Good Neighbor Podcast: Fort Collins
Bringing together local businesses and neighbors of Fort Collins. Good Neighbor Podcast hosted by Nick George helps residents discover and connect with your local business owners in and around Fort Collins, Colorado.
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Good Neighbor Podcast: Fort Collins
Unveiling Industry Secrets: How Colorado Family Roofing is Changing the Game
Ever wondered why your "50-year roof" needed replacement after just 15 years? The answer might shock you. In this eye-opening conversation with Brian Barnes, founder of Colorado Family Roofing, we uncover the troubling truth about an industry built on high-pressure sales tactics and minimal education.
Brian's journey into roofing began with frustration. After nearly being swindled by an HVAC technician who recommended an expensive replacement when a simple $12 part fixed the problem, he recognized a pattern across home service industries. Determined to create something different, he built Colorado Family Roofing around a radical concept: educating customers before selling to them.
The most startling revelation? Approximately 95% of roofs are improperly ventilated, dramatically shortening their lifespan. "The manufacturer puts that 50-year stamp on it because they know most roofers are screwing up the ventilation system," Brian explains. This ventilation problem—which would take just 15 minutes of education to solve—is costing homeowners thousands in premature replacements. When manufacturers inspect failing roofs, they often cite improper ventilation as the reason for voiding warranties, leaving homeowners with the full replacement cost.
Brian also cautions against door-to-door salespeople who appear after storms. These representatives, often college students with minimal training about actual roof damage but extensive training in sales techniques, frequently misidentify normal wear as storm damage. This leads to unnecessary insurance claims that may be rejected upon professional inspection.
Whether you're currently considering a roof replacement or simply want to be prepared for the future, this episode provides the knowledge you need to make informed decisions. Check out Colorado Family Roofing's extensive learning library online, where Brian shares daily educational videos to help homeowners understand this significant investment. Remember: when it comes to protecting your home, knowledge truly is power.
This is the Good Neighbor Podcast, the place where local businesses and neighbors come together. Here's your host, Nick George.
Speaker 2:Welcome to the Good Neighbor Podcast. Are you in need of a roofing company here in Colorado that's local and comes highly rated? One might be closer than you think. Today I have the great pleasure of introducing your good neighbor, Brian Barnes, with Colorado Family Roofing. Brian, how's it going?
Speaker 3:I'm doing good. Thanks for having me on, Nick.
Speaker 2:Awesome. We're excited to learn all about you and your roofing company. If you would just tell us about it.
Speaker 3:Yeah, well, it's Colorado Family Roofing. We're a four-year-old company but we've grown pretty substantially in those four years. We really focus on the aspect of learning and education more than anything else, because there's a huge gap in the roofing industry where you get a lot of the high-pressure sales techniques that all these large companies are really good at. They're really good at hiring a bunch of door knockers that can do some high pressure closes, but when you're putting on something that's supposed to last 30 to 50 years and cost tens of thousand dollars, we're kind of the opinion that you should you should know what you're getting into. So we do a lot of education up front. Now we build a really high quality roof on the back end and that's kind of our business.
Speaker 3:How did you get into this business? So I had I actually had a an HVAC company out to my house a long time ago and our air conditioner wasn't working. I know it doesn't. I got to connect the dots here, so stay with me for a sec. But so the AC wasn't working and the guy comes out and he's, he's selling us this. He's like the the thing is shot. Um, you got to get a brand new AC unit and I'll leave the company out of it. But they were a local company, um, really good sales guy, really slick, um. And so he gets us to sign this contract for a ridiculously expensive air conditioner. We have a pretty big house but is crazy expensive I don't remember how much, but at the time, like man, this is like, this is like five paychecks, like full paycheck is very expensive. So we have buyers regret almost immediately after he leaves because the guy was slick, like very good sales guy.
Speaker 3:Like man, we should probably get a second opinion before we commit to this kind of money. And so we get. We call our friends up, like you should do in the first place, like hey, does anybody know a good HVAC, a good, honest HVAC guy. And one of my cousins said, hey, I got a great guy, not a big company, but he knows what he's talking about. He comes over, looks at it, he replaces a 12 part and the thing has been humming ever since.
Speaker 3:And so and this was my one of my experiences with the service industry and so I'm sitting there thinking myself like I'm so freaking frustrated and this is, I mean, it's everything. Like our water heater went out same time, like all these things are going wrong with our house, with the service industry. And we get a door knocker comes in, he's a roofer, and he comes up and he looks at my roof and he's like, ah, the roof is completely shot. And it's like the same story over and over again. I'm like there's a large gap in this in the entire service industry market. I happen to know a little bit about the roofing industry, so that's the one I jumped into and that's that's the ever since the model was like, with the reason why we named it Colorado family roofing.
