Metrics for Success: End of Year Review - PODCAST TRANSCRIPT

Editor's note: The following is the transcript of a live interview with Kari Aderhold from Aderhold Roofing, John Kenney from Cotney Consulting Group and Zach Carpenter from Jobba. You can read the interview below, listen to the podcast or watch the recording.

Intro: We've got an exciting Coatings Talk for you today. My name is Karen Edwards and I'm your host for today's webinar, and we're going to be talking all about metrics for success. I mean, this is December, right? We're closing in on the end of the year, and we want to take a look at some of those metrics to tell how did we do this year and what should we be doing different maybe for 2025. And we've got a rock star panel here. Kari Aderhold from Aderhold Roofing, John Kenney from Cotney Consulting Group and Zach Carpenter from Jobba Trade Technologies. And thank you to Jobba for bringing this webinar to everybody today.

Before we get into introductions and dive in, I do want to do a little bit of housekeeping. We are recording this and it will be available within one to two days on coatingscoffeeshop.com. You can find it under the read, listen, watch menu. Because we've got some really good information for you today, and chances are you're going to want to share it with some other folks in your company who maybe couldn't be here today. So that's where you'll find it in just one to two days and let's get going. Oh, questions. We will have a period at the end for questions and answers, so feel free to drop your questions in the Q&A or in the chat. The chat's open, so feel free to introduce yourself, tell us where you're watching from and you can drop your questions in there as well and we'll get to those near the end. So let's get started. Kari, why don't you introduce yourself and tell us a little bit about you.

Kari Aderhold: Sure. Well, thank you for having me today. I run Aderhold Roofing. We're based out of Tampa, but we do work throughout the entire state of Florida and some select states around Florida. Been in the roofing industry for a while now, but in the construction industry for over 27 years. So definitely not new to this world. Very passionate about the roofing industry and what we're doing in Tampa and how the industry is evolving, especially with technology. Absolutely love it. So again, thank you for having me today.

Karen Edwards: Yeah, yeah. We're glad you're here. John, please introduce yourself.

John Kenney: Yeah, great to be here. John Kenney. I'm currently chief executive officer running Cotney Consulting. What I do in Cotney Consulting is work in the roofing industry with roofing contractors and education, business operations, you name it I'm there. I have over 45 years experience as a roofing contractor. I still hold my roofing license in the state of Florida. Started out my career up in the Northeast, third generation roofer and worked my way up from, as they say, the rooftop to the boardroom. So I worked as COO of many larger firms before going out and starting a consulting business. So as always, I'm always happy to be here and share with other great people in the industry such as we are today.

Karen Edwards: Thank you, John. And Zach, please introduce yourself.

Zach Carpenter: Yes, of course. Thank you. My name's Zach Carpenter. I currently serve in the role of a senior account executive at Jobba Trade Technologies. I was one of the founding members of our flagship product, FCS Control and I spend most of my days working with contractors and trying to help them solve problems that we can help bridge those gaps with technology. So excited to be here and help share some of the stuff that I see out there too.

Karen Edwards: And Zach, you never tell anyone this, but you grew up in a roofing family, right?

Zach Carpenter: Sure did. Sure did. Yep. In high school, I was working in roofing companies, helping out in the service department and doing AutoCAD drawings and that led into the software end.

Karen Edwards: Nice, nice. Okay. So let's get started about talking about tracking metrics. And Kari, I'd like you to kick us off because you shared some really great info the other day when we were working, prepping for this that I thought was really valuable.

Kari Aderhold: Absolutely. My background is heavy construction, working for general contractors that are billion dollar a year companies with thousands of employees. One thing that I learned while working at those companies is tracking, and that's what we brought into our company when we set it up. We track everything. We track all of our labor hours. We have job numbers assigned to each and every project. Even if it is a very small service project, we assign a job number to it and then all expenses get coded to that job number. And we even go a step further and we have these very detailed cost codes for your cost of goods. Let's just say labor or you have a lift on a job site or your materials or your fuel. And then we obviously have our regular overhead cost codes as well. So any given day we can pop up into our software program and we can look and see exactly where that job is placed versus how we estimated it.

And if it is a time and material job, we can pop into it and we can see exactly how many hours we have on it. It just gives our company visibility and to be able to figure out where our weaknesses are and where our strengths are. And if we have that real time information and access to it and it's not hidden, all of the managers, all of the field personnel, anybody can pop in there and they can see where they're at on their particular job that they're working on. Then we can go a step further and we can start holding people accountable for their departments. Or if it is a job that they're in charge of, we can sit down and we can say, "Hey, this is going really, really well. We want to replicate this throughout the rest of the company. Can you help us with that?"

Or if it's the opposite and maybe there was a rain delay or there was an equipment that malfunctioned and now we have a delay in the project, we can find that quickly and walk through it and make sure that how can we prevent this from happening in the future? Or let's just say we have a delay because we have some laborers who got sick throughout the week or something. Whatever happens on that job, we can in real time work through it and not have to wait a month or two months until we're looking at financials in the rearview mirror.

Karen Edwards: Excellent. I like that you said anybody can go on there at any time and take a look, and that really helps with accountability.

