Private equity is reshaping roofing. Is your business ready?

RCS Influencer Aaron Weinstein says strong systems, connected data and long-term customer relationships are key to staying competitive and creating growth opportunities.

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.

Emma: Hi everyone, I'm Emma Richardson with RoofersCoffeShop.com, and I'm here with Aaron Weinstein from Terial. Aaron, how are you?

Aaron: Doing great, Emma. How are you?

Emma: I'm doing great, thank you. Well, we're here to talk about our August influencer topic, which is private equity and industry consolidation. Do you have anything you'd like to share?

Aaron: Definitely do. That is certainly a hot topic across the industry. And I think it's just only the beginning of of what we're seeing with this topic across both residential and commercial contractors. I actually have a pretty unique seat in that I worked at a private equity fund in the past and was a part of teams evaluating contractors in different trade businesses. so I kind of understand how some of these decisions are made. And I think the biggest implication for the industry is that regardless of what your desired outcome is, if you are interested in selling to private equity one day or you just want to keep this and retain it within the family, competition is increasing. And that means that you need to have a better grasp over how your business operates today and what could impact the day-to-day operations.

So if someone new enters your market and starts pricing things really low, how are you going to compete on that? If you're a legacy family owned business, you probably have that goodwill built with your customers, which is going to take you a really long way. And I think that the folks who are private equity or immune to some of the private equity pressures are the ones who have established those really deep long-term relationships. I also think it means it's a really good opportunity to evaluate your systems and what processes you have in place. At the end of the day, I think data and information that is siloed often makes it harder to compete in this age where you have large conglomerates who have locations all over the country.

So if you want to have the best positioning against anyone in your market or if you're interested in selling to private equity eventually, it's usually in your best interest to take a look at those systems that you have in place. Are they streamlined? If they're not streamlined, how can you get your production data and your service data and maybe all of your estimating data in one platform? Can you leverage AI tools? Is that going to be something that's going to help push your margins forward and help drive business growth? Those are a few of the things that I would think of. And this doesn't even touch on what is happening at the supplier level, which is also consolidating fast.

But I think at the end of the day, regardless of whether you're looking to sell or you are looking to kind of hold on for the long term, this is an opportunity and it's a huge opportunity to push your business forward and and take a more proactive approach to data.

Emma: Awesome. Well Aaron, thank you so much. What a great insider scoop. We appreciate it. Great to talk to you today.

Aaron: My pleasure, thank you.