S2:E35 Roofing Road Trip- PODCAST TRANSCRIPTION

Editor's note: The following is the transcript of an interview with Jack Gottesman, Marketing Services Manager with IKO Manufacturing. You can read the interview below or listen to the podcast here.

Heidi Ellsworth: Hello and welcome to another Roofing Road Trips with Heidi. Today. I am here with David Workman of RoofConnect and I am so excited. This is going to be just so interesting and important for all of our contractors out there to hear what's going on with this incredible network of roofing contractors that are part of RoofConnect. David, welcome to the show. Thank you for being here.

David Workman: Thank you very much for having us. Look forward to visiting with you today.

Heidi Ellsworth: Well, you and I, we keep seeing each other at all the NRCA meetings and Roofing Alliance. You have been just so involved, and such an important thought leader in the roofing industry. I would love it if you would share a little bit about your history, a little bit about you, with all of the folks on who are listening

David Workman: Well, thank you and love to be involved in industry activities, Heidi. I think the Alliance has been really big, Roofing Alliance has been really big for our industry and I enjoy getting to participate in and network and get to know many more people in our industry. There's just some great people in our industry and it's great to get to network. We've really missed that here with the challenges we've had recently, but yeah, so a little bit about myself and how I got into roofing. That's an interesting story. I'm from a little town here called Sheridan, Arkansas, which is where our corporate office is based. Born and raised and grew up here, and I started out, out of high school as a forklift mechanic. Didn't really know what I wanted to do in life, and my dad was a really good technician, and kind of kidded me that I wasn't quite as handy as he was, so I thought, "I'll show him," and I went and became a forklift mechanic. I had some great people in my life that started pushing me a little bit. My wife was going to college at night, and they kept saying, "What are you doing at night, you just going home and sitting around? I'm like, "Sure. I'm going home and watching sports, nice and quiet, just chilling out at home, and she's going to school." They're like, "Well, so you don't want to better yourself? And I'm like, "Well, it's not that," but at any rate, I ended up going to college at night and finishing my degree over a pretty good span of time. I just had graduated from college and I'd learned AutoCAD in college, and I had a guy that I went to church with in my community who called me up and said, "Hey, I just heard you finished college, and I'm looking for somebody. I just signed a really big rep agreement with a company called Firestone." I'm like, "Okay, tires. That sounds cool. Okay. Great. That's interesting." He said, "No, no, it's not tires. It's roofing," and I'm like, "Oh," like roofing, "okay, what kind of roofing?" "Well, they've got all kinds of different roofing, and I'm like, "Okay, this is not sounding really exciting to me." I said, "I want to get in corporate America. That's kind of my goal, and that's what my studies were in. I'm not really interested in this roofing thing, but I will come to work for you for just a little while and help you get your business going." He's like, "Well, I need you to do AutoCAD work for me," and I'm like, "I hate auto CAD work. I don't want to do AutoCAD work." He's like, "Well just try it for a little while." So I did, I was a tapered insulation layout person, and I did that for them for a few years and kind of grew into a national account position, working along with Firestone. Then it just kind of opened up a lot of doors into doing a lot of different things in the industry.

Heidi Ellsworth: Once you get into roofing, you never get out, so that one little entry with the local rep and now look where you're at. That's a great story. I love that.

David Workman: Went to Barnes & Noble, and bought a book on roofing, commercial roofing, and read the whole thing, and he's like, "You're going to learn a lot more than what's in this book," but I immersed myself and learned a lot really quickly.

Heidi Ellsworth: Well, I think that, your story is indicative of a lot of us. Well, we had no idea, we got into it, and then we're like, "Wow, this is the best industry ever. This is great." I know you've done so much to bring on the professionalism of the industry, to really bring in the contractors together, and a big part of that is RoofConnect. I would love for you to share how that also got started.

