SPEAKERS

Dylan McCabe, Heath Hicks

 

Dylan McCabe  00:00

Welcome to the roofing SEO Show Episode Number 22. Welcome to the roofing SEO show My name is Dylan McCabe and in every episode we give you a seat at the table is we interview owners and CEOs of roofing companies so that you can get strategy from them to elevate your own game. Now in this episode, I interview he takes, he is the inventor of the catch all. But before that he was the owner of aapko. And you are going to hear the story, how he went from a sales guy roofing sales for seven years to the owner of a company and quickly grew that company, basically from two to 3 million team to eight locations and over 50 sales guys doing a lot of money with good profit margins and annual revenue, we’re gonna get into all of that the journey and the process and key insights learned along the way, you’re gonna get a lot out of this episode. Plus, he does just a really cool guy, I’ve thoroughly enjoyed interviewing him because of his background, and because of his unique story into this space, and it’s really going to be an inspirational and encouraging story to you, especially if you’re in a challenging season with COVID. You’re gonna learn about how to face challenges, what kind of mindset you need to have, and how to move forward. Okay, there’s just a lot of great stuff in this episode. And it’s a longer one just because the more we talked, the more I wanted to talk with him and get more stuff out of it. So it’s just great. Before we do that, if you haven’t done so already, definitely check out our Facebook group guys, we are growing a group. But I want to be unlike most of the other groups out there. There’s no spam allowed in our groups. There are no links, no videos, no anything. It’s purely for discussion for owners, and partners and leaders in roofing. Anybody who advertises gets gets kicked out immediately. So it’s meant to be a place for discussion. Just do a Facebook search for a limitless roofing SEO group that’s limitless roofing CEO group. Or you can just go to our website, limitless CEO group.com. And a banner will pop up that says join our Facebook group. Let’s build this thing. Let’s make it big and let’s make it quality, where it’s not just this endless stream of random questions and ads. It’s actually a place where you discuss leadership and the key components of your business and get synergy together. Alright guys, we want you part of the community. And I look forward to seeing you there. Now let’s get into this interview with Heath Hicks. All right, as I mentioned, we have special guests he takes on the show today he is the owner of aapko roofing and many of you may know him as the inventor and owner of the catchall.

 

Heath Hicks  02:30

 How’s it going, guys?

 

Dylan McCabe  02:31

Yeah, thanks for joining the show, man. So I think a lot of people may listening to this. Maybe they met you at roof con. So they know you as the owner of the catch all system or maybe they know you in the world of roofing just in different avenues because you’re the owner of aapko. And I think your story is really interesting as how you got into roofing and then how you became the owner of your company and stuff like that. So just kind of share your a little bit about your background and how you got into roofing.

 

Heath Hicks  03:01

  Yeah, so I’m originally from Tulsa, Oklahoma, I grew up a single mom scenario, pretty rough. In and out of shelters, and government, housing, and church housing and all that kind of stuff. pretty rough neighborhoods I seen all of that struggle. So close, you know, inside my house and around all the people I grew up with, I just decided that whenever I got the steering wheel to my life in my hands, I just wasn’t I wasn’t going to allow that kind of stuff to happen, I was going  to make different decisions. And so early on, I was really motivated to try you know, different things, unusual things, think outside the box, do stuff that other people didn’t normally do. So I moved to the Philippines when I was 17. And lived up in the jungle with the tribe. just helping them out community development, trying to figure out how to make their life better. And started a long journey. I did a lot of nonprofit work for a long time all over the world. So all kinds of things went to so many different places that you know, people don’t normally go to for vacation, you know, got to see a lot and learn a lot. And when I kind of settled back here after about five years after college, I knew I was going to have to find some sort of more normal job and worked in film and television for a while for a studio and then that was really attached to a marketing firm. So got a lot of experience there just being creative and telling stories, branding companies stuff like that. And when the market crashed in 2008 I didn’t want to move to LA or New York to be to dive deeper into the film and television industry, it just wasn’t a career I really wanted. So I stayed here in East Texas, started just looking for jobs. I did a few things here and there a couple sales jobs did really well, but didn’t really enjoy them that much. And then one of my buddies had started working as a roofing salesman, and I think he’d been doing it about six months, he just call him said, Hey, dude, you gotta try this job. And so I jumped in. And it was a interesting experience from the beginning, you know, the first, the first two things I learned were how to eat a deductible, and that adjusters were the enemy. So first two things I learned, and realized almost immediately that the second one wasn’t true that they were just good people trying to do their job. And it took me several months to really figure out the first one was wrong. And from there on out, I just kind of invented my own way of sales. In the roofing industry, I didn’t have a lot of good examples, they didn’t, you know, they didn’t have a lot of stuff going on Facebook at the time, there wasn’t a lot of groups you could go to and conferences you could go to for storm restoration work. So I sort of just invented my own process, because I ended up being a project manager sales guy for seven years here in the same area the whole time. And that’s pretty unusual for someone in roofing sales to be in it for that. company.

 

Dylan McCabe  06:31

So let’s, let’s stop right there. Because there’s a huge, there’s a huge thing I want to address that. I see. And this is why I love a podcast, because we can talk we can go deep, and you can share part of your story, which I think a lot of people may get to know you never even know that you’ve been to the Philippines or know that you had a rougher, you know, the early formidable years of your life were very challenging. So for guys listening that, that that, you know, they may even have just that script in their heads of, yeah, but I’ve been I’ve been kind of, I haven’t been given what everybody else has been given, I haven’t been given the opportunity I grew up in a broken home, you know, I grew up with an abusive parent or whatever. from your experience, you know, two people can go through that same experience and come out of it two different ways. Totally. And I heard a story one time a guy says, you know, two people can fall out of a tree of the same branch, one can break his arm, and the other can just come out with a bruise. And so what would you say? What’s just one big piece of advice for people who and people say you don’t know what I’ve been through? My response to that is, well, you don’t know what I’ve been through. But what would you say? What’s a piece of advice that you would give to people that have kind of that defeated mindset where they feel like they’re a failure, or they’re right, they’re defeated, and they don’t have what it takes?