Kari Aderhold: It does.

Karen Edwards: John, you work with contractors across the country all the time, so I'm curious how when you're able to go in and work with a contractor and there are tracking metrics, that's got to make it a lot easier for you to maybe find those weak spots, right?

John Kenney: Yeah. There's no doubt about that. I find that majority of contractors, KPIs is a very confusing term, right? Key performance metrics or key performance indicators.

Zach Carpenter: Indicators. Yeah.

John Kenney: And the metrics that we put those together. So one of the things I like to do when I'm talking to them is make it very simple when we're looking at it. First of all, it has to be tied to profitability and success of your company. If you have a metric that doesn't move the ball forward for that, then it's not really worth tracking. And sometimes we get data analysis paralysis. Don't have too many. You can go onto Google for example, and look up what KPI should I track as a contractor and you will get a list anywhere from 50 to 250. I'm telling you right now, five to 10 is usually more than enough for any contractor to use. Give you an example. Let's just jump into the field holding accountability. Three major things for KPIs that you want to track in your field for sure is safety, quality and production, in that order. If you have good safety metrics, your quality metrics are good, production takes care of itself. Those three metrics alone from your field is going to tell you the health of your company without going any deeper than that.

Karen Edwards: So Zach, you being from Jobba obviously are working with contractors every day as well. And what's your bird's eye view, I guess, of what you're seeing with contractors and what are they tracking?

Zach Carpenter: No, John's right. And I think a big thing that I see a lot too is people not knowing where to get started in terms of even tracking KPIs to begin with. And so I think a lot of clients that I end up working with are interested in having this data and are looking at the software because they want a way to connect everything and make the data usable, but they don't know where to start. So again, I think that was a big thing that I hope people take away from this session too, is the importance of these things and ultimately be able to find a starting point.

Karen Edwards: And yeah, you said KPI, key performance indicator, that's such a business word. And what is it? It's a number, right?

Zach Carpenter: Right.

Karen Edwards: It's data. It's information. So let's talk a little bit about that. Kari, you mentioned it can be all-consuming, right?

Kari Aderhold: It can. You have a lot of data and if you are new to the construction world, you're not used to running a business and you now have revenue coming through the door, you have payroll you're making, you're paying material invoices. There's just a lot of data in the day-to-day life that can consume you and can burn you out if you don't have the ability to harness that data and put it into dashboards or reports that make sense to you. And going back to what John said with the KPIs, is there is a lot of data. You can establish a bunch of KPIs, but you really need to look at just a few reports, a few items to know what is going well and what's not going well. And I think with the way technology is going with what Jobba is doing, with what some of the accounting softwares are doing with what AI is doing, it helps people to harness that data and to use it to grow the company if that is your goal to grow the company.

Or if you're a new company and now you're getting hit with all of this cash coming through the door and it's like, wow, it's exciting. I mean, everybody gets excited with cash coming through the door or credit cards or whatever you take. But what do you do with that? Have you set enough aside for your payroll taxes for your insurance? It's very common in our industry that you have work comp that you pay 30 to 60 days after you actually had your payroll. So you have to set some work comp money aside. And then also your general liability. If you are one of those unlucky companies that has an audited general liability policy, then you know about nine months after your policy renews, you're going to sit down with the agent and you're going to go through all of your payroll, all of your revenue and if you had a spectacular year, which is what we all want, but you didn't set aside enough money, now you have this big bill coming that you're going to have to figure out how to pay for. I think having all of these metrics together and understanding them with dashboards is very, very helpful, so you know what's profitable and what's not profitable.

Karen Edwards: Yeah. Yeah, very well said. And I like that you mentioned that first bullet point there. It's got to be unique to your business' goals. If you've been in this for a while and you're in a growth mode, if you're just getting started, you want to make sure that you are tracking the correct numbers. And John, I'd like to ask you to talk a little bit about the whole successes and weaknesses and the objectivity of the data.

John Kenney: Yeah. I think one of the greatest weaknesses of when you're getting into KPIs is that the focus becomes on where should I be in the industry? And I actually teach just the opposite. And that goes back to your firm goals. Every single roofing contractor out there has a different overhead rate, every single one has a different sales strategy. We're all different. It's impossible to be the same. So pricing's never going to be the same, for example.

So what I like to look at is if I go into a company and say, "Hey, we're going to track these 10 things." How do I know where I stand in the industry? I can absolutely tell them that because as you know I have a lot of industry data and I can say that, but it doesn't mean anything. What matters is we take a look at your historical performance that you have within your company and that becomes your KPI. So real quick question comes up, "Well, I haven't been in business long enough to have a lot of historical data." Well, if you have three jobs behind your belt, that's the beginning of your historical data and then we can maybe take a look at that of where you stand among the industry and give you a range to shoot from. But you got to get away from where do I stand in the industry and get more to how do I beat my own performance data within my company because that's all that matters. And that's where your strengths and your weaknesses come in.

Karen Edwards: Yeah. And Zach, I'd like you to talk a little bit about the problem with paper.

