SPEAKERS

Dylan McCabe, Kirby Smith

 

Dylan McCabe  00:00

Roofing CEO Show Episode Number 22 Welcome to the roofing CEO show My name is Dylan McCabe. And in every episode we interview owners and CEOs and industry leaders in the roofing and general contracting world, so that you can have a seat at the table and gain wisdom from the dialogue. Now in this episode, I’m going to interview Kirby Smith. He’s the president of lightspeed construction in Tennessee. And he does two things very well in a unique and creative way. And one is his sales process and his sales training process. And number two, the process he uses to dominate his local market online and Google using all of the images and videos from those job inspections, and putting them on a page on his website to show up in local search results. It’s so fascinating. It’s unlike anything else, anybody I know of is doing. And I think you’re gonna get a lot out of this episode, we’re also going to throw in some really candid discussion about challenges and leadership when you grow a company. There’s a lot to get out of this before we go there. If you haven’t done so already, definitely join our Facebook group, you can find us on Facebook under limitless. That’s the new name that we’ve rebranded to. And the group is dedicated to owners and leaders in roofing companies, no spam or advertising allowed, while keeping the group clean. We want to get a lot of great discussion in the group. So join the community join the conversation in our Facebook group. Alright guys, having said that, let’s jump right into this conversation I have with the president of lightspeed Mr. Kirby Smith. Let’s get into it. All right. As I mentioned, I have a special guest, Kirby Smith. He’s the president of lightspeed construction in Tennessee Kirby, thanks for joining the show, man.

 

Kirby Smith  01:43

Thanks so much. It’s a beautiful day here in Tennessee, and enjoy getting to take a few minutes away from this beautiful weather to talk to you and your audience. Dylan, thanks so much for having me. Yeah,

 

Dylan McCabe  01:53

thanks for making the time. I like learning about your story. Because you are an entrepreneurial guy. You have kind of an interesting entrance into the world of roofing and an interesting background. And then you’ve gone and you’ve really taken what you’ve learned. And at the end of this, we’ll talk about a service that you even offer to owners of roofing companies. But before we get into all of that, tell us a little bit about you and your background before you got into roofing.

 

Kirby Smith  02:21

It’s a Dylan My name is Kirby Smith, I grew up in Alabama. Never was a great student and went through college or went through high school and was kind of a BC student got to college and decided that engineering was for me, there was really no math background, and no, no real formal training. But I said, Hey, I think I can do this. And I’ve always been, you know, maybe a little bit of an underachiever. I’m sure I’m not the only, you know, roofing contractor who may be kind of felt their way into this business through other avenues. And what it’s what my experience was, was going to college, graduating with an engineering degree and realizing pretty quick, I didn’t want to be in that business. Some of the first advice I heard getting into roofing and selling roofing door to door was from an adjuster. And this just mentioned, said, you know, hey, what, why did you leave engineering? What in the world would you do that for? Because it’s a good job. I said, Well, you get to make more as a roofer. And you get to have control of your time. He said, Yeah, but you’ll make yourself old, real fast. And I said, Man, you’re crazy. I guess I was maybe 30. At the time, I said, you know what you’re talking about? Sure enough, if you guys are seeing the side of my head, it’s nice and gray, and you know, look like a 42 year old dude, like I am these days instead of a nice young pup back then. But so. But that’s one of the quick roundabout.

 

Dylan McCabe  03:40

So you got it. So you did you get an engineering degree, then?

 

Kirby Smith  03:43

Yeah, yeah. for civil engineering, which means roads and bridges and worked in that business for a decade, got my engineering license, and I’m a licensed engineer in the state of Tennessee, and haven’t really ever done a whole lot with it. I can still stand plans and do diagnostics and and you know, builds and stuff like that. But honestly, I’ve enjoyed kind of hanging out here in the roofing business working for lightspeed construction, like you said for about the last 10 years. Well, so

 

Dylan McCabe  04:09

as the president of lightspeed construction, going from engineering, which is super detailed work, and analysis, and math and all these other things. What’s it like going from that into route? I mean, what was the thing that motivated you? Most of the guys that we talked to they get into roofing because they have this dream of making really good money and having good work life balance and stuff like So what was the dream? What got you past the tipping point to go ahead and make that jump?

 

Kirby Smith  04:38

Yeah, so you ever hear those guys that are maybe in their 50s and their 60s, and they’re, you know, I used to be a big, big Dave Ramsey listener, and you’d hear the phone calling and say, Hey, I’m 50 or 60 years old, and I’m scared. And if you really dug down a little bit into their story while they were scared, the reason was that they hadn’t really ever challenged themselves. They hadn’t pushed them. And whether or not they have a nest egg or not, a lot of times the thing that scared them is that they knew they should have been a little bit more and push themselves and never quite did. And so I landed flat footed and started running in the roofing business at the same time. My experience was Hey rekan sounds cool. I think I’ll be able to play more golf if I Ruth. And you can see my golf shirt here It’s from 10 Cup never misses seven right. But my first experience was knocking on doors in Nashville, Tennessee hadn’t been a storm and good solid two years. And just go in and figure it out. His roof looked old and his roof didn’t need to be messed with and that was my job looking for when torn three tab shingles and nashville tennessee did that for a good year and hailstorm occurred in Knoxville in 2011. And moved here with with a brand with the folks that I was working with at the time. That just didn’t really seem to make a ton of sense and so Knoxville estate and opened up lightspeed construction and away we went.

