Mitch Heitsch - Simplifying the Estimating Process - PODCAST TRANSCRIPT

Editor's note: The following is the transcript of a live interview with Mitch Heitsch from Westlake Royal Roofing Solutions. You can Read the interview below, Listen to the podcast or Watch the video.

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: Hello, and welcome to another Roofing Road Trips from Roofers Coffee Shop. My name is Heidi Ellsworth and we're here today to talk about another innovation in the industry. Time saving, labor saving, we are going to talk about technology that is really helping the contractor, and it's all around stone coated steel.

So to talk about this technology with stone coated steel, we asked our friends from Westlake to come and talk to us about Unified Steel. So we've invited Mitch Heitsch to come and talk to us about what they're doing with stone coated steel over at Westlake and also the technology that's making it really easy to use. Mitch, welcome to the show.

Mitch Heitsch: Hi, thanks again for having me. Long time no see, since we were in IRE last week, right?

Heidi J. Ellsworth: We were just there. We were just talking on the sound stage. I have to tell you, what a week, it was wild. Your guys' booth, so impressive.

Mitch Heitsch: We're still recovering, but it was a ton of fun.

Heidi J. Ellsworth: It was fun. You have made a couple of launches and some big announcements that we're excited to talk about, but before we get into that, why don't you go ahead and start with your introducing yourself and what you do with Unified Steel.

Mitch Heitsch: Yeah, absolutely. So again, my name is Mitch. I'm the Regional Sales Manager for our Unified Steel line, which is our stone coated metal. Really excited about this product. It's gaining a lot more popularity in the last couple of years for sure, and we're definitely excited to have been one of the originals and to keep the story going and to keep everything going and keep making it better as we can. So Unified Steel is a stone coated metal roofing product.

Heidi J. Ellsworth: Great.

Mitch Heitsch: To elaborate on that a little bit, I think I mentioned this last week when we did our pitch, but it's one of those things that it's a metal roof, so you get all the benefits of a metal roofing system, the longevity, the durability, but architecturally, whatever you want. Something that looks like barrel, something that looks like a shingle or a slate or anything like that. So great, great product, excited to talk about it today.

Heidi J. Ellsworth: It's beautiful, it's beautiful. Just with my introduction, I said a lot of names, but Unified Steel is part of the Westlake Building Group, right?

Mitch Heitsch: Correct, yeah. So Westlake Royal Building Products is going to be the overarching brand. Then if you think about it from there, we have different solutions. So we operate within our roofing solutions group. We also have stone solutions, which most of our customers might know familiarity with, El Dorado stone or cultured stone. We also have our siding solutions and trim, but then even within the roofing solutions we have individual brands. So our product for the stone coated metal is going to be the Unified Steel. We also make concrete roof tile, that's going to be our new point, concrete roof tile. We do manufacture clay, which is going to be our US tile also made in California. If you're familiar with the synthetic composite line, we also have DaVinci Roofing, which is going to be that synthetic line.

Heidi J. Ellsworth: Right. Great, great roofing products. So one of the things we want to talk about around the stone coated steel, and I'd just love to get a little bit of your history, is the importance of estimating, how much time it takes, obviously, how important it's to a business. So Mitch, over the years, what have you seen change with estimating or how's it not changed? Where are we at with contractors and new technologies?

Mitch Heitsch: It's funny because I think that it's going to depend on who you talk to. I have seen companies and worked for companies that have been very dialed in on the estimating side, where there's a lot of software out there. There's a lot of technology that can help to where you can put together a very accurate roofing bid without even having to really go to the house or look at it, or go to the project and look at it. Then the inverse side of that, I still have great friends and great customers that love to break out the blueprints and a ruler and do it the old school way. So it just is going to depend on where the company is at with their technology, but there's been a lot of great improvements and a lot of tools that are out there to help the estimating process. That's really happened in the last few years.

Heidi J. Ellsworth: Yeah, technology has really, really made a difference across the board. So let's talk about your newest technology that has come out and that is your material list generator. Can you tell us a little bit about this launch and how you developed it?