Zach Carpenter: Yeah, yeah. We see it all the time. And John hit on a lot of good topics there too. I see that. I say that all the time on the presentations I do is that all the contractors we work with are different in some way, shape or form. There's so many ways to be different. But I do work with a lot of people that are coming from paper and trying to figure out getting on board to a system. And I think like everyone's said, especially with the unique to a firm's goals, you really got to go through and evaluate what you're trying to achieve, focus on the first things first and getting away from paper is definitely an important step. And I have a lot of people taking it and they're doing it successfully. But it's good to be able to leverage resources that are out there to be able to help people ease that transition.

Kari Aderhold: I would agree with that. I think one thing I'd like to add is with the paperwork, when we started out and we were a very, very small company, like a lot of small companies, working out of our house. An extra spare bedroom that we turned into an office. And one of the things that we immediately said is, how can we utilize technology to work out in the field and still be linked to the office and not be tied behind a desk? Because when you are the owner or the manager of a small company, you wear a lot of hats and how can you leverage your time best? And so we started with that goal and we worked really hard as we were growing to maintain cloud-based technology so that when COVID did hit and a lot of firms were struggling with everything from time sheets to payroll to their job performances, we were already 100% cloud based. And so that is why throughout the year, our employees will go and ... Not field employees obviously, but our office employees or even managers will be able to go for a week and work somewhere if they want to.

And I'm not talking vacation. But if they want to work remotely, it's not a disruption to us at all. We have that visibility and that real time access to information that everything can be done simultaneously without having to wait for a paper service ticket or a paper time sheet or a paper check. And for us to take our profits through those early years and even now and reinvest it back into the company for that technology to be able to help drive us has been invaluable. It's hard to put an ROI on it, and if I had to put one on it, I'd say it is the best thing that you can reinvest in besides your employees.

Karen Edwards: Wow. Yeah, that's powerful. Definitely. Okay. So let's talk about now we've identified my top 10 KPIs that are unique to my business that I'm going to track to see how I'm doing. What does that look like? How often should I be looking? And we're talking with the title, we said this is the end of year. You don't want to wait until the end of the year to look, right? Kari, why don't you start us. Tell us what does that look like for your business?

Kari Aderhold: We have a couple of different divisions. We have a service division and we have a production division. And so our reviews and our KPIs are a little bit different for each division. For our production division, we look at our reports weekly. We have a very quick one hour meeting on Friday mornings, and we go through our current projects and we go through the financials for them, we go through the labor hours, everything that we need to view. And it's, again, real time from the previous ... The longest that the data is delayed is about three days. So we're looking at virtually real-time information.

For our service department, since it is much faster paced and we have a lot more data and a lot more projects, we look at that once a month. And so we're looking at labor, we're looking at any warranty callbacks, we're looking at customer retention, we're looking at profitability and really honing in on that. Overtime is a big one too, especially after hurricanes or major storms when you're very reactive and you are trying to satisfy your clients and you're throwing people at it on the weekends or in the evening hours. And so just really looking at how overtime plays into it and how it could reduce your profitability or if you are able to bill for it properly, it could help you out. So we do look at it weekly for one division and then once a month for our other division.

Zach Carpenter: I think that's awesome too because you've built this culture of being able to enable your team remote access to everything. So throughout the year, we talk about tracking progress and year-end reviews, you guys hypothetically are in a position to be able to stay up to date every day. Like you said, real time. Things that are hard to achieve, but kudos. It sounds like you guys have done a great job in doing that.

Karen Edwards: And you mentioned, Kari, that it's very visual, right? There's charts, there's graphs. It's kind of presenting the information to you and it's obvious what you're looking at. And the one scenario, and you mentioned this earlier too, especially with a storm or a hurricane since you're in Florida, when you get all this money and this work coming in, but are you making a profit? And this is kind of how you know that, right? And John, we talked a little bit too about this is the data that backs up that feeling. You may be like, "Oh, we've got all this coming in, but I'm not sure we're actually making any money on this." Right?

John Kenney: Well, yeah. So the problem with financial reviews is it's a rearview mirror view. By the time you get a financial statement, everything's already happened. It's like Monday morning quarterbacking. As they say, there's not much you can do about it. It's there. You got to figure out how you get better. The idea of a KPI is to be the forward looking view. So let's use an example. Kari brought up a great example about overtime. So what is a simple KPI in that? And Kari, I'm not saying this is what you accept in your company, but we're going to talk about a generalized roofing company. I can accept up to 5% overtime rate in a week. Okay? That would be your KPI. So what's going to happen is your data's going to feed into that and it's going to automatically calculate your percentages and all you're really going to be looking at is our overtime rate compared to the total hours worked was 2% this week.

That's it, you're done. Okay? You walk away because you know you don't have a problem on the week. Now if that says 8%, that's above the five, then that's something you want to then dig deeper into the data behind it. And that may just be because the storm came through, you had no choice, we're billing for it, we're getting paid, we're all happy. Another quick example, let's look at the service side. You want to track recalls on your service trucks that are going out for week recalls, right? So that's a KPI. Say you got 10 service trucks out on the road. How many recalls in a month is one of the things you're interested in per tech. All right, maybe we're going to accept two per tech. That's it. I'm just making these numbers up for sake of examples. But if it's two is what you're acceptable for a monthly basis, then that's something you're checking on a monthly basis and you're looking at it and saying, "Okay. I got everybody at zero, one. I got one at two. All right, they're good. Oh, I got somebody here at five for this month. That's a problem. Let's dig deeper into truck number seven." Those are what KPIs are for. They're to give you that look and then we dig to find out if we need to. If it's within our standards, we don't have to worry about it.

