Ep 199 - "Restoration is Changing: Are You Ready to Sell?"

Wow. How many of you have listened to the Headheart Boots Podcast? (audience cheering) I can't tell you that react. How much that means to us? Welcome back to the Headheart Boots Podcast. I'm Chris, and I'm Brandon. Join us as we wrestle with what it takes to transform ourselves and the businesses we lead. This new camera angle makes my arms look smaller than yours. I'm noticing that, and I really appreciate it. I thought you did that on purpose. No, I don't. I didn't, and I'm not happy with it. Everybody. What's up, dude? Well, I'd be lying if I didn't say part of my brain is thinking about the River Cabin I'm going to my wife with tonight. That's right. You guys are saftoring him. Yeah, thank you. The McKenzie River corridor in Oregon is possibly one of the most beautiful places on Earth. Now, this is a little special place you've been before, right? Yes, second time. Well, this will be our fourth time at McKenzie River in the last two years. Wow. And we stayed at, yeah. A couple of different cabins. It's great. It's a little rustic cabin. Yeah. A bedroom and a kitchenette and then a covered deck with a barbecue. And if you can picture facing the river, it's like 75 feet of dense green forest and plants and this little walkway that goes right down to the river's edge where you can sit with your coffee in the morning. Oh, yeah. It's unbelievable. That's great. Are you going through Sunday? Yeah. Wow. Good for you. Super stoked. That's awesome. Yeah. Good job. The kids were just letting them run wild. That's right. Just fair. That's what knocked the door and leave. I would maybe hang it from the ceiling just out of reach. They've got to give them some to work on. I got to solve the, that's what we do with the sugar bag. We hang that from the highest point in our ceiling and they got to figure that out before we get home. They could indulge. Yeah, they got to figure out how to solve the problem. It's like an escape room on the get sustenance. That's right. It's a reward instead. Exactly. Something to gold star. Dude, I want to hit a topic. I've been really, I don't want to say wrestling because it sounds negative. I actually think this is a really interesting opportunity for companies in general, but. You talk about TPAs for your extra revenue? Oh, I love TPAs. Yeah. No, that's a different. Well, no, it'll be part of the conversation actually. So, it's this idea of the landscape is changing in restoration. The relationship to carrier to TPA is changing. The lead flow, the game is different. I think we have an opportunity as operators to really iterate our approach and our behavior to create massive wins. So just to do some really quick stage setting and this has been conversations we've had for a while. I mean, we met with the team over at Veriske, I think late last year and had a show where we really talked about some of the things affecting claim volume. Well, they seem to still be in play. Let's put it that way. I think for a lot of companies this year, their doors aren't getting blown off unless you're based in North Carolina or Pittsburgh or Nashville. Okay. So here's really quickly. We've got through TPAs, through these carrier direct programs, it appears that statistically they're down yet again and two double digit numbers. I've heard things as high as 50 to 60 percent as an example. On top of that, we have all these factors that are pushing, I believe, let's call it claim anxiety or claim friction. Meaning, if I'm an insured, I'm slower to pick up the phone and dial 1-800-HELP-ME on my loss because I'm getting messaging that says, "Hey, you processed the claim. We're going to drop you." There's a strong conviction, I think, that certain claims that would have been covered in the past may not because there's this, again, this back pressure. Again, it's an interpretation. One percent deductibles create way more cost out of pocket, right out of the gate that creates some decision friction. And I think we have a growing population that's more independent and they just solve their own problems. And they've got access to information. They have access to AI to help them think through things and process things that maybe they haven't been exposed to. So I think the buyers becoming more sophisticated, I think they're more motivated for several different reasons to take this more into their own hands. And so if that's true, I think one of the things that we're fighting, and I'm just going to speak in my own experience with our company, is that we have to learn some new skill sets because in the past where it didn't really feel like you were selling against something, I think we are now more than we ever have in the past. Yeah, big time. But for us, like we're looking at our ecosystem in Florida and we're saying, okay, we have to be more aggressive about controlling our own destiny in terms of how we get in front of people, how we get exposed to new opportunities, referral relationships, partnerships, all the things. And one of the elements that I'm recognizing as an example, I'll do a couple of examples and I think we can unpack this together is we're in the midst of onboarding a financing solution, a financing partner. That will be white labeled in such a way