Mitch Heitsch: Absolutely. So this was definitely a need that we saw out in the field. So we have, one thing that I think that Westlake does better than anybody else is that we have some of the best people in the industry. Unified Steel, we have reps that are running around trying to help out our customers in any way that we can.

Well, one of those things is our material lists. So if you're not familiar with stone coated metal, you might know that it's a little bit more in depth and can be a little bit more intimidating, just in terms of the parts and pieces that are needed. So a lot of times we'll get a call and somebody asks for a bid, so we'll help them put the material list together. So that was a necessity that was shown out in the field just helping our contractors come along with it.

Well, as our reps continued to grow and we added more reps and maybe some reps that weren't familiar with stone coated metal, we had to simplify our own internal process on how we come up with the material list for our customers. So through series of multiple Excel documents and things like that, revision RA six or whatever it might be. I mean, it was one of those things that we decided that we needed this to live in a place that we could update it real time. Then even more so than that, is that after we've moved that to an online based material list generator, how do we now make that accessible and available for our customers? That now you're not waiting on one of your territory managers to help you with the bid. We are always going to be here to help our customers, but we also know the sense of urgency, sometimes that can come up. This was a tool that's developed to help really streamline and speed up that process.

Heidi J. Ellsworth: That makes so much sense because you don't want to wait for other people when you can do it yourself, and with technology that has just become, you can do it in the middle of the night depending on when you're getting your estimates done.

Mitch Heitsch: Exactly, exactly. We all know how a lot of our contractors work. Sometimes it is in the middle of the night where you're on the road all day and you're seeing customers. Then you get that few hours where you're sitting back at home and you're trying to knock out some bids and maybe your Unified Steel rep isn't available at 9:00 at night. Sometimes we are, I will tell you that, but we don't try and push that too hard, but.

Heidi J. Ellsworth: Yeah, exactly.

Mitch Heitsch: Yeah, so if it's 9:00, 10:00 at night and you want to try and hammer out at least the material list to know what you need, this tool is available to help with that and I'm excited to go through that with you.

Heidi J. Ellsworth: That is cool. Okay, speaking of which, let's see, I'm excited. So we're going to have you share your screen. So if you're listening to this as a podcast, this is available as a video cast on YouTube where you can see this. Mitch is going to share a screen and show us how the material list generator works.

Mitch Heitsch: Absolutely. So first and foremost is, where does this live? How do you find it? Westlakeroyalroofing.com is going to be our landing page to be able to go to our main website. Once you get to our main website, you go and you hover over here over our resource tab. This is actually going to be a great tool for a lot of other things, even outside of the material list generator. So if you're needing to find code approvals, warranties, literature, order samples, any of that stuff is going to live within our resource tab. If you hover down here under these other tools, you'll see we have a lot of different things like our dream home visualizer, great tool to be able to help look at what our roof is going to look like on your roof before it gets installed. But then below that you'll see the steel material is generator.

Heidi J. Ellsworth: Perfect.

Mitch Heitsch: So, if you click on that, it's going to redirect you to our homepage for the material list generator. Now you have some options here. One thing that we wanted to do was make it so that you could go back and visit this later. So if you wanted to log in or register, you can actually save projects as you go along that will live within this database. So you can actually go back into here, log in and view a project that you did a couple months ago, if the homeowner changed their mind on the profile or anything like that and you have to redo it, you can go back in and view that just by going on this login register and creating a login ID.

Heidi J. Ellsworth: Nice.

Mitch Heitsch: So first and foremost, you're going to want to enter in your project details, if you are logged in and you're saving your project. This is going to help you find it, that's going to be, whether it be a job name or a project address. This is going to help you figure out how to reference back to that once you go along.

But getting into the meat and potatoes of it, these measurements that come on the line item number two here, these are going to be really any of your standard measurements that are going to happen on any roof report that you're going to pull. Or like I said, if you're one of the old school and you're up there on the roof with a measuring tape or you're there with a hand ruler getting your measurements, you can go in and actually plug in these measurements based on what these items are in blue. So just going through and plugging in just a bunch of generic numbers, so don't hold me to any of this, but this is just typically what we would see on your average house. You go in here and you plug in your measurement.