Karen Edwards: Right. So Zach, can you talk a little bit about the data history and the role that plays, the value? Because it's great that we're tracking it, but over time, what does that help us do?

Zach Carpenter: Well, I think a lot of it has to do with how you use it. One thing that I like to kind of joke about, it doesn't always land, but when I'm doing the ... I think we talked about this on the deficiency webinar too, but at least in the way our software works, you're building a history for a building or for your customer. And with that historical record, what you've ultimately done is create the roof facts. Instead of the car facts, the roof facts for that facility. And being able to go back and provide. And just having that data alone is hard for people to be able to accomplish, especially without a platform. But when you do and then you can leverage that with your relationships with your clients and give them access to the data to help make decisions, you become more of a trusted partner with your customers and then of course it enables you to have all the inside business data that you guys need as a result from all that work. But there's just a lot of different ways that you can leverage that kind of data for your business.

Kari Aderhold: I would agree with that. I will say one of the feedback that we get a lot from our clients are on the customer portal, being able to have their dashboards and see their real time data. They love that. And then even our service crews, when they log into their dashboards, they have the ability to see their ... One of their KPIs that we have on there is their callback rates. They can see all the callbacks that they've had. And again, it just goes back to visibility and transparency and accountability. Allowing the people that are supposed to be accountable for those job tasks to see what is going on, to see the reality. Because we can all use our gut instinct and I feel like everybody has a really good gut instinct.

Zach Carpenter: It sounds like your customers are just really appreciative that they even have access to that data, right?

Kari Aderhold: Correct.

Zach Carpenter: So do you guys use that at all as a part of your sales process in trying to leverage that access?

Kari Aderhold: We do.

Zach Carpenter: You do? Awesome.

Kari Aderhold: We do. In fact, one of our largest clients, that was the determining factor to utilize us versus a competitor. And it was a very good competitor and they would've done a fantastic job for our client, absolutely. But we have this portal that they're allowed to log into to see and to even to request their own service and they like having that history. A lot of our clients own multiple portfolios, so they're not just owning and managing one building, they're owning 10, 100, 1,000 different properties. For them to have all of their information in one portal and then when they go to sell a property, they can transfer that information over to the new owner and they can show the owner, "We've done our due diligence on this property, here are all the reports. This is a really good building." And they can prove to them that it has been maintained.

Zach Carpenter: Yeah, that's awesome. What a good strategy. Do you tie the access to a maintenance agreement or anything? Or is it just for doing business with you? How does that-

Kari Aderhold: Our goal is to tie all of them to a maintenance agreement.

Zach Carpenter: Of course. Sure.

Kari Aderhold: That really is our goal. We have had success with that. Really getting our clients access to something that other ... Like the HVAC industry, the plumbing industry, the electrical industry, some of them have it, but not all of them are utilizing it. And so when we come into these larger property management companies and we show them what we can offer them, the first thing they say is, "Wow. I wish we had this for our HVAC."

Zach Carpenter: It's a difference maker. Yeah. That's funny. I was meeting with some heating contractors early this week. It's funny how that keeps coming up.

John Kenney: Well, I think today's roofing contractor's got to get the mindset of data and technology that you're not a roofer anymore. I can tell you right now that a roofer is expected to fix a leak, a roofer is expected to install coating correctly, a roofer is expected to put a roof down correctly. That's what they hire us to do. But where the difference comes in by tracking KPIs and data for your clients, you now become a really value added partner and that's where you separate yourself from the rest of the industry.

Kari Aderhold: That's right. That's absolutely right. We all have great competition in our industry and in our markets, and we utilize each other for resources. Brian and I, with our company, we have a lot of our competitors who are friends and we talk constantly about ways that we can improve the industry and we can improve the building structures and what can we do to make it easier for our clients. And yes, we are competitors at the end of the day, but the more that we can innovate and push our industry, the better it is for all of us. And I think the ones who embrace the technology and open it up to their clients are the ones who are going to be the most successful going forward.

Zach Carpenter: Yeah. I think that's a great mindset. And I think at least from what I've seen, that's kind of been the secret sauce. That model is where you find when you get into that commercial world. Because you can get into commercial roofing and do a lot of different things. You can get into roofing in general and do a lot of different things. But that avenue, at least from what I've seen, has seemed to be the most successful route. Do you teach that kind of model, John? I believe you do, don't you?

John Kenney: I do.

Zach Carpenter: With the collaborating and almost being a consultive type partner with your clients?

John Kenney: I do. As a roofer contractor, you understand the advantage to data for running your business. Let's talk about it for the businesses for a second here.

Zach Carpenter: Sure.

