Stories From the Roof S1: E1 with Dave Sullivan PODCAST TRANSCRIPTION

Editor's note: The following is the transcript of an interview with Dave Sullivan. You can read the interview below or listen to the podcast here. 

Speaker 1: Welcome to the Roofers Coffee Shop podcast, with your host Dave Sullivan from the Roofer Show. You've found the podcast that is dedicated to celebrating the roofing industry and the great people that work in roofing. Each week Dave interviews a member of our roofing community to learn more about their challenges and successes and to share stories only a roofer would appreciate. Let's get started.

Dave Sullivan: Welcome everybody, I'm Dave Sullivan and thanks for joining me on the introductory show of the Roofers Coffee Shop podcast where the industry meets. Many of you know the Roofers Coffee Shop as it's been a place for the last 20 years, it's build a community of roofing professionals that share ideas, tell stories, do research, sell items, find items, and get help on the day to day problems we all face. I've been a successful contractor for over 30 years and I host another iTunes podcast called the Roofers Show where I help roofing contractors grow their businesses and you can check that out at theroofershow.com and see what that's all about. I know the owner of the Roofers Coffee Shop Vickie Sharples and Heidi Ellsworth for quite a while now, I've been impressed with what they've done to help improve the industry that I had to collaborate with them on this podcast. The great thing about podcasts is you can download them to your phone and listen to them whenever you want. Each week I sit down with another roofing contractor that's hitting it out of the park and learn what they're doing at their roofing company that's working for them and give you some takeaways that you can use in your business. Today I sit down with Vickie Sharples, the founder of the Roofers Coffee Shop, and learn what the Coffee Shop's all about so let's go in and talk to Vickie. So Vickie, how's it going?

Vickie Sharples: Glad to be here with you Dave, thanks for having me. I've been busy working on adding great things to our website. For those of you that don't know I am a partner in rooferscoffeeshop.com a website for the roofing industry. We have resources, classified ad directories, a really cool forum which I'm very excited about, and now a podcast.

Dave Sullivan: Well Vickie I remember about 20 years ago we used to get the little newspaper every month and I'd read that thing cover to cover. It had some great articles, there was some good information kind of kept you up on the industry and the classifieds were great, you could sell equipment, you could buy some stuff. I remember buying a bunch of old tile, there was some tile yard somewhere that matched up with what we needed, that was a great source. Now the old newspaper's gone and you've taken the show online. What can you tell me about that?

Vickie Sharples: We could put so much more information online than we could in the printed publication, the cost of paper and the post office actually told us they didn't want to mail our paper anymore. I mean we kind of had no choice, of course there's a huge difference in cost and everything was ... it was around 2008, 2009 but everybody had familiarized themselves with the online version of it. It's actually superior although people miss the ink on their fingers and it's a superior way to get communication out there. What really developed because of going online was the forum. We had a forum and people would go in and talk to each other and that's why I'm so excited now because it took us years to get 4,000 topics and get everything updated to the modern technology. We just finally finished and it's so exciting, I'm so excited about it. What that turned into was a huge sense of community within the roofing industry. I agree, I mean this forum and the concept of the forum is really something that I think is fantastic and I want to get into that in a minute. I know that you and your partner, Heidi Ellsworth, have really put a lot of effort into bringing this thing up and your abilities with technology and, what's funny is actually Heidi is giving a webinar right now for the NRCA about technology in the roofing business, and this is something that I found just so exciting in what you guys are doing. Before we get into all of that how did you get into the roofing business? There's got to be a story there. When I was 19 years old my boyfriend's mother worked for a roofing manufacturer close to my house. I was, yeah, 19 years old, I drive an hour into work, I'd work 55 hours a week, and this roofing manufacturer made coding, they made felt, they had bulk asphalt, they had every different component of a roof and they sold direct to contractors and the roofing got into my blood. Then I became familiar with my entire roofing industry, not just as a manufacturer but for dealing directly with all the contractors and I kind of fell in love with it and never went anywhere else. My whole life I've been involved in different aspects in that. I went to work for a clay roofing manufacturer so I always consider myself, because I'm in love with clay roof tile for some reason and I would collect pieces like a little weirdo.

Dave Sullivan: You live in Santa Fe so that explains it.

Vickie Sharples: I love roofing, yes. All my friends are roofing contractors, I just love it. The greatest people in the world are roofing contractors to me.

Dave Sullivan: Yeah that's amazing, both you and Heidi are so well connected and so well thought of, I know, in the industry. That's why I think this is gonna be a great podcast and I think we're gonna be able to offer so much for our listeners.

