03: From 19-Year Old Amish Kid To $50M Commercial Roofing Dream Team with Simon Lee

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DISCLAIMER: These notes were automatically transcribed and NOT checked for grammer, nor accuracy. Read at your own risk! make more money or profit in the fall of 2007 and I did all year working. As a contractor you know, commercial roofing is an amazing opportunity that rewards hard work, but you also see huge issues emerging like finding time to bid jobs, hiring motivated employees, rocketing insurance fees and rising lead costs on Season One of the roofing that pays podcast experienced contractors will share their secrets to what's working in the exploding Commercial Roofing industry. Welcome to roofing that pays. Today I'm visiting with a friend of mine, Mr. Simon Lee from Western Pennsylvania, we're looking forward to a very interesting discussion to work with contractors all across the nation. It was an idea like last year, how much volume did your team purchase or how many people to work with nationwide if you take the whole entire organization of my team leader Be over 24 million. That's all wholesale volume. So that could equate to well over $50 million in sales and roofing projects sold. I can tell you the one guy that's just this is his second year in business is done over $2 million in volume this year in roofing so far, anything a year a ghetto, and it's still we're still we're still in the last stretch here where that could change. That number could change. Let's go back into your growing up years your family's occupation. What did your family do? How did you get into running your own business to start with? The first thing that I remember doing he was milking cows. I grew up on a dairy farm. I was on the dairy until I was 16 years old. Got my first job in out in Montana, my first job away from The feeling post, I was making all these fence posts that everybody gets that are treated Vince Posey, that's what I was doing. got out of there. And when I lived in Kentucky, and I was working with my brother in just general construction, and then when my brother moved, I was 19 years old at this time, on my brother move. He had a few jobs that were not completed or not done and they said, Hey, we need to do this job over here and put a rich cap over on this job and get a shingle and his other job while on the last job that I was on. A guy stops and he saves. So who's the boss here? You know, I'm a 19 year old, scrawny little dude, you know, and but I got the wise idea to split second and I said that would be me, you know, he said, Oh, he said, I guess if you can do this job like, I can trust you to do mine is like Yes, sir. I go over. That's how I became the owner. So They're on I kept doing residential decks pole barns shingle job metal guy anything I just general construction anything I could to make a living. I was about 24 years old at like six seven guys working for me and I'll tell you that's your that is a busy life the most I had working for me at that time was nine people was trying to keep people busy on the job. And I found out what is what a headache is. I mean, I'm telling you, you got to stay ahead of the game. You got to keep the jobs ahead of him because these guys you know you got nine people you can have you can have a full bar and Bill done in two days you know, so there was a lot of bidding at night and through today I was working with the crews and bidding my jobs at night my and keeping them lined up. Well, I finally figured out that I can have four people working for me and make just as much money as I had with nine people. So I kind of got back a little bit like that. And boy, I thought that was better. And so I got this wise idea, man, if I had all the money in the world, you know, like, if money was not the issue, what would I do? Well, I would stay home and grow up with my family, right? My kids instead of my grandkids, and I realized that I'm in debt, and by the time I'm out of the dead, my kids are out of the house. So I thought, well, I'm gonna build myself a veal barn. So I built my meal barn and all I did there was you think I quit doing my construction? Oh, I just got up an hour and a half earlier in the morning and worked in our half later at night. didn't really change my lifestyle. In 2005. A friend of mine Lolo out in Missouri, he told me I should take a look at the commercial roofing. So what was intriguing about Commercial Roofing or what piqued your interest about Commercial Roofing? See at this point. I got four guys working for me and I'm doing calves and feeding in on on I don't have time in the weekend. You got to go home and you don't do chores and I don't have my evenings and and I just became busier the rat race just became bigger. And when he told me about the Commercial Roofing, what piqued my interest was the ability to make the same amount of money on one roof on a 110 thousand square foot roof, I have the ability to make the same amount of money. That would only take me a week. That's what it did on my cash bar for five and a half months. And I said, Dude, I could just do a roof and make the same amount of money as I did. losing all my evenings and my hour and a half sleep in the morning. I said, Man, why would I just go do that it on. So I took