John Kenney: Like Kari said, she has different divisions, which most roofing contractors do. So your service division may have say five or six KPIs that they need to watch that doesn't need to go above the service manager's position. And then from that, that will feed out into where Kari's executive dashboard will be looking at one KPI from that. So that's the kind of things you want to do for your customer. That's the biggest mistake that people are making is not using the data to be the valued partner so they're not calling anyone else. And as you know Zach, I've worked with some of your clients.

Zach Carpenter: Yeah, absolutely.

John Kenney: That's the big key to get these things. The other thing we talked about earlier was fail rate going on in software. I'll say one of the biggest things that I find in the industry is that most contractors only utilize 20 to 30% of what the software's capabilities are.

Zach Carpenter: That's a very strong point.

John Kenney: And that's a killer in the industry.

Zach Carpenter: It is. Yep. We see it happen all the time. We're a business. We have internal metrics to be able to track that stuff and it blows your mind how much ... And like an example with FCS, people that will use the inspection tool all day long and they just pump out roof inspections and they come and say, "I really need a service module or I'm using this and this and this to do service." And being able to connect with them and help inform our clients that there's more out there, that's our job to let them know that we can do more. And that also brings back the importance of those metrics is we wouldn't know that if we couldn't track that data.

Kari Aderhold: No. I was just going back to that. I think again, that goes with the paper versus the software, the technology route. And how many times have we ... I think a lot of us have experienced this. Our service techs will go out or we'll be super busy and somebody will send a production crew to go do some service work and they're not familiar with it and so they turn in the paper service tickets and how many times has it not captured all the information and you don't get all of the photos. And so when you're trying to tell your client exactly what you did on the roof and you have nothing to back it up with and you have no photos because well now it was taken on maybe a personal cell phone or oops, they forgot to take photos because they're not used to doing service every day.

And again, that's an anomaly. But I think people who still deal with the paper service tickets for their jobs, they have a lot of room for error, a lot of things that could be missing on there that you don't get when you capture it in a software program. And then also I think it goes back to that accountability. When your techs and your managers know that clients can see that information, their level of completedness goes up and their grammar gets a little bit better surprisingly and the photos are better quality and the text that they put in there for the descriptions of the deficiencies and how they corrected them, that gets a lot better. They actually story knowing that the client is reading it and not just a service coordinator or a project manager who is going to fix that report for them before it goes to the client.

Zach Carpenter: Well, what are some things that you guys do to drive home the importance of these things to new employees, existing employees? What are some strategies that you guys execute to make them understand how important it is?

Kari Aderhold: Well, we try to get them ... First of all when we onboard them. So when we onboard them, we let them know that we are a technology driven company and that yes, we are hiring them to be a roofer and to diagnose and fix roofs or for the production side where they're going to tear off a roof and install a new roof. So they have a certain skill set, but we go beyond that. We let them know that we are technology driven and they need to be able to be comfortable using their iPad and using different software programs and then we take them through the training for it and we have buy-in from it right from the get-go. It's very easy to see the ones who are going to grasp it and it's very easy when you hire somebody, especially if you're hiring a bunch of people through growth mode, it's very easy to pick out the ones who are going to be your future managers and your future leaders because they grasp that and they cheerlead it and they really embrace it and they help others who are struggling. So we tend to pair people up a very strong technology-driven person with somebody who doesn't have the skillset yet and we try to bring them together.

Zach Carpenter: That's awesome. That's fantastic. I think that'll help. Like we had talked about earlier, I know a lot of people struggle with that, so thanks for sharing some of that content. That's good.

Megan Ellsworth: Well, obviously I'm coming in here hot and heavy, but I've been loving this conversation so far. So looking forward, tracking past data, how do you stay informed, be agile and adaptable, looking back at all this past data that you now have access to and are using regularly?

Kari Aderhold: I think something that we missed talking about that I think is really important that John was going to talk about is when you have all of that data and you're analyzing it and it's really detailed, figuring out how to cut costs but not cut quality. Because I think that's a really big one. When you have all this data and you're looking at it and you're like, "Man, we're just not as profitable as we should be." Because every company goes through those periods of time where you think you're not as profitable as you should be, and then it's that deciding factor of what do you cut and how do you cut it without reducing your level of quality to where safety is jeopardized or the quality of the roof and the materials that you're using, they go down. Because you don't want that, definitely.

John Kenney: Yeah, that's a great point. One of the things you talk about being agile and adaptable based upon that is I think most owners need to get away from the cost-cutting mindset as being the first knife that comes out of the toolkit to cut things away because usually you're going to over-correct and cause more damage than you will good. The big key looking at anything in your company is efficiency and efficiency kind of gets overused. You've heard lean construction, lean this, lean that. But how you want to look at everything is from getting from the starting point to the finishing point of everything you do, including your roofing operations out in the field, is it as efficient as it can be? Is there an extra step that doesn't do anything to enhance the end result? That's where you start to pick it up. I know that's not what today's about, but that's the difference between looking at productivity and efficiency and the same thing works throughout your entire operation. You can only produce so much in a day, but by increasing your efficiency, you'll produce more in the same amount of time.