 

Dylan McCabe  06:00

So you have this dream of getting into something where you can be out and about, make more money, play more golf challenge yourself. And you get into business in your early 30s. Right? Yeah. And so you launched lightspeed and then reality hits, you start working you start going from a guy that’s really focused on selling routes to really being a leader in a company and growing and scaling a successful company. So So tell us about real quickly what what is lightspeed? Are you mostly residential, a mostly commercial Are you a mix of the two kind of give us some bullet points on lightspeed

 

Kirby Smith  06:32

and lightspeed yet li te speed construction, you can go to lightspeed construction.com to check us out, guys want to, we’re doing some cool stuff, man. The bullet point, I guess, to fast forward from say, when I was 30, to the time I’m 40, or 42, I tried a couple of different storms and and chased around. And that was what I knew was knocking on doors, and realized I wasn’t very good at organizing a team and getting folks to another state and trying to handle all of that stuff. And and I didn’t really ever, like the thought of building an enterprise in a place I wasn’t intending to really be. And I was, a lot of times I would convince myself, I’d be like, Man, you know, Columbia, South Carolina just sounds great. But in the back of my mind, I was like, I’m not staying in Columbia, South Carolina. But I realized I was getting old, pretty fast doing that it was making me an old man running up and down the highway. In and around that same time, I learned a little bit about SEO and getting my business ranked and becoming a better marketer. And so with those tools, along with what we all know, every roofing businesses these days that, you know, this got a stable presence and is in an area at once, where a PR business really light speeds a PR business, that that does roofing, so we’ve got to have a stable, great reputation that our customers can feed off of. And so that along with SEO and word of mouth has really been the driving force behind what keeps the lights on, which is good, solid referrals and consistent business and opportunities that we take in.

 

Dylan McCabe  08:07

Yeah, and you guys do some incredible stuff there. So I want to go really deep on that. Before we get to the really exciting stuff. I want to talk about the challenge. I want to talk about the pain you have to work through as a leader when you’re growing a company. So when you started growing lightspeed back, and you’re almost 10 years ago, what was the biggest challenges that you faced? Or maybe there’s even one specific story of something you went through where you’re like, man, I don’t know if this is gonna work. I don’t know if this thing is gonna work out the way I thought it would take us to that place tickets to that season.

 

Kirby Smith  08:41

Would it be okay, if I focused on maybe one challenge, one that I’m sure your audience still deals with every day and sort of kind of book in that with what one of the things that we’re using to help us resolve that issue is personnel, right? Things are great. I had a nice business, making good living and decided to start hiring folks. And nobody had ever given me any formal training. I hadn’t really ever worked for any companies. I’ve been with an HR capacity or a training and development capacity. And so bringing on personnel was the point where it was the inflection point of my business. It was it was after I’d pretty much wrapped up my Storm Chasing days and knew that I wanted to have a stable presence knew that people were going to help me do that. But I didn’t know how to motivate I didn’t know how to develop and just to the best I could, you know, and so, one of the things that you and I have spoken about is I’m an avid reader, books sitting behind you traction is one of my favorite reads. Gina Whitman is awesome. I just finished how to be a great boss by Gina. Terrific. The other book I might encourage you and your audience to take a look at is called the five voices, every business owner should read it. And what that describes is what are the best aptitudes that your people have and how do those integrate to a team and how to actually sandwich those together so that they can, they can bring out the right flavors. I’ll give you a quick pointer out of that. And then since we’re hitting that the depth is the depth. Okay,

 

Dylan McCabe  10:08

let’s go deep max goes deep. Yeah, that’s what it’s all about.

 

Kirby Smith  10:11

So So five voices amazing read. And what it breaks down is and I’m gonna classify myself here breaks down five different types of contributions that your workers and your people and your teams can make. There’s pioneers, right folks that are going to be out there leading the charge, in my opinion, those are typically going to be the people that are going to have tripped up just enough to follow them. But they’re usually going to be the smartest you met my business partner, Andrew Andrews, pioneer, Andrew can get folks point in the right direction and move in that direction. And crushing. There’s there’s going to be myself, which is a creative, I’m a creative person. And there’s two different types of creatives. There’s there’s outloud creatives, and then there’s internalizing creators as well. I’m an outlet, I kind of like to talk through my problems, kind of like the thing to them like that sounding boards, and mentors that can kind of help just turn the mirror around and say, Hey, what do you think about this? Does this look right? You know, a lot of times that may be all I need. And and then I’ll kind of go do my creative thing and bring it back. The book mentions the interesting thing about creative, which is why I want to make sure my depths not to to off. But the interesting thing about creatives about one in seven people actually understand what the hell creatives talking about at any given time. So we literally lead the charge on where we’re going, but nobody knows what we’re talking about.

 

Dylan McCabe  11:36

That’s interesting, man. So so then you very revealing a training on communication.

 

Kirby Smith  11:43

And that was maybe some of my my learning curve. and developing people in that first pain that I’ve really had in this business was that I wasn’t doing a great job of helping folks get on the same page and aligned. And and the problem was me, right, I got to take responsibility. And you know, you kind of kind of bump along and do better with people and hire better people. But it was just in the last six months, I was like, dude, I talk too fast. I’m thinking in my head, I’m explaining thoughts and people are getting this stuff, I need to write these thoughts down, I need to get them more dialed in, bounce them off some other posts, and then bring them back to my team. And so as a creative that’s, I’m sure you’ve got creative business owners in your in your group and in your network, and then limitless. And if that’s you take a look at this book, it is incredible.

