Joel Stanley - Answering the Call of Innovation - PODCAST TRANSCRIPT

Editor's note: The following is the transcript of a live interview with Joel Stanley, founder and CEO of Anchor Products. 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.

Heidi J. Ellsworth: Welcome to Roofing Road Trips from Roofers Coffee Shop. My name is Heidi Ellsworth and we are here today with a very special Roofing Road Trips, because I get to be with Joel Stanley, one of the Stanley brothers who I have been watching my whole career. That I can tell you right now, we've seen pictures of the Stanley family, they are a little bit of royalty in the roofing industry and I am just so excited to spend some time with my friend Joel and talk about U-Anchor, about Anchor products, about being an entrepreneur. So Joel, welcome to Roofing Road Trips.

Joel Stanley: Thank you Heidi. I'm glad to be here today.

Heidi J. Ellsworth: I am so excited for this podcast, let me tell you. If that introduction I just gave you isn't enough, let's start out with a real introduction and have you introduce yourself and tell us about your company.

Joel Stanley: Well, as you said, I'm Joel Stanley, I'm the founder of Anchor Products. We started in 2010 and at the time, there was a big need for attaching things on top of roofs. I was VP of operations for a roofing manufacturer and we were needing to have a solution to attach rooftop equipment that kept moving around and having issues. There was also a big need for attachments of solar and how that was going to happen. I was at a trade show and watched somebody in a booth next to us, that they kept making these samples and I kept watching how they did it. I realized, "If they can hold a roof down with this type of device, then I should be able to hold something down to the roof in the same way." I started working on that. It took me a couple of years to figure it out, but I was able to design an attachment system that would hold rooftop equipment down to the roof.

Initially it was a designed to be a non-penetrating system. We found that a lot of the engineers and things would prefer to have it be penetrating and be an attachment with fasteners. So much has happened in the industry since then. It was an idea and things that were thought about and it's grown into being a standard and a base part of the code that is required in the code for today, that the code's really pretty simple. It's funny how so many people don't understand, but the code's really simple. It says that all rooftop equipment must be bolted, welded or otherwise positively fastened to the structure. Well, you have to have a way to do that. How do you do that with... Including that in roofing membrane manufacturers and asphalt manufacturers, how do they do that? There's a lot of equipment on top of roofs today.

Heidi J. Ellsworth: A lot.

Joel Stanley: Yeah, there is. It's been fun to work on all these different solutions and how do we attach guardrail and how do we attach satellite dishes and antennas and other communication systems. If you look at a lot of high-rise buildings, they seem to be littered with tons of different communication systems and repeaters and ways to receive data and transmit data, so how do you attach that and make sure it doesn't leak, make sure it doesn't void a roof warranty that somebody just paid a lot of money for. It's been fun to develop these ideas and I have really enjoyed, I guess tinkering.

Heidi J. Ellsworth: You're an inventor.

Joel Stanley: I'm an inventor. That's probably the funnest thing. It's something that a lot of people don't understand what it's like to be an inventor. You don't necessarily think like everybody else. You see things about how things could get done instead of how things always have been done. That's what makes it fun though, you get to explore [inaudible 00:05:07] figure things out.

Heidi J. Ellsworth: The thing is that, a lot of times you have people out there and we hear this all the time, people who are coming in and have ideas, but they don't understand the basics of roofing. They don't understand the basics of waterproofing. I would love for you to share your history in roofing, how you got into roofing, your history and how that has really led to you being able to invent products like U-Anchor or that really solve problems, but yet keep the security of the roof?

Joel Stanley: I got into roofing the hard way, I inherited it. You start off as a kid, and I know I was on the roof and putting fasteners in, screws and plates and seams when I was 10 years old. I was certainly welding PVC roof membranes by the time I was 12, maybe earlier. I've been on the roof my whole life. I've worked with every roofing brand, from Asphalt to PVCs to TPO's to KEE's and EPDM's, it's amazing all the acronyms in roofing, we have a lot of them. I've had the privilege of working with all of them. There's certainly some that I'm much more familiar with than others. To have the background knowledge that I have inherited and grew up with, I don't know how it's possible to do all the things that I do without having that background, so I'm very thankful for that. I was running crews by the time I was 16.