Now it gets fun. Now you get into your installation method. As I mentioned before, this is where if you're brand new to stone coating, sorry, stone coated metal with Unified Steel, if you're brand new to it, you might not know the answer to this question. There are different installation methods even within our own company. So we try and make this product as versatile as possible and to try and appeal to different people with different installation preferences.

So one thing that we do is give you the option to say, all right, what installation method do you want to use? Are you going direct to deck or are you going to go on a batten install? It's going to tell you what profiles you can actually do that installation method with. The most universal one is going to be the direct to deck and bend method, so that's a direct to deck, no battens and you're going to bend the panels at certain sections. We have four profiles that can go with that pattern. Just for the sake of conversation, and because I'm a Floridian, we're down here in Florida, we're going to choose our barrel vault panel and a batten install for this project. Now you see here that you have the option to choose what color you want to go with. This is going to be really important, especially once you start getting to an ordering level and it starts getting to the distribution level because part numbers are going to change based on color. So depending on what color you select, it might generate different part numbers for that. So just make sure you're paying attention to that, if you don't know, you always have the option to say, I don't know yet, so we're going to select no color. You can always come back and change that later on.

This is where you'd want to save the project if you were going through that, that you can reference it later, but we're not going to do it at this moment. So we're just going to generate the material. Now, what's cool here is that we're going to assume the worst when it comes to a waste factor. So you might look at this and say, you know what? 11.9% might be a little high, we're going to back that down to 10. Or, maybe you're going to say, you know what? I know my guys and I know that they're going to waste a lot of stuff on the roof, we're going to bump that up to 15. So you have some ability to play with the field waste factor right here at the start.

Then getting into it, right now, you can see that it's now populated [inaudible 00:11:40]-

Heidi J. Ellsworth: Nice.

Mitch Heitsch: ...You're going to need for this project. So what's a lot of fun with this is that as with everything, you have the ability to override all of these counts as you want to. So certain things like your trim cap pieces or even your vent, you can go in and manually override how many you need. You'll also see a lot of these highlighted yellow boxes. These are going to be optional details that you may not have to have or you may not have to buy from us, but you have the option to purchase everything from us.

One thing that I love about what we sell is that we make it a turnkey process. You can get almost everything that you need all the way down to the underlayment to be able to do this roof.

Heidi J. Ellsworth: Wow, yeah.

Mitch Heitsch: So going through that, we have off ridge vents or we have ridge vents. So you have the ability to choose either one of those. Now we get into a lot more of the linear metals. Understanding and knowing because I deal with this every day, but you might not. Pay attention to the notes that are over here. It's going to give you all the measurements, it's going to give you how many come in a full package quantity. You might want to round up to a full pack quantity so you're not breaking apart packages and things like that. Then also a lot of our linear metals that are going to come stone coated, that's going to be our bird stop, our top row metal, those will all come in 79 inch sticks. Any painted metal will come in 10 foot sticks. That's just small little side note, but just pay attention to these notes that are over here on the left.

Then as I mentioned before, we get down into our components. So that's another side of the Westlake Royal Roofing family, is that we actually have our Westlake Royal Roofing Components Division. So whether that be underlayment, whether that be our EBS batten, our elevated batten systems. Wakaflex, which is a great flexible flashing detail, and then even down to the panel scoop that you're looking for

Now, this is the fun part, is that once you go through and you figured out all the parts and pieces that you need, you have two options to export. You can either export it as a PDF or as a CSV file. If you're on the contractor side, you might typically stick with a PDF export. This is where you're going to pull this up and it's going to have just a simple PDF that's going to have all of your parts with the part numbers, and then the quantities associated with it. So you could then take this PDF, send it over to your distribution partner and say, hey, I need to order this, or give me a price on this. So that's a really cool tool that we have available there as well.

The other option is to export it as a CSV file. So if you're an Excel nerd like I am, you're going to be able to pull this up, and then this is where it might get a little bit more helpful from the distribution side. Now, I've pulled this up and now all my parts are down here. Very simple line item, there's not a lot of pictures, there's not a lot of stuff like that, but what I can now do as a distributor is take this and maybe I have my own price sheet or reach out to your friendly Unified Steel territory manager because they may or may not have a tool to help you out with this.

Heidi J. Ellsworth: Love it.

