Tracey Donels - Peer Group Collaboration - PODCAST TRANSCRIPT

Editor's note: The following is the transcript of a live interview with Tracey Donels of Service First Solutions. You can read the interview below or listen to the podcast.

Intro: Welcome to Roofing Road Trips, the podcast that takes you on a thrilling journey across the world of roofing. From fascinating interviews with roofing experts to on the road adventures, we'll uncover the stories, innovations and challenges that shape the rooftops over our heads. So fasten your seat belts and join us as we embark on this exciting roofing road trip. 

Karen Edwards: Hello everyone and  welcome to another episode of Roofing Road Trips from Roofer's Coffee Shop. My name is Karen Edwards and  today I am welcoming Tracy Donnells from Service First Solutions to talk all things peer groups. Tracy, welcome. 

Tracy Donnells: Thank you very much, Karen. How are you today? 

Karen Edwards: Good, good. It's great to see you. I did see you at the IRE recently, but you were just zipping by going one place to... I think I waved, but we didn't really- 

Tracy Donnells: Yes, as were you. I stopped by at the coffee shop booth to do my little video and other than that, I didn't go to a single planned event or... Between the show, the talk, the peer group, we were busy the entire week. It was nuts. 

Karen Edwards: Yeah, yeah, it was a great event. So plug for the show. If you didn't make it this year, put it on your calendar for next year in Vegas. But one of the things that you did there was host a peer group. So we're going to dive into that. But before we do that, I'd like you just to tell us a little bit about Service First Solutions and what you do, peer groups being one of them. 

Tracy Donnells: Yeah, so Service First Solutions, what we are is we are a coaching, training and consulting company that focuses exclusively on growing your commercial roofing repair and maintenance department. It's right there in the name, Service First Solutions and what we say we do is we grow roof service. So I've been a commercial roofer or in the commercial roofing industry for about 20 years now and  I've spent every single minute of it in the repair and maintenance realm, whether in a truck, behind a computer, putting out estimates, doing an inspection, managing crews, scheduling crews, overseeing a department or being an executive of a large company overseeing a $9 million service department. So now for the last four years, me and my small team have been going around the country and exclusively doing that, helping people start, grow and scale their commercial service departments. 

How we do that is really threefold. Like any training or coaching consulting company, we'll come in to work with you for two days, three days, four days, whatever's applicable. We travel to you, work directly with your staff, one-on-one time or one on 20 time you're getting a person. And we also do yearly programs where we work with anyone in your team for up to four hours a week and we come and see you once a year and you get access to all kinds of great tools and techniques and templates and stuff like that to be able to again, start, grow or scale your service department faster. And the peer groups are something a little bit different and they're almost the thing I like most in this business is really connecting people. So in the peer groups, what we do, the service focused peer groups is we take contractors from around the country, typically eight to 10 contractors and we put them on the same Zoom call to share best business practices one time a month. And then we get together three times a year for two, two and a half days. 

Now these are contractors from across the country, they're non-competing contractors. We allow two representatives from the service department to join the peer group. We want the leaders, we want the people that are managing, pushing the service department. Some of our peer groups are manned by managers. Sometimes it's an owner and a manager, sometimes it's a service executive and an estimator or a coordinator and an owner or something like that. But what we do is we get these people together. Again, two representatives from each company and once a month we get on the call and just like we did yesterday, we say, hey, what are our problems? What are your problems? Maybe I have some of your problems solved and you have some of my problems solved. And we don't know how we can help each other or really how fast we can grow until we open up around a group of trusted peers. 

So that's really the essence of the peer group is those contractors one time a month and then three times a year where we get together and we have a day-long meeting called a strategic planning session with your peers that care about the same things you do within your business. And we always try to include some other kind of educational event. Most likely, a lot of times it's a tour of another roofing company. So this week or I guess technically last week, time flies, we had a group of eight contractors, I think about 13 or 14 different representatives from those contractors and  on Monday before IRE, we went to Belden Roofing and wonderful Brad Belden opened up his doors, him and Danny Mendez took us through a tour of their entire grounds, told us what everybody does, let us take pictures, let us ask questions, told us the story of Belden Roofing, the ups and downs and  really got to sit with the leaders of that company and ask them all kinds of questions. 

So that is really when we get together, a real highlight of doing this is seeing some of those shops and meeting some of those... It's called the masterminds in roofing and hearing their stories. 