 

Heath Hicks  07:49

I would say two things. If you’re angry about what you went through, you’re probably still a victim. If you’re blaming others, for your current shortcomings, you’re probably still a victim. And if you want to get out of the curse, or the ramifications of what those people did to you, or out from under the damage that they caused you, you got to get out of being a victim. You can’t be a victim anymore. It Yeah, it. I’ll hear people’s stories, and I’ll look at it and I say, yeah, that is really tragic that you experienced that. But if you let that dictate what you’re going to be now then you’re responsible for it now. Yeah, you got handed something that you know, no one deserved. But at this point, as an adult, you’ve got to make up your own mind to not be that person anymore. And to rewrite your story and rebuild yourself, and it hurts, it hurts to look at yourself in the mirror and say, I’m damaged this way, or I’m missing this thing, or I don’t understand this thing about life because my parents didn’t give it to me or my, this person did something really bad to me. And it messed with my head or mess with my heart. Yeah, it sucks. But you got to be direct and honest with yourself and say, yeah, I’m missing XY and Z. But the only way I’m gonna get it is if I forgive all that stuff, I let all that stuff go. And I figured out how to give myself that now. You know, I never even met my dad. And so a ton of stuff. He didn’t give me a life. And when I was 21, I realized that if I wanted to do so I was gonna have to teach myself. There wasn’t going to be anybody there for me. I’d always hoped another guy would come in, you know, married my mom and become a dad for me or some guy at church would, you know, take me under his wing or adopted me not that there weren’t good people in my life. But nobody was that real person for me that I always longed for. And 21 years old. My girlfriend at the time broke up with me, because I didn’t understand how to be a man. I didn’t have a good career. I didn’t know how to fix a car. I didn’t know how to, you know, install a dishwasher or washing machine. Didn’t know what the lights on your dashboard of your car meant I didn’t know how to fish. I’ve never hunted anything. I didn’t know any of that stuff. And yeah, it wasn’t my fault, of course. But instead of just being upset about the fact that I didn’t get it, you got to focus on what you can do. And so I just set my mind to learning that stuff. Because I didn’t. Not only did I not want to experience that kind of rejection again, but I had to look at myself in the mirror and say that she was right. She was right. I didn’t, I didn’t know any of that stuff. And up to that point, I had been insecure about it or defensive about it, or I blamed other people for it. But I just decided I was going to own it, I was going to be an owner of my story in my future. And I wasn’t going to let anybody that didn’t do something for me, or somebody did something wrong to me dictate dictate how my future was going to go anymore. And I transferred from my job at my school, I worked in the mail department, I transferred from there to the maintenance and construction department. And to say that I was intimidated, or terrified was an under is an understatement. My first day, there, I showed up, there were three other maintenance techs. And so the guy who ran the department has started handing out all these work tickets, you take this to the Senate, this one on this one, you take these two cars right next to each other. And so I ended up with a little stack, I think, for work tickets and things that I needed to go do. And I was reading through them, and I didn’t understand any of it. And so everybody kind of started moving around the shop, trying to find the tools they need and the supplies they needed. And some guys were cutting stuff. And I was looking around going like, oh, what am I gonna do like I had to stall until everyone was gone. So I could sit down and focus enough to try to figure out what I was going to need, your house is going to fix this up. I didn’t know anything about it. And the boss of the time had kind of come back and forth. A couple times, I think you’d figured out that I was stalling, you know. And so he came over and real graciously. I asked him, I’ll see Well, how do I phrase the question. I tried to phrase it in a way that he wouldn’t know that I didn’t know anything about what I was doing. And I think I asked him where the tools were something like that, where the tools I’m going to use for this. I didn’t even know what tools I was going to use. I was hoping he was going to point him out. And he was like, okay, you’re gonna find a crescent wrench I’ll never forget, he’s like, you’re gonna find a crescent wrench over here. And you’re gonna find your metric sockets over there. And then I just didn’t hear anything else. After that. I just blast glazed over because I didn’t know what either any of those things were. And I was like, Okay, cool. Cool, you know, so I go over to the drawer that he kind of pointed out and I open it, and there’s all this stuff in there. I didn’t have any idea what a crescent wrench was. And so I’m like, Well, I can’t figure that out. So I went over to the socket thing. And I was like, Okay, I think I can tell these go on something. But I literally didn’t know how to connect. I just didn’t I literally didn’t know. And so next thing I knew, I was so frustrated. And so insecure. I was standing there crying, literally just crying, hoping that like no one was around. Because I was just I had that moment where I could, I started to feel really angry about the fact that I, my dad. My brother actually took me to meet him. He didn’t tell me I was in the car. He didn’t tell me where we’re going. My brother in new one. He was we had different dads. He took me to meet him. And he went up to the door, whatever, and told him that I was out there. And he’s like, Nah, I don’t, I don’t want to meet him. Like he wouldn’t even walk out of his house to come meet me. So I’m standing there, like thinking about that I was so angry for a moment. And I just realized, it doesn’t do any good to be angry. There’s no reason to be angry. Now. It’s done and over with a long time, long time over with. And so I just collected myself and realized that I’d taken this job to figure it out. And that I could figure it out because other guys did it. So if they can do it, I can do it. And I locked him the guy’s office, I basically just told him the truth. And he took me under his wing and he helped me and you know, a year of doing that job, I came out with this incredible confidence because I figured out how to build things and figured out how to repair things. My my mind opened up to all these possibilities because I was able to get past my victim mentality. It was no longer important who was to blame for what had happened to me. It was important that I took the steering wheel so that I could write my future. So I would say for people that are struggling with their story you want you want to be the author of it from here on out. You don’t want anybody else have the pin. Nobody else sit at the typewriter. It’s just you. And if you think it’s someone else, you’re wrong, you’re letting them do that.

 

Dylan McCabe  14:52

Man that is so good. I really appreciate your authenticity and vulnerability and sharing that because especially in this role of general contractor roofing, there’s a lot of bravado, there’s a lot of alpha males, you know, be impressed by me. And like when we all get to know each other, none of us are impressed. Like when we all really get when I really get to know you and we become close friends, what I start to see is the real person. And all of us, if we’re honest with ourselves, we have were a mixture of areas that are really strong and great. And we have a lot of areas that are need improving, and that are that are not admirable at all that we’re ashamed of. And when you can just accept that then you can actually work on it and develop as a leader. But I love that story. Because that is just for those of you listening to this, I love the way you said it, you write that you write the chapters, don’t let somebody else write it. And for those listening to this, you just heard yet another story of somebody who took a challenge, and used it as a stepping stone, and are all of the things we go through the sufferings of failures or setbacks, all of those things can be stepping stones to success, if we respond the right way. And a lot of times that that takes us stepping back saying, I want to learn from this, I want to use it, I’m going to keep striving forward. And I mean, I just really appreciate that, because I don’t think people will appreciate the story of aapko and of the catch all as much without hearing that part of it. So So let’s talk about that now. So you you did sales and stuff like that for about seven years, which you mentioned, a lot of guys don’t stay in it that long. They go off and start their own thing, or they go on to something else. So as you developed in that role of sales, and as you started, you know, kind of creating a customer experience that got you more sales, you transitioned from a sales guy to an owner. So tell us how that worked out.

