RoofCrafters' Blueprint: Dave Owens on Creating a Trusted Brand

Hannah Eisenberg [: 00:00:00

How can you successfully build trust with your customers and separate yourself from the competition in a highly competitive industry such as the roofing industry? That's the question we're going to discuss today with our guest, Dave Owens from roofcrafters in today's episode of Trust Builders. Dave Owens is the director of revenue of Roofcrafters Roofing. And, Dave, you've spent about 30 years growing this roofing company, and you were part of a program called they ask you answer that you implemented in your organization. And I would love to pick your brain on what the challenges were that you faced, what the successes were that you were able to achieve. And I would love to get some actionable advice for our listeners here as well from your experience. Welcome to the show, David.

Dave Owens [: 00:00:56

Thank you. Honor to be here.

Hannah Eisenberg [: 00:00:58

Looked it up, actually, in 2023, there were 253,000 roofing companies.

Dave Owens [: 00:01:04

Yes.

Hannah Eisenberg [: 00:01:05

Take me back to when you started, before you started day. Ask your so what was the situation like? Were you facing a lot of competition? What were the biggest sort of obstacles that you kept on running into that ultimately made you look at what can we do differently?

Dave Owens [: 00:01:23

Yeah.

Dave Owens [: 00:01:24

So when I first started, it was a little bit different. Keep in mind now, 30 years ago, the main avenue for marketing and for inbound leads was the phone book. Many people don't even know what a phone book is nowadays, and so the.

Dave Owens [: 00:01:40

Phone book was the main thing.

Dave Owens [: 00:01:42

So you put an ad in the phone book and you just waited for somebody to call. Somebody has a problem or somebody has something, they need a service that you provide, and you wait for that phone call. And so that didn't really shift. I did that from 1993 on into. I didn't get my domain until 2005. Actually. My brother is an engineer.

Dave Owens [: 00:02:15

He codes, and he got the domain.

Dave Owens [: 00:02:18

Roofcrafters, and he sent it to me for my birthday. And so I didn't even know what it was. I was like, what am I going to do with this man?

Dave Owens [: 00:02:24

You know what I mean? Okay. He sent it to me. He said, click on it. And it was a picture of. It was a picture of a Tonka truck with a crane.

Dave Owens [: 00:02:33

And when I clicked on, it was, like, flashing under construction, like the site was under construction. And so I was like, okay, cool, what is this going to do for me? You know what I mean? And this was in 2005, 2006. But the transition was the phone book. People were starting to see the shift in advertising in the digital space. And so that's my experience. That's when I started testing the waters. I started going, okay, what is going to happen here. And I was always fascinating with marketing.

Dave Owens [: 00:03:06

When the phone book ads come out, that was a big deal to me because you got one shot, like you put that ad in the phone book and the copy that you put there, whatever you say, it's not like today. If I want to change my website, I can change my website. When me and you're on this call right now, I can jump in on HubSpot and change all copy headlines. I can change anything I want to change. And it'll be live like right now. And so when you go with the phone book, what you say is there.

Dave Owens [: 00:03:30

For a year, you got to make sure that's what you want to say.

Dave Owens [: 00:03:37

To create separation or give the prospect the reason to call you instead of the other 15 or 20 ads that are in that phone book, why would they call you?

Dave Owens [: 00:03:47

And so had to create some separation and stand out.

Dave Owens [: 00:03:50

So I was fascinated with that. Like, how can I get people to call me? Like opening a phone book, how can.

Dave Owens [: 00:03:55

My ad be more unique or speak.

Dave Owens [: 00:03:59

Directly to them or whatever? So I was fascinating with that and my journey. I just kept leaning into that. I leaned into that. I started leaning into testing what this website was going to be or what it was going to do or how this digital marketing, what was happening there.

Dave Owens [: 00:04:15

The whole Google, that kind of became a thing in that era, Google everything.

