“Franchising” Your Roofing Business: How to Make Training Salespeople a Piece of Cake (Literally)

I want you to take a moment to consider Krispy Kreme Donuts, or McDonald’s. There are millions of locations across the country, they’re a successful business with a working model that drives business and yields a consistent profit, and customers know that whether they visit a McDonald’s in Portland, Oregon or a McDonald’s in Atlanta, Georgia, the service, the food, and the experience is going to be exactly the same.

What makes a successful franchise? A proven-to-be-effective system that gets consistent results, that is duplicable and repeatable. In other words, a proven system that, if followed as instructed, will yield consistent, desirable results across the board.

Why is this so powerful? A proven, working system that is duplicable gives a business owner CONTROL over their business – they know that by putting the proven systems in the hands of their staff, the machine will run and get consistent, desirable results, based on the success the same model has proven repeatedly in the past.

Humor me for a moment and imagine you’re a home economics teacher (remember that class we all took in middle school where we made blueberry muffins and whipped up crème brûlée?), and you’ve got a classroom with 20 kids, and the assignment for the day was that everyone was going to bake a chocolate cake.

As the teacher, you’ve got a recipe you’ve used for 25 years – you know it works, and it makes one bomb ass chocolate cake. If you give each of those students the exact same ingredients, the same amount of those ingredients, the exact recipe, and step-by-step directions to make this proven cake recipe, what SHOULD happen?

They should all end up with good cakes!

Now, what if one of the students winds up with a cake that tastes like dirt and looks like a cow pie. What do we know for a fact happened?

They just didn’t follow the recipe.

Why is this good news? Because now you can diagnose the problem to find the solution and correct the issue moving forward. We know for a fact that the recipe yields desirable, consistent results, so it couldn’t have been the recipe – instead, the user didn’t follow the system correctly.

In the storm restoration industry, hiring and training salespeople has been a lot like running a home economics class, but instead of delivering a proven, step-by-step system or “recipe” for success, we basically take our classroom of students and say,

“Okay kids, we’re going to be making chocolate cakes today. A few eggs go into this cake, cocoa, some flour, some oil, and you bake it at like 350ish or 400 degrees for a while. You’ll figure out the rest as you go along.” 

What’s going to happen? Widely inconsistent results, mostly mediocre or poor quality cakes. By chance, 2 or 3 of the students may naturally have a knack for baking and their cakes might actually turn out to be pretty good, but most are going to be subpar. You definitely wouldn’t rely on this type of system to run a bakery.

Without a standardized system that is proven to work, your salesmen only get bits and pieces of the “recipe” and have to fill in all the rest of the gaps on their own, meaning nobody is doing or saying the same things at the door, during their sales presentation, or on adjuster meetings. Without a “franchisable” system in place, salesmen go rogue figuring it out on their own, yielding inconsistent results with a costly learning curve.

By having a standardized, proven system in place that each and every one of your salesmen is trained on, it gives you CONTROL of your business, because you know that as long as they are following the program, they should be getting good results, consistently. So when a salesperson is not closing well or is having trouble lining up inspections, what do you know for sure? They just aren’t following the program.

Not to mention, you know that all of your customers are getting the same experience and your sales team is representing your company properly so you can maintain a good image and reputation. When salesmen have to fill in the gaps and figure things out on their own, God only knows what they’re saying and doing to get a signature or get their foot in the door sometimes (and just one bad sales rep can make a great company look bad).

A repeatable system means you can grow your business. When you have the proven and effective “recipe” to train your new hires, that means no matter who they are, where you are, or who is training them, the model will work. Plus, recruiting and retention will increase. How much easier is it to recruit a new salesman and help them step away from that dead-end (“secure”) 9 to 5 job when you can confidently assure them that you are going to give them everything they need to excel at this position, and all they have to do is just follow the program?

How much better will your retention be when your salesmen have all the tools and strategies they need to do well from the start? Their experience will be better, their frustration and turnover will be lower, and they’ll make more money faster and easier, and when your reps have a good experience and are making money, they’re happy. And when they’re happy, they stick around. When they stick around, you’ve got a solid sales team that’s efficient, happy, and most importantly are producing consistently to provide you a sustainable business model with the potential to grow as big as you want it to.

Bottom line: as a business owner, it is absolutely crucial to your company’s longevity and success to have a proven, effective, standardized training system in place that works. Without it, you’ll constantly be forced to work IN your business instead of ON your business. With it, you’ve got a powerhouse of killer salespeople who are fully capable, confident closers that will produce for you year in and year out, so you can build your empire and make it last.

We’ve built the program. It’s proven, repeatable, and most importantly, effective. You can either invest a ton of time and energy with trial and error developing your own “recipe,” or you can take our “box of cake mix” and just add salesmen.

Want to learn more about what we’ve put together to make training salespeople efficient, effective, and ultimately, a piece of cake? We’d love to fill you in. I’d like to invite you to a free, 30-minute 1-on-1 strategy session call with me personally to talk about your business and what you’d like to achieve this year. You’ve got nothing to lose and literally thousands to gain. Click here to schedule a few minutes to chat.

Talk soon,

Becca Switzer