Mitch Heitsch: Little hint there. Yeah, so there's a lot of great ways that we can then take this CSV file, drop this into something that we can then incorporate our pricing to it. So I don't really have a timer on that one, but you can see how long that took me. With explaining everything, it probably took me what, five minutes?

Heidi J. Ellsworth: Five minutes, I think.

Mitch Heitsch: Going through that.

Heidi J. Ellsworth: Yeah, that was great.
Mitch Heitsch: So, imagine what this does for your company to be able to have your estimator sit down and say, hey, your sales rep's out in the field. He sent you over a request for a roof report. You got the roof report. You sit down five minutes, boom, boom, boom. Here you go. As you're learning it, and again, this is where I'm going to say that, reach out to your Unified Steel territory manager because this is going to be really helpful. You see there are a lot of line items. You may not know what every one of these line items does. This is where education is going to be very important. You want to make sure that you're out there, you're talking with your local territory manager. We always offer trainings, education sessions, things to help get you up to speed on what Unified Steel is and what all of our parts and pieces do.

Now, I mentioned before, I'm just going to start a new project. I mentioned before that estimates change. You might have your own software, you might have your own things that you do it a certain way. Maybe don't necessarily want to use our tool, but you may have a system out there that helps you do it yourself. I've got roofing contractors that have programs that their distributors have already given them their blanket pricing so that when they go in and plug in their measurements, not only will it give them all the parts and pieces that they need, it'll give them their project costs right there real time. So now your roofing contractor can do an in-home sale sitting down at the dinner table with the homeowners and have a price within minutes. If that's something that you do, we have the ability to share what we're using as our calculations.

Over here on the right of this home screen, there's calculations that are used. You can download this PDF that's going to show you the formula for everything that we have used to calculate and how we've gotten about it. You may also look at this and say, you know what, Mitch? I love you, but you're wrong. I don't think that Z Bar is this, I think that it should be this. This helps you understand how we make these calculations and what we do, and allow you the ability to override those and add your own as you need to. But ultimately, we're here to try and help this as a very generic tool so that it's available and being able to be used by really anyone.

Heidi J. Ellsworth: This is cool. I like the fact that you're working with the other technologies that are out there or such transparency. I love that, the calculations used. I mean, that gives transparency to people to be able to... Because different regions do sometimes things a little bit different too.

Mitch Heitsch: Absolutely, absolutely right. That's something that we saw regionally. Again, that's where we go into your installation method that you might be down in Florida and you like to do the cut and bend or a batten install. You might be out in the Midwest where maybe you're using more return metals or things like that. Just depends on what is more comfortable to you and for your crews. We want to be able to help with all those. So the goal with this was just to make it as simple as possible and... yeah.

Heidi J. Ellsworth: I was going to say, that's exactly what it looks like. I mean, I'm tracking you, I see it. I noticed the part down there. Where do you get your measurements? Just making a note down at the bottom. So the fact that you can use it, there's so many different options. Aerial measurements, off your phone, with a tape measure. So it really allows you to use whatever technologies you're already using.

Mitch Heitsch: 100%, 100%. We try and like I said, the goal with that and the measurement used and all this job information is that if you do go in here and you create a registration and you log in, that you can save this and reference back to it. So it might be six months down the road and you're like, man, I was really short on that. Where did I even get those measurements. Oh, that's right, our sales rep told me that I had 200 feet, even really I had 250 feet. Could be certain things like that. Just everything's a check and balance, but it's transparency for us. That's what we really try and stick with, with that.

Heidi J. Ellsworth: That makes a lot of sense. Wow.

Mitch Heitsch: A very exciting tool.

Heidi J. Ellsworth: It is exciting, and I think it's needed. So I guess that's my next question. As you were all looking at this, what were you seeing in the industry? What were you seeing with your contractors that told you really needed this kind of tool?

Mitch Heitsch: Yeah again, like I mentioned, that we have reps that are running around. It's, I don't want to say painstaking, but it can be a lot where our reps are out in the field and you finish up a day on the road and you get home. We do deal with a lot of different customers. So we can get off the road and have upwards of 15 to 20 quote requests that come in a day.