We did so much single ply membrane, it became just what you did. [inaudible 00:07:13] that today I still look at applications and look at what people do and say, "Well, you can't do it like that. You have to do it like this. That will work great." Or I can get innovative on some things and say, "I've never seen it done like that, but that should work." That's where I came from. I remember I grew up roofing, in my family we didn't really have... It wasn't a request if you wanted to go to work or [inaudible 00:07:53], it was, "You're going to go to work today and this is what you're going to do." In the eighth grade, I fell off of a roof and fell 36 feet. I have my family record for the highest fall of three stories.

Heidi J. Ellsworth: Wow.

Joel Stanley: Maybe that's why I'm a little quirky. I don't know.

Heidi J. Ellsworth: Maybe that's why safety is so important.

Joel Stanley: Safety's a big deal. We've worked on so many different things for equipment attachment. We're working on a line right now for attachment of life safety and for [inaudible 00:08:34]. That's a big deal for me. It's an important thing for me. I've fallen, I know what it's like, but more importantly the security that I feel like I need to have with designing all of the products, but especially with the life safety product, I look at it as, if a life safety product that I tie off to doesn't work or that one of my customers ties off to that and it doesn't effectively catch them, some kid doesn't have a dad anymore. I feel that huge liability.

It's a lot to think about, "How can I best do this?" I have some of my engineers that work for me and they point out that, "Yeah, Joel, that is a huge liability, but who better to fix it? What makes you hesitant about being able to do this? We'll design those things to make it the best we can possibly have." That gives me some security, but it's still, how do you make sure that the rooftop equipment's on the building and it doesn't blow off in the harshest conditions. I think we've been successful in doing that, but it took decades of on the roof experience and learning through trial and error to never give up.
I think the biggest thing that my father taught me about being an entrepreneur in this industry, is tenacity. Being tenacious enough to, there's never a time that it's time to quit for the day, we have to get it done and we're going to quit when the job's done. You see that the rain's coming in tonight and this job has to be water-tight sealed up, there's no questions about that. We've made the choice to go this far, that means we have to finish. I learned to be very tenacious and to never give up, and that's helped us get to this point today.

Heidi J. Ellsworth: To me, it is so... I want to go through and you mentioned this a little bit at the beginning, but it goes with what you're talking about, about being tenacious and really seeing a problem. Before when you were at that trade show and this idea came to you and there really weren't any really viable solutions on the market for equipment anchoring them and to making sure that they were anchored.

Joel Stanley: Well, the common application was, put an eyebolt through the roof and have a pitch fan on it. That's very difficult to do. The loads that are put on that are somewhat extreme. We have people in the industry right now that feel like the best way to go is to dig down through the existing roofing and attach directly to the deck. That is one of the reasons that roof tie-offs right now are as big as they are. Let's say you go through existing roofing of six inches of insulation, you have a cover board or a FESCO board or something like that and then you have the existing roofing, so you could have seven plus inches oftentimes of roofing. If you think about what happens, it's kind of like putting a nail in a piece of three-quarter inch plywood and giving someone a pair of pliers and saying, "Okay, get that nail out." it's really hard to do.

You can give them just the metal claw part of a hammer and tell them to try and work on getting that nail out, and it's really hard. However, if you add a handle to the hammer, you can easily pull the nail out of the plywood. That's effectively what anything that comes off of an attachment will do. If you attach directly to the deck and you need to get six to eight inches above the roofing, so you got six inches of roofing, six inches above that, so you have at least a one-foot lever or in our example, a one-foot hammer handle to pry that nail out of the plywood. Things have to become really large and use quarter-inch steel and things like that because of the creation of levers. If we can keep them low to the surface, allow for appropriate drainage, but keep things lower, we'll have a lot more strength, we'll reduce those levers.

We saw these huge opportunities in the market with so much stuff. We found that, for example, in markets, we'll say above the Mason-Dixon line where we have more snow, anything on a roof that, let's say a gas line that goes to an HVAC unit, that gas line in a snow area is snow retention. The HVAC in it itself is snow retention. Pipes and vents and all those kinds of things are snow retention. We had one roofing manufacturer that was having an issue in a northern state that they would have so much snow, and as the snow would migrate on the roof, it would tear vents off. So how do you prevent that from happening? We've designed snow retention for that, so we can protect gas lines and other rooftop equipment from migrating snow by installing snow retention.