that when we're talking about it in the process with a prospect or a client, like granted, there's this robust third party with all the security elements, all the software systems, all the real banking institutional capacity. But we get to seamlessly offer it as part of our relationship with the client or the prospect and it clearly gives them an option or a solution to come up with some better agreement on payment terms. It gives them more options. And us as the company, we don't have to bear the financial weight of being a bank on all our losses. Well, we're deploying that tool because we are witnessing that we are exposed to more and more scenarios where it's not just clearly going to be carrier funds that pay for the job. Or the client is more sophisticated and they want more information to make their own decision. They aren't just going to wait around for the carrier to tell them who to work with, why to work with them, blah, blah, blah. Sure. I think it's a great opportunity. So we've looked at a financing solution as an example. Well, we can't just choose the financing solution. There's training. We've got to now put it into the process. We have to teach the team how to do the board and job management software. Right? Like, there's the whole new set of skills that we have to develop. Absolutely. Another thing that we're seeing more and more of is, doesn't matter if it's recon or mitigation content, we have to provide estimates, ROMs as we refer to them, many do in the business, rough order or magnitude. We have to have a team that can show up on site and talk numbers in a coherent and comprehensive way. It's not just simply show up. Can you sign this and go to work? Yeah. Well, honestly, if you're a roofing company or a general contractor, like estimators and quote, their job is to create a scope of work and then sell that to that prospect in front of them. So this is not new territory for retail contractors. Right. Like, you're often bidding against selling against a competitor. And for us, I think we've just grown accustomed to a lot of our work is not placing us in a position where we're bidding, where we're fighting over a number where we're trying to win something, right? Yeah. And again, I'm being very over, you know, generalized in my statements. But this is what we're personally experiencing. And so in my mind, and I can't remember who said this, I think it was rumsy actually Brennan. I'm going to credit you on this. He's like, I spent several decades becoming a restore so that I didn't have to be a retail contractor anymore. And he's like, as I'm observing my business, I am now starting the journey of becoming better aligned as a retail contractor again. I think he's right. Like I think he nailed it. No question. Right. And so that's what I just wanted to chat a little bit about. Like, is what do we see an experience in the retail contracting environment that maybe is not a system, a toolkit or a process that we kind of consistently adopt or deploy on our side of the industry that maybe we need to take a serious look at and begin to refine? Well, it makes me think of my buddy Jared, right? With his luxury, like custom home-robbing business. Yeah. I mean, I think potentially it affects even the roles that we design. Like one of his roles, you could think of it as kind of a concierge role, right, is his designer. He is full-time designers that are not necessarily like architectural designers, but they're designers that know how to use the CAD software. But they're the ones that are really wooing the customer with all their options, you know, but their personality, the personality they bring to that experience is what differentiates them from all the other remodel. Right. It's that designer. It's that design process where the customer kind of makes their idea their own and all those things. And so I wonder, there's an element of wooing that you do in a retail sale, in a retail construction project where you're really trying to get the customer to fall in love with you, your process and your personality and everything. And in a lot of cases, the owner, the sitting down with that customer, we haven't really been in the habit of wooing customers in the restoration industry. It's kind of like, hey, I'm here to save the day. I'm the white knight. You know, this is great. We're going to take care of you. And we haven't, and this speaks to also the work we do as sales in the coaching teams and the sales front is like, we historically haven't done a great job of really knowing our customer. Like really, both Mr. and Mrs. Jones is, but then obviously all the commercial stuff, the chief engineers, the property managers and stuff like that, we've just never done historically a great job of getting to know our customer. And I think retail contractors tend to be better at that because it's more of a wooing process to win that client over. Whereas with us, it's like, they need us now. Yeah. And so we take that for granted or we have in the past. Yeah. You know, yeah, I agree 100%. Yeah, I think this is one of those moments where those that kind of mentally accept the fact that even though there's things about our industry that we've grown to love and probably it's the main reason why we've continued to stay in this