Dave Owens [: 00:04:22

And that's what got me, led me into. They ask you answer, like, constantly building my website, constantly figuring, trying to figure out. It's a learning process. I didn't have it figured out. I was trying to figure out what makes you come up first, how people would find you. And so the frustrations was hiring marketing agencies to create the copy, create your pages, create all the things for your SEO work and not really understand it, like wanting to understand it, knowing that it does move the needle, right. It does create inbound traffic for your company. It can create massive separation done correctly.

Dave Owens [: 00:05:15

But I just didn't understand it. That caused me to do a lot more research after I probably had four marketing companies, and I'm not the guy that goes, these marketing companies are terrible. I'm not going to say that I was terrible. I was terrible because I didn't know what was going on and I was just handing them money and telling them to, hey, do my marketing for me.

Dave Owens [: 00:05:38

And the shift was massive.

Dave Owens [: 00:05:42

It was about three years ago, about four years ago, I started going and really researching how everything works. And in doing that landed on a lot of HubSpot articles. HubSpot led me over to impact and they have backlinks to each other. And so I was able to click through HubSpot articles into impact articles, which all the information was super helpful. It was like educational information. They wasn't trying to get me to buy anything, HubSpot or impact. They were just like. They had information that was painting the picture.

Dave Owens [: 00:06:18

This is how it works. And so you can imagine, I read a lot of articles. By the time I got to impact.

Dave Owens [: 00:06:24

By the time I spoke to a.

Dave Owens [: 00:06:27

Live person, I was already ready.

Dave Owens [: 00:06:32

I was like, where do I sign up? You know what I mean?

Dave Owens [: 00:06:35

I had already done all the research.

Hannah Eisenberg [: 00:06:37

That's actually a stat that Marcus Sheridan, the founder of they ask, you answer, and business owner of Impact, talks about a lot. 80% of the whole journey of the decision making process is completed by this normal, modern buyer that we are by the time we want to talk to a live person. So that's definitely a cool thing that happened to you as well. Before we go into that, what was the journey like? I wanted just to pick on something that you mentioned. You were saying you were terrible because you didn't understand. You just gave the marketing agencies money. But what was the disconnect there? Now that you're doing your marketing in house and you've done this, what was looking back, the lesson learned there?

Dave Owens [: 00:07:31

Yes.

Dave Owens [: 00:07:32

When you hire a marketing agency. When I hired marketing agencies, they would say, hey, we're going to get you the first page of Google and we're going to redesign your website. We're going to get you leads. And when you get the finished product, your website is. They build your website and all the content is generic. It's not specific, it's just generic. And to be honest, you said there was 253,000 roofers in the United States.

Dave Owens [: 00:08:06

90% of them, if you go to.

Dave Owens [: 00:08:09

Their websites, are just like my website was. Look at me. I'm the best roofer in town. I'm from this town. I do this type of roofing. This is how we do it. We're the best. We're this.

Dave Owens [: 00:08:19

We've been in business for this many years.

Dave Owens [: 00:08:21

It's all me.

Dave Owens [: 00:08:23

Look at me. Look how great I am. I'm the best. And everybody's website is identical. It's just different colors. All the copy is the same. We do roofing, we do shingles, we do this. There's nothing unique about it.

Dave Owens [: 00:08:35

And so even today, right now, is still a thing. And that was like the biggest for me. Oh, wait a minute. I look just like everybody else. I'm saying the same thing. Everybody else is saying. I'm not even saying it. The marketer's saying it.

Dave Owens [: 00:08:57

I got a marketer trying to talk about shingles. Don't know anything about shingles. These marketers that you say shingles, they think they need to go to Walgreens or cvs and get a shot for shingles, for the, like, how do they know what shingles are metal? How do they know what tile? How do they know what the roofing is? How do they know what these things are? How do they know what they cost? How do they know why roofs leak? They don't. So how could they talk about it?

Hannah Eisenberg [: 00:09:23

Yeah, and a lot of times when 90% of the companies say the same thing, it always comes down to price. Right. At the end of the day, if you're so commoditized, price is the only deciding factor, and that's not a good position to be in, especially as a roofer.

Dave Owens [: 00:09:40

Yeah, exactly.

Dave Owens [: 00:09:41

And.