Heidi J. Ellsworth: Wow, okay.

Mitch Heitsch: So, you're sitting there and now you as a rep, and again, it's something that we love to do. We love helping our customers, but when you're sitting there and doing that over and over and over, it's really nice to have a tool, A, to simplify the process on our end to be able to go in and say, I'm going to knock out a bunch of quotes for my customers. Or B, to say, hey, I'm on the road right now, here is the tool that you can use. You can give it a shot or you can wait for what I'm doing. So that's how it started and it's progressed into a point where I think that the goal has shifted now to be able to go out as territory managers on our end to train our customers on how to use this tool. Not that we're shifting the workload, but again, efficiency is everything and if you're not being efficient, saving time, time is money. If that 24 span that you're waiting for a quote to come back from us or a material list to come back from us, could that maybe cost you the job, where somebody else goes in with a hard number and you're still waiting for a quote for a day.

Heidi J. Ellsworth: Exactly.

Mitch Heitsch: So, this speeds up that process in general.

Heidi J. Ellsworth: It seems too because I want to talk a little bit about estimating is the core, if you don't get your estimating correct, your bid's not correct. Even if you win the bid, your production may not may be off, and then you may not be profitable. So really that estimating part of it is so important. And this tool, I mean as you're talking about, and you gave a little wink too, but this really helps you get that estimating down for your material list. Also then going into the pricing.

Mitch Heitsch: 100%, yeah and again, the goal is to try and expedite the process even with our distribution partners. So we do sell through distribution, and we'll have a distributor that'll reach out and say, "I need a material list, and could you give me the pricing on it?" Well, in the past with these Excel sheets that we had or something like that, we might send them a random material list, but without doing it every day and knowing what your costs are for those, it could take upwards of 30 to 45 minutes for one of our distribution partners to actually put pricing to that material list. That's going to cause frustration. I can understand and empathize completely that our distribution partners are dealing with a multitude of different products. So for them to be an expert in just one might be a little difficult. That's what our job is. Our job is to be the expert in this.

Heidi J. Ellsworth: Yeah, exactly.

Mitch Heitsch: So, I want to help and simplify that as much as possible. So like you said, the wink-wink there was more for our distribution partners. It's like, hey, I export this as an Excel or a CSV file. We may have a tool that you can drop that into and say, okay, it auto-populates your price, it auto-populates all these different things with the part numbers. What used to take 30 to 45 minutes to do a quote, now can take 30 seconds to do a quote.

Heidi J. Ellsworth: Wow.

Mitch Heitsch: You're talking about when you're running and gunning, and there might be, it may have been a hurricane, may have been a hailstorm and you're just getting inundated with quote requests. To spend 45 minutes on a quote, 30 minutes on a quote, just is, it's not acceptable. So this gives us the opportunity to really expedite that process and help our distribution partners as much as possible, which ultimately helps a roofer. Ultimately helps a homeowner.

Heidi J. Ellsworth: Right, right. That speed to close, speed to lead, really being able to get that information out there is so important. Whether it's in storm, but also just I think consumers are expecting that. They're expecting things to be a lot faster.

Mitch Heitsch: We're in a digital age, everything is at your fingertips, that it is one of those things that even a 24-hour turnaround used to be like, oh man, you guys are great. Then it just gets quicker and quicker and quicker to where it's like if you don't hear from somebody in a couple hours, you're like, okay, what's wrong? So yeah, you're right. 30 seconds, 45 seconds to do a quote to do a bid. I mean, it makes a world of difference and really just keeps up with what we're used to as a society now, honestly.

Heidi J. Ellsworth: Exactly, and it is really important. I mean, when we talk about how this is going to change how contractors do estimates, it sounds like to me, first of all, a lot more independent. But second of all, in another way, they need to be even closer to distribution and working with their regional reps to really, really make this process sing.

Mitch Heitsch: Yeah, at the end of the day, look, this is a specialty roofing product. There are parts and pieces that go with it. So as I mentioned before, I think that education and communication are always, those are two buzzwords that I come back to over and over and over in my career, is that A, you want to be educated on the process because as easy as we try and make it, you might still look at that materialist and say, all right, what is top row metal? That doesn't compute to the world of shingles or anything like that. So there's some certain things that you're going to have to educate yourself on.