Karen Edwards: Yeah, I think one of the things I like about a peer group is it's really easy to get not stuck, but you're so focused on your day-to-day, your service area. It's easy to feel like you're on an island and you don't always know, am I doing this right? Am I utilizing these tools and resources to the best of my ability? And by being able to talk to others in your same shoes in a different part of the country, it really benefits everybody. And I think one of the hardest parts and  you tell me that this might be one of the hard part is you kind of have to let yourself be vulnerable. Right? You have to open up those doors and let people see inside the good, the bad and  the ugly. 

Tracy Donnells: You definitely do. Like I said, you're never going to grow until you say, hey, I don't know everything. What do you have that you might be able to teach me? And you say, being around like-minded people. And I think that's especially important when we talk about service. The repair and maintenance department often operates its own little department, its own few little people in the back of the company. It's usually not a big team. And if it is a big team, it is most likely very separate from the rest of the company. So a lot of times the project team and the service team maybe don't see eye to eye all the time and stuff like that. So it's great to surround yourself with people that go through what you go through, have seen those problems, have jumped over those hurdles. And once you surround yourself with like-minded people, it makes it a lot easier to open up because all of a sudden you get that immediate trust because I know you've walked through my shoes, so here, let me be honest with you. 

When I first got into this industry, but maybe two, three years in when I was still at Cape Host, my bosses sent me through a whirlwind tour of Florida and  in five days I got to go visit service departments, which at the time every single one of them was larger than mine. I got to tour great shops like Sutter and PSI and Crowther and Springer Peterson. I just went in and pretended like I was a dummy. Hey, I don't know nothing. And these great folks opened up their doors, walked around and  I was going to say, oh, I like this. Let me ask you a question about that because I think that might work for me back in Texas or what's all this? Oh, no, no, no, that's not going to work at all. But what's going on over here? 

And after those five days of doing nothing but asking questions, I came back with almost a master's degree in running a service department. I put all those tools to use and I was able to grow my department to the $9 million department it was. But I would've never been able to do that if I would've just kept thinking I had all the answers. What do they say? You can't see the forest through the trees? 

Karen Edwards: Right. Right. Yeah. One thing about this industry is everyone is so willing to give back and to share knowledge and to share information. And I know that you did some presentations last week during the Roofing Expo and you do them at shows and  that's your way of giving back to the industry. And as you mentioned, you had several hundred people in your class because this is a topic that you don't always know how to run a service department. You may know how to install a roof or find a leak and make a repair, but it's more about processes and procedures. Yeah? Wouldn't you say? You're nodding. 

Tracy Donnells: Yes. Too often in the roofing world, especially as we're a small company, as we get successful, we start putting on some bigger roofs, putting out some bigger invoices, service becomes the stuff we have to do, not necessarily the stuff we want to do. And I really think that's because we don't understand it. Too often I hear, service is the hardest work I do, but from the best service companies I hear from, service is the easiest work they do because they have those processes set up, they have those procedures set up. 

I often use the Chick-fil-A analogy. Most service departments are out here operating like food trucks. They have one or two people in back. They do great work, they do good customer service, but they cannot handle a rush. They don't have time to train anybody or anything like that because they're always busy putting out fires for customers, usually important customers. But if we put take that model and twist it around and take it like a Chick-fil-A drive-thru and think about what are the steps, what are the procedures we're going to handle each and every time that a leak call comes in or someone needs a roof inspection? If we can set up these procedures and train good quality people, not roof experts, they don't have to be roof experts, very little in service has anything to do with roofing. It's all about customer communications and customer service. 

Karen Edwards: Very true. Very true. 

Tracy Donnells: We can set up those policy and procedures and service can now become the easiest work we do. If six people walk up to a food truck, that number five person, number six person, even maybe number four person, they're going to be waiting for quite a while. If six full cars pull up to Chick-fil-A, that's just Tuesday. 

Karen Edwards: Right. Yeah. And so we want those service divisions to be just like that. I'm curious, I want to go back to the peer group because you mentioned getting on a Zoom call. Tell me a little bit about do you follow the same agenda each time? Do you have different topics? What's the length of the call? I'm curious what goes into that. 

