The 2024 Election - PODCAST TRANSCRIPT

Editor's note: The following is the transcript of a live interview with Reid Ribble of NRCA. You can read the interview below, listen to the podcast or watch the recording.

Intro: Hello and welcome to Contractor Outlook Newscast. My name is Heidi Ellsworth and this is a newscast for all contractors. And what's it about? It's about what's happening outside of our industries and what we need to know about. So whether it's politics, economics, the weather, we bring experts who maybe you haven't had a chance to listen to before or maybe you have to talk about what's happening that could affect our businesses as we move forward into next year and the year after. Today, I am thrilled to welcome Reid Ribble, former congressman, former CEO of the NRCA former roofing contractor and I consider a very dear friend. So Reid, thank you so much for being here today.

Reid Ribble: Heidi, it's good to see you. I'm thrilled to have this conversation. I'm looking forward to it.

Heidi Ellsworth: You know I love this. You and I can sit for hours and I can just sit and listen and hear everything that's going on, the insights that you have from so many different directions. So let's start out with an introduction. If you could give a little bit, maybe longer introduction about who you are and what you've done so everybody knows.

Reid Ribble: Well, my name is Reid Ribble. For about 40 years of my life, I had my own relatively small roofing company in Northeast Wisconsin where we did both commercial and residential roofing work. And then in 2009, I had this crazy idea that I should run for Congress. So I decided to do that. And interestingly enough, Heidi, I did it because I was concerned about what sounds novel today, a $12 trillion national debt. And so I ran for Congress and it was interesting. I think a lot of my colleagues in the roofing industry were very, very supportive. But there was also a side of friends of mine that said, "Why in the world would anybody vote for you?" But I ended up winning a four-way primary, and then I defeated a two term incumbent and was elected to the US House of in 2010, I went in with a self-imposed term limit, which I kept my promise and left after three terms.

Reid Ribble: At that point, NRCA was looking for a new CEO and they reached out to me and I became their CEO on a five-year contract, of which I did not renew after the five years. I was 66 years old. I was looking forward to retiring and slowing down after such a hectic lifestyle that I'd had for the previous 10 or 12 years. And so I retired in, I think it would've been 2021 or '22. And now I'm just enjoying my life. I stay in tune with politics. I stay in tune with the roofing industry and do some consulting on the side, but for the most part, I just goof off.

Heidi Ellsworth: Well, and you have a beautiful family to goof off with.

Reid Ribble: I do. I sure do.

Heidi Ellsworth: Well, I have to tell you and I want to kind of level set with everyone who's listening to this, so we are recording this on September 20th, 2024 and this is going to actually come out, Reid, right before the elections in November. And so I want everyone to kind of be aware that some things may happen between today and when this podcast actually comes out, but we're going to be talking about where we're standing today. And this has been a very tumultuous and unprecedented campaign season, I mean, just so much happening. So I would love just some of your overall thoughts, Reid, on what's happening with our presidential election and the Congress, the Senate, states, just kind of overview.

Reid Ribble: Okay, well, let's start with the President first. I mean, you mentioned unprecedented and in fact, it was unprecedented in that President Joe Biden middle stream decided to not seek reelection after he had won the primary system, which would've put him as the nominee. Now, political parties have their right to have their nominees and select their nominees under any process that they choose. And the Democratic Party is not obligated to even follow the will of the voters. Those delegates can vote, and they're in essence free agents at the nominating convention, at their annual convention. So when President Biden stepped down, any Democrat could have stepped up and said, "Hey, pick me." But the machine around the White House wanted to reinforce Vice President Kamala Harris's campaign and got behind her right away. She was able to secure the nomination prior to the convention or get enough delegates secured prior to the convention, and she became the nominee.

Reid Ribble: This threw the Republican Party for loop because they were planning on running against one old man, against another maybe slightly older man. And all of a sudden they've got this much younger, more vibrant candidate that they have to run against and they're stumbling a bit, trying to figure out how to run against her. And we're going to see whether it's successful. I mean, I look at the polling and I'm still a bit shocked that it is as tight as it is. I mean, if I had to make a prediction today here in September, I would say Kamala Harris is the likely winner. But it's just so hard to pick that race because it comes down to, as you know, the Electoral College, which is going to be decided by a handful of swing states, Michigan, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, North Carolina, Georgia, Arizona, possibly Nevada. So how those states go will determine... And predominantly Pennsylvania, everybody should watch Pennsylvania on election night.

Heidi Ellsworth: Yes, it is kind of sad being from Oregon, people say, "Well, our vote doesn't count." Of course our vote counts. Every vote counts up and down the ticket and how important that is. But we know that there are these swing states that are just so critical, and we're seeing both on former President Trump and Vice President Kamala Harris, they are active, especially just recently, you're seeing Kamala Harris in so many different of those swing states and on the trail. And it's interesting, a little side note, Reid, because in Oregon we don't get that many commercials. And as I'm traveling, just been in Georgia and I'm watching all these commercials, I'm like, wow, it's just kind of amazing.

