Intro
Welcome to the explode your Roofing business Podcast, Your Ultimate Guide to growing your roofing business. Are you ready to take your roofing business to the next level, whether you’re just starting out or you’re looking to skill your existing business? This podcast is for you. We’ll be sharing expert advice on everything. From marketing and sales to business management and growth strategies, we’ll bring you the latest insights and best practices for building a thriving roofing business. So sit back, relax and get ready to explode your roofing business. This is explode your roofing business podcast.
Eric Keith
All right, welcome to the explode your Roofing business podcast. This is our very first episode and in this podcast we are going to cover several topics of your business that you are currently running and try to help you in any way. We can possible and today our topic is the power of a professional brand and I have with me today is Brett. He’s one of the marketing strategist. With me over at Blackstone Design and marketing. Brett, how you doing today?
Brett Keith
Doing wonderful, excited to hit the first podcast episode with you.
Eric Keith
All right. I think one of the very foundational parts or elements of a roofer and his business is having a professional brand. And once you have that figured out, a lot of other things just seem to fall into place. Don’t you agree, Brett?
Brett Keith
I think a lot of roofers skipped that and they kind of put it towards the end when in fact, before they ever even, you know, performed their first roofing service, they should have considered their brand as their first priority.
Eric Keith
Right. And when when we talk about brand, I feel like a lot of people think of maybe just a logo and maybe their name and that’s pretty much. The the length and the extent that they think a brand is that’s nowhere near all of it. So, right, why don’t you give us some ideas of, like, what all you would like to see someone have if if they were to speak to you about marketing advice? What all they they. Should have as part of their brand.
Brett Keith
I think the first thing people need to start considering before they consider a name or colors or logo or brand or anything that plays a role into their image, they first need to be understanding what services are they wanting to offer, what type of customer are they wanting to serve. And what is going to be the main personality or theme of their of their company, of their brand? And I think once they understand that first, that’s when they’re able to piece the other, you know, elements in place because a lot of times when I sit down with a marketing strategy session with someone and I start asking them questions. About like. OK, who’s your ideal customer? They’re trying to ask me what that even means, or they’ll I’ll ask them. Hey, what’s your unique selling proposition, your USP and a lot of people have even spent the time to sit. There and think. Why a customer would choose them over the other competitors that exist in their market?
Eric Keith
Right, so knowing your ideal customer really is the starting point where at least at least what you’re wanting to offer. And then who is the best fit for your offering, right, so. Like you know. Walmart serves a whole different group of people than, let’s say, Aston Martin or, I don’t know. I’m trying to think of another like high end.
Brett Keith
Like Nordstrom is a good example that. Takes Walmart quite a bit.
Eric Keith
There we go. So they have completely different customer base where ideal customer you know, Walmarts trying to be the cheap, everybody store where Nordstrom is trying to get the. Upper end of society. Right. So everything they do, every decision they make is going to be tailored to those types of customers, correct?
Brett Keith
I mean, with the everyday low price that only appeals to the person who cares about price, the person who’s price sensitive, the person who is on a tight budget, typically a low income. No disrespect to those people, but for a company like Nordstrom, they’re looking for the affluent, the people that are high income, that are looking for premium products. You know, there’s many statistics and projections out there that both Walmart and Nordstrom have the same bottom line. At the end of the year. But of course, Walmart serves a greater customer base and a different type of customer. So it really depends on who your target customer is in your mind. Now, I think most roofers. Would agree that everyone wants the $1,000,000 houses and beyond, you know, but there there’s definitely a market that exists for repairs and replacements and we know a lot of roofers that make that a specialty.
Eric Keith
Right. So whether you’re trying to tailor your services to the low income? People or the high income earners, you need to know that on the front end and tailor everything about your brand accordingly, right? The name of your business, the colors, your logo, literally your services and your pricing. Just about everything. So you really need to know who you’re trying to target 1st. And then you start filling in the gaps from there, right?