You can never increase productivity without increasing efficiency. And that works the same way in your admin positions. Whatever it may be, look at it that way and you will find that you can increase your profitability on that bottom line a lot of times without cutting costs. Now, if you have a huge wasted item that you don't need, cut it. That's a given. And that comes down to sometimes you make the decision, do I really need this new truck or do I not need this new truck? Always look for ... The other thing besides efficiency is return on investment. ROI. Another term. If returns more than what you're paying, then it's probably worth doing.

Kari Aderhold: I would agree. One thing that we have implemented that has helped us with efficiency is we cross-train. Cross-train our employees to step in, and I'm going to use an example for our admins. Our service coordinators are cross-trained with our office manager and with our project managers so they can step into those roles. We have SOPs. They can step into those roles while somebody's on vacation. And we have had this happen a few times in the past couple of years where we have an admin fill in for another admin within the company and they're going through the processes and the steps and they'll say, "Hey Kari, why do we do this extra step? Could we look at eliminating this? Because it is taking me too long to do this." And so we look at it and sure enough, yes, absolutely we can do that. So it's not always the business owner who's finding that, it's the employees and the people that are maybe not even in that role themselves. It's outside of that role. So by us doing cross-training, we allow our employees to have some buy-in in that process and to be able to help us find those efficiencies too.

John Kenney: I agree with you there. The best information always comes from your employees.

Kari Aderhold: It does.

John Kenney: It comes to that because as an owner, you're working on your business. They're actually should be working in your business, so they're going to know. Like the old Henry Ford, you want to know how to increase production, you walk out onto the assembly line and find out who's doing what job and ask them the question and that's exactly the way you go through your business. That's a very good point.

Kari Aderhold: I would agree. I would agree. I think that, I think having vendor partners, having consultants, having collaborations with your competitors. A lot of people are afraid to reach out to their competitors because they think immediately, "Oh my gosh, we compete with them. They're not going to give me any sort of information." And you're not asking for proprietary information. You're here to share best practices. And when you share best practices with your competition, it makes the industry so much stronger and at the end of the day you're helping your clients even more by learning their best practices and sharing those best practices and becoming a mentor for somebody else or having a mentor yourself. I don't think that you can successfully own any company without having some sort of mentors and partnerships with vendors, consultants, with your competitors. I think you have to do that.

Zach Carpenter: 100%. And I know what you guys know because done business in some sort, but that's a big thing with us too, especially even with just the software implementation is working together. That's why we do these webinars, that's why we do these kind of things is just to try and help advance the industry and help bring everyone and share some of this knowledge these days. Knowledge is kept so close and I think what it does is it helps show like-minded individuals and it shows not only a passion for the industry that you're involved in, but a compassion for that industry as well. So that's great and encourage everyone to take some of those things Kari was saying and try and put them in place. And Roofer's Coffee Shop, Coatings Coffee Shop does a great job. John's out there as a resource. There's a lot of things out there for everybody listening to get help with some of these things if you need it.

John Kenney: Just kind of wrapping up on a couple of things we talked about, for contractors out there, I know we had some questions come in about different softwares and software. Let's talk about far as implementation of software. We talked about how we're not utilizing it. One of the hardest things that happens when you're utilizing software in your company, say with your service technicians or your foreman out of the roof or whatever it may be, is trying to go from that avenue of forcing people to get on something new, to force a change in your company is running into a solid wall. That's what you're going to hit. You need to look at that the same as everything else. If you can sit down with your employees that are going to be using this and actually show them their return on investment, how it'll make their job work smoother and more efficiently, that's a win.

And I know this from personal experience over the years of implementing. The other thing is I got pushed back on was, "Well, if we're using this, that means you're going to expect me to do more." No, you're going to end up doing more, but it's going to be less of your time to do it and that's going to give you more time to concentrate on the more important things of your job that we need to do and you need to do. And that's really good success rate of using that implementation. I know, Zach, kicking you over doing this training all the time from the software side, you must see that pushback all the time.

Zach Carpenter: Oh, we see it all the time. Like we were talking about earlier, Kari gave some great advice on how to encourage people to use it and how to do it. Yeah. Because when I first got involved in roofing software, probably 2008, 2009 range, iPhones were just a fresh thing. Trying to bridge the gap even then, I remember when I was working with Roof Options, you'd go out with a laptop and a digital camera and you had this bag of equipment with you just for something as simple as documenting a service call or an inspection report. And I think especially for the technicians, like we said, people give pushback. "Oh, they're not going to use it. They're not good with technology." Most people know how to do their social media, know how to do their phone. And if you've chosen the right software, it should be simple enough to do. Where like John said, this is going to make your job easier. Yes, it is going to give the company better data, better analytics and better reporting. But you don't have to email me pictures anymore. You don't have to go in at the end of the day and turn everything in and sit there and make your reports. It's for you as well. And so it's just trying to combine all those thought processes is fantastic.

John Kenney: A great question just came across. I don't know if you saw that. That's a really good question.

Zach Carpenter: Let's pull it up.

John Kenney: Yeah.

Megan Ellsworth: It's from Maya.

John Kenney: Yeah, that's a great question and I'll chime in after. You want to take it first, Zach?

