Mark MacDonald – Discover the MetalVue Dealers’ Portal! - PODCAST TRANSCRIPT

Editor's note: The following is the transcript of a live interview with Mark MacDonald of Sherwin-Williams MetalVue. You can read the interview below, listen to the episode or watch the video.

Heidi J. Ellsworth: Hello and welcome to MetalCast from MetalCoffeeShop. My name is Heidi Ellsworth and we're bringing you information that can help your metal business. And I tell you what, there's nothing that can help make more with metal than MetalVue. So we are here today to find out again what is it, and even bigger talk about the new dealer's portal that is part of MetalVue and huge on MetalCoffeeShop. So we have Mark McDonald here from Sherwin Williams. Mark, welcome.

Mark Macdonald: Hey, happy to be here. Thanks for having me, Heather or Heidi? Heather, you're not Heather McGinness Masking. You're Heidi.

Heidi J. Ellsworth: It's okay. We work with Heather. Really. I understand. I get it.

Mark Macdonald: It's clearly top of mind.

Heidi J. Ellsworth: Yeah. Exactly. Okay, well Mark, for those few people who don't know you or haven't seen you on before, can you go ahead and introduce yourself? Tell us a little bit about Sherman Williams and MetalVue.

Mark Macdonald: Yeah, absolutely. So my name's Mark Macdonald, and again, thanks for having me on MetalCoffeeShop. We're really excited to be partnered with you guys and it's going to be a great 2024.

Heidi J. Ellsworth: Yes.

Mark Macdonald: But for those of you who are listening who know Sherwin Williams, but maybe don't know who Coyle is, Sherwin Williams, we have three divisions. One division is what I think most people know is the paint store group, and that's the 5,800 stores across the country. So that when you're driving down the road and you see that Sherwin Williams store, that's them. And they do have the majority revenue in Sherwin Williams. We're about a $22 billion global company. The next group that we have is consumer brands, and I think most people are actually aware but just didn't know it was Sherwin-Williams probably, that we have brands that are not sold in the Sherwin Williams stores that carry their own brand into other stores.

So it's things like Valspar paint, things like Geocell sealants, Krylon spray paint, Pratt and Lambert paint. Those things are premium products sold in the great stores that you know across the country, a little bit smaller division. And then where I live is in the industrial division and industrial finishes, and that's the performance coatings group. In that group, we have six divisions. One of those divisions is called the Coil Division, and that's because we apply paint, wait for it, in a factory to coils of steel. It's a very clever name, very clever name. We spent a lot of money figuring that out. But yeah, that's what we do. We've been doing it a long time. We were Valspar for many years and then we were acquired by Sherwin Williams. That process started in 2015, was finalized in 2017. And to be honest, it's been probably the best thing that's happened to us in quite a long time.

The merger, you're looking at merger number one of culture that fit where we both have the same core values in terms of how we service the customer and what we care about, quality. And then beyond that in research and development, production capacity, all those things just really took what we've already done in Valspar for 150 years and then took that to just another level. And so what I do in that division is if you think of what do we do, what is our role here? Our role here is to bring value to our customer base, right? And so our customers, our end customer... We have customers that we service the entire value chain from the people who make steel all the way to that contractor. We touch each one of those elements and we do service that. But really the core customer that we have, Heidi, is the metal manufacturer, the people who bend metal.

And really when you look at how we service that customer, it's really the heart and soul of our service is that sales representative, that commercial representative that's calling on that customer, making sure they have what they need, that field service technician all built of course on the shoulders of our operations and our technical folks and RND labs. But that value is literally delivered by that commercial representative in the field. So our job in what we do in business development and special programs is we want to provide and create additional value for that customer that that commercial rep can deliver because at the end of the day, we don't make any money if our manufacturers don't make money. And to do that, they have to bring value to their customers. So that's really what I do as I lead a large team of people that wants to help figure out how do we add value to our customers and their customers. That's really what we're focused on.

Heidi J. Ellsworth: Yeah. And that's really where the brainchild of MetalVue came from was you focused on that, on how to get more contractors, exterior contractors, roofing contractors involved with metal roofing. Tell us a little bit about MetalVue.

Mark Macdonald: Absolutely. When we started this process, I mean, it's been a long time. You were there at day one.

