The Catch-All helps you put your best foot forward on job sites

By Emma Peterson. 

The Catch-All system helps contractors keep homeowners happy. You and your team can do your best work, your customer’s property stays neat and everyone leaves wanting to work together again in the future. 

In an episode of Roofing Roadtrips® from season 5, host Heidi J. Ellsworth got to sit down with the co-founder, co-inventor and co-owner of Catch-All, Heath Hicks. Heath spoke about his history in the industry, which began as a salesperson for the first seven of his fifteen years of experience. He shared the story of how Catch-All came to be, saying, “As a salesperson, I was doing that just to try to get more referrals and get better reviews from my customers — generally trying to figure out how I could mitigate all the pain points.”  

One of the big things he struggled with was bridging the knowledge gap between the roofing industry and the homeowner. He explained, “I didn't like the experience I was having with people when I would put on a really great roof, $30,000 roof. You walk outside, and the first thing a customer does is look down into the grass and in their flower beds. And I'm like, ‘No, no, no. Look up here. This is where all the work is. Look up here.’ And they're just digging around being grumpy about a bunch of granules on their porch.” 

 At first, he was just surprised that the customers weren’t looking at the roof. But then he realized that "at the end of the day, most customers don't really know what goes into a roof.” They don’t know the details of the industry, that’s why they hired a roofing company to install it for them. Heath had to adapt his mindset to understand that the customer’s concerns are about if the roof leaks or if it is ugly. They weren’t going to notice “whether the shingles are on backwards, upside down.”  

By the time he became the owner of his own company, he knew that addressing the customer’s concerns about aesthetics was crucial to retention and building a brand. He tried many methods, such as laying tarps over everything in the early morning hours and using metal detectors to find scattered nails, but he eventually realized that "the only way to solve the problem was to prohibit it, just to stop those things from ever landing on the ground.” And the Catch-All, a system of netting to keep materials from ever reaching the ground was born. 

The response of homeowners to Heath’s innovation? He shared, “It creates this cool moment of connection where they realize you were really smart and you're taking care of them.” 

To learn more about the Catch-All and how it has developed over the years, Read the transcript or Listen to the podcast.