How do we protect that equipment? How do we protect lives and other things beneath the roof like cars and different things like that from rooftop equipment migrating in the snow. Or maybe it's just wind that we need to deal with, with exhaust towers and duct systems and there's water lines that people use in equipment. There's so much equipment on top of roofs and now code requires that they all be attached down. Really worked hard to use our relationships that we have and our engineers on my team to help with, how do we secure that and how do we do it in a way that is completely watertight, that's maintenance free, that doesn't require compressions? If you have a compression seal, then that has to be maintained and somebody has to get up there and tighten the nuts or the bolts up every year or every other year and that's almost impossible to do after you install the equipment on top. So how do you maintain it?

We found opportunities in the market for what we thought was a small little company that has been to be much bigger than that, and I'm proud of where we're at in the market. Then the services that we're able to provide with not only equipment for the attachment, but also equipment for above the U-anchor and provide the engineering services that go along with that. There's so much that I never thought I would need. I remember seven or eight years ago, we built an office that had enough seats in it for 15 people in the office area, excluding production, but thought, "Wow, I'll never need that." We have a lot more than that now.

Heidi J. Ellsworth: Well, when you find a need, it's amazing how that grows. It's because you're doing the right things to protect people, to protect the buildings and also to fix something that wasn't there. I know we've already talked about you were at the trade show, you saw it, you went and took you a couple of years putting this concept together. I would love for you to share how you launched. How did you launch this? Because it wasn't in code at that point, right?

Joel Stanley: No, it wasn't in code. Actually, we developed an attachment and I showed it to people for ways to prevent equipment from moving on the roof and damaging the roof. The solar industry also really needed something for additional attachment. Solar had the engineering, they had the design capabilities that I didn't have at the time and they were able to incorporate the U-anchor as a part of their design and meet their loads. They had issues with, they had weight constraints on their buildings and couldn't put more ballast on the buildings. I need more strength, so I was an additive or an added strength. We also were needed in applications for earthquakes and other seismic event type things that, "How do I prevent this thing from moving in a seismic event?" The ballast was not going to be effective by itself, it needed an additional bit of attachment.

So we found that to be the case in almost every project, that you can't just ballast things down, that you end up with damage from the pavers you end up with as it moves. I've had people tell me that, "Oh, this rooftop equipment, it doesn't move very much." My answer to a lot of that has been, "Neither does a vibrating sander." It doesn't move, but it moves enough and it'll eventually wear a hole through the roofing. When you think about some of the membranes that are out there, they're 50 mils thick or they're 60 mils thick, you're talking about something that's the thickness of a quarter. Over years and years of wear that you get from equipment moving, from wind, from seismic events, from we've all been up on the roof when the air conditioner kicks on and we all feel it vibrate underneath our feet.

Well, in that case, the air conditioner is the motor that vibrates the sander. We have aggregate that you used in the paver that works as your sandpaper and you have the weight. It's the same as holding the sand vibrating sander on the roof for years that will eventually damage the roof. The roofing manufacturer is going to come back and say, "That's not our problem. That's an overburden issue." And they're right, it is, it's not their problem. But they also have national accounts that they care about and they want to make sure that they don't have issues. There's facilities that we all learned about during Covid about what is an essential facility. It's essential facilities that must run.

It was really interesting to me when we worked on a food processing plant. It was down here near Texas. This food processing plant, they slaughtered thousand pigs a day.

Heidi J. Ellsworth: Holy cow.

Joel Stanley: The plant has been working for decades. So you think about that, they slaughter 16,000 pigs a day. For the plant to be sustainable, that means that 16,000 pigs have to be born today. 16,000 pigs have to transfer from being in lot A to lot B and they're going to change their feed today and the process of how this goes along. So if you have a leak over their slaughtering line or over their meat processing line and they have to shut it down for any given period of time, how do you ever recover? They don't have another plant to ship 16,000 pigs to a different facility. That facility has to run.

When you think about that for all of our food processing, it doesn't matter if it's lettuce or chickens or beef or whatever, there's essential places that have to run. There's data centers that we just want to swipe our credit card and we fully expect it to work. We don't really care that they just had our tornado blow through the town where that server is that operates your credit card. It has to run. There's so many essential facilities that we have grown dependent upon, how do we make them run? We all grab our phone each day and we want to look at something on social media, it has to run. We would be in chaos without having our access to information that we have today.

Heidi J. Ellsworth: When you look at that and you look at just that overwhelming need, you're right to make sure every roof is working, that it is not just about blowing off or things, but you're right, that constant movement is going to ruin the roof. There's just so many different things that the U-Anchor really solved the problem for.