Heidi J. Ellsworth: I was there.

Mark Macdonald: This is six and a half years of work of just figuring this out. But I think to summarize, how do you summarize six and a half years of work? Well, I guess I'm about to do it. But when you look at the market, if you think of the market that we're all structured to serve, when I say we all, I mean you, me, our metal manufacturers, their customers, there's a market out there where the homeowner figures out that they want a metal roof and they try to get a metal roof on their home. Our industry is well structured to do that. No one needs Mark Macdonald to solve that. That is not a problem we need to solve. We have the best contractors, the most sophisticated contractors and everything in between to go get that roof on a house and do it in a professional way.

We have manufacturers who absolutely have quality products with our coating, the best coating in the last 250 years, Sherwin-Williams coil coatings, and we have plenty of folks who can get that, take that order, put that roof on a home all day long and they're doing it every day out there in large numbers and that's fantastic. So that market is serviced. That market is serviced. Where MetalVue comes in is there's another market out there of other contractors, right? And these contractors are really quite a bit different than our core market. And what they do is they want to do in-home selling, they want to do digital ad spend. They're marketing and sales organizations. Right?

Heidi J. Ellsworth: Yes. Yes.

Mark Macdonald: That is what they are. And they have multiple verticals. Some of them just do roofing and they are marketing sales organizations for roofing. There's marketing and sales organizations for exterior products, things like windows, things like siding, things like roofing, right?

Heidi J. Ellsworth: Yeah.

Mark Macdonald: Those are the people that we want to serve and we want to add a vertical. These are people that traditionally probably don't do a lot of metal roofing at all, right?

Heidi J. Ellsworth: No.

Mark Macdonald: So, what is MetalVue? MetalVue is a way to get our manufacturers trained up and give the business in a box so they can service that type of contractor. The contractors out there, they've got a sales team. Now these people are pretty variable. There's a lot of variable here. Some of these people have one sales rep. Some have more than a hundred depending on their size. And we can service MetalVue. The manufacturer can service that customer. But I think even as cool as that, we can take a customer, let's say you're a restoration company, so a lot of restoration companies are taking a looking around and going, wait a minute, I don't have a lot of storms in my region.

Heidi J. Ellsworth: Yeah. This year especially. Yeah.

Mark Macdonald: Yes. And we talked to someone, one of the best conversations I had in the market, and I'm not going to say the company name, but we talked to a gentleman, a business owner in Portland, Oregon, and he said, "Do you know how many storms I have here? Zero." And so he says, "How can I transition to be more retail focused?" Not to get rid of restoration. You're never going to say, I don't want to do restoration. That's a great business, but how do I add this retail focus? And we again, have MetalVue, a business in a box. So what is it? It's a transformational business in a box to transform a manufacturer to someone who can service this market and service and even transform a contractor into someone who can be a homeowner in the home sales, retail facing.

Heidi J. Ellsworth: Right. And also, I mean, there's contractors out there who want to get into this, want to grow their business and do more of the exteriors and really get into that. And so this also gives them all the tools, the technologies, everything they need to be able to ramp up their business and do more of this.

Mark Macdonald: That's right. I think the baseline here, what's interesting as you're aware, we have Chris Morris on our program who's a key part of the program with Stonegate Consulting and Stonegate Digital. And Chris ran a contractor network with more than 25,000 contractors in it. So between his voice of the customer and the work that we've done over the last few years here, just talking to contractors, we know what they want and the core of what they want and without MetalVue, they don't have it, is day one they want a manufacturer who's going to service them.

Heidi J. Ellsworth: Right.

Mark Macdonald: They want it to be easy to do metal. Because today for the most part, it isn't easy because as we discussed a few minutes ago, our market's not set up to service this customer. Our market's set up to say, okay, the order has come in, right, and how do we make sure that we have as many panel profiles as many material that's readily available in different markets through in-store, distribution direct, and that's there. I mean, that exists. What's not there is to train this individual customer at any level on product sales training, demo kit, marketing sales collateral, digital ad spend in home sales presentation to labor installation training, onsite sales training. That part's not there. That's what MetalVue is, and the heart and soul of that is the manufacturer.

Heidi J. Ellsworth: Right.

