Harmony of Hustle
Jump into the World of Justin Shoemaker aka "The Waterboy" . From Business, to music, this is the inside look of the world of the hyper-driven and their Harmony of Hustle.
Harmony of Hustle
Episode #19: Hunter Ballew
Hunter Ballew is the CEO of Roofing.com, ROOFCON, REVOLT and is a partner in REPCARD. He is a serial entrepreneur who has helped numerous companies grow and reach their goals.
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you can pay them a commission, hire those people and then if they make you money, then they get paid. And then, as you build up that cashflow, then you hire the people that don't make you money the office staff, the operations manager but they save you time.
Speaker 2:All right, buddy.
Speaker 1:Well, welcome Welcome to the show man. Yeah, Thanks for joining.
Speaker 2:Obviously, I'm super impressed by you. You're, uh, you, you. You're in the military as well, correct? I was yeah, what branch are you in?
Speaker 1:Marine Corps.
Speaker 2:Okay yeah, we picked you guys up and dropped you off a lot Nice, we're your taxi drivers, man. I was in the Navy for 10 and a half years. Okay yeah, that's awesome man. So why don't you start off kind of tell everybody you know a little brief thing about who you are, what you do, and then I want to dive right in and really dissect kind of stuff that you've done, because it's very impressive people that all the time.
Speaker 1:Yeah, guy that grew up here in south carolina, the mountains of south carolina, I'm real close to north carolina lawn. I'm uh north of greenville, south carolina, so I always loved it here, never wanted to move to a big city. In fact, I hate how much greenville's growing. I enjoy my space.
Speaker 1:I enjoy my land. We got some land up here in the mountains, um. So, yeah, I just enjoy being out here in the country, man, and and doing my thing, and I travel and get to see cool places, but come back home and live life here and so, yeah, I was going through school, was not much of a school person, like I wasn't a great student. I didn't love the thing. So I knew that I didn't want to go to college and so that's what led me to the Marine Corps. From there, I went to the fire department full-time as a firefighter EMT for five years before finally leaving to do the business thing full-time Along the way.
Speaker 1:You know, got married to a chick I met at the gas station about a mile from here oh, my goodness, pump 13. I was at pump four. We've been together 13 years now and in June it'll be 13 years. We have a little boy that's five biological son, and then we adopted a little girl in September of 2022. So that's been a ton of fun. Man, I'm a big advocate. Try to always raise awareness for adoption, yeah, since I was like a kid that I wanted to adopt. So we love getting to do life with those two babies and travel and have a lot of fun. And that's what life looks like for me now. Man is juggling that, juggling the businesses. We have the annual conference we do every year. We do a bunch of retreats every year. I still have the roofing and construction company. I have an app called RepCard that I'm a partner in, and some other things roofingcom, our partner program, growth partnerships several things.
Speaker 2:No, it's sick dude. And how long were you in the Marine Corps? For Six years, yeah, so good amount of time. How do you think that translated? Because I always feel like I did 10 and a half years and at the time I felt like I wasted a lot of time, because you see all these guys who are killing it in business. But I feel like and just, we'll go over your accomplishments a little bit more. But I do feel like once you get out even though you might have given a ton of time back, when you come into the workforce or the entrepreneurial space, I feel like we get a separate gear that other people that just jump right into it don't have. Did you see some of that when you got into it and kind of, how did that manifest itself in your businesses?
Speaker 1:I think you learn so many things. You know being in it and also, like I credit a lot of my success to the fire departments. I was, I was a reserve in the Marine Corps and I did the fire department full-time. I'm only 33. So I kind of did those at the same time and so for me, like the, the fire department, I feel like, is where I learned so much and just how to handle pressure and like you're being an entrepreneur is is crazy. You can mount up it at times and you know when you not to say that it doesn't happen, because it does happen to me and I've had some really hard seasons in life, um, in business. But when you go out there and you run calls and you hold people as they take their life breath and you tell their wife that like they ain't coming back, this is it and you have to deal with that.
Speaker 2:Right.
Speaker 1:Using a hundred grand on a business isn't that big of a deal. You'll figure it out. I'm still here. I've lost a million dollars. I tell people all the time in 2022,. We lost a million dollars on one event. Like it sucked was like the worst seasons of my life, but we're still here. We figured it out. We grew the next year and overcame it.
Speaker 2:is that your main revenue stream right now is the events or is it through rep card and the roofingcom, which I really want to get into that?
Speaker 1:yeah, so we have, uh, cornerstone construction is the the roofing company. So so we do that in the Southeast, mainly in South Carolina, georgia, a little bit in North Carolina and then, yeah, like I call it, the R3 families is kind of next to my bigger focus, which is roofingcom, roofcon, the conference, and then Revolt does all the retreats and we have the mastermind for business owners and most of those business owners are contractors, whether that's roofers or plumbers, interior remodeling, painting, pest control, whatever. And I put a lot of focus on those With, like RepCard, my partner in that is the full-time go-getter. He does everything. I'm kind of passive in that. It's just like a phone call here and there, the sound and board. And then some other things like our growth partnership, where we partner with roofing contractors to help them grow their company. It's kind of the same thing. It's like a coaching gig where I help them grow and help them avoid the pitfalls that I've seen over the years.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I mean like, so you know, going on roofingcom. It kind of seemed reminiscent of like a home advisor. Would you? Would you kind of agree with that, like similar? Like you, you kind of plug in and you get leads, but specifically titled to roofing.
