Lance Smith: That’s the way you’d have to look at it because you aren’t going to make any money doing it. What do you guys charge as a minimum charge?
Gary Kearns: Our minimum is $200.
Lance Smith: Ours is $150 — and you would think we’re asking for their firstborn.
RC: What’s the biggest challenge facing your business today?
Brett Hall: The instability of material pricing. It’s gone up and down so dramatically in the past couple years. It’s thrown everyone into the same arena because we don’t know what the market price is. And rather than working together as an industry, we’re in the piranha tank, eating one another up.
Lance Smith: Marketing. We relied on cold calling pretty heavily for 10 years. It provided 30% to 40% of our leads for a long time. Moving away from that has been a challenge. We’ve met it by moving toward the Internet, radio, and direct mail. Last year we did about $18 million at a marketing cost of between 13% and 14%. We’re trying to keep those costs there.
Troy Marshall: We’re up to around $4 million in 2006, and we’ve doubled in the last three or four years. Our biggest challenge is keeping communication with the customer at a high level. When I started, I was able to meet every customer. Now, that’s just not possible. In the last four or five years the Hispanic worker has become the workforce: We finally had to bring on a project manager [who speaks English in addition to Spanish]. I took our best roofing crews and selected the crew leader who made everybody the happiest. I have him going full-time between the four crews, to increase our interaction with customers.
Gary Kearns: We have three: managing margins by controlling costs, providing great customer service, and generating new leads. I mean new leads, not just mining my database.