Vickie Sharples: Well it's just another avenue to communicate with people and they can ... and the thing is is that our goal is to have some of the stories, the great guys that have a good story and it just benefits everybody, it's gonna entertain, it's entertaining, but it's also beneficial. Moreso knowing that there's people out there that have the same kind of problem and some guides to fix them or not just to be a problem solver but a success builder. We can say, "You know, I did this and it worked out great for me," and because of the way the forum has been it's builds a brotherhood.  I have a quick story, a guy that wrote that he now has somebody to talk about work with. He goes to a family party and sitting on a picnic bench with everybody and they asked him about work and he starts talking about it and their eyes glaze over. He said, "I feel like you guys are my brothers and I have somebody to talk about work or business with." That's what I always got me that we were the brotherhood. That's what mentally me and Heidi call all of the people out there the brothers, it's our brotherhood, and that's how I feel.

Dave Sullivan:  You know Vickie, I totally relate to exactly what you're talking about about this brotherhood. As a roofing contractor for 30 years I've been through everything and what I found is we all face the same problems everyday. The difficulty in being a contractor and running your own businesses is that you're totally alone out there in the wilderness, you can't really talk to your spouse or your friends, they just don't get it and the only ones that do are other contractors that live and breathe the same problems that we have. What I found over my time in the business the number one thing that I learned that benefited me so much was coming together with networking with other contractors whether it started off when I originally started going to the expos and then conventions and I would get out there and meet other contractors and that was the best thing about going to those shows. You can ask them questions, everybody had a different answer, "Yeah I went through a similar thing." Who wants to reinvent the wheel when everybody ... we've all gone through these same problems and we can share our experiences and hopefully find some shortcuts that we don't have to follow the same hard knock experience. So many of us though can't make it to these groups, can't travel to the expositions and so forth so what I've always pictured is the idea of the forum. I've been in a lot of forums and the problem is that that you got a question about something and post it and then all you do is get bombarded by a bunch of SEO guys promising to get you on the first page of Google so nobody wants to participate. What's the point of that? What I ended up doing was I joined a number of peer groups and these were contractors, non competing contractors, together where we could talk about the issues that we all face, how we could all learn from each other with best practices, that was just tremendous. This is something that I've wanted to get going from my podcast which was putting together a private Facebook group which would be for roofers only where it would be a safe place to go post your questions, get honest answers, and we could really help each other as a community. When I ran into you guys this is exactly what you had, you were talking about how you were really gonna try to update this and try to get that thing going, that's what attracted me to our collaboration. Vickie tell me how that we actually join the forum.

Vickie Sharples: You'll go to the Coffee Shop rooferscoffeeshop.com, you'll see the forum on the top, you feel free ... there's no membership or anything involved, you can read all you want. If you want to participate and post or post a question or post a response to something that's there you just have to put in your name and email address and it sends you a little email to make sure that you are not a robot and then that's it, easy as that.

Dave Sullivan: Do you have a nickname or something or do you-

Vickie Sharples: Yep, you can put in a username.

Dave Sullivan: So it's confidential about-

Vickie Sharples: Yes. Let me tell you roof rod has been taken a million times. It is the most popular name, so you would be roof rod 12 now.

Dave Sullivan: That's great. I think as an example, I'm working with a contractor right now, a young guy coming up wants to pick up his first salesman. He's starting to grow, he asks me, "How do I do that? How do I go about hiring somebody?" Here's the first questions that I would have that maybe we can get going on the forum because I've ran across so many contractors that have these issues and there's a lot of our community out there that has a dozen salesmen for instance, our guys that have been around the block so many times and they've tried it all different ways and what works and what doesn't and that's what this show is all about and what the forum is all about. What's working for people and what's not so we can learn from mistakes of others.

Vickie Sharples: Ironically there is a post I remember seeing not that long ago called what do you pay your sales people, do you pay them a gross or net flat rate, and everybody went on and said what they do so there you go. You have some great questions, all we have to do is put it back up to the top.

Dave Sullivan:  I agree.

Vickie Sharples:  And say Dave wants to know.

Dave Sullivan: Vickie and Heidi have provided a place, a community, where as our tagline say-

Vickie Sharples:  Where the industry meets.

Dave Sullivan: That's right.

Vickie Sharples: You know that's exactly what we do have, it's what makes the Roofers Coffee Shop so unique and that's why it's called a coffee shop, like you go and hang out with your friends and you talk. There isn't anything like it anywhere, that we actually just have a place for everybody to come. They can learn stuff if they want to or put a classified ad or they can speak with each other.

Dave Sullivan: That's a wrap for our show today, I really appreciate everybody listening to our introductory episode and be sure to visit the rooferscoffeeshop.com, sign up for the forum, get active in the community, ask some questions, offer some answers, and it'll make this a great place. You can check out my other podcast at theroofershow.com and see what that's about. Until next time thanks for listening to the rooferscoffeeshop.com podcast.