Zach Carpenter: Yeah, I'll take a crack at it. So get the right support in implementing software. Many companies expect their employees to figure it out and do not invest the time and the support and then they complain that they spent a ton and the software didn't work for them. Interesting. So Kari, with you owning a roofing company, did you guys ... I'm sure you've tried different things throughout the years, right?

Kari Aderhold: Yeah.

Zach Carpenter: Did you ever run into similar scenarios like this?

Kari Aderhold: Absolutely. Even before our company, I launched customized software programs for three other very large companies and two of them were absolute failures and they failed miserably because what happened is exactly what that question alluded to is that the software was purchased and customized to solve a problem and then the management walked away and said, "Okay. It's yours now. You figure out how to use the software to solve this problem that we have." And it failed because there was not the buy-in. You didn't bring the employees in at the beginning of it while you were building the software.

You didn't get their buy-in from it. And we're not looking to your employees to create the software for you by any means, but you need to bring them into those conversations and show them what it's going to do for the company, how it's going to affect their role, how it's going to affect the clients and their coworkers and how it works throughout the entire company. And then you need to have proper training for that. You need to have customized training for each different user and their role within that software and within your company. And once you have that and it's successful and you're not bringing a software in in two months and implementing it. I mean software should take a while to bring in and really make sure that it's going to work for your company and your goals. And that doesn't mean you have to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars customizing it. You could buy something that is pretty much off the shelf and just maybe tweak it a little bit to your needs, but bringing your employees into it instead of just surprising them with something and then making it solve your problem for you is not going to be successful.

Zach Carpenter: No, I see that too. And I know John's got some good stuff on this topic, but I think we had said a couple times, you can lead a horse to water. Like us, our new clients, we offer training, we provide it, we have the resources. At the end of the day, I think like you had said, it does come from the top down and involving everyone because these people are going to be using it on an everyday basis. You want to involve them in those decisions. And also for owners, you want to enable people to be able to learn these things better. Make sure there's a conference room, make sure you have video and good screens and that they have the equipment that they can learn on. Because ultimately them having a good experience and using that software drives you to have these metrics and these KPIs to even do everything we're talking about.

Kari Aderhold: Right. And I think that going along with the training is having your cheerleaders throughout your organization because your cheerleaders aren't always your managers. We all know that. Your cheerleaders are really good at what they do at rallying their coworkers and themselves and getting their buy-in and bringing them on board and some of these things really helps. And then one thing that we did when we were going through our training with some software programs is we recorded them and then we broke them out into chunks for whatever the training module was about. And we put them on our YouTube channel, so our employees can pull up our YouTube channel and they can go to that video first and they can see exactly what they're stuck on or what they can do to move beyond their current issue that they're having.

Zach Carpenter: That's awesome. I guess the last point I'll say on this, and I know John's got some good stuff he wants to contribute, is especially when you're implementing a new software and Kari, you've said this a few times, you do it to solve a problem. And with those kind of changes and with the software implementation, a lot of times does come changes or at least being open to changes in SOPs and updating your KPIs and doing all these things and again, I think just further drives home the importance of having buy-in and top-down enforcement as well. But John, I know you had mentioned you had some good feedback for this topic. What are some of your thoughts?

John Kenney: Yeah. I mean one of the things I've always done, and it kind of ties into the questions that have been asked, is you got to have some super users in your company. You have to have them. You've got to have somebody that your people can go to within your company that are at least your point people that number one, are going to understand the problem they're having even if they don't have the solution. Because example, if I'm the super user, which I have been throughout the years at different times, I want to be able to be the one that's going to you, Zach or whoever you've assigned to your company with my question, get the answer, get the solution, go back and then feed it out within my company. Because you can't have 15 people trying to call a software manufacturer to get an answer. It's disastrous.

So that's the key. Having some super users. And that is usually more of an investment than just doing the normal training. That is partnership with your software provider to have them maybe go to their home office and do a week's worth of training to get them to that point. And I highly recommend that. The other thing is too, from a company standpoint, if I'm going to be your super user, I hate to say it this way, but if I'm an employee now what's in it for me? All right. And you want to incentivize them, you want to be the-

Zach Carpenter: It's a big task.

John Kenney: And saying, "Hey, I'm going to put you in this position. You have the quality, the strength, all the organizational skills that do this, but for taking on this extra work, here's what we can do and work a deal out with you." And that's it. And then also be in the mindset that what we're using today is not necessarily what we're going to be using in three to five years because you know being in the software business, things are going to change and hopefully-

Zach Carpenter: So quick.

John Kenney: Better.

Zach Carpenter: Yeah.

Megan Ellsworth: Yeah. It's really interesting you say that, John, too because Maya, who asked the original question, also put in here, adopting an internal champion within the organization helps bridge communication as well. So true.

Zach Carpenter: Spot on.

Megan Ellsworth: I'd love to start really bringing this all together and wrapping it all up with a nice little bow. How do contractors bring all these different things we've talked about together to create a strategic plan going into this new year? Maybe Kari or Zach, you can go first.