Speaker 1:yeah, we're working on some stuff on the back end that's not launched yet but, yeah, similar the website. If you go to it very basic homeowner base and pop in your information, we have partners around the country that just pay to be partners and we vet them, so it's not like anyone can sign up there's certain criteria that you have to hit, and then we send those leads to those partners.
Speaker 2:Did you do that? Because I know, especially in my industry with water treatment, home service in general I've done really well in home advisor, but I know a lot of different SKUs that don't. Do you think that was a response to that for roofing of? Like hey, lead flow isn't that? Isn't that good. Like we can, we can really attack it better. Was that? Was that?
Speaker 1:kind of the thought process Can't stand like home advisor and thumbtack and Angie's list Pretty common. It basically anything to do with marketing. Roofers hate.
Speaker 2:So yeah, that's it. That's that's interesting. So what do you think like is the pitfall withAdvisor compared to what Roofingcom has been able to do, because I've watched it and it seems like a really amazing service for, obviously, roofing. But I'm curious what we could learn also, or Uri and me could learn, on how you generate lead flow. What is your target from leads? Are you doing ads? What's that process look like behind the scenes?
Speaker 1:Yeah, I think some of the big box companies. It is tough for them because they're that, they're like this big box and you got to fit into their box and they're sending leads out to multiple contractors and not to knock on contractors, because I love contractors and that's my entire business model but most contractors aren't going to put a system, they're not going to put a process in place of how to follow up with those leads and so, like you pay for the lead and then you don't follow up with them quickly, or you don't have a process on how to educate the homeowner or how to show that you're credible. Like back in the day when I was using some of those services, we had a dialed in process of like hey, we're going to submit that we want the lead. As soon as we get the information, I'm sending them videos of our company, I'm sending them screenshots of reviews. Like it was dialed in so immediately. They saw the credibility that we had in the marketplace compared to others.
Speaker 1:Uh, I try to set the appointment immediately, but the problem with a lot of contractors is they take forever to get back to people, like it's. You know it sounds extreme, but for my team I'm you better get back to people within five minutes Worst case. I want it to be sub two minutes a minute, but five minutes Worst case. We'll move on, like if you don't give them a response, if you don't set the appointment, they're going to go get it somewhere else. There's plenty of people out there.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I mean it's. It's interesting Cause like when, when? But the actual company, the actual roofing and construction company, when did that start? Roofing company in 2017.
Speaker 2:Okay, so at this time, you're already competing with some big hitters in the space, me included. So I started my company last year in water treatment, so I'm obviously kind of the same boat, just a little early compared to you. A lot of competition, but I've been able to, with some strategic partners, establish myself as an emerging leader in the space. I'm curious how you went from starting don't have a dollar to your name, really, I'm sure you probably invested a lot of your savings into the business to then slowly getting that market dominance and then being able to get to where you're at now and then growing. What does that process look like and what are some of the things that you actually had to endure to get to where you're at now and then growing like? What does that process look like and what are some of the things that you actually had to endure to get to where you're at that people don't even realize they have to go through.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I wish I could say that I'm just some super smart guy and we just crushed it, but that's not the case at all, man, like. So, like 2016, I leave the fire department into 2015. It was December 22nd of 2015. So, basically, 2016, I start fresh with a business and I started marketing, helping some roofers, realized that it was a pretty good industry. So I started really just as a case study and launched it in May of 2017. That first year, you know, I hired a couple of people that knew the roofing game One guy specifically originally to help me grow because I knew nothing about roofing. And that first year, you know, we did like a million bucks year, you know, we did like a million bucks. Second year, we did like 2 million bucks. I wasn't really involved, it was just supposed to be a case study. Yeah, I just continued doing the marketing and consulting for other people through 2018 and I was helping other people grow significantly and I was like, alright, I should take this a little bit more seriously.
Speaker 1:So 2019 is when I started getting a little bit more serious, hired a sales staff we did like 5 million that year and then grew into eight figures and have kept growing, and some of that's included. Well, for one, we sold the company in 2021. Then we bought the company back about 18 months later, acquired another company to add to the portfolio. So, yeah, there's all kind of stuff on the back end. People don't see. They just see this growth and like, oh, cornerstone's this household name and there's 30 yellow trucks driving around and no, it's not easy, man, it's. It's plenty of months where we're strapped and we're figuring it out in the early years to get to this point and people just don't see that.
Speaker 2:But that's did you did you sub out at the beginning? Did you sub out your installs and then just generate? Leads and sub out, you still sub yeah.
Speaker 1:I mean almost every roofer in the industry subs yeah.
Speaker 2:Really, yeah, similar to solar. It seems like some of the sales arms. It's better, it makes more sense to sub it out, especially if you can get a good relationship. I know for me with water treatment. That's the worst thing ever. You have to have an in-house plumber, otherwise the costs, our margins, just get destroyed. And then, unfortunately, unless you're moving massive, massive volume, like a hundred deals a month, then these big, big plumbers don't really care about you. But then also they're still taking a massive proportion of that. So if you can do a hundred a month it's better to just bring it in house. But obviously for roofing, bigger projects, bigger sales prices, what, how much do you have to like margin wise? Well, how much do you have to give out to these, these subs, to?
