system, I've seen him speak. I've seen him at events. I haven't met him personally. But I've often said, if and when I get the chance to meet him in person, I don't know whether I'm going to hug him or slug him. And the reason why is because he figured out, do this in exactly this way and you will have a business that runs like it should.

Law three, right? But it also irritates me that I couldn't figure it out myself. And I literally spent 30 years trying to figure out how do I get my business to... I almost want to say run perfectly. There's really no such thing. But when we implemented, instituted EOS, what we're experiencing is a business that works like it should in ways that simply were not possible prior to that.

And I guess I just wasn't smart enough to put it all together and figure it out. And that ticks me off, which is why I say I don't know whether to hug them or slug them for... Doggone it, you figured it out. You cracked the puzzle. I couldn't. Either way, and gratitude for that. It's been really life changing. And that's the biggest thing... I sound like a commercial for EOS.

I'm not. The biggest thing people say when they do this, and I'm going to say when they really do it, I'll comment on that in just a second, but the biggest thing people say when they do this is not that it made my business better. It did that, but what you hear people say is, it changed my life. It made my quality of life better. My business used to run me. Now I run my business.

Megan Ellsworth: That's huge. So kind of going off of that, in one word or a small sentence, I would take a small sentence, describe the most important trait in an employee or a co-worker.

Jim Bush: That's really hard to do in one word. The most important trait I would say is giftedness or a synonym you might use is talent. And here's what I mean by that. One of the things that we now know, science like facts and data science has demonstrated to us conclusively, every role requires a specific talent, a giftedness for that particular role, without which that role is either unsustainable for that person or they're simply never going to do it as well as it probably needs to be done.

One of the two things. And this work largely came out of the Gallup organization. So if you've ever read the book, Now, Discover Your Strengths, First, Break All the Rules is another book that came out of that, The Gallup Path, brilliant analytical studies, meta-analysis of leadership and management of tens of thousands of leaders and managers from all over the world.

What they demonstrated is it doesn't matter what you do, do it at a high level where you have a high degree of mastery and excellence requires a natural bent, a natural gift talent for that role. And I don't care whether that is a housekeeper, a doctor, an auto mechanic, a lawyer, a homemaker, whatever that gifting is. And I don't think there's one gift that's better than another. I think they just are.

And all parts of the body, like my finger isn't more or less important than my foot, we as a body are all gifted and all important. And I think of the example that Marcus Buckingham gives of a housekeeper at Disney. Have you ever been to Disney, Disney World, Disneyland? Have you stayed on-site?

Megan Ellsworth: Actually, I don't think I have.

Jim Bush: I have a brother-in-law who works for Disney, and he works engineering. And part of his job is they renovate their hotels regularly. I happen to know this, they have 7,000 hotel rooms on-site at Disney owned by Disney, managed it all. And for 20 years, Disney had one housekeeper who was by far the best of all the housekeeping staff that they had. She was the most consistent, the most efficient, having the most fun, doing the best job, engaging the guests more than any other housekeeper for 20 years in a row.

They have 7,000 rooms. I don't know how many housekeepers it takes, but there have to be 30,000, 50,000 housekeepers to do that and work their shifts and all that. Do you know how gifted that woman had to be to sustain that level of excellence for 20 years? I don't know anybody in my life who could do that. That is giftedness at an extraordinary level. And a great roofer, a great accountant, a great business owner, it requires giftedness. So if you made me settle for one word, gifted for that role, most important thing.

Megan Ellsworth: Absolutely. I think that's a great answer.

Jim Bush: A little bit of a long answer, sorry.

Megan Ellsworth: No, it's great. I think that's so true. I wonder where that housekeeper is now. I wonder what she's doing.

Jim Bush: I don't know if she's aware. She might be retired by now. I don't know, but just an extraordinary story.

Megan Ellsworth: So, to round out the podcast, what makes you smile when you think about your job?

Jim Bush: Everything. I'm 62 years old. I've been doing this for 44 years. I literally grew up owning and operating this business. The interesting thing about roofing is it's a little like the Hotel California. Once you get into this industry, there's a stickiness to it. You can check out anytime you like, but you can never leave. You said it. But after 44 years, I feel like I am just scratching the surface of the ways that we can do business as blessing.

I'm doing, I think, the best work of my career, the most important work of my career, the most impactful work of my career. And so my goal for this decade of my life at age 62 is from age 60 to 70, I want to do the best work of my career and be the greatest blessing, business as blessing, that I have ever been, that we as a company have ever been.

Megan Ellsworth: Well said.

Jim Bush: Thank you.

Megan Ellsworth: Jim, it has been a pleasure getting to hear your story and hearing your amazing accomplishments and your words of wisdom and your little nuggets of advice. So thank you so much for joining me today on the podcast. To round us out again, any last little tidbits of advice for new people starting out in roofing?

Jim Bush: The biggest mistake that I have made in my career is being too independent, too self-sufficient. I think one of the traits that many entrepreneurs tend to have is we tend to be very gritty people. The word grit. We just have a determination and a get out of my way, I'm just going to plow my way through this. I'm going to make it happen. I'm going to make it work. I'm going to push through adversity. Always your gift is your curse. The things that help you the most can also hurt you the most.

And so for me, and I think many true entrepreneurs or true leaders who tend to be very gritty, we can actually be overly self-reliant, overly gritty. So my advice would be, learn from my mistake and tap into the resources that are available for you. Things like what you do at RoofersCoffeeShop. And all of these resources that are out there, you may figure it out someday or you may not. But I can guarantee you, if you tap into the resources, they will shorten your learning curve.

And if you go get a coach, you will become a better player than you would without one, and you'll get there faster than you would, just trying to muddle your own way through. So, my biggest mistake is I spent too many years trying to muddle my way through on my own grit and tenacity and I should have been far more looking for help, reaching out.

Megan Ellsworth: Well said. Great advice. I always say this, but I hope the audience out there listening was writing notes this whole time because boy was there some good advice. I would love to include your 12 laws in the show notes. So everyone, scroll down and take a look at those. And then Jim, thank you again. This has just been absolutely delightful.

Jim Bush: My great pleasure to be with you.

Megan Ellsworth: Uh, likewise. Everyone out there listening, thank you so much. Stay tuned for more Stories from the Roof episodes. They come out on a weekly basis. Make sure you are subscribed and you follow and ring the bell so you get notified every time we upload a new podcast. Jim, thanks again and we'll be seeing you on the next one.

If you've enjoyed these unique rooftop stories, be sure to hit that subscribe button so you don't miss a single episode. Go to RoofersCoffeeShop.com to learn more. Thanks for soaring with us on Stories from the Roof. We'll catch you on the next one.