 

Dylan McCabe  12:30

That’s good stuff. Yeah, I’ll put the notes to the book in the show notes of the podcast. So people can think oh, what was that book that Kirby mentioned? You know, I’m that way as well. It’s hard for me, I have to work on brevity. Because it’s easy for me to it’s easier for me to talk for 30 minutes, and it is for one minute. And so even creating, we created a recent promo video for the limitless CEO groups. And Miller, my business partner was like, how long is it man? I said, Man, I cut it down to five minutes. He’s like, dude, you need to get it down to one like, man, I don’t know if I could do that. Yeah. So as you dealt, so would you say that was your biggest challenge as you’re growing a team and hiring the right people was communication, or was it really just the hiring and onboarding process?

 

Kirby Smith  13:11

Oh, man, what a great question. Yeah, I guess that was that was gonna be the rest of the dovetail in the book. And I was going to mention about how we look at look at team building and a team and culture here. And I know that was kind of thrown around a lot. If you spin around, and I’ll be glad to send you a picture of the front of my office, there’s there’s two acronyms in the front of office, one we borrowed from Dabo Sweeney, it’s BYOB. Bring Your Own guts. can’t work for us. If you don’t do that, right, you will not be a fit the other is b y o see as bring your own character. So it’s the very last thing and the first thing both see when they come in our office is that you have to have this to be here. The other mention I’ve got you know is hire, hire slow fire fast, you know, bring in the right people. And if you realize it’s not the right but not the right seat or on the right seat, but you just have to make the move. And nobody ever taught me how to fire anybody. I remember the first time I fired one of my workers. And she had been with me for several years and I really cared about this this gal, but it was just time to move on. You know, she had a different vision for what we were going to accomplish than what the company was going to be moving towards. And Dude, I don’t know if you’ve ever let anybody go. I stayed up all freakin night. I was looking at the clock and I was watching YouTube videos and reading and looking at the clock and I was hoping the clock would tick backwards. I was so terrified of that 730 meeting where she was going to come in and you know, one of my other workers is going to sit in one of my other workers is going to sit in and have a conversation with her and we’re just going to explain it to her but And I think you know, the books that we read are going to tell us that, you know, they’re going to say, when you’re speaking with that person at that second meeting, no, it should be 20% you speaking and 80% listening to them, right. The other is have things written down, it kind of does sort of parlay with what you’re mentioning, I don’t think it’s possible to have control of your business and have your business leverageable. Unless you build a great onboarding and training platform, I don’t think it’s possible, I think your business will always own you.

 

Dylan McCabe  17:27

And so is that something for your onboarding and training is do you guys use a resource like storm ventures group training? Or do you have your own kind of video training internally? Or how do you guys do that?

 

Kirby Smith  17:38

Yeah, so this is, this sort of starts to speak into the software that we built, we’re using it as a training platform as well. The biggest thing is it just, you can certainly outsource that. I don’t know if you’ll ever get the texture that you’re wanting, you know, I use an Anthony’s gear and SVG stuff will be cool. He’s got a ton of training videos on how to how to sit down and close folks at a dinner table with a storm restoration contract. Right? That’s cool. But does it tell them how to, you know, bid or reflash, the chimney, you know, the I don’t know that. Anthony’s got that in his gear, you know that a chimney is going to be 15 $100 to reflash. And you’re going to put ice and water all the way up and around you find imagine the single measure the width of the shingle. And so we’re getting talking about depth, we’re getting that deep in it, you know, when you go look at it a shingle, you need to take pictures that your best match, you can get a single shingle. And here’s what to look for when the chimney is actually leaking. So we’re going that granular with it so that our folks, whether they’re grabbing, you know, the chimney flashing leads or the valley leads, or you know, the the ridge cap ridge vent leads, those guys understand every detail that we can help them and tee them up. And we can, you know, possibly even put some examples of projects that look like what we’re doing. But But writing this stuff down, however you do it in a very succinct, clear manner. It’s a lot of work. It’s a lot of work. It takes a long time, we’ve been working on this since beginning of 2020, for example, we’re not, we’re not even halfway finished, right? And it’s a it’s a very rewarding process, you’ll learn a lot about what you say and what you do. And you might even tighten in some of the things that you say, and you do Dylan, while you’re going through and teaching it to others, and in a very flat way, which is videos and photos and, you know, scripts and things like that.

 

Dylan McCabe  19:33

It’s so true. You know, I had a I had a former role at a large digital marketing company, and they decided to franchise it out. So we had to develop training and processes for all the franchisees for them to be successful. And I built that whole thing out from the sales training and then and then imagine teaching people that have never don’t know anything about online marketing, and teaching them about Google Ads Facebook ads SEO website design. I mean, it’s just over. It’s it’s overload for your brain, right? But but it’s so critical that you do that. Because if you don’t have processes that are well documented and followed by everybody, you don’t have consistency. So you don’t have a process that’s sustainable. And you also don’t have a process that’s scalable. So I just love that you’re a champion for that. And that kind of leads into the next thing, you know, I just for people listening this, they need to check out your website. Because you guys right away, when you go to your website, you’ve got very simple call to action buttons for somebody to hire you or to call for a free inspection, they can also look at jobs in progress, they can look at their own job in progress, they can look at any kind of job Commercial Roofing, jobs, residential, they can look at repairs, they can look at all kinds of stuff. But you’ve got this great format, where every single option looks the same. The text is really big and bold, you’ve got videos everywhere. And then I looked at the Google listing, and you guys have got over 100 reviews on Google’s with a with on Google with a 4.8 rating. So there’s a lot of questions I want to ask. But for guys listening to this, everybody wants to be competitive in their market. You guys are dominating the local Tennessee market there. And you’re not spending a ton of money on ads. So how are you doing that? How are you getting this organic? Are you getting this organic market share? When somebody types in Roof Repair Knoxville, how are you? You’re doing what everybody wants to do? And we all see all the I’m building up this kind of the answer to this question here. But we all see these Facebook posts in the Facebook groups, how do you want to get this many leads? This many leads this many leads? Everybody’s trying to do this thing? So can you kind of walk people through the first big thing that you guys do? Well,

