SUCCESS STORY: Hyperaggressive Roofer Puts Service Business First
by Chris King
March 2, 2010
The staff of Guardian Roofing poses for a team photo at the company’s new headquarters in Tacoma, Wash. The company, owned by Aaron Santas, Matt Swanson, and Lori Swanson, was a founding member of Roofers’ Success International.
“I enjoy working on growing our business,” said Aaron Santas. “And I love spending time with my kids. Having twins is a full-time job all by itself.”
Santas knows, as do all parents, that trying to figure out the difference between quality time and quantity time is a heart-wrenching affair. But starting up a new roofing business often takes many hours — and many hours away from one’s family life.
Santas and his partners, Matt and Lori Swanson, have found not only the time to grow their business, but they have more leisure time as well.
Many roofing contractors start their own companies only to realize that while they might be experts at installing roof systems, they aren’t experts at running a business. For those with business expertise, the highly fragmented roofing market gives them the opportunity to succeed by grabbing market share and having successful years even in a tough economy. Plus, roofing is more recession-proof than many other sectors of the construction industry — a leaky roof quickly jumps to the top of the list when it comes to home repairs.
For Santas of Tacoma, Wash., those were the incentives that inspired him to enter the field of residential roofing. Santas got his start in the construction industry working for a building products supply company. It was as a branch manager for a national distributor that he learned about roofing products and systems as well as how to manage a business. He also saw firsthand the opportunities to succeed in residential roof replacement.
“I was very interested in selling,” Santas said. He thought he’d be well-suited to sell directly to homeowners, and he eventually went to work in the field with one of his former customers before teaming up with Matt and Lori Swanson to start Guardian Roofing in 2005. As the company took shape, it became a founding member of Roofers’ Success International. “Both our company and RSI were formed about the same time,” said Santas. “RSI helped us in certain areas, and we brought a lot to the table as well.”
Santas attended one of the first RSI Profit Day sessions in Las Vegas and was intrigued by what he saw and heard. He was both impressed and surprised that people from other industries were teaching attendees about a selling system that they insisted would work in residential roofing.
“I knew we’d be able to replicate these functions inside our company, and it gave me the confidence to know I could do that with my business,” said Santas. At first he was skeptical that the RSI selling system would work for a roofing company, but after consulting with his co-owners, he decided to give it a try. Santas was immediately impressed with the results. The one-time skeptic ended up teaching the selling course for RSI, and he still teaches it to all of his employees.
Santas finds it’s harder to teach salespeople who were immersed in other companies’ systems than to teach someone just starting out. “It’s easier to train people from outside the industry,” he said.
Unlike many contractors, Santas had extensive business and financial background, but he and his ownership team found the RSI model was instrumental in the formation of their start-up company. “What helped us the most was the way we set up our company,” he said. “We pay ourselves what our position is worth in the marketplace. That’s what we pay ourselves, and depending on our ownership in the company, we divide the profits. It’s good for the company and good for partnerships, too; it takes the emotion out of it.”
CUSTOMER CARE, NETWORKING
Technical expertise and quality workmanship are essential, but at Guardian Roofing, it’s their customer service that sets them apart. RIGHT: Guardian’s ownership team credits RSI with helping their employees hone their customer service skills as well as their installation expertise.
He credits RSI with helping his employees hone their customer service skills. “Most roofing contractors work mostly outside the house, and most roofers don’t have a lot of customer interaction,” he said. “Our people with experience working in the HVAC and plumbing industries help us with customer presentation.”
Technical expertise and quality workmanship are essential, but it’s customer service that can set a roofing company apart from its competitors, noted Santas. “Anyone can put a shingle on,” he said. “It takes special people to care about the client. Our philosophy is ‘Always do right.’ ‘Always do right’ means that when you run into a situation in the field, you do the thing that helps the client the most.”
“It is more than just another roof job to us,” he continued. “Each job we do has to be handled absolutely perfectly from installation to client communication, all the way down the line. We do not rest until the client is singing our praises.”
RSI offers more than proven systems and processes, noted Santas, who credits consulting and brainstorming with RSI members as another of the group’s benefits.
“Networking with other contractors is important for a couple of reasons,” he said. “The first is support. As a business owner, sometimes you feel like a lone wolf. People who share your circumstances understand what you’re going thorough and can give advice. And I can support them as well.”
The second reason is that noncompeting contractors can be a wealth of technical and business information. “They can also share installation tips and better ways to serve the customer,” said Santas. “You can learn from their trial and error.”
BUSINESS GROWTH
Santas and his partners also get satisfaction from increasing sales and boosting profit margins, even in a tough economy. Santas said they have grown his business despite the economic downturn by “being hyperaggressive and ignoring the media.”
Marketing is essential for future growth, according to Santas. “We get great referrals, but most contractors rely on only referrals and the Yellow Pages,” he said. “Referrals should be the icing on the cake. You have to have a marketing plan, and RSI was instrumental in helping us with marketing.”
He advises other contractors to follow the RSI model and focus on the products and systems that help them run their business. “Be a businessperson first,” he advised, noting that all too often roofers aren’t adequately compensated for their time and do all the work themselves, from answering the phones to paying the bills to estimating and sales. “People pay for all of these services in the real world,” Santas said. “If you ever want to have a business that doesn’t need you as an owner, you have to build that into the price.”
The systems he learned from RSI have been instrumental in Guardian’s success, asserted Santas. “I can say that without implementing the lessons learned from RSI, as well as from many other mentors and information sources, we would not be thriving today.”
QUALITY COUNTS
The key for Santas is the ability to expand the business without worrying about day-to-day operations. If not for the RSI systems put in place, such growth would not be possible.
Santas said, “We could have never set up a new window division if the roofing business wasn’t running so smoothly. At one point we had several key people out of town during the two rainiest days of the year, working on setting up the window business. We didn’t even get a phone call from the office while we were away from the roofing business; all of our people are confident enough that they know exactly what to do to take care of our customers. The right systems and processes, along with charging the right amount for the job, are the only ways to make that happen. And RSI has definitely helped us with that.”
Chris King