Zach Carpenter: Yeah. I mean from my standpoint, my advice would be reach out to your resources, get in touch with people like John, Kari's open to talking to people. But it starts with understanding your needs and then finding a system to get that in place. So from my standpoint, talk to John, talk to your people, talk to your peers, figure out your goals. I can help you identify the right software. And if you need advice going forward, sounds like Kari's open to working with people too.

Kari Aderhold: Absolutely. 100%. And I echo that. I think that once you have your data and you're starting to analyze it ... And we're at the end of the year, so we've all been looking forward to 2025 now. Even some of us who are still working through hurricane stuff, we have to put our thinking caps on and look beyond tomorrow. And using your gut instinct, which is really good, but also using the data. Because sometimes in our gut we say, "Oh, we had a really rough year," and then we look at it and we're like, "No. We actually had a good year. We were setting ourselves up for growth." So maybe the numbers aren't as good as what we thought they should be, but let's look at these metrics and knowing that it was better than what we thought it was going to be. Or on the flip side, if it was worse, we need to look at that too and how do we pivot and how do we not react quickly and make a knee-jerk decision that is going to, like John said earlier, over-correcting too quickly. So you all see that. Or when you're driving down the road and you get off on the side of the road and you see somebody else that jerks their wheel because they over-correct.

We've seen that in businesses too where they over-cut too much, they lay off a bunch of people because the revenue goes down. They do all these things and it's a little too much. So just finding that middle ground. But definitely having partners in the industry helps. Having relationships with, again, I hate to say it again, but your competitors and with vendor partners, consultants. There's a lot of very smart people out there who have been in the business for many years and some are just new to the business, but they're incredibly intelligent and leaning on them is ... We do it. I would hope that other people would do it as well.

Megan Ellsworth: That is great advice. John-

John Kenney: Last thing, I'll close in and try to tie it all together. I think now we're coming at the end of the year. Whether you have time to do it now, between now and the end of December, depending on what your schedules are, it needs to be done at the very beginning of January when you come back. You got to get off-site. You got to take your key players, you got to get out of the office. Nothing ever happens in the office except daily operations. You got to go somewhere where you're in a small conference center, in a hotel, whatever it may be, conference room, whatever you can get out of there, lunch brought in. Plan on spending a day, maybe two depending on what you want accomplish and you've got to listen. You got to listen to your people and it's always good if that's a great time to maybe bring that expert in to be able to be that arbitrator to sit there and listen to what you want to do. Take all those ideas, come back, then you can actually format a plan that will be successful because you're going to get a lot. The data and the KPIs are half of what you need to accomplish.

You've still got the human factor of your team and you need to listen to them because it's important. Everybody is dealing with what you want done on a daily basis, so you want to hear back from them how it's really going.

Megan Ellsworth: That is good advice. I love too, Kari, what you said the first time and the second time is talking with your competitors. That is such great advice, I think across the board on competitors in different sectors.

Kari Aderhold: Absolutely.

Megan Ellsworth: Yeah. I just love that. I just had to highlight that again. Thank you.

Kari Aderhold: Absolutely. Yeah, I think a lot of people are afraid to do that because it's scary. It's scary to reach out to somebody else and say, "Hey, this isn't working for me. What's working for you?" Once you get past that fear factor, and honestly, if you're a business owner, you have to not be afraid of taking risks or asking hard questions, so hopefully you don't have that fear factor. But just knowing that other managers and business owners, competitors are human beings too and they all went through very similar situations and they might still be going through situations and there might be stuff that you can help them with too. It should be a back and forth. It should be collaborative.

Zach Carpenter: And even if you don't have a great relationship with people in your market, you can look well beyond that. There's IRE. Throughout the whole industry, which is awesome.

Kari Aderhold: It makes this easier [inaudible 00:55:22].

John Kenney: I'll put a plug in for our club.

Zach Carpenter: Yeah. If we're done.

John Kenney: We hold an operational peer group on a quarterly basis, and that's exactly where you can come in and it's open and you get to learn from ... There's people in there from every corner of the US that's in that. It's a great time.

Megan Ellsworth: That's awesome.

Kari Aderhold: That's fantastic.

Megan Ellsworth: Yeah. Well, thank you all for this great conversation. If anyone out there listening has questions, feel free to pop them in the chat. If you think of one after this, you can always email us at multimedia or Megan at rooferscoffeeshop.com and we'll put you in touch with these amazing panelists. You can also go to the Jobba directory on coatingscoffeeshop.com to find out more. You can go to the Cotney Consulting Directory to find out more. Thank you all so much. This has been a pleasure getting to jump in and listen to you all just give great advice. So thank you.

John Kenney: Thank you.

Kari Aderhold: Thank you. Have a great day.

John Kenney: Yeah, have a great day. Everyone, again, go to coatingscoffeeshop.com to learn more and thanks for tuning into this Coatings Talk. Thank you, panelists and if anyone has questions, feel free to reach out.

Zach Carpenter: Cool. Thanks everybody. Thanks for stepping in too, Megan.

Megan Ellsworth: Thank you. Yes, absolutely. Thank you, Jobba. Thank you Cotney Consulting, and thank you, Kari and we'll see you on the next one.

Zach Carpenter: Cool. Thanks guys. Talk to you later. Bye.

Outro: Bye.