Speaker 1:the subs. Well, back in the day it used to be like 21% of the revenue, roughly Cause I have like a profitability sheet that I break down. That's one of the things that I preach to all of our members. Inside of Revolt, our mastermind, I'm like look, I know you have the CRM, but I just I don't know, dude, I'm a spreadsheet guy, I'm a whiteboard guy. I like having that visibility. Yes, we track every single job in a spreadsheet in addition to the CRM, so we can see every single thing broken down per job. What was the percentage for subcontractor, what was the percentage for material, what was the commission percentage, what was the supplement percentage? And then at the end of the month we can see what the average was, and then that feeds into our gross profit.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and the other thing, like starting this business, what was like your? What did you have to put into it? Because I'm sure a lot of people are like, wow, this is so cool, good for you You're able to do this. And I think a lot of people misunderstand like the level of risk, like a lot of us take when we first started our company Cause I know for me I went, I had to go all in. I mean, obviously I worked for a different business doing, you know, did water treatment. Then I worked for a solar company. Um, save, save, save, save, saved. You know, had a, had a little nest egg, but I still had to use all that and sell my house just to get this thing going. What does that look like for your end? And like, if someone wants to start a business, like, what advice would you give them? And like, what can they? What did you have to do to even get your stuff?
Speaker 1:I had flipped a couple of properties. I bought and sold everything you can imagine man boats, cars, trailers, rock walls, all kinds of stuff to make extra money. And you know, I had like, when I left the fire department, like 60 grand cash and then I had a good bit of stuff left to sell. So I don't know what that added up to, um, but I whittled all that down and ended up like 22 000 on the debt on a credit card by the end of 2016. And that was not like doing stupid stuff at all. That was not like, hey, me and my wife are gonna go travel to work. No, it was like no, I'm investing in myself. I'm paying coaches and buying courses. I'm learning, learning, learning, sell systems, marketing strategies, coaches, everything I could think of.
Speaker 1:So that was a stressful time because you start to question yourself and their self-doubt. You left the fire department. Everyone was like questioning you when you left the fire department of hey, are you sure you should be doing this? You're going to be back here in a year and dah, dah, dah, dah, all these things. And so, yeah, man, it was an investment to myself. With that said, the actual business side of it, when you get into a business like that and you have subcontractors, it really didn't take a whole lot to start the business itself. You know, I threw up a website, but I was able to build it myself. I didn't have to pay someone because I had learned how to do that you know, I knew how to set up the Google my Business.
Speaker 1:I knew how to do some of those things and leverage Facebook groups to get leads and so as we started getting leads coming in, you know we're getting paid. I'm paying the guy that I hired a commission, so I didn't even have to hire a W-2 salary person originally it was a commission so you're able to start pretty fast and cheap and get rolling and I tell people that all the time, like in the contracting space, we're super blessed because you can hire 1099 folks Exactly. I always suggest man like, go hire the people that don't cost you anything unless they make you something. If you can pay them a commission, hire those people and if they make you money, then they get paid. And then, as you build up that cash flow, then you hire the people that don't make you money the office staff, the operations manager.
Speaker 2:But they save you time. They save you time, but they can also give you better opportunities. And also, if you have a good, especially for operations I learned this from the solar company that I used to work for. They had no operations and we shot that company up from 600K to 25 million in 11 months. And when you do that kind of growth in a short amount of time and you don't have operations dialed in, you lose so much money, you lose so much profitability because there's stuff that you have to be tracking.
Speaker 2:You need systems in place. Like you mentioned, one of the biggest things is just having a cadence to reach back out to clients, and I think that's especially for our space. It's having that customer trust and having those touch points every week, every couple of days of like every day they're getting a newsletter, they're getting a text, they're getting something, because sometimes people, when they enter your funnel, they're just not even ready, especially with HomeAdvisor I'll use that as the best example is, sometimes they go in there just like, totally trying to get information, and they won't even respond to you for like three days after, which is obviously super, super fricking frustrating. You know what I mean, but that's super good.
Speaker 1:So like obviously um you can hire VA to make these touches for you. Like you can have automation, usually for free if you have a CRM. But if you don't want it to be that and you want it to be more dynamic in that conversation, you can hire a VA, like I just hired a new VA for one of our companies, paying them seven bucks an hour from the Philippines Great English dude. Like you get on the phone you would never think they're from the Philippines and she's already crushing it for us. She does three main. She tracks all the leads for us so we can attribute revenue to each lead or lack of revenue so we can see what our, our CAC is. Yeah, average for the month.
Speaker 1:She does uh customer care. So, like, after a customer signs with us, she's reaching out, making sure that they're good, they're happy, they felt heard, if they have any concerns or questions, because sometimes you lose people in between when you're waiting to get done, and then she does uh and after that, like customer care all the way through the end of the project. She's getting the review. So instead of like, hey, leave us a review here. Well, if they're not happy, we don't want them to leave a review, which is far between, but still that one step matters. So she's making sure they're happy, and if they're happy, then asking for a review, and then lastly, lastly, re-engagement of old leads.
Speaker 2:So she'll go ahead the old leads to re-engage them and try to get work out of it so for her it gets, you know, at seven bucks an hour.
Speaker 1:We pay her like a thousand bucks a month, right, if she gets one old job to convert every four months, five months for herself, yeah yeah, I, I mean that's a thing, especially if you can find good ones.
Speaker 2:I know I used, I tried, I tested out. I feel like smart hire VAs is what it was called. They're pretty good but unfortunately, like we had some issues with the VA process. So but it's like anything, right If you find the right ones and they're good, Woodall's C4 Solutions.
Speaker 1:He manages them for you. So what he does is he'll find them for five or six bucks and then he'll charge seven or eight bucks and he makes one or two dollars an hour off of them. But he manages them for you.
Speaker 2:Well, there you go. Everyone listen to the podcast. You just got the gold right there. Go reach out to C4 Solutions. Man, I wish.
Speaker 1:I had an affiliate link but I don't Just look up my buddy, tyler Woodall. If you need any, you can DM me after the show and.