David Workman: Well, depending on who you talk to, there's probably a lot of variations of how RoofConnect got started, but they were really visionaries in the industry that all came together, and they were seeing that there was a lot of consolidation going on in our industry, and that's been good for a lot of people, but they didn't want to be part of that consolidation. They wanted to still keep their local companies and maintain their presence, but yet they were missing out on opportunities with national accounts, and other large national groups that are purchasing through a network. They were missing out on that, so a lot of the visionaries in the industry got together in the late nineties, as consolidation was really starting to get going quickly, and started RoofConnect. The quintessential story of starting on a napkin, it really did. "This is what we want to do, and who's in?" Kind of thing. They worked on kind of organizing and in 2002 is when the first official incorporation of RoofConnect came about. It was started, literally, by roofing contractors who had a vision that let's build a network of quality like-minded people to help you grow our own businesses locally and yet not give up the control of our business, but still be able to participate in national opportunity.

Heidi Ellsworth: Yeah. Really that, bringing that opportunity to do national work to local contractors, working with other contractors, kind of learning from each other, I just think is such a brilliant model. What are you seeing right now, on that national work level? I know with COVID, there's just so many things going on, and the challenges around that, how are your contractors, in the network, and also the national accounts, what's happening there? How are they dealing with all this?

David Workman: Yeah. It changes everything obviously, and the retail industry, retail segments had been hurting for a time there with all the store closures and things of that nature, but we've seen a real bounce back here since things have started opening back up a little bit, there's work already that needed to be done, that got put off for a little bit and got started back. Right now, we're seeing a really good activity from our clients. We know that they're challenged, so we may be going from reroofing situations sometimes to service situations where we're helping them to maintain, but we've seen... We live in a very resilient country, and our customers have been representative of that and just really bounced back here and getting back to business in a new way. We've seen our activity go way up since the March, April, May, when things got so slow.

Heidi Ellsworth: Wow. That's good. I'm sure there's a lot of new ways that the contractors are having to make those calls, and do service and re-roofs. Are your contractors, and just to kind of help our listeners, how much do your contractors in the network kind of help each other, work together, communicate, sharing best practices? How much of that goes on daily?

David Workman: Yeah, I think a lot of what we do at RoofConnect every day helps promote and helps our contractors understand what customers are looking for, especially on a national basis. I think, whether it's... The technology's become huge in this time where we've got to absolutely be able to bring the roof to the customer, whether that's via a drone or whether that's just via a video, and using that to edit and show them what's going on, on the roof. Or whether that's using an app to enter information in where there's contactless with a store manager, when they show up and do a repair. We really had to adapt the way we're doing things to make sure that we're still able to bring... Limit contact at a facility, limit the people that are visiting that facility, and making sure that we're following the protocols for the facility that we're visiting. A lot of that we can share, we do share with our contractors as we dispatch them out to do work, so they're kind of seeing some of the best practices that other Fortune 500 companies, or government entities, or our local state and government are using. We're able to help pass that along to them, and how to be prepared with PPP, how to replenish that, how to work through an app and have contactless interaction with the customers. All that kind of gets pushed down in our best practices, and that gets shared through our dispatching to our contractors.

Heidi Ellsworth: That's great, because we know things are changing. You and I were just talking about this before we started, in that, how we do things, how we go to business is really going to change, and so I love that fact that you are able to bring the information from these huge national accounts on how they're handling safety, to the contractors. What are you seeing on and maybe what are you hearing from the contractors on how the crews are adjusting to all these new protocols?

David Workman: Yeah, I think it's, as we say, everything is a new challenge for us, but challenge is opportunity, right, Heidi? You're making sure that you kind of keep the same crews together and limit their interaction, and not having mixed crews, so to speak, where you're working with one person one day, and somebody else the next day, try to keep their teams tight. Try to do their best to limit their contact with people, obviously the use of mask and PPE. Everything has got to be done different. Every situation's got to be looked at differently today, is where am I going? How am I going to? Who am I going to be interacting in? How do I protect myself? How do I protect the client? Am I still able to get our work done? Every different situation has to be addressed differently than we have done in the past.