Dave Owens [: 00:09:44

The reason I continued to grow.

Dave Owens [: 00:09:46

And evolve was early on, I found value in myself.

Dave Owens [: 00:09:52

That was like one of the key factors. Right. Because it is commodity if you are not valuable, right? If you're not valuable, if you're not creating value, if there's not value in it, because a product is a product or whatever, but there's value in you and what you bring and how you deliver it. And so that was like one of the keys for myself in continuing to evolve and grow and creating a little bit of separation and difference.

Dave Owens [: 00:10:16

Even though I didn't have the content.

Dave Owens [: 00:10:20

Separating me in the digital space at that time, it was for myself, teaching my people that we're the most valuable people there.

Dave Owens [: 00:10:30

Now. We're on a different playing field now.

Dave Owens [: 00:10:34

And we have access to the digital platform that we can do whatever we want to do with it. We're in control of it.

Hannah Eisenberg [: 00:10:41

Yeah. So walk me down that sort of memory lane of you've read all those articles, you came to impact. What came next?

Dave Owens [: 00:10:55

When I first spoke to their sales rep, I jumped right in. Impact has three packages.

Dave Owens [: 00:11:03

It's 18 months, it's two years.

Dave Owens [: 00:11:05

Most people want to take this journey in two years because it's a lot of work.

Dave Owens [: 00:11:08

It's a lot of work.

Dave Owens [: 00:11:12

When you go from paying somebody to do all of your marketing for you to doing all of the marketing for yourself, you have a lot of tasks and activities that have to be completed. And so I'm high performer. I call myself a high performer. And there was 24 months, 18 months and twelve months. And then I asked if they have a nine month program.

Dave Owens [: 00:11:40

Yeah, I won't forget that.

Dave Owens [: 00:11:41

And she was like, no, I can.

Dave Owens [: 00:11:44

Check with the coaches and see if.

Dave Owens [: 00:11:47

It'S something that they think you can get done. And they're like, man, what you're trying to get done? Build this out in nine months. They've never really had anybody do it in twelve months. Most of the people asked for 24 months. The companies that went before me, there's a couple of companies in roofing that went before me. They took more than 24 months to do a mastery. Yeah, just diving into that. And we went for the twelve months.

Dave Owens [: 00:12:15

And just the whole thing, the whole.

Dave Owens [: 00:12:18

Journey is like learning first, tracking everything, CRM side of it, tracking all the analytics and setting all that up, workflows and all. And then we did our website launch from HubSpot. So we building the website, all the.

Dave Owens [: 00:12:34

Pages, learning how to build them, understanding the mythology in building them, why we build them, and why they are laid.

Dave Owens [: 00:12:44

Out like they are right over into the content. And so when I first got in, I didn't have a videographer, I didn't have a content writer, I didn't have a CRM person. So I was that. So I had all those coaches. So I'm showing up on our calls and I'm setting up hubsot, I'm creating.

Dave Owens [: 00:13:00

The funnel and writing the articles based on the funnel, and I'm also doing.

Dave Owens [: 00:13:07

The videographer stuff, like jumping on those calls. And so the first hire we had.

Dave Owens [: 00:13:12

Was a videographer, and then we had.

Dave Owens [: 00:13:15

Content, and then the last was the CRM. For me, that was like, it happened just as it was supposed to happen, because I got to have all these coaches. I got to have all these coaches and understand what my team was going.

Dave Owens [: 00:13:30

To be doing on the front side.

Dave Owens [: 00:13:34

I showed up on the calls, and.

Dave Owens [: 00:13:35

Then when they were comfortable and they.

Dave Owens [: 00:13:38

Were ready to take over, I just stopped coming to the calls. But I had been on them for so long to me, and gotten so much out of it and so much.

Dave Owens [: 00:13:47

On the front side of it.

Dave Owens [: 00:13:51

I already seen finished product number one. So when we started with impact, I already could see our website finished. I could already see the content being created. I could already see all the videos that we were creating. I seen finished product when we started. So being able to be on all.

Dave Owens [: 00:14:04

Those calls was just absolutely fascinating for.

