Hello everyone. Welcome to episode 142 of behind the toolbelt at TC Backer Construction.

Tonight we have two very special guests. We have Heather Hitchcock, CEO of royal roofing, mother, entrepreneur, kick-ass woman in the trades, and we have Joe Salowitz from Lead Scout.

Please introduce yourselves.

Heather Hitchcock of Royal Roofing Facebook

Joe Salowitz Lead Scout Website

Joe

Yeah, so I’m Joe at lead Scout. I live in Michigan and have got a family of four with two little boys. We like to go hiking and all that jazz, but lead Scout, you might recognize our logo a lot of times on the opening credits of this show. Anyways, I’m happy to be here. We’ve been partnered with TC Backer and behind the toolbelt for a while now, and it’s just great to be here.

Yes, it is. I’m glad you guys are here. Tell us about yourself Heather.

Heather

My name is Heather Hitchcock, I own Royal Roofing And Construction of Texas out of Houston. My husband and I have three children; Hayden, Carter, and Asher. I’m relatively new to the industry. I just celebrated two years for my company in September. I absolutely love this industry, and I wish I would have found it sooner. But man, I’m blessed, and I’m enjoying it.

How did you get into the roofing industry?

Heather

Oh man, it was so crazy. So, I have been in the health and fitness industry my whole life working at a gym. I had some crazy life circumstances happen through divorce that basically forced me to figure out what I’m gonna do really fast. I had a buddy who had a small roofing company, and he brought me on site, showed me an insurance scope, and told me how much it cost to put a roof on. I’m like, what am I missing? Like I’m going to sell roofs for a living. I worked for three different contractors for about 9.5 months. They were super shady, taking advantage of people and lying, and just not what I was trying to be about. And I just decided to start my own company.

Right. And hence why you’re here today. Because this is about doing the next right thing and everybody here today is about that.

Okay, so you’ve been in it about two years now, right? Give us some of your greatest moments and some of your worst.

Heather

Oh, I actually have two really good stories for this. My worst moment would be my absolute first roof. I had my materials ordered like six days early. And I’m a chick, so I’m way organized. And so the roof gets torn off, and keep in mind this is my first roof. I’m still new at this. It was a little roof. But basically, we tore it off, and then everyone just sits in the grass and waits. I’m like, what the hell is going on? Why is no one working? I found out that the shingle that I ordered wasn’t there and the manufacturer was actually out of that color. So I’m panicking. The roof is already off and we can’t put it back on. Thank god one of my sales guys came up with the idea to sub it out for a color that looked exactly the same pretty much, but it was in stock. So it turned out ok. But it was still super scary.

My best moment would probably be a month and a half ago. I did my first big beautiful decorative metal blue on this incredible 2 million dollar waterfront property. It was crazy. That was probably my best moment.

Chris

I have a question for Heather. And I’m sorry if you guys already covered this and I missed it.

Ty and I always say that when you’re heavily involved in your own business, you’re actually your own biggest critic, so there’s very little things that someone else is going to tell you about yourself or your company that you don’t already know. What do you think the biggest challenge is being fresh in business? What do you think is your biggest spot for improvement?

Heather

My biggest spot for improvement is systems and processes for duplication purposes so that my sales people can have the same success. I’m a different breed. My salesperson is not gonna have the same success I have because we’re different. I’ve managed to do what I’ve done, but I need to be able to duplicate it and I’m not there.

Chris

Joe has got one of the best stories out of all the guests we’ve had on there man, he’s got a great story, a great past. You know where you came from and what it took to get where you are.

Joe

Yeah. Are you prompting me to talk through? I’m happy to share. So I grew up overseas in Tanzania. I’ve been a constant quitter. I quit everything and that’s quitting in kind of a good way in that I can never do one thing and stick to it because I’m always so excited about the next thing and I’m always striving for more. I’m always trying to get to that next thing. So here’s where it starts. Being a kid growing up overseas, my parents were in literacy work and were missionaries overseas in Tanzania. It was the East Coast so I was on this big freshwater lake called lake victoria, but we moved all the time.