Mark Macdonald: Great news, we have metal manufacturers who are doing that, and one of the reasons our manufacturers are signing up for the program and contractors are because frankly of our brand. You could look at this as a brand delivery system because the strongest brand in the market is Sherwin Williams in the residential space. It is the most well-known brand in the United States. So what's great is our manufacturers who we have great relationships with, can allow and bring that brand not going to the contractor, our manufacturers-

Heidi J. Ellsworth: Right.

Mark Macdonald: No, go ahead.

Heidi J. Ellsworth: No, I was going to say that we need the metal manufacturers with these contractors to be able... And there's so many different parts of this puzzle that you've put together, Mark, and that we've all been involved with. But a big part of it is even just how do we get it delivered to the job site? How does it happen?

Mark Macdonald: Yes, yes.

Heidi J. Ellsworth: And all of this has been kind of put together and these metal manufacturers just really have changed the way they do business in order to start servicing these contractors.

Mark Macdonald: Yes. It's a different conversation. Here's what we have in our core market. We have a series of loosely coupled things in our value chain. If you're a metal manufacturer in the market and you've been doing this for 20, 30 years, 10 years, whatever, 40 years, you don't have any questions. You know where to go, right? You don't have any questions on what an exposed fastener is. You don't have any questions on one inch nail strip, 5V ag panel, one and a half inch mechanical [inaudible 00:12:00]. You don't need to ask anyone what that is and all the components, you know it, right? And you know where to get it, you know how to get it. Right?

Heidi J. Ellsworth: Exactly.

Mark Macdonald: There's not a requirement to walk someone through that chain. The difference is to service this market, you have to have a tighter level of integration. The manufacturer has to have a tighter level of integration with that value chain to walk that new customer through who's not familiar with metal, who doesn't know all the answers to the questions. And it has to be simple. And the great news is our manufacturers that we're working with are doing it. They're doing it today. Today, they're doing it.

Heidi J. Ellsworth: Right now. I mean, I look at what Vic West is doing and it's amazing. I mean, they're delivering to the market. I mean, there's a lot of metal manufacturers. I'm just throwing them out there because I just talked to them yesterday. But to see this transformation has been really exciting.

Mark Macdonald: It is, yeah. And I'm not going to get into any specific names of metal manufacturers, but you're spot on. They're doing it and they're excited about it because the first thing that we have to do when Sherwin Williams talks to our metal manufacturers is the first thing is we have to show them the market and show them that this is real because that's important. You can't just walk in. These are businesses, our customers, our manufacturers, they're not new in this business. They've been doing this a long time.

Heidi J. Ellsworth: Yeah, yeah.

Mark Macdonald: Right?

Heidi J. Ellsworth: Definitely.

Mark Macdonald: Our job is to show them that we've done our homework, that we know what we're talking about and get their buy-in because without their buy-in, this doesn't happen. And once that happens, because without that, there's no opportunity. Once we get past that step, then it's working with them, collaborating with them and saying, "Hey, here's the things we can bring to the table. What do you have?" And something Chris said this year, which is what really important is meeting in the middle. How do we meet in the middle with all of our customers to make sure that we're doing it in a way that makes sense for their business? Right?

That's the heart and soul of what we're doing in 2024. And then as we bring that forward to them, they can start to transform their business at a pace that makes sense for them.

Heidi J. Ellsworth: Exactly. And this really all leads into the importance of a dealer's portal. And I think there's probably a lot of people out in the metal construction industry in the roofing industry who are going to be like, "What is a dealer's portal?" Because they haven't been that exterior. They haven't worked with the siding, the baths, the big shingle manufacturers. And so this has been a huge development in 2023 that was put together by you, Grosso University and all of the people involved in MetalVue participating. First of all, let's talk about the MetalVue dealers portal. What is it and why is it important?

Mark Macdonald: Yeah, absolutely. When you look at what is a dealer's portal? A dealer's portal is someone who is a dealer of products. In this case, we're talking about a contractor. Contractor is a dealer of products, right? Is how do you give someone access to the tools that they need, which would be digital, digital tools that they need to be successful and have an easy transition to use your product. That's what a dealer's portal is. It's dealing value, it's dealing things. Right? And so there are models out there that have been successful for some time. Owens Corning has a phenomenal digital experience. Pella Windows, all the major folks out there have been doing this many, many years. James Hardy.