 

Kirby Smith  21:52

yeah, so we, we built a marketing software, it’s called lead Symphony. And it’s, it’s not the same as my roofing business. But what I found in the process of building software the past three years is that it’s sort of a lot like SEO, right. We all know what SEO stands for these days. And SEO and software very similar, in that they weed out everybody in the middle, right. So if you hire a software business, you’re going to get somebody great, or you’re going to get somebody terrible. There’s not a lot in the middle. And we see the same thing in the SEO world as well. There’s not a lot of folks that are not going to be not terrible, you you’ve got great services that know what they do well. And then you’ve got, you know, you’ve got a lot of folks that are are doing the other as well. And so what I can say is that, when you’re considering a partner to bring on to your business, just a little point of advice, whether you’re considering building some sort of software SEO, be very slow and very careful about that, because you’re talking about spending a great sum of money, and possibly leveraging some of the opportunities that you might have otherwise gotten if you don’t do it very well. But what we do that’s different is that we at lightspeed construction, use lead Symphony software to document every single project that we inspect and perform onto our website. So that’s what leads Symphony does, right. And we spent three years building this, it’s it’s not an app, you won’t find it on the App Store. It’s it’s a, it’s a login through your website that my team goes on every day. And any inspection that we’re on, we’re loading photos and videos, and then content statement. To to that, we’re sending that inspection back to the customer, perhaps even jumping on a zoom call, it’s a little bit different. And when we get on our zoom calls, we’re actually walking those customers through their pages, and then through some culture stuff, and some pitch booking stuff that we have and some upsell things that we’ve gotten our scripts. But the main thing is we’re driving towards the fact that we’re doing a virtual proposal where we’re covering your project. And it’s right here on our website. And so the nice thing that we’re getting there is that we don’t close every single opportunity. We look at Dylan, I don’t know if your closing 100% we’re not right. That would be nice. Yeah, it would be nice. Maybe one of these days. If you figure out how to do that, would you please. And I’ll take a real good boy, okay. But we don’t close 100% of our opportunity calls. And so what we have found is that when we go out and we meet with our customers and put their information on a webpage that’s designed for them, it’s going to create something unique and different that we do that no one else do does that we’re not going to look like a commodity. That’s one problem we got maybe in the East Tennessee market is that there’s a lot of commodity contractors out there we compete with. So this makes us look a little bit different. Every company wants to be different than those guys and this actually does that. And that was one of the The things that we struggle with for the longest time, should we lower our prices? Are we too expensive, we’re probably the most expensive contractor in our market should should we bring it down it’s it’s something that, you know, we’re getting beat on price. And the way that you the the script, you need to author if you want to not lose on price anymore is you have to be different. If you’re not, you’re a commodity, your buddy Joe says that. Joe, he’s with contractor, contractor dynamics. And I love that line. But this makes us different is that we’re able to capture all decision makers on our virtual calls, walk them through every detail of what we’re proposing, and then get our doctors on over that and let them take a look. And it really helps us duck that that objection of Hey, let me think about it and talk to my wife, right.

 

Dylan McCabe  25:47

So just for people listening to this, that don’t have a frame of reference for what lead Symphony is, it’s not some lead generation landing page type thing, lead Symphony is how to get organic leads. Because the software basically takes what would be a presentation. And it takes that presentation of the roof inspection, or the roof job done. And it puts it in this amazing format with pictures with pins and little points that you can tap on or click on and it opens up a picture or a video. And it leads somebody through a story. And it looks like a timeline as you scroll down the screen with images. And it’s a very powerful sales tool. But it’s the most powerful thing to me is that it’s constantly putting content on your website, because a lot of guys know, okay, yes, I need to do search engine optimization. Google likes webpages, Google, if Google, all Google wants to do is the great Librarian of the internet, if somebody types in Roof Repair Company near me, and Google has two choices. As a librarian, it can show that person a website with 300 pages, or it can show that person a website with two pages. While Google as a librarian always wants to show the book with more pages. Your website is like a book. And Google wants to give somebody the best book to answer their question. So to me, we’d Symphony software is a very powerful tool, because you’re taking all these pictures that you would take as a job. They’re going on a webpage on your website forever. And it’s new content for Google. It’s keyword specific. And you guys are dominating the local Tennessee market. And it’s awesome, because you’re not like you said, You’re not the cheapest game in town. And I love that. Because if we all do that, we’re all in a race to the bottom. And we’re all undercutting each other. If we all just try to be the cheapest guy in town. But you guys are staying there at your price and your profit margins. And you have a leg up. And for guys that don’t know, haven’t spent a lot of time researching online marketing 87% of users online, do business with the first three options in Google, it doesn’t matter if they’re searching for a plumbing repair. If they’re searching for tennis shoes, if they’re searching for romance, they click on one of the first three spots in Google and they get their answer, they do not look any further. So if you are not in the first three spots in Google for any keyword phrase, you are basically invisible to the public. And so you guys have figured out a way to do that. So that’s how