Dave Owens [: 00:14:08

Me and just amazing. It was a really great experience. I had hired coaches before and I'll say that impact has really a first.

Dave Owens [: 00:14:17

Class operation as far as structure and.

Dave Owens [: 00:14:20

How they show up and how they teach.

Hannah Eisenberg [: 00:14:23

Yeah. So not only did you do it in twelve months. But then you did the sales enablement, you did the HubSpot mastery. I think you had five, six coaches.

Dave Owens [: 00:14:32

At once at any given time, and website mastery. So, yeah, we had website coaches, too.

Dave Owens [: 00:14:39

So not only did we have just.

Dave Owens [: 00:14:43

The philosophy of they ask, you answer the three things we had website mastery and sales and assignment selling. Yeah.

Hannah Eisenberg [: 00:14:52

So tell me a little bit. I assume that you were the ask your answer leader in your organization, the one who ultimately is the responsible person. So lead me a little bit through the organizational or cultural change that had to happen within roofcrafters as you went through that journey.

Dave Owens [: 00:15:14

Yeah. So really, I think the first change that I seen that was going to need to take place was video culture. So we didn't have a video culture.

Dave Owens [: 00:15:25

And so the minute that I seen.

Dave Owens [: 00:15:29

How impactful the video was going to be and even how impact did the video, how the salesperson sent me the video, sent me a Vidyard video waving.

Dave Owens [: 00:15:38

At me and the whole thing. And so I seen that.

Dave Owens [: 00:15:42

And so immediately when I signed up with impact, I created a rule for myself. If I'm going to email you or text you more than three lines, I send a video. So I just started shooting video art videos and sending them to my team and internally, and that started it. To create, to shift and change the.

Dave Owens [: 00:16:03

Culture, I believe it's got to come.

Dave Owens [: 00:16:05

From the top, right? And we're not going to get the.

Dave Owens [: 00:16:08

Massive change without the leaders partaking in.

Dave Owens [: 00:16:13

It, not saying, hey, you need to do this, hey, start shooting videos, start sending videos to people. Start writing down content ideas. Start writing down. Every time you hear something, start writing it down. That's what I was doing. I was sending videos and then I had a list of questions. Anytime I heard something, I had a massive list. So before I even hired a content manager, I had a list that I.

Dave Owens [: 00:16:37

Was able to hand off to her. I did the spreadsheet, I did that.

Dave Owens [: 00:16:42

Because I was on the front side until we made that hire.

Dave Owens [: 00:16:45

I had that.

Dave Owens [: 00:16:47

All of that stuff was in the sandbox. All those questions was in the sandbox for if she could just come in and just start tackling them. But still, you have to get that and other people have to get that.

Dave Owens [: 00:17:00

Rhythm and want to show up to.

Dave Owens [: 00:17:02

The revenue meetings with legit questions that they're getting asked in the trenches, out in the field and in face to face interactions, not just stuff that we make up.

Hannah Eisenberg [: 00:17:15

Yeah, no, for sure. One of the things that struck me about your website, I think as one of the first things, is your video, the usage of video. And we talked about this before on your local service area pages, where you have the service technician or the inspector of that particular town make a video and be that face of that page. So what is that result of doing something like that, where you have a video of that person explaining the process and laying out the steps of what an inspection should look like and all the other things that you explain in the video? What is the effect of a person seeing that particular person in that service page?

Dave Owens [: 00:18:08

So let me ask you this.

Dave Owens [: 00:18:10

If you were buying a roof, if you were buying a roof and you didn't have your neighbor or your family or nobody knew anybody, and you got to go out and start looking for a roofing contractor to invite to your home, how would you feel after watching a few videos or watching a video of somebody and that person shows up at your door? You've watched their videos. You've watched one or two or even just one video, but you're going to get more than one because when you watch the one, we're going to send a bio video and the 80% video. So you're going to have opportunity to see two or three, four or five videos of that same person, and then that same person shows up at your house. How would that make you feel?