Speaker 3:Is family actually stands for. Forget about me. I love you, just wanted to be like client centric, education centric, honest. You know the people that you could be like we don't. We a lot of houses. We go to be like you don't need a roof, but let me all we could fix this pipe right here real quick for like it's like 10 bucks, like oh my gosh last guy quoted me at 20 000. Like I know that's why we started the business.
Speaker 3:Well, we do like selling roofs as well. But uh, we just we more than anything. We just want folks to understand everything about the process and be honest.
Speaker 2:What are some other myths? You dispelled some already which stole my thunder on my third question, but what are some myths and misconceptions in your industry that you haven't named that maybe people have anxiety about before they call and you can dispel that?
Speaker 3:Yeah. Well, a lot of it, especially in our area, is storm damage, right. So that's where you get all these door knockers compounding your door and they're going to tell you hey, you got storm damage on your roof, you need to file a claim. And the problem is most of these guys and I said a little bit before, but most of these guys are kids straight out of college they get sold on hey, you can make a ton of money over the summer. Come knock doors. They're not roofing experts and so they have no idea really what they're looking for. They get a quick demo of what hail damage looks like and then they get a very long how to do high pressure sales technique meeting.
Speaker 3:And this is the majority, the vast majority, 95% of the roofing companies everywhere statewide and Colorado as well have this business model. So it's the same thing I ran into with the HVAC guy. Like, let's find these really slick sales guys that know nothing about HVAC or your system. We'll give them a little bit of industry knowledge and go sell them as much as possible for as much as possible. So the storm damage is one major one that folks really need to look out for, because these guys will go up there and, whether they know it or not, they're going to call every single defect on your roof or a little ding hail damage. And then you go file a claim you got a ding on your report for that. The inspector comes out, says this isn't hail damage. This guy doesn't know what he's talking about, so that's, that's one of them.
Speaker 2:I have about 10. I don't know how long this podcast is. What's their other best one, if there's anything else you want to mention that people worry about in the in the uh roofing industry that you guys easily overcome with your first experience with people.
Speaker 3:Yeah, well, I mean, our biggest objection is quality versus cost, right, so we build a very high quality roof, like I said before, like this thing, this thing is supposed to last 50 years. So we build a roof that will last 50 years and if it doesn't, then we put a warranty on it that is not going to depreciate until you're 50. So a lot of that has to come down with. And here's a huge problem in the roofing industry that still hasn't been fixed is even the good roofers and even the good crews have no idea about ventilation, and ventilation and roofing goes hand in hand.
Speaker 3:It's a huge, huge deal and 95% of the roofs that we're on are improperly or inadequately ventilated, meaning they're mixing ventilation systems, which cancels the ventilation system, voids the roof warranty, the roof lifetime gets cut in half, literally cut in half. You get a 50-year roof. It gets cut to probably 10 or 15, maybe 20, if you're lucky, years because the asphalt dries out. That's the major problem with roofs and getting a new roof is that asphalt. When you fit, when you do the ventilation correctly, all of a sudden these roofs can last way longer. You know, manufacturer says 50 years and the reason why the manufacturer says that is because they know that 95 of these roofers are screwing up. I honestly don't think the roofs are going to last 50 years.
Speaker 3:I think they're going to last about 30 to 35. But the manufacturer puts that stamp on it because they know most roofers are screwing up the ventilation system. They don't look at it, they don't fix it. So when you're 20 or 25, most time people move twice so they don't have to worry about it anyway. But if that person person's in the house for 25 years, they're going to call Owens Corning up and say hey, my roof is degraded. You gave me a 50 year warranty. Owens Corning comes out and says your roofer screwed up the ventilation system. Sorry, this is on you. That roofer has a workmanship warranty the last five years, maybe 10 at max, and so these guys are completely out of pocket on the roof.
Speaker 3:That literally should have been the last roof in their lifetime, and so we fix that. We fix ventilation every single time. Almost every single roof we have to fix it.
Speaker 2:Wow, and do you bring in subcontractors that are HVAC to do that, or do you do that yourself?
Speaker 3:No, it's not an HVAC deal. It's just the intake versus the exhaust, which is part of the roofing system.