Speaker 2:I'll send them to you. You might need to just hit him up Like listen, bro, I'm about to get you a ton of referrals. I need that affiliate link right now. I think, with our industry too. One thing that people neglect, too, is just like the organic relationships and knowing, like, especially, home service, like the referral game and the way that all of us can collaborate and help each other is super impressive. How did you generate leads right off the bat when you first got in.
Speaker 1:I actually have a process called seven figure handshakes where it's just again really simple spreadsheet where a new rep can come in, and there's like 41 different industries trades, home inspector, real estate agent, insurer, agent, pest control, plumber. Dah, dah, dah, dah, dah. All these different people.
Speaker 2:And then I say go find them.
Speaker 1:All you got to do to find them is you literally go to your local Facebook group and you search home inspector and there's going to be 400 posts where someone has said, hey, who's a good home inspector? And then on that post there's going to be 40 comments of all the home inspectors. You reach out to one and you try to be strategic. Take your time, be strategic. You could have a VA do this too for your reps. But be strategic and find the people that have the biggest following. So I'd go to them and say, hey, we do a bi-monthly meeting at our headquarters. We pay for Chick-fil-A, you get to come in have breakfast, we sponsor it and we just talk and we refer each other business.
Speaker 1:And so you know, some of our best reps are not the ones that knock doors, they're the one that build relationships and they have that stable of referrals coming in. And you know how that works, man, like if you go knock doors or you get cold leads, you know you might close 10, 20 percent of the contacts that you're getting. I'm not talking about like actual opportunities of the contact, but referrals, just referrals. You're going to close like 50% of. You're going to close like 70 or 80 of the actual opportunities because they're so hot.
Speaker 2:Yep, I think that's like the one thing in a business that if you had like, if you had limited resources and limited things to focus on, having some sort of referral cadence is one of the biggest ones because it's the only thing that can compound. And if you can build your business around getting referrals, then you're like, let's say you're talking about your CAC value right, like, let's say your cost requires like 800 bucks, which, and let's say you have a good enough, like without referrals. Let's say you have a good enough like cold inbound and you have your own outsourcing and big box relationships to get enough leads in. And let's say you're getting 50 installs a month off that with an $800 CAC, that could be great and you can still be profitable and build a big business. But if you can turn on the faucet for those referrals, then technically that CAC, especially if you're like because for us, the way we do it is, we'll actually help pay down the system if they get a certain number of people to buy a system. So each person it compounds for us.
Speaker 2:So I tell all my reps every deal you sell you should get three deals out of no matter what. And if you can get one deal for three and let's say my CAC is 500, then literally you divide that CAC by three. Now your CAC is less than 100 because those are all free, and then out of those three you do that over and over again. So every deal gets you three, those three can get you three more, and then you actually get to compound and as a sales rep that's how you become a million-dollar salesperson is by that compounding. And then if you have all your reps doing that as a business without really doing much more effort and not have to put more money into marketing, you now go from. That's the problem.
Speaker 1:Most reps don't realize that it is less effort to build a relationship. What they see is it's so far out that I have to build this relationship and hope that a lead comes one day. What they don't realize is if you build 10 relationships, one of them is going to refer you for the next 30 days.
Speaker 2:They don't really go bang doors or go to a network meeting, whatever and they would really go bang doors or go to a network meeting, whatever, and try to get the lead right then instead of build a relationship, which is super frustrating. But what I found is and maybe you can touch on this too but one thing that I've tried to do is show them how this works. No-transcript, give them to my rep. I say, listen, I just got eight referrals, watch how this works. And then I let them see me do it. And then like these are my leads now, now go do it yourself.
Speaker 2:Right, and I do that because I have found, um, whenever you give reps stuff without any work for it, it definitely entitles the rep, and so you want to show them, give them the skills and like like this is how you do it, and then let them do it. And I think a lot of it's a belief system, like reps got to believe, especially when you hire them on, like you sell them a vision, but they got to believe in themselves. Right, a rep of belief is a rep that'll make you money.
Speaker 1:Yeah, no doubt, no doubt.
Speaker 2:So that's great man. What would you? Uh, what do you say? Your biggest hurdle?
Speaker 1:has been in your entire growth, something that you wish. If you go back right now and like, yo, bro, this is not what you expected, what was that? What's the one that smacked you in the face like fuck, yeah, yeah, is it okay to share, like a a uh, scenario that was hard to overcome? Is that?
Speaker 2:yeah, whatever you want.
Speaker 1:We are open format here, man, whatever you want so I sold the company cornerstone in 2021, late 2020. I got interested in the whole acquisition game. Like, hey, how do I build this thing to sell? We weren't ready yet. I didn't feel like we were ready yet, but I wanted to learn the game.
Speaker 1:And so we rolled into 2021 and one of the masterminds that I joined, one of those coaches, reaches out. He's like, hey, man, I got these people, they want to acquire a company, they're interested in you. I, I got these people. They want to acquire a company, they're interested in you. I've told them all about you, I've told them about your company. I'm like, dude, we're not ready. Like our margin is super low. We had invested a ton of money in 2020 into growing into other markets and we knew like we were doing it with a purpose. But our market was like literally single digit net because we were opening all these others. And so he's like, well, dude, you should at least meet with them. You know you could at least learn something from the conversation. I'm like, that's right. Yeah, wow, I meet him.
Speaker 1:So I fly out to San Diego. I meet this dude. He's the CEO of a company. It's actually a publicly traded company and he throws some numbers around after I show him everything we have built out, all these systems, processes and a lot of stuff that they didn't have, like some new age, more modern stuff that they could implement into all the other acquisitions they had, and so it was big value for them. And when he was throwing around those numbers, I was like, okay, you know, we might actually play ball here if you're talking about that. And so I didn't even make it home, dude.