 

Kirby Smith  28:14

the map pack is cool. Yeah, it’s, it’s, it’s really cool to be ranking in the map pack for sure. Um, the, I guess the sort of flip, flip what you’re saying as well. The other thing is that we all know that we’re writing reports and putting bids and estimates and putting time and documenting what we’re gonna propose to our customers, right? Why not do that in a place that you might be able to get some value, I guess that was sort of the speak to have, I’m not closing 100% of my opportunity calls. I’m just not, I’m never going to. But if I can close the 50 or 60 or 70% that I do, and then have the other 30 or 40%, end up on my website as assets that live there for ever, and help Google find us and make it easier for other customers to find us as well. Maybe just not even Google, maybe if they’re just searching Our website is flipping through and they see something that sort of correlates to their issue. We’ve created a library of assets to sort of leverage off your word library that Google’s the library for everything lightspeed just wants to be the library for, for roofing in East Tennessee to talk about the problems we experience here and have assets that help folks understand that quicker. And if for example, you call my business this afternoon and said hey, curb Anita son Tom, by the way, if your customers aren’t selling some tunnels, they’re between three and five x profits. And it’s a lot like McDonald’s asking do you like fries with that? We’ve just got a building we’ve just gotten through building really simple and I still leave behind and hook for your audience. They want to stop by lead something calm. We’ve got a a course on how to upsell sometimes and the questions you should be asking and some of the ways that we pitch offers upsells and help our guys get better at pushing that stuff. But we create these assets and whether the customer moves forward with us or not, it’s just going to increase our market share in our presence and our visibility, and it will tell a better story. But if you call me Dylan this afternoon and said, Hey, curb on one sun tunnel, let’s say man, I get it. What do you know anything about Scientology? Say? And I’d say Well, hey, let me send you over a link real quick. My website, this is a customer that had a lot of the same questions that you’ve got. And they were asking the same things that you’re asking. And it’s going to have photos, videos, videos, but as a happy customer testimonial right there on my website, talking about the same issue that you’re calling me in regards to when just when that’s that’s our win right there. That’s that is what makes us different.

 

Dylan McCabe  30:52

That’s so good. Your you know, your story is similar to to some other brands that are that are really crushing it right now, because you didn’t start in online marketing, and then get into roofing. You are the president of a residential and commercial roofing company, you had a big challenge that you faced repeatedly. And then you figured out a way to basically put your this really compelling presentation online and and make it a permanent webpage on your site. So you’re getting organic search result action off of it. You’re using it to close deals, give us some stats on I know you tracked your close rate going up? And then yeah, how has that helped you close more deals with customers?

 

Kirby Smith  31:31

Yeah, and just to speak just another moment or two to my background, I I attribute it all to my upbringing. And my family. And I come from good style. My like, my dad’s name is Kurt, he’s a minister. My mom’s name is spring. She’s a school teacher. And their parents were some incredible folks. And a lot of the culture that we have here was borrowed from from from those folks. And so it is, it is just purely a coincidence that I was just, you know, maybe as a person who never gave up on a decent idea and tried to make it better. But that’s that’s something that my grandparents, my parents always instilled was be looking for that other little angle, don’t be like everybody else, find something that’s unique. And so that that is the kind of thing that it just sort of happened to be though I landed in 2010 or 2011, the days before, digital marketing was a thing before anybody was paying 1000s of dollars a month on on Google or Facebook to get exposure. And I said, I don’t want to do that those those leads look a lot like commodity leads to me. And not only that I’m renting those commodity leads, and no offense to Google and Facebook and Twitter and those guys, for what they do, they do a fine job of it, they definitely manage folks attention in a very interesting way I just said, I would rather have a better one better texture leads and five commodity leads. And I can’t control that, you know, if I’m buying this attention from Google, and this attention from Facebook, I’m not trying to hate on any of the big tech platforms. But we just decided to do things a little bit different and play their rules, their game lead Symphony is 100%, white hat, there’s nothing that we do that’s, that’s out of bounds, it’s not going to put any exposure risk. But every project that we inspect and perform we are creating assets around and getting into the weeds there just a little bit more. So we upload photos to lead something you know that right? So when we upload photos, the two most powerful things you can do with the photo when you upload it to your website are going to be one

 

Dylan McCabe  33:47

quiz title and the alt text,

 

Kirby Smith  33:48

alt text Okay, all text Yes, all text is correct the title this let’s agree on that one as well, all texts. So what all text is these days all text is a way of Ada disability describing what a photo is to somebody who’s blind. So when your alt texts in your image, you want to alt text it the same as if you’re describing to a blind person. When I talk about a shingle I say this is a great college shingle has lots of granules missing and there’s a nail that is pop, I described what the picture is, like I’m describing lead Symphony helps you do that. It reminds you when your photos have not been all tagged, and you can all tag them straight to the database. That’s that’s a problem no one else has solved. So that’s absolutely crush worthy. The other to answer my own question, there is excess data that’s going to be longitude and latitude in the image and then comments. And so what it’s going to allow us to do and our lead Symphony customers to do for their websites is to drop in that next step which is longitude, latitude, and then a quick description of their business. You know, we’re lightspeed construction, 1532, Washington Avenue, and so on and so forth, and certain email and phone number, all that’s embedded into every image that we load to the web. So it’s pulling multi latitude, and then it makes sure that your alt text or alt text is correct and gives you reminders when it’s not. So that’s a Yeah, you know, crush,

 

Dylan McCabe  35:10

right? You taught me something there. Yeah, that is so interesting, because Google’s algorithm wants to give local searchers the best local search result to their question. And that plays into that. That’s really powerful.