Heidi J. Ellsworth: Yes.

Mark Macdonald: These people have been doing this a long time. And what do you expect if you're a contractor that wants to access and to deal those products? You want a dealer's portal, a place that's one-stop shop where you can go in there, you can grab marketing collateral, you can grab digital, you can grab links to other products and services that may be associated with those products. Right?

You want training, maybe even in-home sales training. Right? What we did was we looked at the market, we looked at this large program that we've built, which is MetalVue is business process change, which is just changing how you do, changing what you do every day. That's all that means. It's a fancy way of changing what you do every day and services and software. And we are very lucky in our program to have partnered up with best in class in the industry for services and software. We have brought to the table some of the greatest folks and services and software because we want to deliver that. We want our manufacturers to be able to deliver those services and software on a silver platter, right-

Heidi J. Ellsworth: Yes.

Mark Macdonald: To each and every contractor that comes on board our program. Now, we have customers out there that are what we call fully baked, right? They're a tier one and tier one to us we define that as someone who has everything. Right?

Heidi J. Ellsworth: A call center. They have lead generation.

Mark Macdonald: CRM, lead generation, appointment booking, best practice appointment, booking rate, best practice in the home, 72 hours. They've got it. Sales processes. When you think of shows in the country, those people are at top 500.

Heidi J. Ellsworth: Yeah, yeah, exactly. Yes.

Mark Macdonald: Those people are at QR 500.

Heidi J. Ellsworth: Right.

Mark Macdonald: And we've seen that. We know that. And what do they need? Well, that's going to be different, right, than someone who is trying to grow their business because those people probably won't be a top 500, but you know what? We want to service both.

Heidi J. Ellsworth: Yeah.

Mark Macdonald: And the only way that you can do that at scale is with a dealer's portal. That's the only way you can do it because you have to be able to serve up that value in a way that's consumable, whether it's someone who's going to top 500 live and maybe all they need and want is service from the manufacturer and our brand, which we're okay with that. They're also [inaudible 00:18:08] with Roofing Passport.

Heidi J. Ellsworth: Right, right.

Mark Macdonald: And that's fine. And maybe there's someone else who needs a business in a box because maybe they don't have a call center. Maybe they don't have repeatable sales processes like from Grosso University. Right?

Heidi J. Ellsworth: Right.

Mark Macdonald: Maybe they don't have a real solid plan for digital ad spend, right?

Heidi J. Ellsworth: Yeah.

Mark Macdonald: And we have fantastic partners. We've got associates, we have Spectrum PSCI, we've got Stonegate Digital, and we have marketing collateral to plug into whatever they have. This whole wheel of their workflow, we can bolt on wherever they want something in their workflow, we've got that solution to bring it to the table.

Heidi J. Ellsworth: And I've obviously been in the dealer's portal. I actually have a video in there about MetalCoffeeShop. And so for everyone out there, that is really... The thing that's so great about this is you can go in and you can watch a video on every service that is offered.

Mark Macdonald: Yes.

Heidi J. Ellsworth: Plus, you can also get a one pager. So you have downloads that you can share with your team and your whole team can get in there to really figure out. The thing that's cool is right now, Mark, we're offering seven days where you can go into this portal, no cost, no commitment, no nothing and just see what it's all about. See how this is working. And then when you join as a contractor, exteriors company, roofing company, wherever you're at in the process, once you join MetalVue, it becomes customized with your metal manufacturer. And so talk a little bit about that because I think that's really important to bring those... Like you said, meet in the middle.

Mark Macdonald: Yeah. That's a great thing that we're doing. As we bring on individual metal manufacturers, what's fantastic at working with Grosso University is each one that comes in, each metal manufacturer that comes in, white labels that software, white labels that structure that we have built out with Grosso and then that's theirs. They own it, and then they can tailor it to their needs because in a lot of cases, maybe they want to bring in their own proprietary installation training. Maybe they want to bring in their own proprietary information on how they're servicing their own customer base, and they can build that out themselves and post it. Right? They can build it out with Grosso, which many of them are doing, and they can post individual content. What if they want to have more information on how they work with distribution? What if they want more information on their proprietary approach to certain roof structures with flashings and trim?