Brett Keith
Yeah, I would definitely agree because once you understand your ideal customer is for, let’s say, the middle to upper class, then you know how to structure your offering. You know how to structure, you know, the benefits of hiring you versus the competition that’s going to appeal. So being, you know the, let’s say as an example presidential club of GA F That’s going to matter to the person who’s. Looking to hire the best roofer, but if there’s.
The best of the. Going to be.
Eric Keith
Best so they don’t have to. Deal with any problem. They’d rather pay whatever it cost upfront just to not deal with any headaches later on, right?
Brett Keith
While the you know middle to lower class type of customer, they’re not really, they’re not impressed with your certifications or your badges and awards and what they care about is who has the cheapest quote.
Eric Keith
They want the best deal.
Brett Keith
And that’s pretty much it. They don’t care about warranties. They don’t care about, you know, the style. And look, they just care about what’s the cheapest.
Eric Keith
Right, right. So I guess I, I guess that’s a that’s another thing you mentioned benefits or reasons why to choose you so we many times we call that a USP you know a unique selling proposition you know what are some reasons why your ideal customer should choose you over your competition? And you need to tailor that USP to your ideal customer.
Brett Keith
So and that starts, you know when you consider the name of your company, a lot of people think that that doesn’t play a role, but it actually does colors. I mean, there’s a lot of colors that are attributed to luxury brands versus colors that are more for the mass market. You know more widely accepted by all walks of life, so. Understanding that and understanding what offering you know, there’s some roofers that you know swear to never do a replacement. Some are on the opposite end, where they swear to never do a repair, so understanding who you’re serving your service offering has to meet the needs of that type of customer, because if you don’t offer repairs and you’re trying to go after, let’s say, and. Average homeowner or lower middle class type homeowner who may want the repair well, now you’re not going to be hired because you don’t even offer the service that they’re primarily interested in. And if you’re after the upper class people then being able to be a full service where you can offer, let’s say maintenance and having some type of maintenance program in place as well where you come on an annual basis to do inspections and you know other little forms of maintenance that’s going to matter to the person who is let’s say upper class. Because they want that Peace of Mind to know that they’re they’re investment is being protected.
Eric Keith
Right. So you’re still talking about tailoring the services to your ideal customer now. Also once you have that figured out, you know the unique, the US, the USP, the unique selling proposition, that’s things like let’s say, nobody’s going to beat our prices, right? That would obviously be tailored to someone who. Who wants the the bargain shoppers right and not the higher income earn? So you definitely want to create USP’s that fit your ideal customer. So obviously if you’re. Trying to hit. The high income you obviously would not use something USP like that you know.
Brett Keith
In contrast, you would want to use something like lifetime warranty or to crime your warranty or or the presidential club. Or were, you know, Master Elite where this where that?
Eric Keith
No headaches or hassle free or you know on and on things like that that they don’t ever have to think about it again, right? You’ll deal with that problem once, and you’ll never be a problem of theirs again. That’s that’s what I feel like the affluent is looking for, right? They want to make one phone call and that be the end of their problem, and they’re they’re willing to pay whatever it is to get rid of that problem out of their life.
Right.
Brett Keith
And when you’re working with, let’s say, the middle class or lower class, it’s very. Important to make sure you have financing options available. The affluent will be interested surprisingly in financing as well. If it’s at an affordable interest rate. If it’s not at an an affordable interest rate, then they’re not gonna be interested. They’ll just use their own money. But a lot of times it will surprise you that we found that. Many affluent customers have used financing, even though they could write a check and pay cash for it. You know, first day.
Eric Keith
Oh yeah, other people’s money.
Brett Keith
They always use other people’s money as much. As they can.
Eric Keith
Yeah, right, I agree. All right. I have a list of just some basic things that you know what is a brand and you know one of the big categories I have listed out is, you know just the basic info. So we talked about the name of your business. You need, you know, you need to know your ideal customer. I have, you know, what services you’re offering, the USP we just mentioned. And you also tailor your tagline or slogan to again your services or to your ideal customer. And Brett, we also have mentioned residential or commercial, do they need to know that on the? Upfront I would say.