environment versus investing in and becoming a retail contractor or adding those additional service lines, there's a lot of benefit. There's been a lot of benefit. Everything from margin to consistency to lack of competitors, blah, blah, blah. But it's all shifting and changing. And if we can be aggressive about accepting that and then beginning to iterate behavior, hiring practices, training practices, expectations. around that, I think those are the teams that will inevitably win in the short term. So here's, I'm just going to share some examples of what we're currently looking at and/or adopting as part of this evolution, if you will, and again, not to say that we're out there winning yet or that we've got it figured out. This is just stuff that we're processing and saying, I think we need to commit to some of these shifts. One, again, I've already hit it, it's like a financing solution. I think that you're doing you and your team a disservice. If you don't have a trained and well-onborted process or system platform, that you can create an opportunity for someone to break up the payments. There's just something special about that, especially when you can do it in such a way that it doesn't compromise your financial standing or cash flow, which is the ultimate game. So I think that's something for folks to consider. And again, what we're realizing is choosing something is only part of the battle. The real work then is going on training how to use it and how to incorporate into any existing mitigation or recon process that you have already. I think another thing that we've identified, and again, I want to be clear, these are things that we're identifying that we will be investing time and energy into, not all of it to play right now. Are you a business that's under 5 million in sales? And you're just now getting ready to try and scale your company up and hit some of those targets you've always wanted to hit. But now you've got to build a sales team, or maybe you just hired your first sales rep. But you don't really know how to manage them. How do you manage lead, trained, develop a sales rep? Flunnedite has a solution for you now. So we can actually assign your sales rep a turnkey VP of sales that will help them create a sales blueprint, their own personal sales plan for your market. They'll have weekly one-on-ones with that sales rep to coach, mentor them, hold them accountable to the plan. And they'll also have a monthly owners meeting with them, meet with you or your general manager and review the progress that sales rep. They're planned to actual results. What kind of performance improvement they're working on with them. Also let them know, hey, you might they're doing really well. Maybe we should think of hiring a second sales rep. They're going to have that one-to-one advice for you as an owner or senior leader on the team as well. How great would that be to have a bolt-on sales manager for your one sales rep and it's only $2,500 a month? If you're interested in talking more about that, reach out. Let's grab some time and let's talk shop. Our floodlight clients this last year in 2024 generated over 250 million in revenue. Supported by, advised by an industry expert whose own denoperated business just like you. So take action. Don't kick the can down the road. Start with our business health and value assessment and let's unlock the next chapter of your success story. Another thing is that I believe we need to get that sounded passive. I know we have to get more aggressive. We have to get more aggressive about what we adhere to and follow as an onboarding process for the client. There has to be more work done up front even before you secure commitment. And I think this is what scares us in our industry is that we've kind of lived in a space where you tried to mitigate your level of commitment and energy spend until you could secure the opportunity or have some confidence level that you've got this thing in the bag. Totally make sense. I absolutely understand why I'm a huge proponent of that. But and I think in the current ecosystem, we're going to realize that we have to give more before we ask for commitment because it requires that in order for you to earn enough trust to ask for the commitment. And I think in the past, we didn't have to stress about that the level that we do now. So examples would be that call intake process. Like how committed and dialed in are you on what is said, what questions get asked and what way are they asked and then how is your team providing information and asking the team to commit in these little moments of yes to get them to walk with you through the sales process. I'm not saying we got it figured out. I'm saying this is going to require time and attention because if we ignore it, we're going to fail. Like this is something. Okay. Another example is the estimating piece that we talked about. We have to create tools so that it's easier and easier for our team to create a bona fide number that they can trust with room for error. But then that individual that shows up to sell your company to that prospect has to be capable of talking through that number and getting agreement. Where in the past, it was like, we didn't need to be great at that. Yeah. Or we could be less great. Whatever