Speaker 1:I flew home the next day and I landed in charlotte to come back to greenville, and by the time I landed in charlotte he had an offer in my in my inbox, and so, oh wow, it worked out a deal. It didn't take long. I ended up selling it. It was uh 48 million dollars total, with cash and shares, and I got, you know, some of it in shares, some of the cash there was. There was uh like kickers for if I brought other people into the company. There was a make whole provision so that at one year I'd be made whole if the stock fell, and so there's all these things to protect me felt good. I brought a company in within 30 days. I went out and found another acquisition within 90 days. They offered me to take over as CEO of the entire thing.
Speaker 1:There were some like issues. I felt like as I got into the business that I was a little bit afraid of some liability, didn't know if things were being done quite the right way because it's a public company and reporting and just a lot of legal stuff. I'm not the guy man. I don't know if this is appropriate to say on the show, but this is just who I am man. It's like if I want to walk outside my office here and take a piss, I want someone flipping out on the internet because I decided to take a piss in the grass, yeah, so you know, I I decided not to do it and it went downhill from there. The ceo kind of lost it on me and to me and oh no yeah we got like a big nasty lawsuit.
Speaker 1:It went great. You know, it was frustrating because, um, they said a lot of nasty, untrue, completely untrue things about me, which, in a way, it was funny, because many of the things that they said about me were very easy to disprove. It was like if you're a dude on the internet and you see this and then you look at the allegations, you can go research the things and just as one example was like Hunter sold us this company and they weren't even licensed, and it's like, okay, we'll just go to South Carolina, lor. Yeah, look up the license for for corner to LOR, look up the license for Cornerstone Construction and see what date we were licensed. Was it before or after the acquisition? Obviously, it was 2017 whenever we got into business, right. So there was things like that that were easy, but I had a lot of people, man, a lot of people turn their back on me in that time and it was easily the hardest time of my life easily, without a doubt and there were so many nights. I just lay in bed freaking, my hair thinning.
Speaker 1:And it was a tough time, man, but we went through that and I found out who my real friends were and it didn't take long. We were like four months in and to this day I still feel confident that they thought I was just going to bend over and take it and say like, oh yeah, here's all your shares back. And I was like no, like I will defend my honor and my name, we will go all the way and I'll spend every penny I have fighting you, whatever. And so, yeah, like four months in, it didn't take long at all. They came back with a settlement offer. I said no, they came back with a better settlement offer where it was like you get to keep all the cash we gave you. You get to keep all the cash we gave you. You get to keep eight million in shares and you can have company back. But we need, out of this and the reason they did that was because of that make whole provision.
Speaker 1:So at one year the stock had dropped significantly, so they owed me another 127 million shares, collectively 127 million shares. So, um, yeah, man, it worked out great. I found out who my friends were, but it took me a while, dude it. It created a lot of self doubt, and then that led right into that year where I lost all that money on Ruthcon. And so you can start the question, you know, am I as good as I think I am? Am I a business owner? Am I a good leader? Like I'm not doing real good? So that was a tough.
Speaker 2:I want to, I'm going to go deep on this. But you said I don't feel very good and if you don't want to answer this I don't blame you. But rough numbers, cash in hand after everything. Like how much did you actually before all the lawsuits? Like how much did you make? Like because I know you know when you sell things it's not all up front. But like where did your net worth go to after selling?
Speaker 1:If you don't mind me asking there's a reason I'm going to go into this. No, I don't mind sharing anything. It's just really complicated and I'm not saying that to defer. It's complicated because all the other businesses and stuff I mean. What I can say is quick math is this Total value? I got $48 million when I sold the company. When I got the company back, I kept roughly 12 million of the 48.
Speaker 2:The way the deal was structured is I essentially bought the company back for three quarters of what I had been paid, but before you even sold the company, what was the percent gain of your net worth, roughly before you even did all this, from starting the venture to selling? What would you say? That percent gain was Dude. I have no clue. That was four years ago.
Speaker 1:I'm assuming it was a lot. I'm assuming, right, yeah, I mean I probably at least doubled my net worth and then it's grown from there, you know. So, yeah, and the company's in an even better spot now. What happened is I essentially got to loan the company for 18 months and get paid that money. Now I did give. Of those 8 million shares that I kept, I gave like 5 million to my team because I made that promise. That's why I turned down. The first settlement offer is to give all the shares back and just keep the cash and get the company back. And I said no because I had already written out a plan to give all of my employees that had been a part of the team as we grew at shares. And so I negotiated the shares to be able to give them those 5 million, and they were split up based off of seniority and all the different things.
Speaker 2:So, yeah, yeah I just think it's interesting because, like financially, if you were just like you know, a guy working a nine-to-five job, you look at these, these situations, you're like, oh you know, tough must be so tough, right. But people I don't think understand a lot of times, like with this business, is it doesn't matter financially what levels you really hit. Every level comes with new freaking demons you have to fight and every step of the way you question and you're like dude, why am I doing this? Is it even worth it? Am I as good as I am? And that self-doubt and that fear is so real. And every time you feel like you go past it, every new opportunity brings that all over again.
Speaker 2:Speaking anecdotally, on my scale, I put probably 80K into this thing and it's been grind, grind, grind, grind.