Hannah Eisenberg [: 00:18:50

I would definitely think they're like, I almost have that feeling of, oh, my God, they're a rock star because they've been in all those videos. They've explained those to me. But how it makes me feel is I can trust that person, make me feel, trust them much more because it's my home. But it's also a very big investment that I have to make. So I have to consider that carefully. So when I watched those videos, I was like, this is awesome.

Dave Owens [: 00:19:20

Yeah.

Dave Owens [: 00:19:21

That's the effect we're dealing with.

Dave Owens [: 00:19:26

People are watching those videos right now. We know that right now we have tracking on it. People are watching those videos. It is a big investment. And so when somebody does show up.

Dave Owens [: 00:19:36

This is like feedback that I've gotten from the estimators.

Dave Owens [: 00:19:40

Hey, man, I showed up and they were like, oh, my God, it's you. And they're just so happy. They're like, oh, my goodness, it's you. Oh, I've seen three or four of your videos. I'm so glad you're here. And it is, it builds trust because this is very important. We're never selling in those videos. Go watch all the videos.

Dave Owens [: 00:20:01

We're never selling anything. It's a constant state of providing very useful, helpful information to take person. Just like we started from the 0% to the 80% and by the time we show up at the door, just like when I signed up with impact.

Dave Owens [: 00:20:20

I was already there.

Dave Owens [: 00:20:22

Just take my hand and take me over to the 100% mark.

Dave Owens [: 00:20:25

Right?

Dave Owens [: 00:20:25

Just lead me to the right button, to the right package, to the right roof, to the right type. Right. We're just leading them over to the.

Dave Owens [: 00:20:33

Thing that they already want, that they.

Dave Owens [: 00:20:35

Already know that they want, and they already know how they want it. We're just leading them to the last little bit. That's it. And so, done correctly, that's what it looks like.

Hannah Eisenberg [: 00:20:45

Very cool. So you were saying it's a lot of work. Twelve months, you're an overachiever, you got through it and now it's done. You graduated the program, you achieved your 80 plus on your impact scorecard and now what happened? What's the impact it had on you as roofcrafters?

Dave Owens [: 00:21:09

Yeah. So we were really close at ten months. I'm really happy about my team. We were close. We went through the last couple of months.

Dave Owens [: 00:21:19

And when you're in coaching, I coach too.

Dave Owens [: 00:21:23

You get to a point where when you don't really feel like showing up on the coaching calls, it's nothing against the coach, it's just we're at a place where the value is like.

Dave Owens [: 00:21:30

But we went through it because we.

Dave Owens [: 00:21:33

Wanted to dial in the smaller things.

Dave Owens [: 00:21:35

And make sure we fine tune stuff as a team.

Dave Owens [: 00:21:39

We've met and agreed to go all.

Dave Owens [: 00:21:43

In and not just not show up.

Dave Owens [: 00:21:45

So we showed up and here it's not done. We finished the program. That's like the beginning stage. You get through all of that work, those twelve months of all that work, and it was a massive amount of work, especially when they added the website in on top of us. We're trying to learn video, we're trying.

Dave Owens [: 00:22:06

To learn content creation.

Dave Owens [: 00:22:10

And then we had to write all the copy for all those service pages and the whole website copy and laying it out and all that stuff. And we had to do it all right. We had to put all that stuff on the pages and stuff. It was the pictures and all that stuff, man. It was just a massive amount of work. But it doesn't end. You finish the program and it doesn't end. It's just like the beginning now is.

Dave Owens [: 00:22:30

Okay, what do you want to do with it? What are you going to do? How are you going to make it your own? Because now at this place we've taken the principles and we've applied it to other things that we do.

Dave Owens [: 00:22:42

We've taken things that we were taught.

Dave Owens [: 00:22:45

And now we implement that and create different things for us that helps us in different avenues of things that we did already. We just implement ways to track stuff. We implement ways to run campaigns. And so it doesn't end.

Dave Owens [: 00:23:03

It's never ending.

Dave Owens [: 00:23:04

We're still students, we're still in a learning stage. Impact says we mastered the program, but.

Dave Owens [: 00:23:11

We haven't mastered what we're doing. And so it's continue to evolve.