 

Heath Hicks  16:48

So I worked for one company for about five years. And then I tried out to other companies just, you know, just short season, and I told him it was trial. And I was basically I was putting them on trial, you know, like it was their trial period to see if they could support me enough to handle what I was going to bring into their business. And two of them didn’t make it. But during that time, the owner of aapko had really tried hard to headhunt me for like a year, he had met with me a few times he taking me out to lunch, we ran into each other and topsites. And he took me out to lunch the last time he was kind of a one man show at that point. It wasn’t it wasn’t a big deal at all. At the time, he had kind of gone up and down with storms or whatever, he had scaled up a little, you know, a few sales guys and then go back down to just him or whatever. And he was really nice, dude. Really Nice, dude. But he basically just said, He’s like, man, I really want somebody here that can help me because he was a little bit older. It’s like I want somebody that can help me, you know, get into like, new school roofing, you know, not not just old school sales. It’s like I want to turn it into a roofing company. He kind of said, like, I’m old dog can’t learn new tricks. Like I want somebody to come in. And I’ve heard that kind of stuff before. It didn’t, it didn’t really do a lot for me. But But then he told me about how this was the only thing in life that he’d ever done right? Is that business, he didn’t get himself together until he was in his 50s a lot of bad decisions, a lot of bad habits, addictions, etc. Just you know, he just told me, this is the only good thing you’ve ever done in life, really, he found a great woman at the end of his life. And he made one, one smart set of decisions. And he didn’t want it to go away. If he made a mistake, or if he got too old, or if it’s something happened to him, because it’s still supported his daughter, he had a daughter pretty late in life. She was still young at the time. And he just said, You know, I just want some I want it to be here. If something happens to me, I want something to be able to run it. And that kind of just pricked my heart a little bit, you know, just hearing him talk about his legacy. And so I said, Okay, we’ll figure it out. Give me some time to kind of close down what I’m doing in my pipeline over here. Because you know how it is you a lot of times you don’t collect everything you’re supposed to collect once you actually bounced from somewhere. And so I just wanted to make sure that I had a good handle on everything. And then he died two weeks later, just out of the blue. Wow, not not expected at all. You didn’t have any long term conditions or anything you just died like two weeks later. And so as soon as I heard that, I contacted his wife and I just said hey, I’m gonna come over, he had literally just talked to me about this stuff, you know, not knowing anything like this was gonna happen. But I’m gonna come over and just figure out how to help you keep it open because she didn’t know anything about the business at the time. And so I jumped in, there was three people at that. At that point, we just kind of split the company into three parts and figured out how to run it all. And we got pretty dramatic from then on out there. Some people steal a lot of money from the company and a lot of shady stuff. Kind of in the gap of leadership, you know, and it was really sad because they were stealing From her, you know, widow, they were taking her money. So it was pretty hard to work there for about a year and a half. And then I think she kind of figured out what was going on there. The CPAs kind of figured it out. And she just asked me if I wanted to buy it, because apparently that was one of those other people had been telling her they were going to do that and kind of stringing her along or something. I don’t know exactly. But either way, I stepped up to the plate. And I said, Yeah, we’ll, we’ll do it if there’s a reasonable price, but the company wasn’t dead at the time. And I just said, Let’s work to get it back to zero, and then figure out what it’s worth or whatever, and then we’ll figure it out. So worked for a few months, really hard, like busting, it’s super hard to just generate as much revenue as possible to be able to make up for the debt load that it had, and got it back to zero, she made me a good deal. I felt good about helping her transition, you know, into that season of her life, having some money to go with her and support yourself. And just a good deal is really positive. Until the day of transition came in, it was pretty tumultuous that day, I had people kicking and screaming and punching holes and walls and trying to beat me up and all kinds of stuff the day that the transition happened because they were upset about their gravy train going way, you know, wow. Yeah. So the day that I technically started, because on that day that we had grown over that last year, a fair amount, and there’s probably like six or seven people working there. And by the day that I did the actual transition, and I took over, I had to bring in someone from there to even be another person, it was just me and one other guy that jumped in pretty last minute. And so the day we took over is just me and one other dude. And we had a plan to get to 5 million in revenue within five years. Because we were just basically doing about a million a year in revenue. And it was just me, I was the only one selling anything really. So just me selling. And so it was about a million a year. And I went to the Small Business Development Council and the incubator around here and all that stuff and just try to like, get my get a handle on what we were gonna try to do and put a strategy together. And they’re like, man, there’s no way they’re like this really aggressive to try to get to 5 million in five years, you know, from a million I was like, Well, I mean, I know that it’s possible. It’s not. I mean, I knew the job inside it out, you know, minute by minute of the day to Penny by Penny by the job, I knew exactly how it all how it could all play out. And so we just jumped in and tried to get it, try to hit it hard. And we ended up doing our first 5 million in the first 12 months instead of five years. Wow.

 

Dylan McCabe  22:40

So as you saw, as you transitioned You, you, you went through the stuff you went through as a sales guy, then the owner dies Two weeks later after this conversation. Yeah, so now you’re back into a situation where it’s kind of like Baptism by fire. And you’re having to really run a company, without having run a company before as the leader and owner, you work out this deal with her, you get the company down to zero. And now you’re going to your back, you’ve got to kind of have a clean slate in your company. And you’re growing, you thought you were gonna get there in five years, you’re doing 5 million a year. What was the biggest challenge that you faced as the new company owner? And you guys are growing? I mean, you’re staying busy? What what would what would you say is the biggest challenge you face as a new owner at that point?

 

Heath Hicks  23:26

At that point, it will I absolutely knew that I had to reproduce myself and my sales guys. And so the hardest thing was not getting caught up in the details of the logistics of running the day to day part. I knew there would be a time that I would really jump into that. But to get to a trajectory to get up off the ground and really get out and into space. And away from the gravity of failure. I suppose I had to reproduce myself. And so it was challenging to not get too caught up and to trust other people to get that done. Of course, there had to be oversight there had to be influenced. But I couldn’t allow myself to step out of that role of developing the team, the sales team, to start worrying about what was going on in finance and what was going on the administration side of things, it just wasn’t what was going to be successful for us. And I know there’s a million different ways to do it. So I’m not criticizing anybody else for the way they do it. But for me, I knew that I just couldn’t get caught in that. And so there was a lot of trust, there was a lot of mistakes. On that side. There were a lot of shortcomings that we didn’t make up for until like year three and four, even things that weren’t totally built right, internally. But I knew that the external driver of the business had to be up and running before I stepped away and really focused on that. And they created some challenges for sure. But that was my biggest thing was being able to just reproduce myself and having that singular goal and not wavering from it. And so we went we finished the first year I think with seven stable producing sales. Guys by the end of the first year, and then the second year in PCs, and I think we were about 11 sales guys into the season of sales for year number two, and it paid off dramatically, because we doubled that next year from 5 million to 10 million. But we only went from seven sales guys to 11 sales guys, because they all found their rhythm, they found their lane, they knew what they were doing. Every day, everything was efficient, they were making good sales, they were making great money. And so once we kind of got that trajectory to kind of get away from failure, because of lack of revenue, there’s a million other ways you can fail. But then we started focusing on systems at that point, internally, by year one, the challenge was to not get distracted from reproducing myself and the system of sales that I have created, the way I sold things, the reason I sold things, the way that I treated customers and viewed customers, I had to replicate that. And so that was the focus.