Then ultimately from there, it's communication. Are you communicating with your distribution rep on pricing? Do you know who your local territory manager is for Unified Steel, to say, hey, Mr. or Mrs. Expert, I need your help. That's the thing that we're here to help in any way. So that's the communication part of it. As I mentioned before, the trainings that we do, the education sessions that we do. I mean, we go to our customers, we get down to the ground level to say, we'll spend hours upon end trying to help you get this, because it's an exciting product and we want to get out in the field as much as possible.

Heidi J. Ellsworth: Right, right, it's a great product. I mean, talk about sustainable, long life, it's so important. Okay, so you showed us how to get onto the website, how to get onto this. Question. Is there any cost to this or any other processes to be able to add this to the contractor system?

Mitch Heitsch: As with everything else that we do know, no, there is no cost to it. You saw how easy it was, it lives on our homepage. In two clicks, you can get to this material list generator. The login option, it is completely optional for you, but I would highly, highly recommend that you do that because it's nice to be able to reference back to those things. But yeah, there is zero cost to this tool, just as there is zero cost to anything else that we do to help assist our customers. The education sessions that we do, the on-the-job onsite job training, come into your office, there is zero cost to all of that. That is us working as a partner to our contractors and to our distribution partners. We truly want to be partners in every sense of that word. I don't think that charging for a tool like this would really say that we have your best interest in mind.

Heidi J. Ellsworth: No, not at all. You are enabling the contractors to do more. That I think is key for all of us and for the homeowners who need those roofs right away.

So Mitch, thank you so much for sharing this great information.

Mitch Heitsch: It's fantastic. The last plug is, because there has been a lot of blood, sweat and tears that have been poured into this tool and many hours on the phone and arguing back and forth of what should be in there, what shouldn't be in there.

One thing that I am thankful for is that this company that I work for with Unified Steel and ultimately with Westlake, is that we have such great open communication lines with this. Part of it is because of how our company is set up and the culture that we're set up with. We're able to tout and really proudly say that we're based in Houston, Texas. Westlake is corporately headquartered there. Our product's made in California, our concrete's made all over the country, and it doesn't get a whole lot more local than that. So communication chains are wide open and it's all within three hours of coast to coast, right? It's not like we're waiting on somebody halfway across the world to give us an answer on this stuff. So it helps a lot having Westlake being a locally based company to be able to get this kind of stuff done and get it done efficiently.

Heidi J. Ellsworth: That's great. That is so excellent, and you launched this at the International Roofing Expo, and you're also going to have it at the International Builder Show coming up in a couple of weeks. So anyone listening to this, be sure to check it out when you see Unified Steel at the trade shows, because you can talk about it right there in person.

Mitch Heitsch: Come find us, we'll have a lot of representation there. You might wander into our booth and not realize that you're in a booth at all. We will have a pretty massive setup out there.

Heidi J. Ellsworth: Nice.

Mitch Heitsch: We're going to have all the divisions out there, so we're really excited about IBS. Yeah, definitely come find us in the roofing section and we're happy to help explain this more or answer any other questions you might have.

Heidi J. Ellsworth: And Roofers Coffee Shop will be there. We're going to be broadcasting live from that, from your booth, from the Westlake booth, at the International Builders Show. We're very excited about that. So Mitch, I will see you again in just a couple weeks.

Mitch Heitsch: We'll be back in Vegas. It'll be fun.

Heidi J. Ellsworth: Okay, well thank you so much, and thank you everyone for listening. Great information for your business, if you're not currently using stone coated steel, look into Unified Steel. This is a product that can differentiate your business and really what consumers are looking for. Now with the material list generator, heck, it's easy to put it all together.

Check out the Unified Steel directory, the Westlake directory, on Roofers Coffee Shop, and be sure to visit us at the International Builder Show or online anytime. Thank you so much. Be sure to listen to all of our podcasts for Roofing Road Trips under the RLW navigation, under Roofing Road Trips, or on your favorite podcast channel. Be sure to subscribe and set those notifications so you don't miss a single episode. We will see you next time on Roofing Road Trips.

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