Dave Owens [: 00:23:19

I promote for myself and the team, I promote creativity. So I give them that flexibility. And the meetings, for me, when I show up in meetings, it's like, hey, how would you like to buy the roof? What are you thinking about? Think about something different. Not just going through the motions of creating the content. We put out five to eight pieces of content a week, written content, and 2026, 25 videos a week. Not just like going through the motions.

Dave Owens [: 00:23:45

And doing the work repetitiously.

Dave Owens [: 00:23:53

How do you see yourself? Or put your own into it, put your own thoughts, your own creativity into the whole thing. And so that's how it is for us. We're in a constant state of evolving and being students. I encourage my marketing manager, I encourage him to go out and look at other websites. There's other websites that are doing buyer, that helps us study the buyer's journey.

Dave Owens [: 00:24:22

There's some.

Dave Owens [: 00:24:23

Carvania is a prime example. I started looking at that two years ago, three years ago, before I met impact. I started looking at their websites. Like, man, these are really good. These carmax, they're really good. They build trust in this and the way they design the website.

Dave Owens [: 00:24:38

Study these websites.

Dave Owens [: 00:24:40

Stay in these websites that are buying without a sales rep showing up. Study these websites because the buyer's journey is always evolving. I don't go to a grocery store.

Dave Owens [: 00:24:53

You know what I mean?

Dave Owens [: 00:24:54

I don't go to a grocery store. We have our groceries delivered. I haven't bought a car. I haven't been to a car dealership in years. And so I say that because the buyer's journey is always evolving. There was a time not long ago where I stayed at a car dealership for two or 3 hours. Miserable, terrible experience. Excited about getting a car.

Dave Owens [: 00:25:18

Terrible experience. So how can we make the experience better? And that's what I tell my team. How can we make the experience better? Where is it going? How comfortable are people with doing the transaction? Like through a Zoom call through technology. How can we use technology to make their experience better? And then how can we implement that so our team is working on all that. Buy a roof without me coming out to your house. But we can have the same conversation. You can watch all my videos, you can get all educated. And how much trust do I need to have from you for you to buy the roof from me without coming to your house? Because that's the old school way of doing it.

Dave Owens [: 00:25:59

Is it going to last?

Hannah Eisenberg [: 00:26:01

Yeah. Very cool. What was the actual impact on your business? Have you shortened sales cycles? I'm sure revenue went up. What were the concrete things that you were able to point to and say, hey, that's the impact of doing this.

Dave Owens [: 00:26:19

Okay, so one of the first metrics that we really seen was closing percentage. So closing percentage increased. We got guys closing. We got several of our estimators closing over 50%. We got a couple that close in 60% range. When the average was 30%, we were running at 30, 33% closing percentage. So to have guys increase their closing.

Dave Owens [: 00:26:46

Percentage, that was a massive improvement.

Hannah Eisenberg [: 00:26:50

That's almost double.

Dave Owens [: 00:26:52

Yes. That was tremendous.

Dave Owens [: 00:26:55

Again, attribute that to the trust, building.

Dave Owens [: 00:26:57

The trust, the videos, getting educated and.

Dave Owens [: 00:27:01

Just understanding that everybody felt that. And it's the whole thing, it's just not one piece of it. It's the entire thing.

Dave Owens [: 00:27:09

It starts, it's the website, it's the.

Dave Owens [: 00:27:13

Bio videos, the 80%, it's the one to ones that they send that the majority of people don't know anything about. Right. Those one to one videos are very impactful. Right. We send one to one videos, follow up videos, one to one where we're providing more education. It's all of that.

Dave Owens [: 00:27:32

And so that was one thing.

Dave Owens [: 00:27:34

Yes, we saw we have a continual.

Dave Owens [: 00:27:38

Up and right movement on our traffic.

Dave Owens [: 00:27:42

And our inbound leads. So.

Dave Owens [: 00:27:46

We do SEO for profit, right? We're not doing SEO for traffic, to.