Joe

So every single grade I was with new kids, and I was always just trying to find my footing. I think through that experience, what I learned was I needed a rock. I need something to hold onto to stay steady. And what I found for myself was, if you just excel at one thing, like at that time I was in school. So if I just excelled in school, everything else would turn out to be okay. I might not have a lot of friends or be on a sports team, but I could always succeed in academics. So that’s really where I just tried to get on people’s side when it came to the teachers and try to be a teacher’s pet and I try to excel at academics and that was my thing. And that carried me through. And so when we moved back to the States, it was 2001 around September 11th, and I distinctly remember being terrified. We came back to Minnesota, the arctic north as I like to call it, from the equator to the arctic north. And I just never fit in. I just never, ever fit in.

Even in college, I tried to figure out where my place was. I did go to school and graduated. Couldn’t decide on a major, though. I ended up just collecting credits together and then they said, hey, get out of here, like you got enough credits. They gave me a diploma thankfully. And I’ve always just been seeking out the entrepreneurial path, like what’s that next business venture that I can do? I found that in Lead Scout and I’ve been able to start building this business and it’s been so fulfilling to look back at that experience of moving all over the place and that kind of kinetic energy that I always had, and then applying that to this awesome thing I love to do, which is building businesses.

Do you want to explain what your business is?

Joe

Yeah, so Lead Scout is a lead generation application you can download on the app store very, very soon. But right now we just have a web platform. It’s entirely based around trying to help people that are building businesses to establish their sales processes.

The way that we do that is we try to give sales teams really bite sized prospect lists. We’ve started around job sites. So as you’re doing job sites, we give you a bite sized prospect list around those job sites and then we’ll back that area with direct mail impressions. And then, with our mobile application, you can go out and actually canvas those prospects. You get data from it and all that stuff too. But it’s just a really tight prospecting and impression building tool that we are rolling out to sales teams to help them better establish sales processes.

Oh cool. There is a need for that in this industry, haha.

Joe

I hope so. We’ve been chasing the user feedback. That’s basically how we build the products. So anytime that somebody gives us some good feedback, if you’re a Lead Scout user, just send us an email with a question. And that’s really how we build the products. So we don’t try to explore on our own too much. We do a little bit of that, but we’re really following what other people’s critiques are.

Chris

What I like most about it is for anyone out there that’s doing door knocking or door to door interactions, Lead Scout basically warms up your leads for you before you go knock on that door. So you’re not just doing a cold door knock. You’re hitting with subliminal messages. You’re getting a lot of touchpoints into these homeowners and warming up these leads prior to your sales people actually going to knock on the door. It’s almost like a, “Hey, I know I’ve seen you somewhere before,” kind of thing, you know what I mean?

Joe

Yeah. If you’re the contractor that just got out of the high growth phase, there’s a point where you say, well I want to grow. I wanna expand to this new geography or I want to grow to 50 people. Right? So how do you do that?

Joe

So the key there is that you’re gonna have to come up with some kind of mature processes to actually do that. You’re going to have to have some dedicated growth strategies. A lot of people say, “well where do I start? Do I download an app that gives a bunch of data. Do I just put more google ads out there? Like what do I do? What are the strategies?” And that’s where we come in.

Yeah, and I know we use them. The cool thing about it is that one job that you sell, that will initiate the campaign to happen. We have it built into the overhead from that one job that we sell, so when we sell it, 20 notes to neighbors are sending out three postcards and a handwritten note that says, “Hey, did you see the roof that we installed down the road on so and so’s house on so and so date?” So then if your guys do go out and canvas, they aren’t just sitting there waiting for the leads because now we’ve given them those 20 addresses that are already warmed up. We’ve warmed up the neighborhood for you. So now you’re not cold knocking, you’re warm knocking. And then they also have the technology to get more information for you as well.

Joe

Yeah, absolutely. We’re continuing to build on that too, and it’s a fun process. I come from tech. I don’t know a lot about home improvement beyond my exposure with Lead Scout frankly. So I come from the tech world. I’ve been consulting for over a decade doing software design

and all that stuff, so it’s a completely different space. And now I get to spend time with a bunch of roofers.We work with a lot of landscapers. I recently found out that epoxy floor coating, those types of contractors love to use lead Scout. So it’s fun. It’s fun to get to know all these little niches in this space. We had this pool contractor come up to us. They had already downloaded our app and they’re like, “hey, this is cool. I can sit on my couch, watch Netflix and I can search your satellite view of the map and see all the pools and start to build my leads and my prospects by just looking at the map while I’m watching netflix.” Like hey, more power to you, that’s great.