Reid Ribble: Yeah, I moved from Wisconsin, which is a swing state and a really tightly contested swing state to the state of Tennessee. So I've got the same circumstance you have in Oregon where there's just not much going on in the way of political advertising. And I was up in Wisconsin recently, like you going to Georgia and it was inundated. It was every single commercial was a political based commercial.

Heidi Ellsworth: I think it's wild. Well, I want to come back and talk about presidential initiatives here in a second, but before we do that, let's talk a little bit about the Congress and the House of Representatives and the Senate. What are you seeing there?

Reid Ribble: Okay, so right now the US Senate is controlled by Democrats. The US House is controlled by Republicans, and it's just a very, very small majority on each side. And so I can pretty well tell you what's going to happen in the US Senate. Republicans are going to take the Senate. I don't think there's any doubt about that. Senator Joe Manchin has already announced his retirement. That means West Virginia is going to go to a Republican that's going to make it 50/50. So the only way that Democrats hold that is if in fact, Kamala Harris wins and Republicans don't win any other seat, but that's unlikely because they're likely to win.

Reid Ribble: And a couple of weeks ago I wouldn't have said this, but after having been in Montana just a few weeks ago, I would say it's very likely that Senator Tester loses in Montana and we have a new Republican senator from Montana giving Republicans a 51/49 majority in the US Senate. I don't really see any other Senate seats switching. It's possible. I don't see it right now, but if it does switch, it's likely to switch in favor of Republicans, not Democrats, just by the number of opportunities that are there.

Reid Ribble: On the House side, that it is a true 50/50 split. It's going to be very, very close no matter who wins. It's not going to be a true governing majority. And I would say if Kamala Harris wins the White House, Democrats are likely to win the House of Representatives. If President Trump, former President Trump wins the White House, Republicans are likely to hold the House of Representatives. But neither of them are going to have much more than a four or five seat majority, and so they're going to have to do things in bipartisan fashion or nothing is going to get done.

Heidi Ellsworth: And you actually answered a question I was going to ask because I am very curious on how much the presidential election could influence the House of Representatives and the Senate because it seems like there's momentum happening out there, and I'm going to just say it, on the Democratic side. I see just such a ground game that it makes me curious on how much that could change.

Reid Ribble: So I think the ground game on the Democratic side is more obvious on the presidential ticket, and those congressional races are left for the ground games in those individual states or congressional districts. And so it really, it's very candidate-focused and candidate-dependent. So Kari Lake is not particularly the best Republican candidate there in Arizona to run for Senate, and I don't know that it really matters what kind of ground game she has or she's not likely to win, even if President Trump wins the State of Arizona and we don't really know how good President Trump's ground game is going to be because they've offloaded that work. I mean, the RNC is not doing that work, which is just kind of weird from my view. They've turned it over to Turning Point and other groups that are not aligned with the RNC, so I don't get it.

Heidi Ellsworth: Yeah, that's really interesting. I've been tracking that too, and I just find it incredibly interesting. One of the things that I think is so important for the roofing, all interest and really this newscast is about construction overall, but interest rates are key. And they just went down yesterday and you're hearing a lot of discussion out there, like it's a political thing, which however that works. But to really look at that, what are you hearing from the construction from within the roofing industry, from contractors just on what they're seeing with policies, financial, everything that's coming around with these two candidates?

Reid Ribble: So first of all, I just want to touch on the interest rate thing about the Fed moving and making a political move here to protect President Biden or Kamala Harris's campaign. There's no truth of that at all, unless of course you would say that the Fed then did the exact same thing in 2020 to project Donald Trump because interest rates in 2020 fell the whole year all the way down to zero. And so you can't really say it was political. The Fed moves based on what they're foreseeing and what is real in the economic data.

Reid Ribble: And so when you see interest rates falling, it's because the economy is slowing. When you see interest rates rising, it's typically because the economy is moving too fast. And so we had this period of inflation after all of the money that two administrations, there's nobody that's without guilt here, two administrations flooded the zone with cash during Covid and then everybody wants to point their fingers at the other guy and saying, you're responsible for the inflation. Well, the inflation was that they flooded the US economy with 50% of the nation's GDP and surplus cash. And so the whole idea was ridiculous from the outset.

Reid Ribble: But without regard to that, as interest rates fall, remember the connection is that because this economy is starting to slow down and you're seeing it already happen in new construction and so what do they do to help provide a soft landing so we don't have a recession or a deep recession to bring those interest rates down to lower the cost of borrowing so investment starts to occur again and people begin to do construction work. There's a delay that's going to happen and rates are going to fall a bit more than what they are to do that. But I think you also don't want to speed it up too fast 'cause you don't want to trigger another round of inflation. And so I think the Fed's doing a pretty good job on managing that. And new construction is dropping off pretty rapidly around the country, but reroofing and retrofit roofing is holding up pretty well around the country.

Heidi Ellsworth: That's what we've seen too. And obviously interest rates are going to help with, I mean a whole generation on people who are trying to buy their first homes. And so hopefully that always stimulates obviously the reroofing industry.