Dave Owens [: 00:27:51

Us is a vanity metric for our team. It's great and everything, but how many leads did we produce? How many people could we help for that? And so the inbound leads, it's not even close. The amount of leads that we are producing now on an average, daily average. It's just fascinating to me still. I go, wow, these are things that I check every day, by the way. I go in and I check out how many articles are, I look at individual articles, we track individual articles, how many people are reading individual articles, how many clicks they're going through, how many links they're clicking on, how much they're.

Dave Owens [: 00:28:29

Driving through our content, and then also.

Dave Owens [: 00:28:36

The leads that we are producing on a daily basis.

Hannah Eisenberg [: 00:28:43

It's cool when you're in that position of we have so many leads, we can't even process them all or we can't even help them all. But you get to also then change your attitude to say, you might not be a good fit, but you over here, we can help you much better. See, you get to be a little picky.

Dave Owens [: 00:29:07

I think the more authentic our content is, the more real authentic we are in our content, our voice and our demeanor and how we carry ourselves. And, and it really, we, the videos really help, right? Like, the videos that we make really get to show, like, we're going to.

Dave Owens [: 00:29:31

Show up just like that.

Dave Owens [: 00:29:32

That's who we are. We're going to show up just as you read and watch. That's who we are. And so if you like that, you're going to love us. If you don't like that, chances are we're not a good fit.

Dave Owens [: 00:29:47

Right?

Dave Owens [: 00:29:47

We're just not a good fit.

Dave Owens [: 00:29:51

We've gotten better because of the impact.

Dave Owens [: 00:29:54

Because of they ask, you answer, we've also gotten better at just, we're not a good fit for everybody. We knew that.

Dave Owens [: 00:30:05

But.

Dave Owens [: 00:30:08

You get clearer and the clearer it is, the better we operate. Right? We get clear, like, we're not a good fit for somebody who doesn't like value. There's, 16% of the world doesn't care about value. They go for the cheapest. It's all commodity to them. It doesn't matter. They're going to buy the cheapest of everything. 16%.

Dave Owens [: 00:30:25

16% of the world loves value. And they go for the best.

Dave Owens [: 00:30:29

They buy the highest version, the best.

Dave Owens [: 00:30:32

Of the best, the upgraded versions, and.

Dave Owens [: 00:30:34

Then the rest of the middle 67%.

Dave Owens [: 00:30:39

They don't know where they're at. We're like the bottom people, the people who don't have a value system, we're not a good fit for these people who don't know their value system. Some of them, we are really a good fit for, some of them we may not be a good fit for. Those are, that's our biggest people. These people, we're just, we just connect with these people that want value. We just connect with those people. Those are like our people. So we've gotten better at understanding who we're a good fit for and who we're not and telling people up front before we put time and energy into it.

Dave Owens [: 00:31:16

If you're looking for the cheapest, there's no sense in us coming out of your house. There's no sense in us stopping by. If you're going to call five companies and look at the bottom of the paper and whatever the lowest number is, that's who you're going to buy from. Then there's no sense in us coming out because you will always, in this world, you will always, if you keep calling, you will always get cheaper. I've been to clients houses that they've gotten 1516 estimates, 17 estimates. They got them sitting on their table when I get there. Why am I here? Yeah, why am I here?

Hannah Eisenberg [: 00:31:51

So now, you've had a lot of success with this. You love it. You obviously are super passionate about it. And I want to switch to you helping people also implement that as well. So you are helping entrepreneurs and especially in the home improvement sector, right. You're coaching people to do the same. So if someone is listening to this and they're like, hey, I want to talk to Dave about coaching, how can you help them? What is it that they should be looking at?

Dave Owens [: 00:32:35

Yeah, so I want to just go a little bit deeper in that as well. I'm not looking to implement. They ask you answer into people's companies. I work with other contractors, mainly home service providers, doesn't matter. HVAC, plumbing, home service providers and other business owners. I coach other business owners in building out a successful businesses. And so I start with foundational stuff, what their foundation is, core values, missions, visions, all their foundation. We lock those in and then I move over into systems and processes.

Dave Owens [: 00:33:19

And so that's what I work with. I work with business owners who have.

