Taylor Hanes and Guy Kopperud - Click Once, Contractors! - PODCAST TRANSCRIPT

Editor's note: The following is the transcript of a live interview with Taylor Hanes and Guy Kopperud of One Click Contractor. You can Read the interview below, Listen to the podcast or Watch the episode.

Karen Edwards: Hello and welcome to Metal Cast by Metal Coffee Shop. My name's Karen Edwards and today we're going to be talking about a digital toolbox for contractors. And joining me on this episode are Taylor Haynes and Guy Kopperud of One Click Contractor. Welcome to Metal Cast Taylor and Guy.

Taylor Hanes: Thanks a lot, Karen. Great to be here.

Guy Kopperud: Thanks, Karen.

Karen Edwards: Yeah, I'm excited to learn more about One Click Contractor because I don't know a whole lot. So if you wouldn't mind, let's start by introducing yourselves and tell us a little bit about your background. Maybe Taylor you can go first.

Taylor Hanes: Yeah, sure. Thank you so much. So, Taylor Haynes, I'm Chief Operating Officer at One Click, and about two and a half years ago I got involved. My background, I started my career in the military, graduated from the United States Military Academy at West Point. I'd always wanted to jump out of airplanes and shoot machine guns and got a chance to do that for several years as an infantry officer and airborne ranger qualified guy in the Army for a while. Had a great time, met my wife, exited the army, got into entrepreneurial type of businesses. And my whole thing that I've been doing throughout my career is working to build great teams and One Click has a great team and we are excited about building it and carrying it forward to the next level and just continuing to serve the great teams that are on our contractors and our customers side of things. So it's been a lot of fun and a great learning experience so far.

Karen Edwards: Excellent. Thank you, Taylor. And Guy, how about you?

Guy Kopperud: Oh, my life sounds boring after Taylor. Do you always have to go first, Taylor?

So yeah, Guy Kopperud. I've been with One Click about the same amount of time as Taylor, about two and a half, three years. My background really is to help One Click with the pulse of the construction industry. I was a contractor for a long time. I always say a recovering contractor. But my job is really to help educate, inform, my work on the marketing side, creating content for contractors. Just I look back at my career in the construction remodeling restoration space and we just didn't have the tools like contractors have today. So when we talk more about One Click, it's really exciting to help contractors be more efficient, get more done. Ultimately, as I look back, the things that I used to do if I had the tools that are available today, wow, what an incredible way to grow a business.

Karen Edwards: It really is incredible when you think about it. I've got an iPhone and the iPhone came out in I think 2006, so that's not that long ago. And since then when the web exploded and YouTube and smart phones, technology has just gone at a crazy fast pace and it sometimes is a little overwhelming. So, when companies like you develop solutions, I think part of your goal is probably to help make it a little easier for the contractor to embrace, understand and use. So I'd like to know about the history of One Click Contractor. Can you tell me how the company got started?

Taylor Hanes: Yeah, sure. So it's a very interesting history here. So Dale Thornberry is the founder and part of the founding team is Chris Thornberry, Mark Gehringer, a couple of other folks that were early on and they had all worked together to create and actually patent some of the very earliest remote measurement technologies that were used in roof measurements. And so they created those technologies and wound up successfully creating the product and then selling that product to some folks that are still widely used and some of the leaders in the field.

And so Dale had this incredible background, having done a lot of different things in the contracting field. He started his career as a contractor, was very successful in that area and all opportunities to leverage technology to make life easier. And remote measurements was one example of that. And as they were working in that area, he realized that the next big opportunity for contractors was to streamline the process of measuring, quoting and getting business done with the customer. So that's really where One Click comes in is everything that a sales rep wants to do at the kitchen table with a homeowner to present and finalize and close business with their customer, One Click provides a streamlined digital process for doing that.

Karen Edwards: Okay. So One Click, is it really one click? How does that work?

Taylor Hanes: The final click.

Karen Edwards: Yeah. How's it work? If I'm a contractor and I'm looking for those services, if I subscribe to this aerial measurement service or this aerial measurement service or maybe I'm using a certain kind of presentation, how does it bring it all together?