Heidi Ellsworth: Yeah. I love that. I keep hearing this also, is that people are kind of developing, what I've been hearing, called pods. The teams that are a pod that stick together, and it helps on the social distancing, and kind of keeping the contact limited. I think that is super smart, and it's also really kind of great, I think, for your national accounts, because they start getting to know the same crews, and the supervisors, and the people are coming out, there's a really one-on-one relationship with the facility management that I think is important too.

David Workman: That's right. The consistency of who they're interacting with.

Heidi Ellsworth: Yeah. I would love to talk a little bit about... For the contractors who are out there who are not involved in a network, or not part of a national conglomerate, or a roofing company, but for those who want to get involved with a network, who want to do more service work, more national work, more national account re-roofs. What's the first step, David, how do they kind of take that step towards getting involved in something like this?

David Workman: Heidi, that's a great question, because I'll first say, national work, whether it's federal, whether it's state and local, or whether it's national accounts, large retail, real estate, it's not for everybody. That's the first thing you have to decide, if you're a national contractor or not a national contractor, but a local contractor who wants to do national work is, is this for me? Because the requirements often are very detailed. We're working with generations now, that are coming up, that everything they do is technology driven, and we're in an industry that although continues to grow in technology still lacks behind some of the other industries. You really have to learn, first of all, what the requirements are going to be for an account, and is this going to fit your company? Can you provide what they're looking for? Because it's a high level of detail. It's not sometimes the detail, because you can't go to someplace locally and sit down with a national customer. They're handling facilities all over the country that they may never even see in person, so they don't have time to have interaction with a local contractor, often. They're looking for a national entity like us to break it down into pieces they can handle, let them know where their worst problems are, help them prioritize where they need to have their spend. I'd say first, it's not for everyone. You've got to really be able to adapt to that kind of work, and I think, honestly, it makes contractors better when they do adapt to that kind of work, because I think it makes them a much stronger service provider in their local market. First thing is, is it for you, do you really want to stretch your requirements, and know that you're going to have to document and provide information possibly in a different way than you're used to? So, that's one big thing. Two, make yourself available and let those networks know that you're out there, because we're always looking. Every contractor has supply and demand, and if a contractor is really busy, and they're full of work, we still have customers who are looking for work, so it's important that we know who's out there and who's available, and what kind of work that they're good at, because depending on the client, you're going to have a lot of different rooftops. We need them to make themselves available to us, and let us know that you're out there, and what kind of work that you do well, because our job, as a national organization, is to match the customer with the proper labor solution. That's what we do every day. It's to match the right contractor with the opportunity. Make yourself available, and want to grow your company, and that's a good way to do it.

Heidi Ellsworth: I think that's so important, what you just said too, because not only is it about the ownership of a roofing company wanting to maybe get involved in national work, but they have to really think about the system, their crews, the back office, what processes they have in place, so I think that's great advice because it can be somewhat... Having worked with different contractors who have gone through this process, it is a cultural shift, a little bit, to go from just pure local, working with all local, to working with a group like RoofConnect and with national accounts.

David Workman: It is Heidi, and I think, one of the key things there, is like you said, the back office and the paperwork side of it. It can be very good business for you, and I think it really helps develop some best practices for the contractor themselves. When you're working with Fortune 500 companies, or federal government entities, or whatever the case may be, they're on the cutting edge of what they expect, what the expectations are, and they're really setting the trends that are going to be passed down to others, and the high level of information. We do business with a lot of people that we very seldom have to have phone interaction with, because everything is done via a program or email, but you do learn a lot of best practices about how you can be a better provider in your local market, to your local customers, by doing national work and seeing how that's being done today.

Heidi Ellsworth: Yeah. I love how you talk about the technology too, because you're right. When you are using the technologies that these national accounts require, and then you bring them back into your local market, all of a sudden you're kind of... That's a differentiator for you, as your company.