you want to look at. It's changed. That's changing. Like you've got to be able to have someone that shows up can answer the three universal questions. Do you care about me? Can I trust you? Can you help? They do it with the way they act and then they need to comprehensively be able to speak through the money and solicit an agreement. Like if you can't do that on the front line, that is a sign of trouble as we continue to move into this new ecosystem. A fourth thing is, and this is broad and I don't have the solution. Like we're not effectively putting these solutions in place. If you think about what a retail contractor on the construction side has to do in order to earn the trust, show competency, help make decisions, help make designing decisions like get the project in motion and help that client be led through a construction process. There's a lot more upfront investment. And I think that if we just slow down a little bit and start asking ourselves hard questions like, what are we expecting our project managers to do? What level of additional layer of support have we even considered and put into place? I'm thinking things like, and I'm not saying we all run out and do this. I'm just saying these are variables I'm trying to currently wrap my head around. Retail show floors, providing a much more in depth construction schedule. Doing a better job of soliciting interaction with the client, have them engaging in homework. The design piece. Like not having a designer on staff. And again, please don't I'm not running around and hiring all these positions myself. I'm just wrestling with the concepts right now. That design element. How much time do we lose in the front end of a construction project? Because we're leaving this decision making to the client with very little coaching direction or support. I don't know how to make the decision. And in the past like us waiting six weeks to get a job started may not have been that big of a deal. But what we're experiencing now is the commitment on the client side is so much less than it has been in the past. They're more finicky. You can lose them faster. And the less control we have on the upfront process, the beginning of wooing them and pulling them in to commitment and participation, the more likely we are to lose the client now that I feel like we ever have been. And so it's like that design element. How powerful is it if somebody did have an on-site designer that could help the client really process through and make good design decisions because they're being guided by somebody that does that. Like they're skilled at it. Yeah. You need to have a certain measure of scale to afford to have that role. But probably less scaled than you imagine, right? I mean, I think those people can probably be hired for less than $80,000. Yeah. And I think maybe there's some element of fractional. Maybe you talk to some of your larger vendor partners. Yeah. And you share some costs. Maybe it's also a training component for your estimators or PMs that they develop more of an understanding of design principles and that kind of stuff. The other theme that I'm hearing in my head is general salesmanship. Yeah. Meaning, what are we doing to actually persuade and woo the customer? Like I mentioned earlier, for example, I think a lot of these retail remodeling companies, they have sequential emails that go out. It's like a new customer as their first meeting and then they get this nice little kind of recap email. They thank you for me with us today. We'll have your full proposal and stuff ready shortly. You know, they've really dialed in. What is day one of working with us look like day two, day three? And how do we reinforce the relationship and kind of the sales process in our industry? We've never really had to do that. No, but now we're facing the point we do. And so then the question becomes, what are the various ways that we can sell? Who we are? The service experience, right? Like what kind of attention can we apply to that? The gift that we give them, perhaps when we show up on site, the information we leave behind, one of the things that I've been thinking about and talking with the team about is using loom more aggressively. And one of the ideas that I had was why in the world are PMs not doing their 24 hour job updates just on, oh, via loom and just sending because loom summarizes and transcribes the whole thing. That's true. Makes it very easy for people to, so if it's a long, a 10 minute thing, because there's a lot of stuff, they can easily jump to parts of the video. It's like a really rad platform, but it's also rad because it's easy to text message. Yeah. You can text people loom video and they can view it right on their phone or you can email it to them and it creates this gift, like video rich preview that can just be pasted right into the body. It looks super pro. Yeah. Why would we not have like loom could be a key fundamental part of our tech stack that every single one of our employees is utilizing loom for customer communication. Everybody loves video. Yeah. Loom gives people the option of watching the video or reading the transcript or looking at the outline of the message. Yeah. It's just a really perfect and I'm sure there's other solutions like loom, but that's just