a look at it went through training, very low investment in my training and the wholesale package that I bought, and I got the training and I said but you don't want you don't want it was very unfortunate. Even after I took the training. I got excited. I came home and I send out email Bit of advertising on it now you have to understand I was up general contract for residential. And I never advertised that any. And I had a very, very hard time understanding that I need to spend a little bit of money to advertise because in the residential industry, it was word of mouth. boredom. I couldn't keep up. It was all word of mouth. And I was like, why should I spend money if you know for advertising? Well, commercial is a big time difference than residential. But I did I send out like 2500 flyers. I got a couple leads, got one little job that was 2500 square feet. I did that job and I paid for my flyers. It paid for my training package. And I said, What at this point, you ain't making no money and I got stuck in the rut again, of residential. And I stayed from 2005 until 2000 of fall of 2007. I get a call from somebody and he said, Hey, I'm here while back already Save your fire. Hi. And I just couldn't believe that somebody kept my flyers for two years. And so I got his address and information went out, looked at his job, and he had a whole plan of building but he only wanted the one done. And so I gave him a contract on that. And I said, Now if I have more square foot than this, I can even get a better price. He looks at that. He says, Oh, that's not too bad. He said, How about you take that road from that roof back to that did the whole plan. He said, I let me let me look at this call in the morning, in one day, he signed that contract, and I made more money, more profit in the fall of 2007 than I did all year working. Then my eyes open up the light came on right and I said I better listen what Andrew was telling me all along that I need to be doing. So that's how my advertising got started. I started advertising 10% of whatever I want to make that year and you went on to run a very successful company for Many years later on, ended up selling that company, which we'll touch on later in this interview, let's talk about something that you might not enjoy talking about, which is struggles in commercial roofing. Can you share one of your biggest struggles in roofing so that we can learn from that and one of the hardest things is to get good quality workers to work for you any like two or three guys is all you want. You don't want more than that, because we are not trying to do a state state. We're not state workers. We all need two or three guys. You know, on a on a roof, probably the hard thing is I believe that the owner of the company should show up on the job, get it started, make sure it's being done right and then he should be able to leave and go and give customer service to the new client that called and and be there quickly. If you don't have good workers, it's hard to leave them on the roof and go and bid that other job if you can't demand that they do the job. Right, get at least one guy that you can truly depend on it can lead your group so that you can go and build these jobs within 24 hours after you got that call. If you go out and you're walking that new potential clients group within 24 to should be done within 24 hours after they first called you. If you do this, you have separated yourself from a huge mass competition out there. You would be surprised how many times I went out and talked to the building owner to say, dude, you're the first guy that showed up out of five or six that would call man that's easy to separate yourself from the competition right there going out there and give that customer the customer service that they deserve, and then get the contract back to you know what, that's another thing that I heard a lot of complaints from building owners. They say they come out look at the job. It's been six weeks and I still don't have a contract. Why you waste your time to look at a roof and not get the contract doing within the next 12 hours. Why not get the contract job while your story with the building are still fresh in his mind? So what would you say to someone looking at getting into commercial roofing today, you know, either as an add on to their existing business or even as a new business, what would you say to someone looking at this? If you're a new person, and you do not own a business at all yet and you have a job, my recommendation is don't quit your job. If you don't have to quit your job, don't quit your job. Send out flyers. Maybe you're allowed to take a week off every two weeks. And in this case, you might not be able to go out and bid the job within 24 hours, but you bought one day full of looking at roofs and you ask for one day off in two weeks and you send out these flyers and let the flyers do your work. You know when these people call you call them, they might leave you a message. You call them back and you set the appointment for two weeks ahead. It's going to be a little harder baby but it's a way that you can do it if you are an existing roofer. A Maybe a shingle guy or a dude metal or you know Residential Roofer, by all means we're not asking anybody to stop doing that. It's this is just roofing