Tracy Donnells: Yeah, so we do stick to it on an agenda where the lengths of the calls are typically about an hour and a half. Sometimes they wrap up a little bit shorter than that. We like to allow the time because we don't want to cut off a really good conversation. We don't want to run out of time because we're not going to meet for time and we're busy and we may not get back to that point. So we open up every call with an update of what's been going on since the last time we talked, right? Quick little two, three minute update. And then we go through whatever our travel plans for the next time we're getting together. So I have a peer group. The next time I get together with a peer group, I'm taking a group to Mobile, Alabama and  we are going to tour Thomas Roofing, which is one of my customers. But we're taking a different peer group to Thomas Roofing. So they're not in this peer group, they're in a different peer group and  they're going to open their doors to a totally new set of people. 

So we talk, what's been going on? Where are we going to go next? And then we typically dive right into our issues list. And the issues list is run very similar to the EOS level 10 style of IDS in a meeting. We put issues up on the board. We typically vote for whichever the one that we want to talk about and we discuss and then we go from there. And that's typically a routine monthly meeting. Now the agendas at the day long meetings in person, they're very similar, but we're going to be there for eight hours and usually we have one really big discussion topic that we're going to tackle. 

So last week, the group that met in San Antonio, since this is the first time we're getting together for the year, we discussed what our revenue goals were going to be for the year, what our non-revenue goal was for the year, something that's working on the department, not necessarily in the department and then what were the two biggest hurdles we saw that were going to be coming up for us to be hitting those goals? And it was amazing, once we got eight companies, two hurdles a piece up on the board, well five of them had the same hurdle. 

Karen Edwards: Yeah. 

Tracy Donnells: So that obviously became the number one issue that we're going to talk about. And right then and there, we dove into a two and a half hour conversation about hiring, training, compensation, all kinds of stuff like that. 

Karen Edwards: So tell me a little bit about confidentiality, because if people are vulnerable, they're opening up, they're sharing, they're not dirty laundry, but some challenges, but some successes as well. Is there an NDA? How does that work? 

Tracy Donnells: Yes, we do sign an NDA each year as we renew the groups because the groups have a tendency to change and grow and stuff like that. So we do sign an NDA. And again, we don't have any competitors in the groups. We do have some groups that have roofing companies that I would say are relatively close to one another, even for me, a person coming from Dallas and how big Dallas is. But it's amazing what a state line can do to divide business. So for example, I have one contractor in Milwaukee and one contractor in Chicago and  one has no interest in going to Illinois and one has no interest in going to Wisconsin. So they're okay being in the same peer group. 

Karen Edwards: Are people that graduate or outgrow or... Do you find that people love the peer group so much they're sticking around no matter what? 

Tracy Donnells: So most are usually sticking around no matter what. We did recently change to where all of our peer groups renew at the beginning of the year now. And so what that allows, it allows me, us to shift up peer groups because sometimes we're going to make really good friends in the industry. But if I'm in a different peer group, I'm not going to disassociate with these five great people I met over here. I kind of look at it like my FEI class. I got a lot of great friends in FEI, but I don't see them every year. But every time I see them, we pick right back up. So a lot of times our peer groups will grow and  so we have a couple people that will say, hey, I like this peer group, but I want to go meet some other people. So we have two contractors this year that are in the same city that are flipping peer groups because they enjoy the groups, but they want to see who else can we learn from? What else is out there? 

Karen Edwards: What's the size of an average peer group? 

Tracy Donnells: So usually eight to 10 contracting companies and then one to two representatives per company. And I say eight to 10 because we typically like to start when we're about seven to eight. But if we have someone who may possibly join the group throughout the middle of the year and  we don't put anyone in a group without first asking of the group. So the group that I just met with in San Antonio, I'm going to be addressing that group about possibly adding a new member that I think could be very beneficial to the group because they're a common size, they have other similarities let's say in the industry and  they're in a market that no one else in that group is in. 

Karen Edwards: I am wondering if you have any success stories. I know you said people tend to stick around because it's about relationships and networking, but without being specific, share some of those success stories that people have experienced. 

Tracy Donnells: For sure. I mean, it really comes down to not only saving time and money and making the right choice... Or let's say not making the wrong choice. So I might meet someone in a peer group and  I don't know if they have the exact right answer for me, but they may have tried something I was going to try and they can say, here's why you should not do that. Don't go down that road. So a lot of times we're just learning from experiences, but sometimes there's something really quick. So I remember we had a peer group about a year and a half ago and  we were talking about a certain piece of equipment in the service department for leak detection. And they were talking about buying this piece of equipment and somebody had just bought the piece of equipment about two months earlier and  by switching the vendor, they saved like $1,800 just by having a conversation that who knows if he would've had that conversation elsewhere. 