what we've been using and it is so fantastic. Yeah. Why would we not build loom video communication personalized for the customer right into our mitigation response process? Yep. Our mitt flow. Yeah. Right? Why once the when the technician, the lead technician gets back into their truck after collecting the work authorization, stabilizing, they sit in their truck in for one minute. They open up loom, they put it in their holder in their dashboard. Like, hey, Mrs. Jones, I just wanted to do a really quick recap of what we talked about. Just make it easy for you to share this with Mr. Jones later. if he has any questions, you know, I talked to you through this. Talk to you through that, talk to you through that. The next thing that's going to happen is X. Listen, I'm really excited to work with you guys if you have any questions. Don't hesitate to text me back. Huge, right? Yeah. And I think the, as we're talking about, it's like these little things to teach people what it's going to be like to buy from you before they over commit or before they fully commit. These are perfect examples of, imagine if you go do an inspection for the first time, like you said. And like they didn't sign your work off yet. Like we haven't got them to that point. Right? They're in this pending status, if you will. Like this is an opportunity to teach them. Yeah. Like your level of follow up, your level of engagement to earn the opportunity versus I'm not going to give this a ton of energy until I get commitment. I think that's what I'm trying to say principally is there's a lot of little things that you can do to the investments tactically. But it's this mental shift of, it's Gary Vaynerchek's jab, jab, jab, right, right hook or whatever the fricking is. Give, give, give, give, give, then you ask. And I think that for many years, we haven't had to do a lot of giving in order to ask. And I think that's shifting very aggressively. And those who decide and find a way to give constructively and intentionally, by the time you ask for the client commitment, there's no reason they won't say yes. Because you've given them enough to make to earn their trust and answer the three questions. And I think that's where I just know I get cut up. Because I want to save my people's time. I don't want to burn them out, chase and loosen or chase and potentials. But then it's kind of like mentally, I think we just have to commit like guys. We're going to have to do more of that nowadays than we ever have before. And we don't need to act like a victim about it. Like let's invest, let's agree. Let's identify that that's just part of how you win now. And let's do it with intentionality and proactive commitment and reap the benefit. Because there's still plenty of work going on. I think one of the things we're wrestling against when people listen to this is for some and in some markets, they look at their current team. And they say, I think my team can really do that. Yeah, you know, certain roles, right? And I think obviously a part of it is, well, you've never expected your technicians to function that way. Yeah. You and I've seen this firsthand where team members that early days, people might have called it demo donkey, you know, they're just swinging hammers versus what ultimately came one of our fully equipped senior technicians. It's hard for people to see their folks making that jump. But you know what's interesting is I think of Kevin, really, definitely, remember Kevin from Summit, our trade tech guy. Yeah, you know, he's one of these, when he's big, manly men, you know, that just kind of doesn't talk a whole lot, you know, and a little bit gruff. He's kind of that prototypical trades person that is not super oriented by default around jaw jacking with the customer and you know, wooing and that kind of super kind. Although he's actually a very, very kind person. But my point, my point in this is, yes, I think anybody can be trained to do these loom videos and as an example, if they understand the why. And I think one of the reasons why anybody can be trained to do this is because these types of things are all examples of how we would prefer to be treated by the next plumber, remodeler, you know, repair person that's coming in our house as well. Every single one of us would love to get that recap video that we can share with our spouse or our roommate or our, you know, whatever. I think that's a small hurdle to get over, but I can imagine some people are thinking, gosh, that's really going to force me to retrain and reorient my team because they're kind of order takers right now. Yeah. They get their work order. They go out. We have a task list of things for them to complete and really wooing the customer and presenting our brand has not been one of those things. Yeah, you know, get away without being awesome. Yeah, just being tactical. Yeah, of just being very task oriented. Yeah, I think those days are going away abruptly. I really do. I think that the level of commitment that we're going to have to have around several things, I think, one, just adopting toolkits that we have experienced and witnessed retail oriented service providers leveraging to woo you and earn your trust to get commitment. I think that we have to look at all of that. And we have