Speaker 3:You got all the static vents on your roof, most of them have half of what they need. And then if they do have those up there, they don't have enough intake vents underneath. And if they have those correctly, most people have those gable roofs which cancels the ventilation system. Or they mix a power attic vent with one of the static vents which cancels the ventilation system. So all kinds of weird ways you can get into it. And if you literally if you did a 15 minute educational session on it with like Lamanco, which is one of the biggest ventilation providers out there, they'd tell every single one of your roofers exactly how to do it and then the problem be solved. It takes 15 minutes and a little bit of time on every roof to do the calculation. But that's it. It's not hard, it's not complicated, which blows my mind why we're not getting this right as an industry.
Speaker 2:And we know that marketing is the heart of every business. Who are your target customers when it's not storming?
Speaker 3:Yeah, it's really just homeowners that have a roof that's 20 to 25 years old. That vast majority of roofs aren't gonna make it past 25, especially the ones that were put on, you know, in the nineties or what have you. So that's Stay in the residential lane. We do a lot of we do. We're probably 80% residential, 20% commercial. In the commercial space we really kind of separate ourselves because again, the same HVAC situation that I mean everything is built off this one HVAC guy. So God bless that guy actually, but the same guy.
Speaker 3:Most reapers go in and they're going to say you need a completely new flat roof, epdm or TPO roof system and that that cost is astronomical. Like those things are expensive. Huge buildings, um 90 of those roofs can get a coating on it. Just a spray on coating, you clean it off. You put a coating on, you fix a couple of the things that are wrong with it and you get a 20-year no leak warranty on that commercial building, whereas these tpr, epdm roofs are only lasting 25, 30 years anyways. So for a fraction of the cost you get a 20 year no leak warranty on that commercial building, whereas these TPR, epdm routes are only lasting 25, 30 years anyway, so for a fraction of the cost you get 20 years and that coding company's guarantee is going to last 20 years.
Speaker 2:Since you have an unusual interest in educating pre-educating customers, have you ever thought about doing your own podcast?
Speaker 3:I thought about it. Yeah, I started one, so I actually we do kind of have. It's not a podcast, but I have a learning library on my website, coloradofamilyroofingcom. You click the link, it says learning library and I have. I do a video a day and it's all educational, just like this, and there's just gobs and gobs of videos. I'm a little behind on posts. I have probably 200 videos that need to be on there.
Speaker 2:There's probably 75 on there are you just putting them on your website or anywhere else?
Speaker 3:uh, they're on facebook. They're on instagram, youtube. We post them every day um. So, yeah, follow us on there and get a lot of tips wow, that's awesome.
Speaker 2:Um outside of work, what do you do for fun?
Speaker 3:so I coach my son's youth football team. He's in seventh grade, so I got one more year. I've been doing it since third grade and that fills up literally every other hour that I have available in the fall, and then we also do spring as well. But I love it, man. I don't know what I'm gonna do with myself when football's done and he's in high school.
Speaker 2:Brian, please tell our listeners one thing that they should absolutely take away from this podcast about Colorado family roofing.
Speaker 3:The biggest thing, and I mean I would love for you to call us and do an inspection, but the biggest thing that you got to take away is you got to call a roofer that knows what he's talking about. The door knocker, the door knocking industry just shut the door. If they're out there door knocking, they're exactly like the HVAC guy that got me into this business. There's actually like all these door knockers I've been talking about. Don't trust those guys. They don't know what they're talking about. Get a vetted family or friend to give you a call. Give us a ring. We're probably the only root for an estate that encourages three quotes. Because it's super important, because you have all kinds of skills and abilities that are. Come out and take a look at your roof and you're talking about a $20,000 to $30,000 purchase. You want to make sure you're very well informed. So hop on our website, get educated. There's also an ebook on there that I wrote. That's got a ton of information on it. Do the education if you're in the market and then call for the inspections.
Speaker 2:What's the name of your ebook? It's roofing secrets revealed by brian barnes roofing industry secrets revealed by brian barnes making sure you didn't have a different pen name yeah, it's also on amazon.
Speaker 3:I sold one. I think that the minimum you can sell is $1.99, so I'm a published author it doesn't matter, you're an expert and you're published now.
Speaker 2:Well, brian, I really appreciate you being on the show and we wish you and Colorado Family.
Speaker 3:Roofing the very best moving forward I appreciate you having me.
Speaker 1:Thanks, sir. Thank you for listening to the Good Neighbor Podcast. To nominate your favorite local businesses to be featured on the show, go to gnpfortcollinscom. That's gnpfortcollinscom, or call 970-438-0825.