Speaker 2:In the first year we did half a mil and then we got a Home Depot relationship which at that point the business had finally gotten to the point where I was like, oh, I'm making money, I got money coming into the bank account, I can finally pay myself. But then Home Depot was like hey, by the way, we're going to give you six stores, which is great for the business. But then I had to shell out like $25,000. So now I'm back to zero again and like, yeah, it'll probably work out, but also couldn't work out if we don't close deals. It's like this revolving thing, in every level you go to that continues to happen and I think people like, look at that and they're like, oh, tough for you, but like that shit's real, like we're still, you're still a human and the problem is like that's those stressors become more and more stressful and you know, I think that's why being in business and starting a company is like the fastest way to grow as a person.
Speaker 1:Justin, I can tell you this, man, and for anybody listening, you probably could relate and you probably should use this and tell yourself this and write this down. I have to tell myself often, hunter, you prayed for these problems. You prayed for these problems. I tell myself that all the time because it's true, man Like, if you, if you took me 10 years ago, I'm stepping. I'm 33 now. This is 2024. I left the fire department in 2025. So I'm coming up on nine years and this year will be nine years. So nine years ago you take me, I'm still at the fire department. You say, hey, hunter, you could be in nine years running these companies doing tens of millions of dollars, making millions of dollars a year, impacting thousands of lives, speaking on stages, doing podcasts like this with cool people right broken to be a best seller. Travel the world with your family. Take your son on a trip here and there. Dude, I freaking be on a street corner if you told me I'd do anything. I'd do anything right.
Speaker 1:Like you told me I could have this life, Tell me what to do. And so I have to remind myself how freaking grateful I should be and I am, you know, most days. But there's those days I'm not going to lie there's those days I start questioning, you know, am I good enough to do this, and should I have all this?
Speaker 2:And so yeah, yeah, it's interesting, man. I mean it's just, you know, you pray, you get that hedonic. Adoption is probably the craziest thing in the world, because you get used to the things that you want. That's why, like a lot of times, people who get a lot of material success get very depressed because that billion dollar house becomes a house, that Lamborghini just becomes another car after a while and it's like it's just natural. That's how our brains operate. You can't fix the psychology of it. So I think that's why having a purpose is so important.
Speaker 2:But you know, social media fucks it up for everybody because it looks so sexy, like, especially like. If I go to your page I'm going to see Instagram oh, this guy's speaking on stages Boom, company, boom, nice car, oh, private jets, oh dry, oh, you know. Oh, look, he's hanging out with the idols. Like you know, you're in these spheres of these like business people that you know other people look up to, so it all looks awesome, but that's just not how it is. I mean, I'd say maybe it's switch for you, but I'd say, especially in business entrepreneurship, it's 80. Getting punched in the nuts, it's 20.
Speaker 2:You know, having some caviar and champagne, and it's to me, I think that's the best part about it is it should be so hard, it should be difficult. But I think the reason why so many businesses fail is people get into it because they just think it's the glamour. And then when it gets super hard and then it's not hard for a month, not hard for four months, it's not hard for a year, it's not hard for three years you don't even fathom that time horizon. They think it should happen tomorrow and it feels so wrong when it's not like that hardness feels so wrong. But it's how it's supposed to be, you know we started.
Speaker 1:we started roof con in 2019, 39 people there, 10 vendors. Yeah, next year. You know, I didn't even know that I wanted to do it again, cause I was embarrassed that only 39 people showed up, like we had as many speaker and vendors there's as actual attendees and half freaking attendees. If you look at the picture of my team cornerstone yeah, if you look at, that's awesome. All the guys on the right side are my team and my gf rep and like, yeah, next year during covid we had 881 came. So a huge jump, because everyone that was at that first one talked about how great it was and how it was about personal development, leadership development, not just money. 50 vendors at the next one Kept growing to. Last year we finally broke through at 5,000. Oh, wow, we had 250 vendors two years ago. It was the biggest vendor year.
Speaker 2:Nice.
Speaker 1:But we still never made money on the event. Dude, right, people see the event. You have no clue how many people will message me about the event, how it's changed their life and all the things, and that's great and that's why we do the event. But I don't want to keep losing money on the event. You don't know how often I'm like God, dude, at what point is enough enough? And so, like this year with my team, the message has been make a dollar.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I don't care. Like I want to make half a million dollars and pay off debt from previous years in that business. Yeah, make a dollar this year, year six, we are going to be profitable or whatever. That is the goal, yeah. And so I've been kind of message, being kind of public with that message, to the point where it's almost like I don't know if you've heard of like build in public. Yeah, have you heard of that? Yeah, to the point where, like, I want vendors to know that, dude, I won't freaking, you know our attendees to know that I'm not ashamed of it. Man, it's a hard game and people think that they come to the event. What?
Speaker 1:happens, man is like you go to my website for roofcon and you see that it's 897 and you see there's 5 000 people there and you say we made five million dollars. No, that's not how it works. I tell those tickets came from revolt members and I tell those tickets were guests and speakers and some of those tickets came from vendors and a ton of those people were free expos and yada yada. No, that's not works. We lose money. It costs so much money to bring in a Tim Tebow, to bring in a John Maxwell to you.
Speaker 1:Wouldn't believe how often I'm on a podcast and someone's like how'd you get Tim Tebow? And I'm like 75 grand, we're not boys. I didn't just call him and say hey, man, will you speak at my house? I wish that's how it worked. Build a relationship? Yeah, um. The venue to rent a venue like orange county convention center or energy oh yeah, like it cost a ton our av in that that year 2022, our av alone, dude, to set up the stage and the lights and the mics and all that was eight hundred thousand dollars yeah, like it's, it's most.