What if they want more information on installation training? Right? What if they want more information on their business itself and all these things to make it easy for that new dealer, that new contractor to market and sell their product and put it on a roof? So as much content as you can get in there that helps them, the better off they're going to be. And so the beauty of what we're doing with Grosso is they can either the manufacturer can fully collaborate with Grosso and build new content, or they can just build their own content and host it whatever they want to do. That's meeting in the middle. And then we're giving them a baseline of information. Now that baseline is not just for the manufacturer to onboard, it's mainly for the contractor, like we talked about.

Heidi J. Ellsworth: Exactly.

Mark Macdonald: That dealer of their products, and that's how we're doing it.

Heidi J. Ellsworth: Yeah. And those contractors, dealers, same who are coming in there are going to be able to... There's an overall synopsis too. Like you said earlier, Mark, not everybody's going to need lead generation. I think everybody needs lead generation, but not everybody [inaudible 00:21:53]. And so you can kind of pick and choose. I mean, there's financing in there, sales training, marketing services, CRMs, you name it. It's so rich. And for companies that are trying to put together their tech stack and really start selling, making more with metal, this is the place because you've vetted all of them.

Mark Macdonald: And I'm glad you said tech stack in this because if we've got time, I'd like to touch on that.

Heidi J. Ellsworth: Yeah. Yes.

Mark Macdonald: One of the big changes we've had in going into 2024, we have a large meeting coming up in January with our team to kind of talk about this vision. I'm talking about it ahead of time a little bit.

Heidi J. Ellsworth: Okay. I like it.

Mark Macdonald: When you say tech stack, that's an important concept because it implies integration. The way we're approaching the customer base and in the way we view the customer base in 2024 and forever is it starts with our manufacturer because without our manufacturers, there's no program.

Heidi J. Ellsworth: Right, right. Exactly.

Mark Macdonald: Number one. And the second thing is the contractor. Now, there are elements of delivery in between the manufacturer and the contractor, meaning there are platforms. Right? So there are distribution platforms, there are large scale contractors that are national. There are large scale financial platforms. All of these things can have technical, what you call a tech stack, which that's a thing. That's a thing.

Heidi J. Ellsworth: Yeah.

Mark Macdonald: Picture stack of things, stack of books. That implies integration. Right? We have two offerings for our customers, and really everything in between. Offering number one is, I'll call it the storefront offering. So what if you need metal? Everyone needs estimating for metal, everyone pretty much. And we have that with Roofing Passport, with our partners, with EagleView, with Roofing Works with Smart Build, right?

Heidi J. Ellsworth: Yeah.

Mark Macdonald: We have that done. And we call that the storefront, meaning you're going to log into Roofing Passport, and that's going to be your graphical user interface. With the dealer portal, which we're talking about with Grosso with the manufacturer, that's going to be a dealer portal that the manufacturer runs and has in conjunction with Grosso University. And that's another storefront of value, but we recognize that people have technical stacks, and in that case, we can also shift to being a content supplier. Okay.

What if you have an enterprise integration where you're doing an enterprise level point of sale with a contractor and you don't want a Roofing Passport storefront. As Chris Morris would like to say, we're not proud.

Heidi J. Ellsworth: I love that. That's so true.

Mark Macdonald: We will integrate with your enterprise platform. We'll integrate with your tech stack with that data to provide that to you because our number one goal isn't for someone to stare at the Roofing Passport interface. Our number one goal is to put a metal roof on a house with a Sherwin Williams coating. If we can integrate that data that we have that's so valuable with our system, with Smart Build, we're going to do that, right? The second approach with MetalVue, if you think of a dealer's portal, what if you have your own enterprise content delivery system? We'll take our content and integrate it with your platform. Right? So again, not proud.

Heidi J. Ellsworth: We just want contractors to be able to put on more metal roofs.

Mark Macdonald: Correct, correct.

Heidi J. Ellsworth: I mean, bottom line with Sherwin Williams. Yes.

Mark Macdonald: The concept of a dealer support is really important because it is a fluid kind of definition. On the manufacturer side, we're going to provide every manufacturer that's in our program will have the Grosso dealer portal available and readily available with all that content off the shelf done.

Heidi J. Ellsworth: Right.