 

Dylan McCabe  26:08

So that’s a big thing we talked about in our roofing CEO groups is having processes that are documented, illustrated, and followed by all so that you’re a process driven company and not a person driven company. Because Because sometimes you don’t have the right people. But once you get the right person, you got to have a process is repeatable. So we could we could talk about this for an hour about how to develop the right sales process. But if you were to just take a few minutes, and outline your process of how you onboard and train and basically create these clones of the right, the getting the right people in the right seats on the sales team, how does it What does that look like all the way from your hiring, too? Now you’ve got them. You’ve got them there, you train them, and then you deploy them? What does that look like?

 

Heath Hicks  26:56

So it starts with the way in which we approach hiring the thought behind it. So in evaluating a person, whether I think they’re going to be a good fit or not. The two biggest things is motivation and character. They’ve got to have motivation, and they’ve got to have the right character. And if they don’t have the motivation, I can’t give it to them. That’s something they’re bringing to the table, I can give them inspiration. I can direct them, I can guide them, I can put some boundaries around their motivation to get them moving in the right way. But if they don’t have that, there’s, there’s nothing to be done. You know, my pastor used to say, growing up that it was it’s hard to steer a car that’s not moving. And I’d rather I’d rather get in a car with somebody going the wrong way, because at least they’re going somewhere, I can turn them around, but somebody that sit in their car, and I go anywhere trying to talk to him, talk him into getting started. That’s way harder, find somebody who’s already moving, who’s already been successful. If you don’t have a job, this Job’s not for you. You know, if you haven’t been successful, if you’re not already making good money, this job is not for you. I’m not trying to find guys who’ve never made money before. I’m not trying to find guys who haven’t been successful before. I’m trying to find people who have hit a ceiling of earning or, more importantly, most people, it’s not the earning cap, it’s the ability to continue to be challenged and grow and learn. That’s what the cap most people run into. because money is really not as much of a driver as we try to give it credit for for most people, especially people of character, I guess there are some people who fall into that boat, but I guess I don’t interact with a ton of them. So maybe it doesn’t seem like a bigger crowd as it is to me. But most most people want a strong vision and path forward that they can be a part of. And they’ll even make less money for that opportunity. And so finding people who are capped by their previous success, or in their previous success, they’re capped by the people who work for the organization they work for or just a career choice. Sometimes it just only goes so far and may have to wait around in a position for 10 years or 20 years for the next thing to open up looking for those people. I we typically find people are motivated. And so if they’re motivated, then we evaluate the character. Are they honest? Are they genuine? Are they going to do the right thing always, when even when nobody’s looking? That’s the people we’re looking for. Because that’s kind of an intangible that you do communicate, even in the first 10 seconds with a customer you do communicate that certainly not with words, but it’s it’s an intangible, almost imperceptible that people will get about you, they just get a good read on you. And if they get that read on you and they can tell you that you’re there for them or to benefit them and not yourself first, then they’re probably going to trust you through the process. So gotta have the right character got to have motivation. And after that, as long as they can learn as long as they can follow the system. Learn the system, I can make anybody successful. I don’t care what they look like, I don’t care what the previous experience has been. I don’t care what the personality type is, if they, if they’ve got strong motivation and good character, and they can learn, they can do what they’re told they can succeed. That was the system. That’s the system that we were striving to build in years one and two, was a sales system that could make average Joe’s successful. Because if you build it around rockstars, your system is it’s weak. It’s not right, it’s imbalanced. And rockstars are the ones that always want exceptions. They’re the ones that always break the system, and the ones that don’t follow the rules. I don’t, I don’t want a whole team of rockstars I don’t really even need one Rockstar, I need a bunch of guys that just want to be successful, that are ready to get in the dirt and work hard. Because they got something to work for, you know, usually a family and kids and stuff like that, it’s pretty important for finding the right kind of people. But we said from very early on that we wanted to build a system that average Joes can could maximize, you know, it would make up for maybe what they lack in some areas, the system would strengthen them and support them and help them to be more successful than you’d be on their own.

 

Dylan McCabe  31:15

That’s good stuff, man. And then when you guys train them, you go through the interview process, you’ve you find a guy with character, who’s motivated, you find a guy that wants to learn stuff like that. And then do you do like a mixture of online learning plus in person just going following along with one of your other sales guys on here’s how you expect to read.

 

Heath Hicks  31:36

So, we, we did most things pretty different. I would say, we just tried to throw out what anybody else has ever done and figure out what was successful for us figure out things that had made individuals on our team successful or the team as a whole and replicate that and hone in on that. And so we basically hire one time a year, we have one training a year. And we hire them before season starts. And in each of their offices. So I think we have eight offices now. And so in each office, they’ll get hired locally there. They have a week where they go out into the field and they observe what’s happening from the sales side and from the installation side. Just so you can get kind of a context of what we’re going to train them after that. Because if you’ve never been on a roof never done all the stuff, you can tell people all you want, but how to measure a roof and how to climb a roof and how to talk to a customer. But if they haven’t seen somebody sitting there with a customer talking to them, it’s there’s no frame of reference for it. So the information doesn’t stick, hold on to five or 10% of it. So we set it out in the field to get a context of what the job is. And then we bring them in all together, we bring everybody in company, and we do one big training week. And the green beans will start on Monday and they’ll go through Friday. And the experience guys will jump in on Thursday and get Thursday and Friday training. But the guys do get that training every year. And it’s always new and updated and fresh for the guys that have been here. But for the green beans. We’ve got, you know, 10 or 12 staple topics and talks that we give, you know, to get them from green bean to being able to be successful. But I look specifically for people who have never worked in this industry before sales experience is fine. But I really, really kind of don’t want most people that have been in the industry not not individually, even because of them most of the time, just what they bring to the table from the people they work for. It’s a lot harder to retrain somebody than it is just painting right the first time. And again, when I say right, I mean our way. I know other people have different ways. And it’s, it’s great, there’s people that probably do better jobs in different areas than we do. But I just for them to fit in our company, they need to be trained our way. You know, because we just have a specific way we do everything. So they need to do it our way and understand our way have our culture. So we bring them all together. And we do it all at one time. Because there’s such an exchange of information and culture and energy that happens when there’s a bunch of people together, they take it a lot more seriously than if they’re sitting in a room with one other guy and watching some videos and somebody comes in every couple hours and checks on them. Those guys, I have a hard time taking that seriously. But when there’s you know, 60 or 80 people in a room together and everybody’s focused and they’ve all got their notebooks out and listened to people that have really prepared their talks. They’ve got good PowerPoints and they’re, you know, focus good communicators, it’s just more successful. And so to be able to do that you can’t do it once a month. You can certainly can do it once a week and so we just do it once a year. So we figure out based on our plans for the next year how many people we’re going to need to hire and we kind of have a you know if we want to hire 20 and we’re going to have to interview 80 which means we’re gonna have to get this many applications and weeded out because you know, so many people especially nowadays, just don’t show up. They don’t care about finding a job. We’ll go through the second one Have you process on the phone and book an appointment and just no call no show, it’s like so common. So, you know, we based on how many people we actually meet on the ground being successful, start working that number up, and the funnel just goes up. So at the top of the funnel, we get, like, you know, 2000 applications we’re trying to take, tweet down having 12 successful guys on the field out here, you know. So we try to get them all together and do it at the same time, just give them the best chance of success and even give them the highest quality training we can. That’s how we do it. And then when they go back into their individual offices, they’ll have a field trainer that stays with him for a couple weeks. Just to give them pointers of, you know, day to day stuff, application of all the stuff they’ve learned and seeing once they get out into the field.