Taylor Hanes: Yeah, great question. And it's one of the areas that we've worked very hard to create a seamless experience for the customer. Obviously the measurement process is one step that every contractor's going to go through as they're quoting a roof and trying to close business. And certainly when you're looking to sell metal roofing, that's a key component.

And so, kind of quickly start to finish, the contractor is going to arrive on site, they're going to inspect that roof, they're going to measure that roof and then they're going to work to put together an estimate for what the total price tag is going to be and then present that to the customer. This is how it's done, regardless of whether you're using the back of an envelope and a literal tape measure or whether you're using the latest and greatest in terms of remote measurements and technology at every turn. Those certain steps, every contractor is going to go through.

And so what One Click does is just logically order those steps and automate as much of that process as possible. So for example, you use a remote measurement provider. So for example, in the metal view program, a lot of folks use EagleView and they can order an EagleView roof report directly in the One Click tool. So they don't have to jump out of one platform, log into another one. They're in One Click as the software platform that they're working in, and they do make one click to order that EagleView report. And then those measurements are automatically populated into the estimator. And so when they go to create the estimate for what the total cost is, it automatically pulls in those accurate measurements. In this case, that we're talking about, just as a hypothetical, it's the EagleView report measurements, but we also incorporate with many of the other remote measurements and you can still continue to put in measurements manually as well.

Guy, what am I missing there? I'm sure.

Guy Kopperud: Well, I think one of the things that we saw during COVID where a lot of contractors were the homeowners didn't want people, strangers in their home, for obvious reasons. So still today we encourage contractors, you can do a lot of this upfront work ahead of time before you get out to the client's house. You can already order the roof report, as Taylor said, from like EagleView, have it in the tool, have your estimate is basically already generated before you go out there so you can really spend time with the homeowner instead of being distracted measuring. And you don't even need to get up on the roof at that point, other than to say does it have more than one layer of shingles, things like that. But that's really the genius of it is One Click's tool allows you to be so efficient that you can focus more time with the customer. That's kind of the takeaway.

Karen Edwards: Okay. So I'm curious, does One Click have an estimating platform or are you integrating with third party estimation software?

Guy Kopperud: Yeah. It actually is an estimating tool. We tend not to oversimplify the fact that it is an estimator, but there's so much in front of that and behind it, everything from offering financing to credit card processing. It really is, we like to think of it as a sales enablement tool, and estimating is just one component of it. A great question.

Karen Edwards: Yeah. And is it an app on my phone? Do I log in from my browser? How am I able to interact with and use the platform?

Guy Kopperud: Yeah, it's a web-based solution. You can use it on your iPad. It does have functionality on the iPhone that is somewhat limited. It's just you can get your customer information, things like that. But to really use the full functionality of it, you want to be either on an iPad or a desktop.

Karen Edwards: Okay. Phones still, some phones are pretty big, but I understand. iPads, it's a little easier to see.

So you mentioned, Taylor, when you were talking about the MetalVue program. Do you want to talk about where One Click Contractor fits into that program? What's your role? And maybe if I need to preface, the MetalVue program was established by Sherwin Williams to help contractors make more money selling metal or to add metal to their business and they really took some best in class tools, One Click Contractor being one of them, and kind of put them together into a program. So how does that work?

Taylor Hanes: Yeah. Well, I appreciate that because we definitely want to talk about the MetalVue program. We're excited about it. It's a great program and it is great because it offers tremendous opportunity to our customers and we're constantly looking for ways that we can better serve our great customers and our future customers. And Sherwin Williams and in particular, Mark McDonald and his team at Sherwin have had the vision that selling metal roofing is an area that is largely untapped for the vast majority of roofing contractors. And there's a number of reasons for that, but I think the simplest way to say it is that it's a different sales process. And so your traditional roofing contractor has a great sales process and they know how to sell, they know how to sell roofs, but there's a gap in how to sell a metal roof because the quoting and the installation is quite different. So the MetalVue program helps to streamline that process and make selling metal roofs not only accessible but really quite simple and straightforward. And it's everything from training in that sales process to the digital tools that are necessary to make that a streamlined process.

