Advocating for better outcomes with associations

RCS Influencer Aaron Weinstein says change doesn't happen overnight, but associations are a mechanism for driving change in the day to day.

Editor's note: The following is the transcript of a live interview with Aaron Weinstein of Terial. You can Read the interview below, Listen to the podcast or Watch the recording.

Jenny Yu: Hi everyone. My name is Jenny Yu, and I'm here with RoofersCoffeeShop® today for an Influencer response for the month of May. And I'm here with Aaron Weinstein of Terial. How's it going, Aaron?

Aaron Weinstein: Hey Jenny, doing great, how are you?

Jenny Yu: I'm doing great as well. Thank you. Thanks for being with us. This month, we're talking about leveraging associations and chapters. We're hoping you could share your thoughts and opinions about the value of local, state and national involvement for things like roofing days, advocacy and lobbying. So why are all these things important?

Aaron Weinstein: Absolutely. For us at Terial and me personally in building the company, involvement in the national associations — the NRCA, some of the larger regional associations, the North/East Roofing Contractors Association, the Western States Roofing Contractors Association — those are a few of those large regional and national associations we've been members of. And it's helped in for a variety of different reasons.

I think one of the primary ways that it's benefited our company is that it's helped us really understand what the key issues affecting contractors all over the country are. I think that at least for us in our capacity, we are serving contractors nationally, and it's really easy to get isolated into your local markets. But once you are able to step into that national stage, you get to see a lot of similarities, but a lot of key differences. It may be how, for example, labor, payroll, materials, all differ among different kind of contractor bases in different markets.

But I think the biggest thing for us at least — and we saw this recently at the Roofing Day event, which is a lobbying event in Washington, D.C., where we went on behalf of the NRCA — is at the national level, being involved in these associations really does give you a direct line to the legislators. And I think a lot of us have probably seen and been frustrated by lack of progress in some of the legislations that are important to us and your companies. But at end of the day, this is really something where the more interactions that we have and the more we're able to advocate on behalf of the foreman, the techs, our employees and partners in the industry with people who are making these decisions, the better the outcomes are going to be, even if it takes multiple years or decades to kind of achieve what we're looking for.

So I think when you look at an association, a lot of people might look at that as a short-term investment: what am I going to get out of this this month this year? I think that's totally the wrong way to look at it. I think you need to look at this in the long term and over many years, if not five plus years, and the small steps that you can take today to help increase awareness of the industry and of the problems and challenges that you're facing are going to pay huge dividends a few years down the line, and we're hoping to be able to see that with what we did at Roofing Day in D.C. just a few weeks ago.

But we understand that, you know, change doesn't happen overnight. So I think these associations are a mechanism for you to drive change, even if it's a little bit slower or less tangible for us in the day to day.

Jenny Yu: Definitely. Thank you so much for sharing that. And yeah, thank you so much, everyone. If you want to check out all of our influencer responses, please do so. And you can learn more about Aaron and Terial at their RoofersCoffeeShop directory. Thank you, Aaron.

Aaron Weinstein: Thanks, Jenny.