Brett Keith
I think it’s. I think it’s very important to. To make a distinction of who you’re going to serve, I think if you’re starting out and your experiences, let’s say, rather inexperienced, you have just a few years under your belt, I would recommend starting out with just residential because with residential it’s an easier sell to make. It’s easier to fund. You can get a lot more of them. You can get a lot of reviews generated by doing a lot of residential job. And more specifically, repairs when you do repairs, it’s easy to sell a repair. You don’t have to have some impressive resume and portfolio to be able to sell a repair. But what that essentially does for companies that are new and starting out. Is it helps you build? Up your portfolio in an incremental process. Where you can get a lot of reviews, a lot of repairs which are easy to sell and then that builds up your portfolio portfolio to be able to start selling replacements. And once you kind of maximize your opportunity and dominate the residential spectrum, that’s when moving into commercial becomes a lot easier because you’re not starting from scratch trying to compete with a lot of huge roofing companies on several $100,000 projects. Now you have that portfolio on that resume and that you know list of experience.
I was.
Eric Keith
One another reason. Also, just like what you’re saying is like I I know of a past client who, you know, only did residential, and he started dabbling into commercial and kind of gotten into some jobs over his head. And he was still a little inexperienced in commercial and, you know, kind of lost his shirt when he he did a job wrong and got sued. Over it and you know. By taking things slow, you’re going to gain the experience, and even if you did get sued, you know, let’s say 100,000 if if you’re a much bigger company by that time it, it ain’t going to devastate you in your. Business so.
Brett Keith
Right. And I’m sure some of you listening. You’re you’re a full experienced tradesman when it comes to roofing, you could do anything, repair, replace commercial residential. It doesn’t matter what the roof type is or how big or small it is, you can handle it. And for for those. To people you know, definitely, you know, go after both simultaneously. But even at the end of the day it just it’s important to make the business decision from a profit analysis and to make.
Eric Keith
And risk versus we’re roared, yeah.
Brett Keith
And just make sure you make that decision in that clear distinction up front, because that’s going to play a role in how you brand your company.
Eric Keith
Right, right. So and and knowing back to your services, knowing whether you offer repair or just replace or both or whatever.
Brett Keith
Yeah, and.
Eric Keith
But then go ahead.
Brett Keith
Let me ask you, uh, how would that play a role, Eric, in regards to their imagery, like what a lot of people refer to as like the logo or the branding or brand book? Talk to me about how they, some things they should consider their.
Eric Keith
So if we’re talking about logo and brand colors and whatnot, so if if we’re talking about trying to reach the higher income type people, you would want a more prestigious type of logo. So you would want a more prestigious type of font, right? And there’s a few colors that you would, you know, ideally use too and in the color. Aspect I would say simpler the better. So we’re talking about, you know, whites, blacks, Grays, Silvers, maybe some gold, but just keep it very simple. If we’re going for, you know, the high. End if we’re going medium to low end the rainbows, the colors of the rainbow is a good place to start. It’s very bright. You think of Walmart, right? It’s blue, yellow, real bright, things like that. You can be a little more creative with your logos and whatnot targeting that type of clientele.
Brett Keith
And when we talk about when you talk about fonts, how important is it to make sure you’re choosing the right font in regards to like readability?
Eric Keith
Oh, big time, big time. So I would always choose a readable font and so something you could do is maybe, you know, have your font. Not written or your your business name written out and your font and print it off on maybe a business card or whatever, and then just stand like 10 feet away and see if you can read it. Ask other people to stand 10 feet away and see if they can read it. If you cannot read it, you know just standing 10 feet away, chances are it’s not a very readable font. So a lot of times, if you if you move to a cursive type font, you want it to be a very readable font, right? A lot of times, you know, cursive can get very, very hard to read.