David Workman: It absolutely is, and you learn. Over the years, I've seen so many contractors that have adapted to things that we've done with national accounts into their own business, and it's been a game changer for them. Whether it's helping them with portfolio management instead of just running leak calls, and not thinking about it after that. Oftentimes in our business, 15 years ago, maybe roof leaks were just a necessary end to a reroofing opportunity, and today, it's become a huge part of a lot of people's businesses out there. That service, and how to handle that service, and what the client's really looking for is absolutely a game changer, I think, for local contractors who get involved in that.

Heidi Ellsworth: Got it. I'm curious too, just to kind of follow up on this thought, what are you seeing from... Any changes on the national accounts on kind of the type of roofing that they're looking for? I know the COVID has just put such a blanket of need for security, need for protection, but also there's this ongoing trend of sustainability, and are you seeing any new trends coming out, request wise, from the national accounts?

David Workman: Not yet. We all got hit with this in March, and things started closing down, and capital projects started stopping, because people wanted to get a handle on this and where it was going. Oftentimes, the service departments did the same thing, because, I mean, nobody was working and they're adapting from working from home. Now then, it seems like that pent up demand there from March, April, May, and people already had their budgets approved, so we're seeing everything kind of turn back open all of a sudden, but we really haven't had a time to adjust to what's going to be new yet. I suspect we're going to go into a pattern, depending on how our economy and where the pandemic goes, we're going to go back into a pattern of a lot more service and maintenance, trying to maintain instead of spend money in a lot of places until we kind of figure out what's the status of retail long-term. I think you're going to see more fulfillment centers and maybe some new construction in that area, or existing buildings that they're taking over and moving into. I think, I predict, we're going to see a lot more maintenance and service opportunities, and maintaining for a little while as we kind of figure out what the new normal looks like.

Heidi Ellsworth: Yeah. I had been hearing that a lot. That companies really need to, if they already have a service department, they need to keep really pushing that, marketing it, making sure they're aware in that they don't have a service department, they need to get one going. Both residential and commercial. That there's just going to be a lot in that direction.

David Workman: Yeah. I think that's what we're going to see for a little while. Then, at some point, you're going to have that demand like you always do as the economy goes up and down, that you're going to have a pent up demand for reroofing, but I think we're going to be in a little bit of a maintenance and repair model going into 2021, a little more than maybe capital expense.

Heidi Ellsworth: Well, David, you and I both went through that with the recession, so we've been here.

David Workman: Absolutely.

Heidi Ellsworth: Just like you were working with Firestone, I was working with Carlisle at the time, and so we know that we get through these times when we work together. I think, when we really look at what you're talking about with RoofConnect, and this network, this collaboration of all these contractors, I think that we need to continue to do even more of that to help each other in this industry, and continue to grow that roofing respect, the professionalism.

David Workman: Absolutely, Heidi, and I think we're in a great industry that does that. There's plenty of business out there for everyone, and if everyone can communicate their challenges and share with each other how to improve themselves, that's good for all of us.

Heidi Ellsworth: I think so, too. Let's bring out our crystal ball. I always love this conversation. I want to kind of talk about, overall, some of the trends that we're seeing, but before we do that, what do you see for the next five years for RoofConnect? How do you see how you're going to be dealing with national accounts, how you're going to be dealing with contractors, how's that changing in the next five years, and kind of what are you guys looking at?

David Workman: Yeah, I think I may have touched on it a little bit earlier, but just continued growth through technology. We've got to keep finding ways to use our technology, to bring the roof in a meaningful way to decision makers, and national accounts, and federal, and the large multi-facility people that we deal with. We're just going to continue to evolve into... We tell people often, we're in the information management business with a specialization in roofing. That's really what we do is, and so I think that just the advent of continuing to use technology. I know Roof Connect is worked hard, and our own company to take technologies we're using and integrate them together, and using some cool ways to do that. Whether that's tying our database management system into Salesforce and to our accounting systems. Just to continue to use technology both in our own organization to make us more efficient, and also, to be more efficient in what we're bringing to the end user and our customer.