Now today, I'm curious, in your entrepreneurial spirit and your tenaciousness, without giving us any secret sauce, what are some of the things that you're seeing, again, fitting some of those needs to keep those buildings, those rooftops secure?

Joel Stanley: Right now some of the buzzwords that we hear in our industry as well as seemingly so many others, they want to talk about resiliency. They want to talk about how roofs gets designed that can meet, "Regardless of what happens, my server facility is going to be dry." Or, "My plant that produces or processes food or something like that is going to be in the proper condition and be dry." How do I appropriately do that? I see resiliency on a roof having to do with so many different things. I see it as having to do with the right roofing product installed by the right roofing contractor that is trained and understands and has the experience to manage roofing a facility that has to run. And maybe has to while it's being re-roofed. The things that could fall from the roof and you have people walking on the roof and dust that falls down, that's not going to work in a computer chip manufacturing plant. What kinds of things have to be considered?

It reminds me of a project that I did a long time ago. We were working on a project, I was the manufacturer's representative for sales. I was working with a roofing contractor and we went to a zoo and they needed a new roof on their primate cages. Primates were the big thing for this zoo, that's where they got all their funding and they got all their grants for their primates. The contractor that I was with was literally the only contractor that asked the zoo, "What kinds of things do we need to be cognizant of with the animals? Do we need to have a vet that is with the animals? Do we need to have... What kinds of precautions do we need to have? Can these primates actually jump onto this roof? What kind of workers do I need to have here that are going to be trained and understand what kinds of things they can and can't do? Can they make faces to the primates and they won't have issues and that kind of thing? What's time constraints?" He was the only one that cared about the animals, [inaudible 00:28:06] above and beyond.

When I'm looking at being resilient in a roof system, I'm looking at the right kinds of products with the right kinds of contractor that understands the environment that they're working in, that understands the environment that the roof is going to be subjected to in the future, that has an appropriate maintenance program, that maintains the roof and we can understand precautions or things that we should watch for in the future, that also has trained people doing service on equipment that's up on the roof. Oftentimes in the roofing industry, we want to blame the HVAC guys or the plumbing guys, it's always somebody else's fault. But if we can work with building owners to design resilient systems that involve properly trained teams of people or teams of industries, I think we can have systems that last a lot longer, but that's hard to do. But for some facilities, that's certainly going to be a requirement and we're happy to be part of that requirement.

How do we keep your communication systems toppling over and damaging a roof that could damage servers? We just want to watch the Super Bowl. The fact having a server that is wet and ruined can affect everybody's entertainment. How do we make sure that the equipment doesn't move and damage the roof, or how do we make sure that we have properly trained communication systems people that don't damage the roof or don't damage their own equipment? It's all part of the whole thing. I don't think that there's a way to design more resilient HVAC without considering everything else that's around it. It's a full picture of everything on the building that needs to be considered. So we need to have... I'm just a small part of that team. I make attachments that hold things down in harsh conditions and help in a way that works with the rest of the people in the team.

It's taken a lot of work with partnering with people like Daikin and Coleman and other people that make HVAC equipment or that make plumbing systems. How do we do this effectively that work for not just one industry, but oftentimes three or four industries. It's trying to put everybody together and it's amazing how none of them work together

Heidi J. Ellsworth: Well, and that's really what it's all about, is by working together, you're going to have a secure roof, you're going to have happy customers and the clients at the end of the day, which is so important. That kind of leads me to one of my last questions is, as a contractor, so as we're talking to the contractors out there, how can they be sure that they are incorporating good attachment anchors product that is going to really take care of their building owners and make sure that everyone is safe? I'm going to ask two questions. One is, how do they evaluate that to make sure they're using the right products? And how do they get the right training so that it is being done correctly for the best security?

Joel Stanley: Well, first off, I felt like I needed to create a product that was intuitive, that was easy for a roofer to install that was consistent with other applications that he has. I couldn't have a product that requires them to use tools that they don't normally carry. I also needed to design a product that didn't require maintenance. It couldn't include any sealants, it couldn't include any re-tightening of bolts or of nuts or things like that over time. It's interesting that other people that I compete against in the market, everybody else today has a compression seal. I don't see how a compression seal can be effective. You have to maintain that seal, you have vibration of the roof, you have vibration of the equipment, which is going to loosen nuts or bolts and you're going to have to go maintain them.