Mark Macdonald: If it's an enterprise platform and there's an integration required for content, done. We're waiting on you.

Heidi J. Ellsworth: Yeah, bring it on. We're ready.

Mark Macdonald: Bring it on.

Heidi J. Ellsworth: I love it. I love it. Well, okay, I do want to make sure we get out there how people can get involved. So one of the things is this is all on the MetalCoffeeShop. In fact, if you go to the directory, the very first directory is MetalVue and all of this information is on there, all the people who are involved. And then you can find every single person who's on the dealer's portal. You can also find them on the directory of MetalCoffeeShop, and they're connected, talk about integrating. Right? We connect each other. We want that information to be out there as much as possible. So Mark, one of the last things I'd love for you to kind of talk about is contractors are looking at 2024 and they're thinking, how do I diversify my business? How do I stay upfront? Because there are some places in the country that are a little soft, and so you need to have your business strong and diversified. How is MetalVue going to do that for contractors?

Mark Macdonald: I love that question because we deal with this question every week. Right? So the way that we're looking, again, I'm relatively new. I'm not relatively, I'm new to this space. So I've learned a lot over the last couple of years fast. And then of course with Chris' help learned even a lot more. The way that our customers, these new customers, and really, when I say customer, I mean I guess our customer's customer.

Heidi J. Ellsworth: Right. The contractors, the dealers.

Mark Macdonald: The contractor who's dealing the manufacturer's products that are coated with our paint. The way that they view their business is, I would say the only word I could say is vertical or products. I've even heard the word projects. What are the projects they're going to do? What are the products they're going to do? What are the verticals they're going to add? Is really, every contractor is looking at this and relatively through the same lens, which is how am I going to make profit?

Heidi J. Ellsworth: Yeah.

Mark Macdonald: Right?

Heidi J. Ellsworth: Every day, yeah.

Mark Macdonald: Every day. How am I going to make money? And so that implies two elements essentially at a high level. One is what are the products I believe I can make money on, number one. And number two, when I have a product or service, how do I make that as efficient as I possibly can to maintain and grow my margin? That's basically like when you go to QR 500, that's what they're talking about.

Heidi J. Ellsworth: Yeah, yeah.

Mark Macdonald: We're having large scale meetings about those two topics. Right? What are verticals that I'm interested in, products that I'm interested in and then how can I be as efficient as possible to maintain, hold and grow margin? Right?

Heidi J. Ellsworth: Right.

Mark Macdonald: And so, when you look at metal roofing, if you have someone who's in roofing already and they're doing windows, they're doing siding, they're doing roofing or they're just doing asphalt roofing, assuming you have all the service, what if everything I said on this call is true? What if it were true? Why wouldn't you do that?

Heidi J. Ellsworth: Right.

Mark Macdonald: Because if you already have a vision, if you're in roofing, you're in exterior of the home, you have a vision that's going to include roofing, right? And you haven't done it because these services have not existed, right? Because without metal, these don't exist. But what if MetalVue is real, which it is, because national, by the way.

Heidi J. Ellsworth: Right. Everywhere.

Mark Macdonald: You can get these services and bolt them onto your business, why wouldn't you add that vertical? And then we have the products and services that are built into the business in a box to add if you need them to make your business more efficient.

Heidi J. Ellsworth: Right.

Mark Macdonald: Right? That's the answer. I mean, so we have it. In fact, we even had a customer, again, I'm not going to say the name of the business, but we had someone who's heavy into windows and siding. And when I look at the market, we say exterior folks and roofing folks, asphalt retail, those folks are hungry.

Heidi J. Ellsworth: Yeah.

Mark Macdonald: And then when you look at contracting exterior, people who are in windows are hungry. I don't know exactly why that is, but they're hungry bears.

Heidi J. Ellsworth: Yeah.

Mark Macdonald: And when you have someone that does it, we have a new customer that's aligning with a manufacturer that did not do roofing, and they didn't add roofing. They added metal roofing, specifically.

Heidi J. Ellsworth: Metal roofing because they know it's profitable.

Mark Macdonald: Yes.

Heidi J. Ellsworth: Yes.

