Morgan recently sat down with Kyle Evans of American Pride Roofing to talk about managing an exterior remodel, breaking large projects down into manageable phases, and why education is their top priority.
There are so many components to an exterior remodel. How do you coordinate it all, and what do you do if a full project is too much for a homeowner to handle financially all at once?
There’s all kinds of things that go into the exterior. There’s several different trades. Most of the exterior trades that you’re gonna run into on a typical basis is gonna be roofing, siding, soffit, fascia, guttering, and then windows and doors. Sometimes there’s decks that people want redone or they want an addition done. So, it’s kind of nice that we have the ability and the contractors to be able to put that together. Oftentimes, when you’re replacing your siding, it’s also the best time to replace your windows. If you’re 20 years in with your exterior and all your materials are starting to fail because they’ve got 15-20-year warranties, that gives us the opportunity to try to encompass a full exterior if the customer can handle it. And if they can’t handle it financially, we break it down into phases.
I’m working with one customer right now, and she said, “We’re ready to go on the roof immediately, but we have a long-term plan for the rest of the year where we want to do the siding, the windows, the soffit, the fascia, and the gutters.” It just was too much to handle right then. Some contractors would shy away from that, I think, and say, “It’s either all or nothing” or “We’ll just do this part and then we’re going to go about our way.” But we really want to make sure that we’re delivering to these homeowners.
Their house is the most important thing to them for the most part. It protects everything that they own. It’s their castle. We always try to make sure that we’re being a service industry. Oftentimes, other people just say, “Well, this is what we offer, take it or leave it” and then the customers are left wondering, they have questions, and they’ve not been educated. They don’t know what they’re paying for most of the time, so we try to be as transparent as possible.
Education and transparency mean a lot to you. What does an initial inspection look like, and how do you help homeowners feel confident in their goals?
We have a lot of programs that we use to show the customers what their house looks like when we do our initial inspection. It’s not uncommon for me to take a couple hundred pictures of a house if we’re talking about doing a full exterior and basically take them on a tour of their house as it is now and give them an overall vision of what their house could be. A lot of customers really like that, and it’s not uncommon for me to spend an hour or 2 or 3 (or I’ve been known to spend half a day) with a customer just talking about what’s best for them and how to help them move forward. I hear it all the time, “Kyle, I’ve had 4 other companies out here and nobody has talked to us about any of this. Nobody’s gone through with us what the warranties are, the manufacturing specifics or things like that.”
A lot of people enjoy the education that they get from the in-home visit when we do our inspections. It gives it a little bit of a peace of mind and some faith that we do actually care about what we’re doing, and we care that it turns out to be what the customer wants at the end. It’s not just a quick in and out job as fast as we can get it done and move on to the next one. We’ll take the time to customize things for them so that way they can have it the way they want and be proud of it when it’s done. American Pride, remember?
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