Dave Owens [: 00:33:23

Struggled with scaling, with growing, and I.

Dave Owens [: 00:33:29

Help them develop systems and processes to scale and grow their businesses the way they want to. That's what I've been doing for the past five years.

Hannah Eisenberg [: 00:33:41

Yeah, thanks for clarifying that. Now, someone listening who would love to benefit from your experience, what would be the biggest advice that you would give people? If they're listening to this conversation, they're like, I've tried these many things. None of it is working properly. What would be the advice that you give them?

Dave Owens [: 00:34:04

Oh, yeah. For me, I've hired several coaches. I've had many coaches and mentors. And business is really simple. Business in and of itself is really simple. It's marketing, sales, operations, production and hiring, recruiting. That's it. That's what business is.

Dave Owens [: 00:34:30

And so we as people complicate business. We human beings make business difficult, we make business chaotic, we make business complex, and we fix our businesses. And when I coach people, this is the ultimate coaching. I coach people to build core values, create their core values, identify their core values, mission, vision, guarantees, and move into systems and processes. In that process, in that journey, Hannah, I'm teaching them and coaching them to better themselves. Because as we better ourselves, our businesses get massively.

Dave Owens [: 00:35:19

Don'T we, as humans?

Dave Owens [: 00:35:21

We don't follow the business, the business follows us. I had it reversed, right? Until I began that journey of hiring coaches. I thought the business was up here. I was identifying myself with the business and I was down here and I was pushing the business. That's not the way it actually works, right? So it works as we go. We don't lead people past a capacity that we can lead ourselves. So when we look around and inside of our business, our leaders, our sales, our marketing teams, our production teams, everybody, we're not going to lead these people past the capacity. We can lead ourselves.

Dave Owens [: 00:35:58

And so we know that we have to evolve. We have to improve self. And as we improve ourself, as we get better, as we trust ourself, as we have more confidence, as we grow, our business grows, as we are chaotic and we're in confusion and we're in high beta and we're hyperreactive, guess what else is?

Hannah Eisenberg [: 00:36:23

And we'll bring our ego in.

Dave Owens [: 00:36:26

It's your business. That's the cool thing about coaching, is I can talk to somebody and how they are and the things that they have going on in their business is what's going on internally. And that's just the way it works. And it's how it is.

Dave Owens [: 00:36:43

It's how I was. It's how I was. And before I started the journey, I.

Dave Owens [: 00:36:50

Was frustrated and trying to figure it all out. But I had to look in the mirror and realize that it was me. It was me that was creating the mess in the business.

Hannah Eisenberg [: 00:37:02

Love it. On that note, thank you so much. If people want to reach out to you, where do you hang out? LinkedIn is the best way to contact you.

Dave Owens [: 00:37:14

Yeah, LinkedIn is fine. I went dark on social media just because I'm peaceful, very peaceful. It created peace for me. And I don't watch tv and stuff like that. I stopped watching tv many years ago. And then social media was another platform that I decided to go dark on it. This coming October will make two years. But what I decided to do was go all in on my marketing for the business.

Dave Owens [: 00:37:40

And so the energy that I was putting into social media, I put into website and content creation and my team and all that kind of stuff.

Dave Owens [: 00:37:48

And I will say that has been.

Dave Owens [: 00:37:52

A decision that has paid off, just folds after folds. It's just been a great decision.

Dave Owens [: 00:37:59

And so it hasn't created any.

Dave Owens [: 00:38:05

Fomo. I have no fear of missing out from social media and who's doing this over there and who's doing that. I think it's a fascinating thing, and I think it's a tool that we can use.

Dave Owens [: 00:38:17

But for myself, I chose to step.

Dave Owens [: 00:38:21

Away from social media. LinkedIn. I can be found on LinkedIn. You can reach out through messaging or email, and I'm there. But, yeah.

Hannah Eisenberg [: 00:38:29

Excellent. Thank you so much for sharing your wisdom and your experience with us. I really appreciate it.

Dave Owens [: 00:38:40

Yes, absolutely. My pleasure.