Do you know it's perfect. At least you're not fishing in a little farm barn where there's only blue gills because you could go fish in a big Blake border, you can get some blue marlin. Both of them are the same amount of effort. If you're already an existing contractor, and you're already doing roofing, commercial roofing is just part of it. We're just asking to maybe have another tool in the belt gives you a great chance to kind of merge from residential to commercial. What is one thing you would do differently if you were starting over? If I had to start this whole thing over I would give it all that I got? I would do it today rather than tomorrow because oh, and wouldn't you agree with me that if this actually works, it'd be better to do it sooner rather than later. I would stop thinking about it so much and start doing when you had your roofing business. You are buying your commercial roof coatings and roof materials from Conklin. Why Conklin's? I've checked out a lot of different companies out there I'm not here to knock anybody, there's a lot of coding companies out there, okay? And there's a lot of other ways that you can make money. But when I searched into the content company, I realized that they had a very high integrity, I met the owner and I realized that this is a lot deeper integrity there and and the minute most of them, it wasn't, you know, everybody needs to make money, but his number one goal was quality, quality over quantity just made sense to me that, that I should want to go with that. And then the next bigger thing right after that was that I realized that I don't have to be in my business here by myself. I yeah, it's I it's for myself, but I realized all of a sudden that I have a team of support people that are willing to show me the way Tell me what doesn't work and what does work. You know, we're living in a dog eat dog world and I was like, man, nobody wants to give you their information. But when I got involved with this, everybody wants to give you What works for them and what doesn't work and and a it's a team effort. You know, it's called customer support there that I was not permitted benefits and reasons why would somebody else when you first earn Conklin's preferred contract or title, you reset volume level. How did that make you feel? They when I first started roofing, I wanted to be a High Quality Roofer I wanted to be, I mean, yeah, we all got roofs out there property that we wish we did on a little different called the learning curve. But once I achieve the preferred contractor status, you feel like a million bucks. And guess what you do when you feel like a million bucks, you go make a million bucks. Right? for one of our last questions here. Today. You're mostly coaching training other contractors. As a coach and trainer, where do you see Commercial Roofing as an industry and let's say five years from now, where's the industry headed? When I first started most of the people that I would go talk to in the commercial roofing building owners They would, they'd say, Well, what is content? They didn't know what it was. And then I have to sell myself, including the product that I'm using. Now I got people that are calling me saying, dude, this building owner calls me and said they want a complex system. I mean, they're they're literally asking for the comm system, not just a waterproofing system, but they are there now naming the brand that they want. And while you know we go from what was it 11 million in 2000, and then 15, and by 2017, it was 15,002,000. I'm this is just my little leg. It's just my team. This ain't the whole Conklin. And by 2018, we were at 19 million and total organization volume 24 million. I see this in the next five years it's going to be 24 million is going to be a small number. From what we're going to see in the future is exploding And I'm telling you, I'm gonna say this. We are the luckiest people are the most blessed people to be allowed to be part of this company in this small stage that we're in because once we hit that hundred million, I mean it's still gonna be really good, but being allowed to be in it now. Now's the time to get started now is the opportunity is wide open, because I'd rather be a part of it plans still under 100 million. I have a few short questions I call the lightning round is your favorite roofing product either coatings or membranes. coatings by far and why is that because it's I pump it up on the roof and I sprayed in place rather than carrying it up and nailing it in place. And I found when I sprayed in place, the flashing everything fits really nice. It wasn't Your favorite app you used in your roofing business? Yeah, weather app. gotta know what the weather is, though on. What's your favorite business book? Probably the How to Win Friends and Influence People. Would you rather go to the mountains or to the beach? If the trip was paid by someone else? I'd go to both. If you could leave one sentence of advice for another person that could make an impact, what would that be? Find out what your passion is, and then pursue that with all that you got. Great interview. Thank you, Simon for your time. Yes. My pleasure. Thanks for listening to roofing that pays. Before you go. Can we ask a huge favor? 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