 

Dylan McCabe  35:48

That is so good. I mean, there’s so much so much I want to ask you, but I don’t want to make this a three hour podcast interview. But with your so a lot of people hearing that might be thinking, Wait a second, did he just say eight offices? Is that what you said? Yeah. So you guys clearly have a solid system in place, if you can sustain the growth of eight offices, because a lot of you know, our tagline for our deal is connecting CEOs to accelerate growth and sustained success. Because a lot of guys will have a big year, you know, $5 million year, then next year is a $3 million year and the next year is 4 million, the next year is two, and they don’t know how to sustain it. And so you guys have found a way that’s worked for you to develop the systems. You’ve got the right people on board. And you’ve got a vision that you know, a company culture and vision that people want to be a part of long term. And I think that’s awesome. I mean, we could do another podcast interview just on that. But so as you as you got into that, and you guys started growing, you go through those challenges of trying to replicate yourself, you have a big first year. What happened from there? Because I know obviously, now you’re at a point where you’ve got eight locations you’ve got how many sales guys do you have?

 

Heath Hicks  37:04

About 50

 

Dylan McCabe  37:05

50? sales guys? So how have you? What’s been one of the biggest keys to that kind of a growth? I mean, how you can’t do that by accident. So what was it?

 

Heath Hicks  37:16

We’re doing? It’s definitely very purposeful. How do you how do you how do you make that growth? And how do you sustain that growth? What’s your question?

 

Dylan McCabe  37:26

Well, what’s one of the things that you guys were doing early on that enabled you to keep getting more jobs to, to get referrals to get more business like that? Because that takes some a real intentional approach to sales? Yeah.

 

Heath Hicks  37:46

Yeah, I would say, if you train the guy to be successful, and he approaches the customer the right way, then there’s really not much option for him other than getting referrals from the customer, if he really does it the right way. If he really values that customer through the whole process, of course, they’re going to want to take him to the people that they know, you know, if they really feel like he was there, to serve them and help them and get them through the challenges they were facing at the time. Yeah, absolutely. I don’t want to tell you. So we focus on that, from the beginning, we talked about, you know, your money is not in this job, it’s really in the next two jobs. And then as soon as you get to that second job, it becomes the first job against your money is not really here, it’s in the next two. And you just keep that mindset knowing that from moment one, what you’re really working for is the moment that when the job is done, they put you in a golf cart, and they drive you over to their neighbor. And they’re like, I gotta I gotta, I gotta, I gotta introduce you to these people. That’s really the barometer for success. It’s not just an individual job, and whether it made money, whether they made good commission or not, it’s how many people are they stuffing into their pipeline? And when does it become a siphon, or start sucking customers into this entity where you’re not even doing the work anymore? The momentum of your your work and your effort and your character and your focus. It’s just drawing people into the other end of your pipeline. That’s what you’re working for. So that’s a long term goal, it takes you six months really to build that pipeline. But if you know that that’s possible, and you’re working around people that are already doing it, and your training from the beginning focuses on that. Yeah, you’re probably going to experience it.

 

Dylan McCabe  39:28

So if I hear you, right, you’re basically saying with your sales guys, the goal is, for every roofing job  have closed, the goal is to actually get to more close jobs out of that not just to referrals to close jobs.

 

Heath Hicks  39:40

We don’t even count like opportunities. Like when someone gets like, you know, the old school report cards, we ask them to write down you know, a couple neighbors names and phone numbers are stuff we don’t even count that as referrals. Not that it’s not that you shouldn’t do it, you should do it and you should absolutely follow up on it and hunt those people down but we don’t really even count those as referrals. We can Out close deals as referrals. Because nothing really matters up to that point, you can sign a million contracts, but who cares? If you can’t keep them? What does it matter? And if you spent all that time with that customer, if you only got that one customer, you kind of you kind of failed.

 

Dylan McCabe  40:18

So what’s uh, so what’s the key takeaway from that for guys listening this that are saying, Man, keys guys are killing it, you know, what, what, what’s a big party or not a party what’s what’s a key takeaway piece of advice you want to give to guys listening to this that want to elevate their sales game?

 

Heath Hicks  40:35

Well, you’ve got to pick a strategy, and you’ve got to work it from the first moment. So if your strategy is going to be to get easier customers, less expensively and more quickly, then it’s going to be referrals. And if that’s your strategy, that’s going to be your goal from the first time you meet with customer a is to get to customer B, and C. And if that’s your code, if that’s your goal in that interaction, and that should be your goal in your training. And if that’s your goal in your training, then you’re going to hire people who can do that. You know, so it works itself backwards. You know, kind of reverse engineering, the end goal, because if a guy is getting referrals off of every job, even if it’s just one, if they’re shooting for two, and they’re only getting one, they stay busy, if they’re getting 1.2, referrals, you know, built close jobs off every job they get. And by the end of the season, they’re too busy, they can’t even take any more customers. If they’re getting too off of everyone in the beginning of the season, they’re maxed out within three months, there’s no way to get to the end of the year, even doing all those people. So then we end up hiring makeup people just to come in and catch all the overflow jobs. And that those people are like, this is awesome, we shut up and they just get handed a bunch of jobs. Because, you know, sales guy a can’t even keep up with it. But again, it’s really that intention and that goal, creating it, putting out in the distance like a lighthouse. And only driving forward to that one singular thing. And then everything backwards between here and there, you can just make sure that you’re staying on course and build your system coordinating.

 

Dylan McCabe  42:07

That’s good. Well, let’s switch gears and talk about something that I think is is popping up in people’s minds if they’re listening closely, especially if they’re motivated, like you said, which is money, right? Nobody, nobody got into this business to be poor. Right, a lot of us are motivated, because we want to provide for our families. You know, my story is similar to yours, I grew up very poor, I’m motivated in a large way to provide for my family in a way that I wasn’t, you know, not not not to be the the next john Rockefeller, but just to make sure that things are good, they’re safe, they’re secure. There’s opportunities. There’s, you know, safety nets in place, financially, and stuff like that. So for guys listening to this, and they think, Oh my gosh, 50 sales guys, eight locations. And all he also owns the business and started the catch all, which we’ll get into at the end of the interview here. But what’s your take on money, let’s just take a minute to expose the ugly side of the earnings in the roofing industry, why there’s so many guys that get into this business make money, and a year later they’re bankrupt.