Right. And your sales people have the app too, so while they are out there scouting the neighborhood, they can give or point out things too.

Joe

Yeah, that’s the most successful way to use it. A lot of people use it just for direct mail just to warm up their job site areas with the direct mail campaigns. We’ve really studied the art of direct mail. Sometimes people see us a lot of times as the direct mail service, but we really go beyond that. The best way to use it is hand in hand with your sales team using our mobile app to canvas and to hit those lists. We’re constantly trying to build it up too, so, like I said, every time that you have feedback, let us know and we’ll keep adding features.

Cool. So if someone wanted to get a hold of you, where would they go?

Joe

Just go to our website, leadscoutapp.com, and you get everything you need there. You can get a demo from me or somebody else on the sales team. We’ve got a growing team. Lots of W2’s now. We are continuing to grow, so you can absolutely get a demo. There’s a few videos on the website where we go into great detail. Mention “storm” and we’ll give you some sort of deal too.

Joe

We should probably mention a little bit about the conference that we are at, “Storm Into The New Era”.

Heather

It’s been incredible. I have already been through a lot of conferences and stuff like that so I’m kind of selective and this has been exactly what I needed to personally to refill myself. It’s been good. We’ve had powerhouse speakers. Tommy Harris just blew my mind. I don’t know how many times I’ve cried. I mean, I know I’m a chick, but I’ve been crying a lot today. These guys have been incredible. I needed this to get personally filled up. I am constantly pouring out and giving. You know how it is. I was literally in my closet in tears the night before we flew out here just because I felt so overwhelmed. Now, I just feel encouraged and edified.

Joe

I stepped into your session. It was a session for the women in the audience, and I wasn’t allowed to be there, but I stepped in for a second and then I backed away. But what I saw was you were sharing some really intimate details about your journey and your story and everything you’ve been through and people were locked in on it.

Heather

Yeah, it’s a pretty gnarly story. My whole life testimony is pretty gnarly. I’m pretty vulnerable and transparent with it because I just feel so incredibly grateful. I have a spirit of gratitude. You can’t really go wrong if you’re always grateful. I’m not saying I don’t have times where I’m not, but my heart for what God has done in my life and my business and my family. I can’t not share my struggles, the struggles that made me feel like a failure or stupid or whatever, to hopefully make some other people realize that they’re not alone and still encouraged and see that golly in their life is not that bad. They might think, “If she could overcome that I can overcome this.” There’s hope.. So yeah, speaking was great. I enjoyed it.

Yeah, I didn’t hear much, but I did hear that you had people crying in there during your speech. An impactful story allows people to know that they’re not by themselves. You know what I mean? So many of us are walking around here thinking that they have no one to talk to and that no one can relate to them. They think that they are the only one that’s ever experienced this before, but with somebody like you getting so raw and opening up and being very intimate, that allows other people to put their guard down and relate to it. We put a shield up. I personally don’t like people that much in general, so I always put a wall up and I keep myself to myself and then once I get to know you, then I can finally open up to you. I just have always been that way. I’ve always been real tight lipped. It’s just the way that I was raised and it’s really tough for me to open up until I hear your story and then it’s like, wow, I can really relate to that – I’ve done that same thing and I’ve felt that same exact way. And then it’s much easier to open up. Especially at things like this, not to like a random stranger, although sometimes it is easier to just open up to a stranger on the street, but a lot of the times it has to do with where I’m at in my head space. Like you said, it’s good to just come to something like this to get replenished and re-energized and to put down that wall. Also, to be around other people in our industry, and not necessarily anyone that’s a worthy rival either.

Thanks for watching everyone. Have a great night.

The post Roofing Podcast 142, Heather Hitchcock CEO At Royal Roofing and Joe Salowitz from Lead Scout – Behind the Toolbelt appeared first on TC Backer Construction.