Brett Keith
And you know, I even experienced that as a consumer. Yesterday I was driving behind a vehicle that said integrity cleaning and it had a phone number and just the font and the stroke and just kind of how they had the phone number written. I was doing my absolute best to try to read the number and could not interpret if it was the number one, a number 7 and therefore I just struggled to be able to capture the number. So if you want your marketing to be effective, these are just some of the simple things you may consider up front. So Eric, now let me ask you this.
Eric Keith
Well, hold on while we’re still on. That, like mental energy, is like one. Everybody’s lazy pretty. Much just just. A general statement, right? Nobody wants to exert more energy than necessary. So when you try to make something hard to read, people don’t like it, right? Once they read it, you know they’ll try to avoid it next time. And that also goes into what we’ll probably get into later is remembering your brand, you know, brand recognition. If if again you have a hard to say name, that’s something we didn’t even talk about. Brett is, you know, choosing a word, or if you have a last name that’s just hard to say, choose a different name, by all means, choose. Choose something that’s easy to to read, to say to say off the tip of your tongue. Right. So be very careful on naming your business. Sure, it’s easy to remember, easy to read, easy to say so, things like that. I was going to jump into an aspect, also part of a brand that is a little more abstract, but it’s it’s the reputation of your brand that’s a major and some people call it brand. Just just what people know your business as or your brand as. So Brett, you want to talk about maybe how important reviews or your reputation is in, you know a professional brand, how, how important is that?
Brett Keith
Well, as a marketing strategist, I’ve had the ability to speak to many different roofing business owners and there’s many companies that have grown to two to five million simply off of word of mouth. And that only happens because they’re doing quality service and that’s the foundation. If you’re not doing quality work and you’re not satisfying your customer at the end of the day, then everything else as far as your reputation management strategy is going to be flawed. So it’s important to make sure the workmanship, the technical workmanship of your trade is as best as it can be. And then once you have that in place where your work is. Proper then that’s where you know the customer experience really needs to be enhanced as much as you can and that’s through effective communication, letting the customer know what to expect when their roof will be replaced or repaired, how long it will take, what the cleanup process looks like and just kind of all the INS and outs of that project. But then after the project is complete, you shouldn’t just hit the road, never to be seen or heard from again. You need to touch base with that customer and you need to be asking hey, have we satisfied? Have we met your expectations?
Eric Keith
Right.
Right.
Brett Keith
And then from there that’s an opportunity for them to have a discussion and present either areas that you can resolve. Immediately or thinks of just. Hey, everything’s great. We’re happy. Which once you get the answer from your customer saying, oh, no, you guys are great.
Eric Keith
Right.
Brett Keith
Everything’s perfect. I appreciate it. Don’t. Do not. Do not leave at that point. That is now your your transition. That’s your bridge.
Eric Keith
I wouldn’t change a thing.
Right.
Brett Keith
Getting a review. To to getting a referral and having some type of referral incentive, even if it’s just based on goodwill, you know, hey, it really helps us out when you give us a referral, please, if there’s any friends or family that you know that need an any roofing services, let them know that we’re available even if it’s nothing else.
Eric Keith
Right.
Brett Keith
You know, some people actually offer some type of actual referral. Spiffs or incentives, whether it be a prize or a gift card or something. But either way, the main thing.
Eric Keith
Yeah. If you get that feedback, I’m I’m thinking like if you’re in person and you get that feedback and you’re asking, let’s say you you have a sales guy in, in the house with the customer and they say ohh man, everything’s great. You guys do a fantastic job. I wouldn’t change a thing. I’ll, I’ll tell everybody I know about you. You pull out your phone and ask. Hey, can you say that? On the on the on video real quick and and capture that video testimonial and post it everywhere. Post on your Facebook your your website everywhere. So yeah, definitely do not leave a A, you know, a testimonial or view on the table.
Brett Keith
That’s good.
Eric Keith
Ask for it, ask for it first, turn it, and then ask for.
Brett Keith
And I’ve even I’ve even heard some sales reps still request to use the clients phone to take a picture or a video and then they transition and say now using your phone that you just took this picture video with. Can you attach that to your five star review for us? Because what that does is not only does it geotag it.