 

Heath Hicks  43:11

I would say it starts with the heart. And my, my heart and taking this opportunity to be the owner was to make sure that the people that I knew and loved around me for the last 10 or 15 years of my life had an opportunity. I personally had an opportunity to go and pretty deep into commercial like large scale commercial sales. And I probably would have made more money in the first two or three years of this journey. If I had taken that route, it certainly would have been simpler, come with a lot less responsibility. But my heart was, you know, in this little town that I live in, there’s not a ton of opportunity for people that want to make more than 45 grand a year, 50 grand a year, you know, what, especially without a real degree in a specialized field, you just don’t have a lot of opportunity to do that. And then even when you do in this little town, if you make 65 or 70, maybe on paper, it sounds good. But how much money did you have to spend to get that degree? And how long is it going to take you to pay it off, you don’t really have a ton of opportunity in front of yourself for a while not that you should, you know, not be willing to take the route you have to take but I knew what the opportunity was in this in this field for people to earn if they were the right person that could do it the right way. And so I took the opportunity because I wanted the people that I knew and loved to have that opportunity that I’d had. And my goal from the beginning was to serve them to help them inspire them to make them successful. And so because of that, it was never hard for me to reinvest the money that I was making in back into the business because it was benefiting so many people. I had a guy be real frank with me and this is kind of a rough word. And so I don’t mean to offend anybody but he’s a Business acquisitions and tax lawyer, he was telling me that what he saw most people do is they just raped their business. They just took everything out of anything and made they took it out. And they left the business without the ability to sustain itself without the ability to grow without creating any value in the business, they were taking all the value out and putting it into their own lives. And it doesn’t really generate return, when you do that. It might generate a moment of satisfaction when you get to buy the boat or the truck or whatever, you know, but it is not the smart way to do business. And so for the first six months, I didn’t take a paycheck at all, and we had  . You know, a lot of people tell the story of like how we just didn’t make anything, no,we made good money.  I just didn’t take it because I knew is more important somewhere else. And especially in the early portions, the money I put in there was going to come back way more many times than what I was, but I didn’t take out and or the money I put in here to the money that I put it back year two was gonna was gonna roll over a couple times. But the money that put it in the first six months, it was gonna roll over like 1020 times. And so I was just motivated to not take it because I had made good money for myself before that. So I didn’t take anything out of the business, but the first six months, and then my CPAs were like you have to take a salary, at least this is the minimum you can get away with was 60 grand a year. So I took 60  a year for a couple years  And, you know, according to like revenue splits or percentages, I shouldn’t make any way more than that. But I didn’t want I wanted to stay in the business because it meant we could buy more trucks and then we could have a better office and then I could recruit more people. It meant that I could support the people that are already there better, you know, and I could hire people before I needed them before everything was crashing and burning. I had the money to hire someone. Before everything was falling apart now that we did have some big failures there. But yeah, if you if you really want to make money, then double down on yourself and let it ride. Leave it in there, let it work, put it to work. Bet on yourself. Don’t bet on your free time spend on yourself. You know, that’s my that’s my particular perspective. My heart wasn’t in here for the money, I had no real driver to make any money beyond just not having to feel the stress of not being able to pay my bills. That was my only goal in getting into roofing sales or in my career at any point was really just to not feel the stress. And that honestly is much more about how you manage your mind than it is about how much money you make.

 

Dylan McCabe  47:28

So true. I mean, I think that’s great because our culture that’s so countercultural. I mean, I’m in Dallas, Texas, Dallas is a very showy city, people like to show what they earned through the cars, they drive through the clothes they wear. I mean, I grew up in Houston, I moved to Dallas. And I heard for the first time the phrase $30,000 millionaire. People that only make 30 grand a year, but they want to look like millionaires. So they lease a BMW and so on. And it’s just so silly, you know, but it’s, and I heard somebody else say this slogan for  , Texas is keep Austin weird. But the slogan for Dallas should be keep Dallas pretentious. But I love I love the point you made because

 

Heath Hicks  48:08

you keep people poor.

 

Dylan McCabe  48:09

Yeah. I like what you said, though, because it’s so countercultural. And I feel like it should really be required reading for any of us, who are business owners to read a book like the richest man in Babylon, or Rich Dad, Poor Dad by Robert Kiyosaki, because it makes it pretty, pretty clear. Like you’re either going to build up your assets, or you’re going to build up your liabilities. And a lot of guys get into this industry and they make their first 100, grand or whatever, and they go straight to liabilities, they go straight to putting that money into something that they won’t make any money out of like a $70,000 truck or whatever. And those things are fine if you can afford them. But but most guys get into this. And they see a big paycheck and they think, Oh, well now i’m i’m wealthy, and it’s not sustainable. So I really liked that I actually had a conversation with Kevin Kennedy. He helps do succession plans and exit plans for owners of roofing companies. And a lot of his clients are in commercial roofing. But he he shared some really shocking statistics with me and I don’t want to botch them. But basically, the majority of business owners in roofing don’t have a company they can sell, because of that the financial instability, a lack of processes in place, and they haven’t surrounded themselves with the right people. So they also don’t have a plan that where they can do a succession plan and pass the business off to a partner or whatever. So I just love what you’ve done. And there’s so much wisdom to gain from that. I think the last thing I’d like to ask you about is where in the world did the catch all come from? I mean, how did you go to from scaling a really successful roofing business to now you’ve got a second company which is the catch all?

 