Heidi Ellsworth: Yeah. As you know, we're seeing it across the board, distribution is coming out with some amazing technology solutions, the manufacturers have new technologies for the rooftop, and really looking at how do we take the best advantage of the roof. I continue to see this movement towards really thinking of the rooftop as acreage, and what's the ROI on that acreage rather than just let's cover it and protect it, which is important. Got to have that at the bottom, but there's so much more to be done. I would love to kind of see some of your thoughts on going forward on what some of the new technologies, once we get through all this craziest, but some of the new technologies that we might be seeing rooftop, and how we can be a bigger part of that.

David Workman: Mm-hmm (affirmative). Mm-hmm (affirmative). Well, just one of the things you're seeing is more and more video from the roof, where a customer can actually watch the roof going down through a time lapse camera.

Heidi Ellsworth: Cool.

David Workman: I mean, there's just more and more things that people are going to be adopting and requiring. Then you're not sending project photos, but it really ups the contractor's game and their quality. I mean, you've got to make sure you're doing things the right way, and so if a customer puts a camera up there, safety's going to be paramount, obviously now, with COVID the PPE, everything involved in that. You're seeing a lot of new things that are going to change the way we do business in the future.

Heidi Ellsworth: I love it. I love it. Well, you know what? This has been incredible, and I would really recommend any contractor out there listening to reach out to you, David, right?

David Workman: That's right.

Heidi Ellsworth: And to your team. How can they reach out to you just to kind of maybe find out if they're a good fit for a national network, or kind of maybe just even networking, getting to know you? What's the best way for them to get in touch with you?

David Workman: Best way to get in touch with us is go to our website, which is roofconnect.com, and we've got a inquiry form there, they can fill that out, and then they'll be contacted by the right person on our team. There's just some general information, and then we've got a few people on our team that call and reach out, and get to know the contractor, and visit with them and see if they might be possible fits, learn what they do. That's the absolute best way to do it. They can feel free to call our office anytime, and we've got emails on our website, but that's the best way. That way we can look at the information, know who we're talking to, and then reach out to them and set up a visit.

Heidi Ellsworth: Perfect. I think everyone needs to kind of think about that, because what we're seeing, consistently, is the businesses out there who've been able to differentiate themselves, to really diversify, are the one, and obviously, as you said, so eloquently to adopt technology, those are the ones who are really doing well through all this craziness. I really encourage everyone to look at that, and obviously, this podcast is going to be on many channels, plus it's on our website. At Roofers Coffee Shop under Roofing Road Trips with Heidi, you can find the podcast, find the information about RoofConnect and it will all be right there too. David, thank you so much for being here today.

David Workman: Heidi, thank you so much for having me. I appreciate all the work you do in the industry, and I'm a big fan of yours, and I appreciate you taking the time to have us included in your podcast.

Heidi Ellsworth: Oh, thank you. It's mutual. I'm just so happy we were able to do this and we'll do it again. I want to check in and see how things are going, and I love working with your team, so we'll be back here again, talking about what's happening out there in the wide world of roofing.

David Workman: That would be great. That would be great, and I wish I had more, I wish I could tell people what's going to happen. I just know that we better embrace what our customers are looking for, and be able to adapt, and be nimble to what they're looking for. It's going to be a little bit different time, going forward, for a while.

Heidi Ellsworth: Yeah, it will be, but we're together in it, and that's the thing that matters. I think that's what the great thing with our industry is.

David Workman: Absolutely.

Heidi Ellsworth: Thank you, David. Thank you so much, and thank you everyone for listening to this segment of Roofing Road Trips with Heidi. As I said before, you can find us at rooferscoffeeshop.com and to Read Listen Watch where you can either read, listen, or watch to learn how you like it when you want it. Thank you so much for being here and have a great day.