Mark Macdonald: And this is a window person. This is a window person who's going out there and turning the crank, banging on that cash register every week and they added metal. What does that tell you? And this is not a small company. This is a large multi-state business. What does that tell you? It tells you there's something there. There's there with metal roofing and with our program, you can add it next week.

Heidi J. Ellsworth: Right. And you get everything you need. And I mean that's going to include obviously all the upfront services, but also for those of you listening, it also includes how to get sub crews, how to get labor, how to get training to install the metal roofing, connections with distributors. This is really the whole thing. If you've never done metal, like this person you talked about, it is like, here, this is how you do it and this is what you need.

Mark Macdonald: Absolutely. You mentioned the labor component. We have so many partners in the program, we can't go through them all here. They're on our dealer portal. They're on our marketing, they're on MetalCoffeeShop so you can see every one of them. There's quite a few now. But when you mentioned labor. [inaudible 00:31:58] of the most disruptive pieces of software in the market today.

Heidi J. Ellsworth: Right, yeah.

Mark Macdonald: [inaudible 00:32:02] for labor and they're real. They've grown quite a bit over the last five years, but they're national.

Heidi J. Ellsworth: Yeah.

Mark Macdonald: They're adding customized labor pools in every region in the United States right now, and it's working. They have great feedback, and that's part of our program. Right? They're exclusive to Sherwin Williams in this space, not in all verticals to be clear.

Heidi J. Ellsworth: Right, yeah.

Mark Macdonald: And Metal Roofing specifically. And what a partner. I mean, they can walk in to any business, any customer who comes in, forget metal roofing, they can add labor pools to any vertical in that home.

Heidi J. Ellsworth: Right.

Mark Macdonald: Any [inaudible 00:32:42] which is insane.

Heidi J. Ellsworth: And the sub crews are growing so fast.

Mark Macdonald: Yes.

Heidi J. Ellsworth: To be in front of that and to be able to use that in your business safely and in the right ways is just critical. And it allows you to bring on these verticals of items that you haven't done before.

Mark Macdonald: It's so disruptive. And we're so proud of the relationships we have with these folks. I mean, you're looking at [inaudible 00:33:09], right?

Heidi J. Ellsworth: Yeah. The visualizer.

Mark Macdonald: Oh my God, this powerhouse and visualization, they built the pro app, right?

Heidi J. Ellsworth: Yeah.

Mark Macdonald: They built this pro app, and the pro app allows a contractor to come in, log in and pull up... Assuming the manufacturer's library is available to them, they can pull up and sell it in the home. That's a game changer.

Heidi J. Ellsworth: Yeah.

Mark Macdonald: That's a game changer.

Heidi J. Ellsworth: It's great. And you know what Mark? We have metal casts, we have metal talks, webinars, podcasts, all from these partners and they talk about what they're doing. And so that's on MetalCoffeeShop. Then take all of that, and that's all been put into the dealer's portal, and so you now are able to get in there, see individual videos, but then also get all the resources of them talking about what they can do. Okay, we are at the end of our time, but we need to just again, seven days. It doesn't matter. This is forever. It's just from the moment that you sign up, you have seven days to really explore it. So figure out your time and then sign up for that. You can find that all on MetalCoffeeShop in the MetalVue directory and also Grosso directory, and Sherwin Williams. It's everywhere and it's easy to find. You'll also see a bunch of ads on there. Mark, thank you. We love our partnership. We love being part of MetalVue, and I'm really excited for 2024.

Mark Macdonald: I am too. Heidi, thanks so much for having us as part of this MetalCoffeeShop and RoofersCoffeeShop. We're really excited about the relationship. There's really no better way to network all this stuff together. We're excited to work with all of our partners in 2024. We're meeting in January of 2024 to kick off the year. It's going to be a phenomenal year. There's a lot of great stuff ahead of us, so thank you for working with us on this.

Heidi J. Ellsworth: I love it. And I will see you in January at that meeting and I'm excited to kick it off. And so everyone stay tuned. There's a lot more great stuff coming. So Mark, thank you so much, and I want to thank all of you for watching and listening. You can find this on YouTube. Be sure to subscribe and ring that bell or on your favorite podcast channel. Be sure to set your notifications so you don't miss a single episode of MetalCast. Please check out all of our podcasts on MetalCoffeeShop. We will be seeing you in the new year. Have a great one. Thanks a lot.