Heath Hicks  49:51

Yeah, so in my seven years of doing the job, you know, every day in somebody’s front yard, I had a lot of opportunities to understand what a customer really wants from the experience. Yeah, plenty of opportunities, especially starting out in the place I did where the mindset was, you know, roofing is what it is, this is construction site, we’re gonna break some stuff, we’re gonna leave some nails behind, but we’re going to do our best not to, but it’s probably going to happen. But you know, some part of the deal, it’s expected. And so communicating that to the customer on the front end, they usually kind of sound understanding, like, Oh, yeah, I kind of get that. But then the reality of it is for them, they come out, or they come home on lunch, you know, on the first day, and their house looks like it’s never going to recover, like their house looks like it’s never going to be the same. There’s crap laying everywhere, there’s, you know, tracks back and forth through the yard, or guys who carry a bunch of stuff and trample the grass down, and there’s bushes leaning over. And the fountain that their wife loves is disassembled, and it looks like it probably got cracked, or whatever it is, and then all of a sudden, this anxiety just escalates. And now, even if you worked really hard up to that point, to make sure you’re on the same team with that customer, you just like broke free, and they’re clearly adversarial with you at that moment, for what you’ve done to their place of residence, which is, you know, very, very likely to be the most valuable thing in their life is that home for a bunch of different reasons financially and emotionally and otherwise. And so they immediately feel like, you know, something is going very wrong, and it’s not going to be right at the end. I just hated that experience. And so I worked, you know, very diligently over a long period of years to figure out how to do it in a way that would make them comfortable with what we were going to do from communicating better expectations up front, not overselling it being realistic about what it’s going to be like, and then try little things all the time to make less of a mess, protect things more, make the job site look more like a job site and a garbage heap, you know, mid job, like I’ve just kind of like take a snapshot of my brain of what was happening right now. And if the customer drove up and saw this, what would they feel, they probably didn’t see it right? When they left, they didn’t even look back at their house, they just drove off to work. Showing up from whatever then their mind was their house to looking at that in the middle of the job. Most of them are going to panic, you know, with the way that we were doing it at a time we’ve changed a lot. And the roofing industry as a whole has started to change too. So it’s not maybe as bad as it was, although I still see really, really bad job sites all the time. I just started using plywood and tarps and signs and caution tape and cones. And whatever I could do to make it look like we were trying to do the best we could and what we were doing, we were doing on purpose, not on accident. Because if they came out here and they see everything and they think it’s haphazard, then they get really uncomfortable. Like this stuff, you’re laying on the ground, it looks like someone spilled it or through it or couldn’t get it over there. So they just tossed it over here that that doesn’t communicate excellence to them. So we were I was always just trying to make it look like everything was on purpose. Everything was measured and calculated. And even if there was trash out, it was in a contained pile. And we had stuff around it together with my blow off. And it was obvious how it was going to transition from here into the trailer and not ruin their yard and all that. And so I just tried everything I could think of. And then the nail problem once I kind of got the job site build process under control. The nail problem was just endlessly frustrating for me. Always having callbacks. And when I say always not every job, of course, but a percentage of jobs, you know that that next morning or a week later, or two weeks later, four weeks later, I found some nails my dog stepped on it or it’s in my golf cart tire or my lawnmower tire and then they’re frustrated, they had a great experience, that experience kind of wore off. And then the last little thing they remember was that just it just crushed me, you know, because it’s such a better job than that. And there really wasn’t a good way to deal with it. I mean, I tried everything, I started buying the project managers, metal detectors, and I bought the crude metal detectors, so they both had him so they could both do it at the end of the job. But then I then I found these magnets from some company in Colorado, they were like 900 bucks apiece, supposedly the most powerful magnet on earth or whatever, about a whole slew of those. And it just made marginal difference, margin difference. And the only thing it really made honestly was the only difference made with people saw the extra effort of them doing that. And then if there was still something that might be a little bit more understanding, they still weren’t happy. It didn’t like it, they just might have been a little bit more understanding. And so I just kept diving in and kept digging in to figure out how to solve it and I just realized one day I’m like, man, if I can just keep the nails from ever hitting the ground. That’s the only solution. Because once they hit the ground, you’re never going to get them all up. It’s not gonna happen. I’ve tested it I promise you. I get people on Facebook all the time, jack we don’t ever leave any nails behind. Yes you do. You leave a ton of nails behind You just don’t know it.

 

Dylan McCabe  55:01

Yeah, not that you mean to.

 

Heath Hicks  55:03

Yeah, most customers don’t call you, you’ve got to realize if you get a call, there’s probably three to five other customers that have the same experience that can call you because they’re not confrontational. You know, they don’t want to open up a can of worms, they’re vainly satisfied enough to just get done with it, I don’t want to talk about it. And so if you get one call every month, you probably got 568 10 customers that had that same experience that just didn’t tell you. And you’ll know, because you’re not getting referrals. That’s why you’re not. If you’re not getting referrals from every one of your customers, there’s something wrong with your system, something’s not going right, because you should get glowing reviews from everybody. Unless there’s like a very obvious mistake, you know, like, one of your crew, like, you know, took a dump behind the shed, and they found it, those people are probably not going to give you a referral, it has a very clear reason why. But if you did a seemingly Good job, and that person is just not a raving fan, is because there’s there are things they experienced, that they didn’t like. And even if you sit them down, and pull them for 20 minutes, they’re probably not going to tell you about most of it, because they’re just uncomfortable doing that. So look at your results that you’re getting in your referral department and just realize there’s there’s probably stuff that you’re missing. And so for me, I knew that one of those things was the nails because I was getting calls consistently. No matter what I was trying, I was still getting the calls. And so I knew that there was a lot more people that I was hearing about having that experience. So I just realized I got to keep the nails off the ground because once they get in once they get in the grass, and once again the flowerbeds, you’re knocking them all out, I don’t care what you do, you get down on your hands and knees, I’ve tried it. I’ve literally dropped 100 nails in an area and marked it and let everybody work over the whole day in an area that I know they didn’t drop any. And then we’ll go back with a magnet and we’ll pull out like 60. And then we’ll rake the grass and we’ll do it again, we’ll pull out like 20 more. And then we’ll put the magnet every which way every possible way, get to more and they get down on your hands and knees and you find five and you’re like well there’s 12 nails left right here, I put them here myself, I can’t find them. They’re not out there’s there’s nails going to be left behind. So I just realized that the only way to do it was to try to keep it from ever hitting ground. So I started messing around with nets that were on the nets that covered the debris on the trailer. Those nets because tarps were burned and stuff I tried a million times. I mean, I bought like I have a whole trailer full of tarps, I would talk like the entire property like to the edge of the lawn, I’d stick it in at the edge of the other person’s lawn, you know, just to try to make sure, but then we’ve just burned and stuff all the time and tajrish kind of a false sense of security. Because to get hold real quick, you know that a lot of times you drag, the crew will drag material around to get it to the trailer. And they’re actually sprinkler nails the whole way, in an area where no one’s working. So nobody goes back there to check it because it drag it right in front of us to drag it out in the yard where there was no material. And so there’s sprinkler nails. So they’ve got marginally better, but it didn’t solve the problem. And so I started messing with those nets. And then they were a fair amount more durable than I really thought they would be. But I really switched to them just so I was burning everything and found that they were more durable. And tried to come up with these systems of clips and stuff where you can hang them from the facia or the gutters or whatever, I just kept damaging people’s houses with that the clips would break stuff off or snap a little piece off the fissure we hang it on the gutters, and we get all scraped or dented, or pulled or bent or whatever. And we just kind of had this realization one day that if we hung it from poles and leaned the poles against the house, then we could use it on any house, no matter what the facial look like, or whether they had gutters or they didn’t or whatever, we just weren’t going to attach it to the house. And that was the real kind of breakthrough moment for us when we realized, oh man, we can make a system that we can at least take with ourselves to every job and know that we’re gonna be able to protect the house. And so as soon as I started doing that people were asking me to make them some or to buy it from us or whatever. And so they developed from there, but the genesis of the idea was just just to make a better customer experience. It’s all it was about. And then since it’s grown a lot like we have great marketing potential that you get for that value. You can supplement carriers for it, you know, with some success. It’s not, you know, highly, highly successful, you certainly don’t get it every time but you can get it enough of the time to get ROI on what you paid for the system. You know, within your first year easily. And then you get the marketing value to get referrals and callbacks because it brands your job in such a way that there’s nobody in the neighborhood that doesn’t know you’re doing the roof. Everybody sees it. Everybody knows what’s going on. And it makes it much easier to door knock around, get warm leads. We get people all the time to stop in the yard and are like what are you guys doing here? You know, it looks like we’re fumigating the house or you know, people don’t know, because we wrap it up so tightly. They can’t even see the house half the time. And so it just generates a lot of attention. And it’s also really effective. communicating to the customer that you do value, their experience. You’re really doing absolutely the best that can be done. And if there’s a mistake that you’re like, Well, I know you really did your best. I really saw You communicated it you delivered. I saw you guys set it up. I saw you wrap everything. So yeah, you broke, you know, a rosebush, or there’s some males over here. But I know you guys really tried. And then they go, yeah. Oh, yeah, it’s a construction site. I know, you’re not going to get them all. But thanks for trying, I can just really change their perspective. And so once we experienced that, we were like, yeah, we should probably, you know, start letting other people buy it, you know, but it wasn’t my intention, I just invented it for me, because I was just  going crazy suffering that same problem over and over again, you know.So