Eric Keith
Oh wow, yeah.
Brett Keith
And have a unique IP address as we all know through like SEO and stuff. But when they upload that, it helps make that review so much more powerful by being targeted.
Eric Keith
It does, yes.
Brett Keith
And of course, including just the value of a picture or video.
Eric Keith
Right. It doesn’t look so coerced, right? It looks like they did of their own free will. Because they were so ecstatic about your service that they wanted to do it on their own, their own volition. So yes, that is an excellent tip right there.
Brett Keith
So in regards to reputation, you gotta earn it. You gotta ask for it. And there’s of course many strategies that could be implemented in asking for it. But the main thing is to understand. We all talk about and we hear the power of compounding in regards like investments and let’s say a company gets let’s say 10 leads and out of those ten leads they have different conversion rates, but a sole job turns into a review and then it turns into a few referrals. Well, now those new jobs. That came from the referrals now turn into additional reviews and then turn into. Additional referrals and just from a few initial leads, you’re getting a compounding growth that’s organically happening without needing to generate new leads. It’s generating referrals. And a lot of companies that I see struggle are the ones that never get reviews and never get word of mouth, which typically there’s a reason why they’re not. But regardless of that, when you’re not growing and compounding, you don’t have the value of the power of compound. So then you always have to have a fresh. Batch of new leads. And the moment the market slows down a little bit, you’re starving.
Right.
Eric Keith
Right, right. Absolutely. Yeah, I wrote down. I wrote down like some quick tips for them to take away, you know, make sure your brand attracts your ideal customer. So I I wrote a couple bullet points. So first you need to catch their attention so you know tailoring everything to that ideal customer. So if you think about fishing, right. You know, there are certain types of fish. And once you know the fish you’re going after, there’s certain kinds of bait that attracts that fish. And, you know, not necessarily attracts a whole host of different fish. Right. So the same thing with marketing, you want to tailor your marketing efforts to that ideal customer. So first catch their attention. Gain their trust. So this is this is having those testimonials on your website having good reviews on all the different platforms and you know just really gaining trust by let’s say you know other badges or awards that you’ve got, so catch their attention, gain their trust. Next is. Earn their referral or endorsement. I wrote down, but yeah, I think you’ve been saying referral, so we’ll stick with that. Next is repeat and it gets easier and easier each time you repeat the process. So just. I wrote this down before you even start talking about the compounding effects, but yes, basically what I just said complements what you just got through mentioning by, you know, the compounding effect. Basically, this process will get easier and easier because you should be able to gain their trust easier because you have more. Good reviews and good testimonials. And you know if you have videos and pictures of people, maybe thumbs up. If maybe you want your yard signs or whatever, that just that just really looks good and people begin to trust your site more because just the social proof of everybody seems to like this company. So things just seem to get easier and easier. You get like kind of this snowball effect, you know, rolling down a hill. It just gets bigger and bigger and bigger and it just gets easier overtime.
Brett Keith
Absolutely, yeah, all good sports.
Eric Keith
So and to me that that boils it down to the power of having a professional brand.
Brett Keith
And just a question for those listening. Just wonder how many of your competitors are following these steps and guidelines that we’re presenting today and how well are you? Because if you’re not, you could obviously be implementing this and dominate your competition. And for the most part it’s very rare to see a company following this religiously and properly. So feel free to obviously adopt as much as you can. This because it will be transformational in your business.
Eric Keith
Right. Well, I hope you guys learned a lot about building a professional brand and the importance of it and this is going to conclude our first episode. Thank you for listening and stay tuned for the next episode.
Outro
Thanks for tuning in to the explode your Roofing business podcast. We hope you found today’s episode informative and actionable. Remember growing a successful roofing business takes time and effort, but with the right strategies and tactics, anything is possible. Don’t forget to subscribe to our podcast so you never miss an episode. And visit our website for more resources and information about our book. Explode your roofing business. Thank you for listening and we’ll see you in our next episode of Explode Your Roofing Business podcast.