 

Kirby Smith  35:24

Yeah, I mean, I guess just back to me and what my story looked like, I, I knew that there was a lot of other folks that were struggling with this, I knew there was good companies out there that were not doing a great job at telling their story, and getting some of the things that they’ve worked so hard on in front of their audience. And they’ve got tons of material. I mean, your average reefer, how many pictures? Do you think that he or she has on herself? Right? Right, 1000s 10s of 1000s of photos and videos that are sitting on their cell phone, making $0. And, you know, maybe for sophisticated folks, they’re dropping into some sort of cloud storage app, or, you know, Google stuff, you know, and that’s cool. But it’s still not making any money. It makes money when it goes on your website, and demands that Google or any of the other engines pay attention. And then when your customers get to your site, you can keep their attention longer and have a better texture of opportunity once they come out the other side and give you a phone call.

 

Dylan McCabe  36:26

Yeah. So you’re basically what you’re saying is, is we’ve all got a lot of assets on our phone that are just sitting there that aren’t making us any money. But they could be

 

Kirby Smith  36:37

that is that situation? Yes. That that is it?

 

Dylan McCabe  36:41

Well, I think and for guys that want to learn more about lead Symphony, because we could I mean, we could talk about lead Symphony for an hour straight. And it’s, it’s, it’s a phenomenal piece of software, because it does a lot of things, from adding content to your site, getting you people that are searching online, making it to where they find you instead of the competition. It’s a sales tool. It’s a lot of things. So I actually, it’s a great training tool.

 

Kirby Smith  37:07

There, Brian bra is right there, you you can work for lightspeed construction, tomorrow, you’re going to be in lead somebody and learning about what we do.

 

Dylan McCabe  37:13

So it’s a phenomenal tool. So for those of you guys that want to learn more, I actually did a YouTube video with Andrew Kirby’s business partner, and we walk through lead Symphony, because I think it’s just, it’s just one of those things you really need to see in a video. And so I’ll also put a link to that YouTube video in the notes of this show. That’ll be on our website, limitless CEO group.com, you can go to our YouTube channel, which is limitless, you can find it in our Facebook page and stuff like that. And, and just go as deep as you want on that because it is phenomenal. But I also want to touch on another thing which you guys do really well, which is referral business. We all know that you’ve got to have referrals to have success in sales, and to grow a company. So how do you generate referrals? Because if I remember correctly, your guys aren’t allowed to get their commission if they don’t do something. Yeah, that’s

 

Kirby Smith  38:05

true. Yeah. And how much time do we have left? Just real quick, because I’d love to talk to referrals for the next hour, honestly. Yeah,

 

Dylan McCabe  38:13

I know. Yeah. We could do a whole interview on that. Yeah. about another 15 minutes or so. minutes. Okay.

 

Kirby Smith  38:19

So quick shout outs, my parents burning Curtis Smith and my girlfriend Beth. Not sure I’d be without those folks. They’re awesome. And they definitely help support me a lot and getting us here. As to your question, lightspeed construction is very focused and talking about traction and Gina stuff. I don’t think that your business will ever scale without focus, without coaches without focus about, you know, really getting into the things that hurt that’s in my opinion, the definition of focus is, is dealing with the stuff that sucks that nobody else wants to do. And so it’s, it’s kind of sucks at first, when you tell a salesperson, hey, you’re gonna have to get a customer testimonial video, or you don’t get your commission, I need that customer testimonial video to go onto their page. It’s a painful thing, because not every customer is going to want to do that. And what we find is that by the time we’re done doing it, they don’t even realize it’s happened. You know, hey, Dylan, tell folks about why you liked the roofing job that we just performed and why you chose lightspeed construction. Even if you’re not, even if you’re not a video person, which we hear quite a bit you’re going but we’re pretty strict. But you’ve got to have your customer testimonial video on our website so that we can all use and leverage those tools and our customers can have us in business for the next 25 years. They want us in business so that we can warranty their routes and so and my guys get the picture. It’s it is a different experience trying to onboard something like lead 70 and we’re still figuring out the growing pains of you know, when When our new contractors Come on how to really get the buying and adopt because it there is some ask, and it will require focus. But I just don’t think you ever get speed without focus. It’s the fuel that gets speed in your business. And you know what they say money likes velocity, right?

 

Dylan McCabe  40:19

And so as you develop that focus with your sales, guys, what were the results, I mean, if I, if I remember correctly, then you say, for every job you close, you get not not just two more referrals, but actually two more jobs closed, is that true?

 

Kirby Smith  40:34

Oh, we haven’t really gotten into the weeds on tracking that if you do want some hard statistics, we’re up 20%. On our close ratio, I’m using our sales, we decided what leads somebody to call our sales system Own your market away. And so we are 20% up. And that starts the beginning, hey, we’re going to need five minutes here based on when we get to your property. And so we come on site in five minutes, or FaceTime. And we need to jump on a zoom call with his and hers with both both of them afterwards. And so we will have a better opportunity jumping on with both his and hers. But we need less time face to face with the webpage that we’re going to be building our customer, we asked them to share that, hey, drop it on social media, text it out to some of your friends and family you’re happy with the project would really help us out. And anybody that calls obviously your referral fee, we’ve got that ingrained in our culture as well. But it’s it’s obviously referrals are a huge portion of our business and and so it’s nice to be grabbing 20% uptick in closing percentages with virtual closes using Leads Leads. And I’ll repeat that 20% increase in your closing ratio with lead 70 on virtual closes because you get both decision makers on the on the same page. So that’s why we call that hone your market. After that we haven’t really been tracking or, you know, delving in too much with our referrals. We know that they’re increasing, but yeah, absolutely, we’d love to see, you know, one new opportunity for every customer we get or one new close contract. But you know, we’re just we’re thankful for everybody, this is gonna give us a chance to bang on the roof, honestly.