 

Dylan McCabe  1:00:30

 that’s why it’s such a cool story. I mean, but that’s how all great products are born. It’s because it came out of our true problem that you the inventor had. And we love it. I mean, it ran tight general contracting, my business partner, Miller, Wheaton owns rain tight. And we, we have really enjoyed having a catch all because it does solve that problem with the nails. But like you mentioned, the customer service part because we want to review as well, like, we want to give them the best customer experience. I tell I tell people up front, we want you to have world class customer experience, so that you can be excited about leaving a review on Google or Facebook and excited to tell your friends. And for us, it’s been a great customer service tool. But it’s also been a powerful piece of marketing in the more affluent neighborhoods of Dallas, because they may have spent 2030 grand on their landscaping. And now I can come in and say hey, by the way, I noticed that really nice landscaping, it’s all going to be protected. We’re going to make sure not a single thing falls on that, because we use the catch all system. You know, have you ever seen that before? No. Okay, well, we’re one of the only roofers doing it. And so we set ourselves apart by using a system. And it worked. I mean, we had a deal in in Highland Park and Dallas was one of the most expensive neighborhoods in Dallas, and it was a retail job, they didn’t want to file a claim because they own multiple properties. And they didn’t want their rates to go up. And part of the sales process that I use to close the deal was by explaining the catch, all right. And I want their neighbors who have multi million dollar homes to see, right, general contracting on the front of the net, and I want their neighbors across the street to see it too. So we love it. Yeah,

 

1:02:08

you know, it’s funny, one of the things that we didn’t realize people were going to do with it is we have people that upsell it all the time, customers are happy to pay 500 bucks, 1000 bucks to know that they get that extra protection because nobody else given a presentation given that opportunity. People make money with it all the time. People put it in, in marketing, they use it to close a deal if they get it to kind of close on number and then they’re like, Well, hey, you know, I’ll throw in the catch all because they already built it for value for 500 bucks, 700 bucks, 1000 bucks, or whatever it was. If you go with us, we’ll throw it in, you know, sometimes you use it for that, but a lot of times people just pay for it be like yeah, I want paid 500 bucks, like interest has been aggressive, I’m gonna pay 500 extra bucks to make sure my stuffs, okay, you know, people have a lot of success with that. And that’s not anything we ever, we didn’t even start that. That my company, we weren’t doing that, because we just never thought of that we didn’t assume people were gonna pay us we thought it was just going to be a differentiator. And there’s a lot of people using it to generate revenue, you know, on top of that, because, you know, cost X number of dollars to get the kit depending on which size you get or whatever. And then you sell it 10 times and you doubled your money already.

 

Dylan McCabe  1:03:13

So good. Well, how can people who want to learn about the catch all How can they learn more? What’s the website,

 

Heath Hicks  1:03:19

go to catch all com or roof works com, and you can read about it there, you can watch a ton of videos, get all your information, you can order it there, you can call the number on the site, you can order over the phone, if you have more questions or whatever. They’ll talk you through the process of getting the custom banners made that come with the kit that come included. So yeah, you can call or you can just go on the website. I wanted to show you I don’t know if you’ll be able to see it. But this is uh, this is our reviews. I guess it’s  to be backwards. Just showing you our reviews that are Tyler office 274, five 4.9 stars 274 reviews. On our Tyler office alone, I think across all offices, we’re close to 500 reviews

 

1:04:03

Yeah, we get a lot because we push for it from the very beginning. That’s what we’re working for is that review and that referral. So

 

Dylan McCabe  1:04:08

that’s awesome. You guys are killing it. Well, what’s one parting piece of advice before we wrap this up to other business owners out there,

 

Heath Hicks  1:04:18

get a coach, develop yourself jump into a peer group. You know, reading books is good going to conferences is good. There’s there’s a lot of value to be had there. But having somebody that can sit down with you one on one and tell you what you’re doing wrong to your face. If you can, you know be strong enough to hear it and benefit from it. You got to get it. Nobody’s six. There’s nobody really successful in life that doesn’t have coaches behind them. I don’t care what they’re doing, whether it’s business or sports. It doesn’t matter. really highly successful people got a team of people that they pull from so if you’re not doing that you’re missing something and I don’t coach I’m not selling you trying to get me to coach you. I’m just telling you, you need to coach you can message me If you want find me on Facebook, I’ll tell you the ones that I use but, you know, doesn’t matter where you go in a in, in a sense, it doesn’t matter. Yes, there are certain ones that are better than others. But just taking that step to be vulnerable enough to have somebody look you in the eye and say you need to do X and you just stopped doing y. And next week, I want you to tell me how you did x and how you stopped y. That’s gonna make it it’s a game changer for you.

 

Dylan McCabe  1:05:23

It’s so good. Good advice. Well, he picks owner of aapko and the catch all thank you so much for joining us, man. Lots of great see Romulan man, talk to you soon. All right, great interview with Heath Hicks. I think it’s a phenomenal story that he has his upbringing, you know, if anybody was to be deemed somebody who wasn’t in the right situation to be successful, it was he he went through a lot of hard knocks, but he overcame those challenges. And he kept striving forward. And I think it’s just a lesson to all of us about perseverance and also creativity to get to become a go from sales guy to owner of a company and then create a system through a need that you see on a daily basis, like the catch all, become an entrepreneur in that sense and solve a real problem. And that’s how the best products are created and launched the catch all which is also a successful company. I think it’s phenomenal. So anyway, I’m a big fan of heat. I love his story. And we’ve also become an affiliate partner with the catch. Also, if you’re not using the catch all already, I definitely am a big believer in it. We use it at rain, tight general contracting. It’s a way to get referrals and sales and also just protect all of the landscaping and stuff like that around the house and really just set yourself apart from other general contractors and roofers, so you can go to the catch all calm, slash, or not catch all.com slash anything. It’s just catch all that calm. But when you go to checkout, put the promo code limitless, and you will get some special treatment. All right. So we appreciate that. It’s a way to say thank you for the free resources in this podcast. And guys again, please if you’re listening this far, join the conversation on our Facebook group, go to the limitless roofing CEO group. I will see you there and I’ll catch you in the next episode.