But the quick little time savings like that, right? We had customers who share training programs, who share marketing ideas. Hey, what's your preventive maintenance program look like? Oh, do you have a one sheet that really pops? Oh, I like how yours is designed, let me look at it. Hey, I really want to start a employee newsletter, but I haven't really seen any roofing newsletters I really like. Do you guys have any newsletters? And then boom, all of a sudden you've got seven different examples of roofing newsletters in your email inbox. By the way, Corellis in Chicago may have the best employee newsletter. It is so cool. It is so cool. 

Karen Edwards: It's awesome. 

Tracy Donnells: And you wouldn't know about that until you asked the question, right? So if you have a network of peers like this and you come across an issue, why not ask them a question? Because the worst answer you're going to get is, nope, you've got to do that on your own. Just by asking a question, we may already have the simple solution, we may have time savings or we may have money savings. 

Karen Edwards: And your peer groups are focused mostly on commercial roofing service departments. 

Tracy Donnells: Correct. Commercial roofing service. Now, if we focus on the commercial service department, everything else in that commercial company is going to grow. My old firm, we eventually grew that department to, yes, eight and a half, $9 million in revenue. That was great, but what really mattered to me was 50% of our project revenue on the other side of the business came directly from our service clients. And that really not only helps you with the finances of a company, but it can really take the stress out of a company because now 50% of the customers like us, we don't have to prove ourselves to them again. They're giving us a chance or they're giving us the benefit of the doubt, right? How valuable is that sometimes [inaudible 00:18:06]? 

Karen Edwards: Sure. Yeah. Yeah. It's all about the relationships, the building trust and  they've seen you, your work and your performance throughout the years in service so that when it does come time to replace that roof, then you're going to be the first call they make, I'm sure. All right, so someone is listening today and they want to learn more about these peer groups and Service First Solutions. How do they do that? 

Tracy Donnells: Easiest way is to email us at info@growroofservice.com. Growroofservice.com. That's exactly what we do. We'll get exploratory meetings set up with you ASAP and  we'll see exactly what it is. What's the best service to be able to help you grow? So much of it is timing. If the timing's not right, we're not going to be successful, you're not going to be successful. So a lot of it goes into when is the right time to start, but also how much time do we have to dedicate to this process? Proper service is all about dedication of time and response of service. If you're going to go to school, you can't go to school without putting in the time. So between our different packages, we have different options based on where you're at. And we've had several companies that will start with a peer group and then they'll have us come visit them maybe a year in or something like that. And then maybe after, oh, well now we have a revenue generator and we have a coordinator, we've built two crews and now we're going to sign up for a yearly program. Something like that 

Karen Edwards: Right. Yeah, I like that, that you're really meeting the contractor where they are and customizing for their needs. That's really important. 

Tracy Donnells: Yeah. I mean, it's definitely a process, right? I mean, the new motto we're putting all over our shirts and our stickers is, "The day you plant the seed is not the day you harvest your crop." You have to do it right at the front side, but then you have to tend to that soil and take care of it and do all kinds of stuff. Otherwise, you're not going to get that result in the end. 

Karen Edwards: Excellent. Wow. Tracy, thank you for being here today and having this conversation. I hope that we've given some folks out there some things to think about. 

Tracy Donnells: Yes. Thank you so much, Karen. 

Karen Edwards: And that was Growroofservice.com. And you can also find Service First Solutions on Roofer's Coffee Shop. They have a full directory with contact information, articles, information about what they do and  hopefully we'll help you achieve the goals that you have set for yourself for the coming years. Tracy, again, thank you. Thank you everybody out there for listening. Be sure to follow us on social media, subscribe on your favorite podcast platform because we want to see you on a future episode of Roofing Road Trips. Take care. Bye-bye. 

Outro: If you've enjoyed the ride, don't forget to hit that subscribe button and join us on every roofing adventure. Make sure to visit Rooferscoffeeshop.com to learn more. Thanks for tuning in and we'll catch you on the next Roofing Road trip.