 

Dylan McCabe  42:11

Oh, it’s so good. I mean, 20% increase is a legitimate curve in the right direction. That’s, that’s really powerful. I know, there’s a lot of people listening to this thinking, well, I own a company and I’d be willing to pay a lot of money to have somebody that could come and teach us a method that would increase our revenue by 20% each year. closing ratio 20%

 

Kirby Smith  42:30

Yeah. And um, there’s, there’s two big mentions on a virtual close is that thing number one, you get to kind of two step you’re close, we all know we’ve all heard of one call closes, right? So you go out, you meet a customer, you figure out a scope, you throw a price out and hope that they they move forward, ask them a bunch of questions that are commitment questions beforehand, have some closing questions you’re going to ask, this really does a nice job of helping you figure out their budget before you ever have to sling a price if your customer, right, so if you called me and said you want the suntan we were talking about earlier I got out, I’m going to mention a range of price and then see the sun tunnel is going to be between 15 120 $500. And off of that I’m going to get a bearing off of your price, that’s the big benefit that we get Thing number one is that I’m gonna get a bearing on your budget, right without actually having to say, Don’t tell me your budget on this channel. So I get a bearing on it. And then I actually get a chance to put my proposal together and jump on a call on zoom with you and your wife where I can show you happy customers that have been serviced, talked about the customer testimonial videos, and then use that also leverage getting his and hers together both decision makers, it’s it’s a big win for us. And that’s those two things together added together are probably the reason that you’re seeing a 20% number. They’re both probably about a 20% uptick, we get better information on the budget on the front end. And then we get both decision makers or all decision makers. And this goes for commercial deals as well. Right. So one of the big things that we’ve adopted in the past year is service agreements, and on a service screen to talk to apartment complexes or Hoa or asset managers, these guys are never available, right? they’ve always got somebody that’s, that’s kind of gatekeeping the deal for them. So this is a terrific way for us to grab their attention for a few minutes. You know, you just it’s difficult to close opportunity unless you get both decision makers together all your decision makers and principals and then have a clear understanding what their budget is. Those are the those are the two things that are uptaking our numbers that 20% we’re talking about. We’ll help our customers with lead Symphony. Anybody we bring on, we’ll be glad to teach them to on your market system.

 

Dylan McCabe  44:41

So what’s one key takeaway you would you would share from all of that to guys that definitely want to increase their close rate in virtual sales during COVID. I know we just at the time of the recording of this podcast. Pfizer has come out with news that they’re 90% successful with their new vaccine. So maybe we’ll see a shift now to where we can do More in person. But for now, zoom is a great sales tool. So what’s one big key piece of advice you would share with that?

 

Kirby Smith  45:07

Oh, man, um, for virtual closes? I think it’s I think it’s what we all know. But nobody’s really saying that it’s anytime you close a customer. I know what I want to tell them. Right? It’s a big, but I don’t know what they want to hear. It’s a big disconnect in the sales business is I want to go and tell them when I love talking, right? I want to go talk talk talk, it’s a lot more important to sit there and have the script down with the questions that you’re going to be asking. We can even mention some of the scripting that we use. That’s that’s very powerful, on how to flesh out, you know, some of the potential objections or maybe the commitments that we’re looking for and the things that are important to our customers. That’s the biggest thing is find out what’s important to your customer, forget a little bit about your agenda, find out what aggravations they’ve had, and what direction they want to see, you know, the property, the service or whatever service you might be offering.

 

Dylan McCabe  46:08

That’s good stuff. Yep, that’s so good. And so to kind of bring this to an end with everything you’ve gone through, to this point, almost 10 years, being the president of this company, and then creating the lights, not creating lightspeed but creating lead Symfony going into that, where do you see lightspeed going three to five years from now, what’s your, what’s your vision for that? Where are you guys headed? And why?

 