Speaker 2:most these events are loss leaders. Until you get to a scale where you know you get speakers that come just for the exposure, you can cut costs on certain things. You have people that want to speak at a lower rate, but, yeah, the bigger you go especially I mean Grant Cardone talked about it a lot where a lot of his 10X conferences were massive he loses money on them. I will say, though, if it makes you feel better and I think I would, if if you haven't looked at this, which you probably have, is, I do think, even though you might lose money monetarily on a lot of these events, I don't.
Speaker 1:I think the asset you really are building, though, is that audience and you're building people to join from revolt and roofing dot com, and like we set them up, as a VIP and title sponsor. I'm not saying they're not, but I know that the event itself loses money.
Speaker 2:Yeah for sure. But that legacy that you build, I think is what is impactful, because every year you grow. I know who you are. We never talked really until we reached out on Facebook, which, if I could tell anything to anybody and what you're doing for my small podcasting group is amazing is I think people need to have an invest in me budget and go to events and go to like pay money to go to masterminds, pay money to go to courses, because you'll meet people and if you're a good person, you network the right way.
Speaker 2:What I have found is people who are ultra successful, right, um, and I think we you know circle that I met you through is Victor and the apex guys and and things like that. If you bring value to these people, they want to help you out. I've found hyper-successful people want to help you grow and if you're hungry and you're in these circles, you'll meet more people. And by doing things like this and then, every now and again, you'll see a rare opportunity where someone like you or Victor or Elliot or the Cardones or whoever these people will post things where it's like hey, I'm trying to reach X number of people and if you're on it, you can get and start building relationships, and at that point it's all just about how much value can can you provide that person. And a lot of times it is in.
Speaker 2:You know, when you host an event. It could be as simple as hey, dude, I'm coming to the event, I'm buying a ticket just supporting the event, and if you can't afford an event yet, hey, what can I do to share this, what can I do to promote this For Victor's stuff? I was like, dude, I was going to go, but with the Home Depot thing it ruined it. I was like, dude, send me all your stuff, I'm just going to run ads for you, and that's, I think, a big thing that people forget is they feel that they don't need to invest money or they shouldn't invest their time to build relations.
Speaker 1:But, like it's, if you don't do that, it's just a one way street and well, I have our setup where you there's an expo only so like the value is in the community, not speakers the values and the come for free. Come to the expo, just hang out and meet people. And then I always offer every that I've done RoofCon or any event. I say if you truly cannot afford to come, you just can't afford it. You can come for free on me one year.
Speaker 1:But, next year you better have implemented the stuff and learned and made money. Don't ask for another free ticket. I'll give you one, but you got to earn it the next year. So we do that and just try to give back. Man, and we've seen some cool stuff, dude. We've seen some cool stuff, dude We've seen. Uh, one of my favorite stories is a dude named Josh Keith. We let him come for free one year. Next year he came back and bought multiple platinum tickets. He joined our mind he 10 X does business like. So cool to see what started with free. And then he continued to grow.
Speaker 2:So let's let's talk about that real quick. So if you have a roofing company right now, right, You're new, you have, maybe you're you've been in business for four or five years. It's a competitive market space because there's a lot of money in it. What have you seen has differentiated the roofing companies? What makes a company successful? What do they have to do? What is that differentiator?
Speaker 1:roofing company and again, we don't just work with roofing companies. In fact, roofcon alone is not just for roofers. It's more of a leadership development conference than anything but specific to your question. There's insurance and there's retail, there's commercial and there's residential, there's metal there's shingles, we'll make it easy.
Speaker 2:I'm a residential roofer right, because I know there's a lot of them out there. I'm a residential roofer easy, I'm a residential roofer right, cause I know there's a lot of them out there. I'm a residential roofer Uh, I got a subcontractor. You know I'm getting in leads. I want to. I want to become the next. What you made right. I want to be the next big thing in my area. But I got 15 other competitors out here doing the same thing I'm doing. What would you tell that person? Like? What would you tell them? Like, is there step number one, step number two?
Speaker 1:do these things to go A couple of first steps are getting super clear on your vision for what you want your company to be, what your mission is like, mission statement, what your core values are. Some of that stuff is not sexy. It doesn't sound sexy, but it matters. And why it matters is what I'm going to say next, which is when it comes to recruiting like. You got these. You just you just said it. You got 15 other guys out there. You got to be able to beat them in the interview.
Speaker 1:So one thing I tell owners all the time is quit selling roofs and start selling people. You got to quit selling the product. There's too many roofers out there that are still out in the field selling the product. Quit selling that, start selling people on the dream and the reality that they can change their life by being a part of your company. So one of the first things I did when we started grow cornerstone was six figurefigure blueprint, creating this training platform where a sales rep could come in and earn six figures by being a part of the team, and so I teach people how to set that up.
Speaker 1:So, like, once you have your core values and your mission statement, the vision for your company. When I say vision like I mean actual vision. Like, do you want two markets where you're selling a thousand roofs a year? Do you want to do X amount of revenue? Like, what is your vision? Where on do you want to be? Make it clear, have a map. When I used to do the recruiting in this chair, in this office, I would literally have a map that I would show the team that this is what we're going to execute on over the next 10 years so they can see it and want to be a part of that journey. And so then I'm talking about the values and the mission statement and then I talk about our common mission, which for us is the Revolt Foundation. So we give money back to the Revolt Foundation, so we're investing back into the community, and for us, specifically, it's typically underprivileged kids. We just had one the other day, that this week earlier we heard about a family that had their house burned down.