I have a Jeep that I drive and it has to be maintained. You take it off-road and you have fun with the Jeep, but you've got to come back and verify that things are still tight, that it's safe. The same thing happens with equipment after a storm. We need to make sure that the equipment's straight and the pipelines are straight and they're not damaged. At DFW Airport where I fly out of all the time, they have a team of people after a storm of Gale Force winds that go back, which that happens on every month [inaudible 00:33:58]-

Heidi J. Ellsworth: I was going to say.

Joel Stanley: Good day in Dallas. But they move pipes back into straight lines. They've taken a tremendous amount of effort to make sure that there's never any downward deflection in a pipe and that it can't get damaged from sagging and things like that. Unfortunately, they haven't taken into account that the sideways motion is exactly the same motion as a downward motion in the eyes of the pipe. It can damage the joints in the pipe just as much. They also haven't taken into account lifting of the pipe. Sometimes it's like, say you get impaled with a knife, then maybe the best thing is to not move the knife, you leave it in there, don't pull it out. Well, moving the pipes back into place could have damaged them more than if you had left them where they were crooked. We have to come up with ways to do that.

But for Anchor products, we see the future is bright and it has a lot of opportunities for us to look at how the roofing industry can work well with so many other industries that use the rooftop as their landscape to work on. Speaking of landscape, we see it for rooftop gardens, we see it for plumbing systems, we see it for HVAC and we see it for so many different things. Communication systems that are utilizing that roof space and how can we have an effective attachment that is maintenance free? And we don't see that being possible at anchor products with a compression type fitting. We see it needing to be matched the existing roofing.

I can't just use a product that... I can't use a John's Manville PVC on a Sarnafil PVC roof. I have to have components that are, Sarnafil has to be made with Sarnafil and in a way that Sarnafil is accepting of. We have worked very hard to make sure that all of our products, we're not just a vendor back to all those roofing manufacturers, but we have to buy their product from them too, so we're a customer and we're a vendor for them, because that goes both ways. But products cannot be a maintenance item, they cannot have sealants, they cannot need to be... If you have a product that's a compression seal and it attaches to a guy wire that is attached to a large antenna, we'll say, if that antenna is moving in the wind and it's pulling on the attachment, it's also pulling on your seal. Those two things don't go together. It's either an attachment or it's a seal. If you didn't have to pull on it would be fine.

But since we do have loads on that in both sheer and intention, you have to have a solution that is watertight independent of a compression seal. We see that as a vital critical factor in how we create our products. We see it as having to be in partnership with the roofing manufacturers and having a product that is included in those warranties. We work heavily with them to... The U-anchor should not be considered overburdened. The U-anchor is a component of the roof. Assembly on top of the U-anchor, that is overburdened. But the U-anchor itself is a component of the roof system. Most of the roofing manufacturers in the US today are accepting of that and include that in their warranty. We're proud of that. We're happy where we're going.

Heidi J. Ellsworth: Yeah, that is so cool. That is, Joel, inspirational. Just inspirational. Everything that you've done, how the business has grown, where you're at, what an intricate part the anchor is and the attachment in overall roof system. We have a lot more to talk about in the future. I know we have one coming up. You have a brand new mobile showroom that I'm really excited, we're going to be live from that in the next couple of months. We have a lot to talk about. So this has just been delightful. The first step of learning the history, hearing everything that you have going, how important this is. Thank you so much.

Joel Stanley: The U-Anchor can be purchased through most of your roofing manufacturers. They can call us direct, we'll arrange for how to acquire it the best way and which products you should be working with. We'll be glad to help you guys in the future. We do so much look forward to getting out with our mobile showcase and showing people the many things that the U-Anchor can be used for.

Heidi J. Ellsworth: That is so cool. You're going to be at both the IRE, the International Roofing Expo and IBEK Show, both coming up here in the next couple of months.

Joel Stanley: That is correct.

Heidi J. Ellsworth: I love it. Well, I'll see you there. So very excited about that. Once again, Joel, thank you so much for being on today.

Joel Stanley: Thank you for having us, Heidi. It was a pleasure.

Heidi J. Ellsworth: Always fun. Always a delight. I want to encourage everyone out there, please go to the Anchor Products directory on Roofers Coffee Shop and check it out. This is something you're going to see specified. It's code as we've been talking about. Something you have to really understand and take advantage of for your company, so check out that directory and get all the information. Also, please listen to all of our podcasts. You'll find them under the read, listen and watch navigation or on your favorite podcast channel. Be sure to subscribe and set the notifications so you don't miss a single episode. We'll be seeing you next time on Roofing Road Trips.

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