Kirby Smith  46:34

Yeah, tune in the past two years, right? And just sort of speak to that and sort of give you a projection based on what we’ve done. We’ve done three things that are hugely important this this past year. Thing number one is that we’ve revamped our point and this is outside of the software, this is just pure lightspeed, right? lightspeed starts in Knoxville, Tennessee, like lightspeed has brought on a written down formulated sales system that is clear and understandable, has the questions that we all know we need to be asking that nobody’s asking. And we train on that every week. So we pull those clauses together, and we review the clauses that our customer our guys are taking to our customer base, we review those and see what went right, what went wrong, and what needs to be tweaked or improved on. So we review those every Monday and Friday. So we’re dialing in our sales proposals in a major way. Because it’s very expensive to kind of have everybody sort of doing what they want. I love to flow. Don’t get me wrong, I love to just sit there and just jibber jabber and build rapport and kind of kind of finally get it, you know the vibe of that the clothes but that’s not how it works here anymore. We’ve we have a lightspeed brought our own guts. And what that means is we’re doing stuff that isn’t comfortable, right? We’re focusing on those questions and the things that we see the most benefit value, and we’re discussing, and we’re granting that into what we’re saying. So that’s thing one is the point of sale thing, too, is building and adopting a training system where we can leverage other people’s time as opposed to save my time or my team’s time, we can get those guys to learn faster, better. And since a lot of effort and a lot of work, but it’s one of the most rewarding things that I’ve ever done. And then, you know, the third thing, Dylan, is that we have really tightened down our upsells. Right, so as a retail contractor, we haven’t had a storm in Knoxville in three years, right? So you go broke, if the only thing you had was a sales contract for storm restoration couldn’t do that. Right. So what we’ve done is we tighten our upsells. So if you call me mentioning a roof, I’m going to mention you know, maybe even over the phone or right there on the front end, hey, are there any darker rings in your home that you guys thought about eliminate? And from there, I’m going to plant that seed of that upsell and then I’m going to jump in the script that you have So like I mentioned, if you go to lead simply calm we’ve actually got a quick webinar on how folks and get quick information about upselling some funnels, but we’re at between three and five x profit on our sons. And it’s a it’s a very powerful tool to realize what we’re upselling and how upselling that and then having our guys do do pitch ups, right every Friday and every Monday we got a 92nd pitch on you try and cut my head on how you can pitch your your gutter guards or your rapping, you know, rapping facia, or or some tunnels or chimney caps or whatever that upsell might be. We’re going to try and pitch off see touching close that that that upsell as far as the next three to five years for lightspeed construction. Service service business. I, I was speaking with my my good friend Lee hate over the weekend, he was telling me that Florida he’s doing $4 million a week and insurance restoration skills and that number is incredible. Congratulations. After the $10 million in service a year, right here in Knoxville $10 million in service. That’s 80% profit on service work that we’re calculating. And if there’s anything I can coach young guys out there, take a look at the service business with your apartment complex is your asset managers, get those guys on warranty roofs that you haven’t put on, he’ll fix them get that money in quarterly, you’ll make it over the aggregate I’d rather do $10 million in service in one year than $5 million a week and storm restoration in some other state. No offense to storm guys whatsoever. I just seen that being the vision and the intention of lightspeed construction while we’re growing the software side as well.

 

Dylan McCabe  50:56

That’s so good and just you know, to give a plug to my friend Ryan Groth with sales transformation group for guys that want to learn how to do that. You need to hit Ryan up he’s worked with the top one a lot of the top 100 companies in roofing you can check out his website that sales transformation group Ryan Groff he will absolutely train you on how to build up that that service business model. It’s just awesome. So we get john Townsend as well over with Ryan John’s off he’s a super smart guy.

 

Kirby Smith  51:26

So yeah, y’all check out one we love working.

 

Dylan McCabe  51:28

Awesome. Well, we can keep talking about business and growth man, we’ve touched on a lot of challenges here we’ve talked about the leadership Leadership Challenge. We’ve talked about resources to read we’ve talked about onboarding we’ve talked about standing out and Google with lead simply this has been awesome, but do you have any any parting piece of advice is one thing you’d like to leave behind that if they didn’t get everything else? Just one thing you want to leave behind to people listening to this

 

Kirby Smith  51:55

retraction by Gina Whitman read the five voices like I mentioned, especially retraction they’ll take you about three days and if at the end of a quarter and a year you’re having trouble with reading traction call limitless does get us can help you out and you know hey, I guess the one other final word besides that that’s a terrific reading that is the text of of your sales training and it’s a good one to have right

 

Dylan McCabe  52:21

yep we do we follow traction in the whole us system and our CEO groups Yeah. So thanks for the plug.

 

Kirby Smith  52:28

Yeah, like the worst plug God ever but there is no segue It was like by the way you know yeah we love that would be a recommendation was to read that book get into it see what what’s their Thing number two is that the roofing business one of most often but it’s awesome businesses out there I’ve worked in several business my life and folks want to see good succeed. We don’t want to bat around for long, but we want to see good succeed. So if you’re a young struggling business owner, and you’re having any trouble with this or that, and there’s so many terrific resources, you know, from from Ryan, or from you guys are from Steve Patrick are the SVG group and, and there’s so many folks that want to help you know, what you’re looking at how to recognize it faster, and maybe how to focus on some of those things that are going to make you a lot more money, but might be kind of painful, but I really appreciate you having me on. Thank you so much, though. Um, it’s been awesome.

 

Dylan McCabe  53:21

Absolutely. Same here, Kirby Smith, president of lightspeed construction, thanks for joining the show.

 

Kirby Smith  53:26

Enjoy it. All right. Hopefully

 

Dylan McCabe  53:28

now you can see why I was excited to interview Kirby. He’s a very entrepreneurial business owner. And I love what they do with their testimonials. I mean, their sales guys won’t get their commission, if they don’t get a video testimonial of the customer that is just so fascinating to me. And when I got to learn more about a lead Symphony, I was so excited. I said, hey, let’s do an affiliate deal. So we are an affiliate partner of lead Symphony, and I’ll put the affiliate link so if you’re gonna check out lead Symphony, just to give a nod and a thank you to us for sending you there. You can use that link and we will get credited will help us keep this podcast going and support it and pay for the things you need when you’re running a podcast like soundproofing and mics and all kinds of stuff that goes along with it when you offer a free service. Okay, guys, this is Dylan McCabe with the roofing CEO show. Thank you for joining us. Definitely check out our Facebook group and join the conversation. It’s a unique community only for owners, CEOs and leaders with no spam or advertising allowed. I look forward to seeing you there and I will catch you in the next episode.