And so the way One Click fits into that is that we are basically an integrator of many of those different tools. And so we mentioned EagleView as an example. The contractor can order that EagleView roof report and the roof measurements directly in One Click, which just streamlines that process for them to get the measurements in the report. And that feeds into a lot of the logic behind how to create an estimate. We also integrate with Engage and Engage is a great presentation tool and allows contractors to create a very beautiful but also very professional and differentiating presentation.

And so the contractor, when they're in One Click, they can pull in the estimate and the pricing so that they can create a presentation for their customer that's accurate and consistent from each rep. So you're not going to have one sales rep that comes up with one number, another sales rep that comes up with another number. It's going to be an accurate and consistent estimate and then make it very easy, very straightforward to put that into a presentation so you can go ahead and present that to the customer and earn their business. Then you can close business right on One Click, get their signature on your contract, collect payment and even offer financing in the platform.

Karen Edwards: That's fantastic, that really all the tools are right there, especially financing because metal roofs are growing in popularity because for a lot of reasons, their sustainability, their durability, their longevity, their fire resistance, their hail resistance, but it is a premium product. It's different than selling asphalt shingles. It's not as forgiving if your measurements off a little, right? So yeah, I think it sounds like a tool like One Click Contractor really provides that confidence to the contractor.

And I'm curious, I'm going to ask you, Guy, because you said you have a background as a contractor. What do you say to contractors that are like, "I've been doing it this way for 20 years. It's fine. I don't want to have to learn something new." How do you get past that? Either reluctance to learn something new or maybe fear of the unknown?

Guy Kopperud: Yeah, that's a great question. And what I always tell contractors is that remember when the roofing nailer first came out, were you resistant to adopting that technology? There was a cost associated with it, right, with getting a compressor. And the nail guns weren't cheap back then. Until you saw the contractor down the street doing a roof in 30% of the time it takes you to do it by hand. I even remember back in the day, I'm old enough to know that we were selling, like it was virtuous to hand nail. So I would say think back to the other tools that we saw the value in the time that we save adopting technology. It's the same for One Click Contractor.

Or like Taylor mentioned, when you're selling metal, you mentioned it yourself, that it's a premium product. When you use a tool like Engage, you're really selling yourself, you're selling the value of that roof. You're not going to be able to just go, "Well, I can give you a 15 year shingle or a 20 year shingle." And you're trying to upsell these shingles. This is a premium product. So to look your best and to be able to do it efficiently within One Click's platform, you're going to be able to sell a lot more roofs.

Karen Edwards: So really you have to think of it as a tool. And I said that at the beginning, we're going to be talking about a digital toolbox. You have that nail gun. You have the tools that help you do your job better when it comes to the installation or the actual work, but why not have those tools that help you do your job better when it comes to sales and estimating and that kind of stuff?

Guy Kopperud: Yeah, absolutely. And I think what we've been told by our customers, we tend to get customers from competitors. And one of the things that we always hear is that our team at One Click, we don't just collect the check and see you later. We're here to help you. We'll help you with really recommending an entire tech stack if you want from CRMs to financing, things like that. But you're not going to, when you get onboarded through One Click's platform, we're really here to help you. And that's probably the biggest. There's an old thing we used to say in construction that you didn't have time to do it right the first time, but you have time to do it twice. So that means if you are really going to take the time to adopt a platform like One Click, you got to give it a chance. And that's probably the biggest thing with contractors is that mentality. I don't have time to learn it. Yeah, you do and we're here to help you.

Karen Edwards: Right. So tell me a little bit, what does that onboarding process look like? What's the learning curve like? I mean, what should the contractor expect? When am I going to be up to speed and feel comfortable using the tools?

Taylor Hanes: Yeah, one of the-

Guy Kopperud: Go ahead, Taylor. I'll let you start with that. I have a couple ideas.

Taylor Hanes: Sorry. Sorry to step over you there.