to identify responsibly what portions of that we can take on and adopt in our world because we just were running out of excuses to ignore that. I think another thing that we are identifying as part of this process is that task orientation, it's becoming lower and lower on the totem pole of priorities or skill set that you're looking for. Big time. And you're really starting to identify that we need people and we've kind of talked about this what we did at Varysk is there's this level of or sorry, a cotality, there's this level of people got to be prepared to be people, people like they got to do people work. And tasking isn't necessarily where that's going to be heavily invested in the future. It's the selling, it's the relationship navigation, right? Most of us that are listening to this and you and I talking about this, we'll see a day before we're done with our work where Tesla, Optimus Prime robots are doing a lot of the tasking for us. Yeah. I think it's inevitable whether that's five years from now or 15 years from now. Yeah. Some of us are going to see that change in the business and I think it's probably coming faster than most of us acknowledge or think. And yeah, then it becomes all about how do we make people feel? Yeah. How do the people on our team make people feel while they're doing business with us and our equipment and everything else we do. And you know, you and I have tested the waters on this. Not even recently. Like when we were coming up and operating, one of the things we deployed was that Ritz Carlton service system and some people seen us talk about that on stage. But you know, that was front and center, an example of us casting a vision and really developing a powerful why about why is this so important? Yeah. Well, because everything's becoming commoditized, we saw it back then. Yeah. It's like, well, anybody can go get an SBA loan, a couple trucks go to REITs, you know, and now all of a sudden, the restorer are magic. That's how we make people feel. Yeah. In the process. And when we rolled that out, man, all of our folks, our blue collar team, like they embrace that almost immediately, you know? Yeah, I think it was meaningful. I think it gave them for like a more missional perspective on what we were doing, why we're doing it. Yeah. And it also, like, I guess part of my recollection of that though is that it showed itself in their willingness to do what otherwise would have been uncomfortable things for a lot of them. Yeah. Yeah. So, yeah, I think that kind of the final frontier on this or I don't know if that's right terminology, just kind of like a big principle thing that we need to pay attention to is this is going to ultimately affect who you hire. This is going to change who our future team members are based on what we're going to ultimately need them to be capable of doing in order for us to remain competitive as less and less lead flow is provided as a gift me and what you're just having to earn every opportunity. It's going to shift how we behave and what we show up and what we're willing to do. So again, plant in the seed, I think that's just something for us all to just kind of slow down on a Saturday morning with our cup of coffee and go. Okay, what are things that I've experienced from vendors coming and working on my home that I've partnered with, I've done business with that I respect. It made me trust them. They earned my yes and then asking yourself what of those actions, systems or processes can I actively adopt in my business right now ensuring that I continue to remain out front as things become maybe more restrictive or more competitive in our space. That's good. Should I do like some kind of cheesy little pitch here at the end to wrap things up for people who are still listening? Yeah, there's at least two people. So if this conversation resonated with you, one of the things you might be thinking is, boy, I need to really figure out sales and how we're selling, how we're showing up to customers, etc. Well, this is a core part of flood lights wheelhouse and you're not alone and we have solutions for that. So we have sales partners on staff that we can install in your business and help you make this transition, help you actually build out a real sales team, help you level up your existing sales rep if you're not fully satisfied with what they're generating for the business and so forth. All you got to do is reach out to floodlightchrp.com, send us an email there, find me on LinkedIn, Chris Nordijk, shoot me a DM and we'll get together and we'll talk shop. But sales is probably the most important aspect of our business for the foreseeable future because so many of us have been accustomed to the business just flowing in through some reliable channels. And those channels are starting to dry up as we're talking about it. It's forcing us to rethink our business and sales a big part of that. 100%. So reach out and until next time. Light up. All right, everybody. Hey, thanks for joining us for another episode of Head Heart and Boots. And if you're enjoying the show, if you love this episode, please hit follow, formerly known as subscribe, write us a review or share this episode with a friend. Share it on LinkedIn, share it via text, whatever it all helps. Thanks for listening.