Speaker 1:So it's like oh wow, there's these people on Facebook. They need clothes for their kids, they need food, they need blankets, they need yada, yada, all these things. And so for that it was like here's the list of everything, let's go help them do this and get this. And so when the team sees that they know that you're not just about you and about filling your pocketbook or your wallet and I think that's so important, man that they see that you have a bigger vision than just yourself. That vision includes them so they can help hit their goals, but also that common mission that has nothing to do with me or myself making money. It's about someone else and helping them. So from there, man, then it's building out a recruiting funnel to automate the process to disqualify people. There's a couple of videos we put on there. The first video is about the actual job. The second video is about the company. We have an application, we have them do a personality test. There's all these different steps we do to disqualify people so they don't waste your time in an interview, and then moving into the six-figure blueprint.
Speaker 1:So you're building out a training inside of Teachable or something like that. It costs you 100 bucks a month, yeah, and it's welcome. Section of basics to roofing or whatever your product is, solar pest control, it could be whatever the crm, it could be the sales process, marketing, legion techniques. There's so many different things that you could put in here. So when a rep comes in, you handle the login, they log in and they go through it. Because I'm not going to take away the value of in the field training. You can't replace that. They need that skill. But you can do like 80%, 90% on the computer. They can learn a lot of that stuff. Like there's never a reason for a rep to walk up to me and say, hey man, I don't know how to do this in the CRM. Nope, you're going to watch the training and you're going to know it. And if someone comes up to me and ask me, I'm going to tell them to go watch six-figure blueprint.
Speaker 2:That's awesome. And I think what you touched on is why I think these uh, it's so hard for people to grasp how to grow a business. Because you just said you know you got to just your vision, the whole vision. And I think a lot of people don't have vision and I think that's probably why they struggle, because they wanted to say, if I just go and knock enough doors or I just do this, that's what will make me successful. But a lot of times it's these intangibles that you're talking about. You actually have to have this. You got to get people excited to want to do this thing and be around you and be in your ecosystem, otherwise you don't go anywhere. And I think that's what and maybe I'm wrong, but I think that's probably what separates the best from the rest. And I think that's why I will build a billion dollar business, because I told everyone in my reps I said listen, you're coming in at the start of this. If you stick with me, I'm going to build a billion dollar thing. So if that sounds enticing to you, let's fucking go.
Speaker 2:And because of my background, I have a very high intense energy on how I operate things. I'm very much like listen, we're here to fucking kill. We're still team six of the freaking water treatment space. We kill everybody. If we're not there to slaughter, then we're dying. That's all I. I love it, man. Yeah man, it's a lot of fun. I do think you probably have that energy, without even realizing it, to get people fired up man. I do think you probably have that energy, without even realizing it, to get people fired up man. So that's awesome, man. Question if people were to book an hour with you like one-on-one and you help to grow the business, what would that be worth?
Speaker 1:What would you charge someone to do that? So I have my rep card set up for people to get to and I think I only have a 30 consulting call set up, and it's 500 bucks.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:Yeah, 30 minute consulting call. If they go to my rep card, repcardcom slash Hunter, it's 500 bucks. I do legacy days I call them legacy days where people come in for a half day. I have a cabin here in the mountain.
Speaker 1:They get to stay at with their, with their spouse, um, and I do that for 10 K. Usually, you know, if someone hit me up from the shot, I would do 5 K. But, um, there's different options. You know one one of the cheapest ways to get involved, man, and to learn a lot of the stuff that I teach sometimes it's not going to be me teaching it, cause we have coaches. We have about 15 coaches, um is by going to one of the retreats, one of the report tax retreats.
Speaker 1:We do this for women, we do this for men and we do keep them separate. So it's either men or women at those retreats, because we talk about the personal stuff too and we want people to be able to open up. But those are the best. And then we have tons of free training, man, like if you go to berevoltcom slash booster it's a free test that I've created. It has scoring configurations in there, so, based off every answer, it's going to tell you where you're weakest in one of the four portions of your business and it'll give you free training in that area.
Speaker 2:So this podcast alone almost an hour that's like a thousand dollars of free info they could have just downloaded right there. Yeah, for sure that's awesome, man. So I know I want to be respectful of your time. I know we have a hard stop. Is there anything else you want to kind of just tell people, or you think that could help people, that you wish maybe you had heard, or you know? Tell people where to find you. The floor is yours, man.
Speaker 1:Yeah, man, yeah. So I just think that more people should lead with legacy in mind. You know, make decisions today, not for the payoff that you're going to see today, not for the result you're going to see next month or even this year, later this year, next year. Sometimes it might come decades from now or even when you're gone, and that's okay. To me, legacy is not about the amount of money you leave your kids or the land you leave your kids or your name being on a football stadium. That is not it. It's not about your Wikipedia page. It's about the impact you continue to make on people after you're gone. So when you start to think like that.
Speaker 1:it changes the way you operate because you're making decisions knowing that, hey, they might not ever see my face, shake my hand, know my name, but I'm going to make an impact on people Like this podcast is a great example. Dude, 50 years from now we're probably both going to be dead. This podcast is going to be live somewhere and maybe some kid watches it and it changes his life. So put in the actions today, knowing that it'll change someone. So lead with legacy in mind. Make decisions today that a hundred years from now can impact people. And yeah, man, I'm pretty easy. Like I'm not on all the socials and stuff, I'm on Facebook. If you want to hit me up, if you have questions, if you want that profit booster assessment or my eight figure checklist or any of that stuff, just message me on Facebook.
Speaker 2:No, that's awesome, man Legacy. You couldn't have said it better yourself. I could not have said it better myself. I should say that's amazing. I think any interview I've ever done or anyone I've spoken to at your level who's hyper successful, I want to say that's probably the most common thing they say is they don't go out for the money, they chase the legacy. So, Hunter man.