So, I love, Karen, I want to reflect back to Guy's last answer because I love getting that boots on the ground experience and his story about the nail gun I think is such a good one. And I really believe that for any business, if you're not growing, you're dying. And it's so important for all of us to, although we may be in our comfort zone, we've got to be pushing our business to adapt, to grow and to adjust to where we are today.

And so with One Click, what we're constantly working on is to provide our customers with the best tools that are going to help them gain efficiency and close more deals, close bigger deals. And so if we can help them make more money and/or save time, then that's a win. And that is in fact what we hear from our customers that we do for them and that they appreciate.

And so to Guy's point, the team that we have in onboard, I will brag on them any chance I get. As a business, we make a big investment in this and we want to have the best people working directly with the customer to ensure their success. We're not going to stop until you are successful in getting onboarded. And what that means for us is that we're going to take your price list, we're going to take your logo, we're going to take your contract and legal documents, and we're going to build. We do this for you. We build out your instance of One Click. Your account is built by us, and then we train each one of your reps for larger organizations sometimes. And we're blessed and fortunate to work with some of the biggest players in the industry, and sometimes they want us to train the trainer and do different programs like that. But whatever the approach is, we're going to make sure that all of your sales reps and others that are on the platform are trained. And we're also there to answer calls and questions really anytime.

So that process, usually the long pole on the tent is waiting on the contractor to get their documents to us. But by the time that, and that can take a little bit of organization, but it's not a heavy lift. But by the time they get that over to us, for your average size roofing contractor, we can have you up and running within a couple of weeks.

Karen Edwards: Excellent. Guy, did you want to add to that?

Guy Kopperud: Yeah, I would add to that. Taylor mentioned it. I think one of the things that we see, well, two points. First of all, if you don't have a sales process, just adopting One Click's platform, using it, you will create a sales process. The user interface is very friendly. The way you walk through using that tool, you will have a sales process in place. Number two, the second part is we see that a lot with contractors. They don't have contracts, they don't have their own pricing, whether it's in an Excel spreadsheet or especially within roofing. I mean, I don't know how many years people say, "Well, I charge $450 a square or $550 a square," and they don't know all the details.

So, I think for a contractor, as Taylor said, you either want to grow your business, make more money or you want to save time. Maybe you're happy with you having 20 guys on your team and you just want to save time, that's fine, that's okay. But if you don't have these pieces of your business nailed down, whether it's contracts, it's financing in place, it's the pricing. I don't know how you could grow. It's just a step you need to take. And that seems to be with smaller contractors, that's kind of the... We can help you with that. As Taylor said, we'll build it in the tool for you, but the pricing is unique to you. It's not just an off the shelf price list.

Karen Edwards: Right. Yeah. I think one of the keys to success in any business is to understand your numbers. And if you're going off a broad $450, $550 a square and you don't know all those numbers that are involved, it sounds like this is the way to really start getting a grasp on that.

Guy Kopperud: Right.

Karen Edwards: All right. So how do contractors get started with you?

Taylor Hanes: Super easy. They can go to our website, OneClickContractor.com. They can click on a button and get scheduled for a demo. They can call our phone number that's there listed on the website. And as soon as they reach out, we're going to be back in contact with them. We're standing by ready to serve the customers in this industry and get them up and running as quickly as possible, but also make sure that we address their concerns or answer any questions that we have as quickly and efficiently as we can. We know everybody's busy and we want to be very cognizant and respectful of their time as well.

Karen Edwards: And they should definitely tell you if they are a part of the MetalVue program, right?

Taylor Hanes: Absolutely. Yes.

Karen Edwards: I know a lot of the participating companies in that program offer special discounts, special pricing, some special perks. So check it out. Taylor and Guy, I want to thank you both for being here today and for educating our listeners about One Click Contractor and the difference that it can make in their businesses. And I want to ask everybody to visit One Click Contractor's directory on Metal Coffee Shop. Be sure to subscribe to this Metal Cast podcast on your favorite podcast platform and set your notification so that you don't miss an episode. And we'll be seeing you next time on Metal Cast. Taylor, Guy, thank you.