Reid Ribble: Yeah, it will. Although I will tell you something, I got married in the 1970s and was buying a home with 13%, 14% interest rates.

Heidi Ellsworth: Me too.

Reid Ribble: And I remember when I refinanced my first home and got it down to seven and a quarter percent, I thought the money was free. And so we had had this 40 year period of unusually low interest rates, and so people got accustomed to that, but we need to let the market drive it based on demand a bit more so that the whole economic system can stabilize and we can control inflation better.

Heidi Ellsworth: I agree a hundred percent. And what we keep seeing is contractors, especially in the reroof market, is continuing to be very stable. Not the huge backlogs that we had during the covid or the material shortages, but in a good fashion. So hopefully for all construction that continues that direction.

Heidi Ellsworth: What are some of the other differences when you're looking between Vice President Harris and former President Trump, when you're looking at their policies, what they are thinking about doing, how do you see that affecting and influencing the construction industry?

Reid Ribble: Yeah, basically there's not a big difference based on how they've articulated it. And so they appear to have started a bidding war against each other with how much money they can give away. And the current Vice President, Kamala Harris is talking about giving first-time home buyers a $25,000 cash credit so they can buy a home. And she's thinking that that will solve the housing problem, and you cannot reduce the cost of housing by increasing demand. And so she's looking at it from the wrong side. All she's going to do is shove demand up and builders are going to make the money. And so that policy doesn't make any sense, but neither does President Trump's policies about no taxes on tips or no taxes on overtime. If they went to no taxes on overtime, it would incentivize every company in America to cancel all salaried employees because the salaried employees, they're working 60 hours a week now, they'd want those 20 hours to show up on their payroll so they can get a third of their income with tax-free.

Reid Ribble: All these ideas are bad, and they all increase the national debt and that increased national debt drains the private sector of resources that it needs to grow. And so I think both of these candidates are very busy trying to give away the farm and not busy enough telling the American people the hard truth that there's going to be some softness for years as we try to get our arms around trying to contain the growth of the federal government. And that means probably a period of higher taxes and less benefits coming out of the government. That is inevitable. When it happens, who knows?

Reid Ribble: But I will tell you, if we lose control and the world no longer trusts the US, we may lose the global currency that we currently have with the dollar, you would see some very difficult economic times here in the US. And so we need a steady economic hand, we need a truth teller and neither party's giving that to us right now.

Heidi Ellsworth: That is so interesting because one of the things being at Roofing Day again this year back in April, I was struck by more the brazenness and openness of talking to the legislative aides. And maybe it was just because I was talking to Oregon people, I'm not sure, but in previous years, it's been a lot more buttoned up. This year, you could feel the frustration. You could feel the frustration from the legislative aides. They were more willing to talk about it. They were more upfront, they were asking great questions and it was a different feel, at least for us from the Oregon delegates who were there about that. You have that insider insight of really, we think, oh, it's all of these politicians and I say that in the nicest way, but really, who is running the federal government in Washington D.C.? Can you kind of talk about that a little bit?

Reid Ribble: Yeah, yeah. Well, the fact of the matter is for the past 30 years, presidents have grabbed more and more power and Congress has been all too willing to let them do it. And so they're allowing presidents to make difficult choices because they don't want to make difficult choices. Then you have this whiplash effect between left and right. So if one president who's a Republican does a bunch through executive order, then the next president is a Democrat, cancels all that and does a whole bunch of their own things through executive order. What I really want to hear is a president look Congress in the eye and say, "I'm not doing your job for you anymore. You guys have to legislate and I'm going to go in front of the American people and tell them when you don't," and force them to try to get something done.

Reid Ribble: And I think this discussion is really relevant when you think in terms of probably the biggest win the roofing industry had gotten maybe in history was with the 2017 tax cut in Jobs Act. But most of those provisions are set to expire, and the reason they're set to expire is because they're going to blow up the deficit if they don't. And so they had to figure out, how do we get this big tax cut done without blowing up the deficit? Oh, I know. We can just have them all sunset. So stop and think of a very inept Congress in charge of things in 2025, we got all these tax cut provisions ready to expire. Everybody's clamoring to hold their special little giveaway, and members of Congress have to do the one thing that they're most skilled at and that's nothing. If a member of Congress just doesn't do anything, all those tax provisions trigger back to pre 2017.

Reid Ribble: And so in a heavily divided Congress, that is a likely scenario, other than the fact that nobody wants to be that guy or gal taxes. And even though you can argue, "Well, I'm not raising taxes. I'm just letting a bill that we put in place a couple of years ago to kind of spur the economy expire now that the economy's doing okay." And at some point the American people have to recognize, we've got to pay the bills around here or we've got to demand less of government.

Reid Ribble: I know that contractors don't want to hear me talk like that because they probably want me to say we need to keep every provision in place. But I'm at a place now, quite frankly, Heidi, with seven really young grandchildren, every time we have a year of deficit spending in this country, it is a tax increase. It's just a tax increase on my grandkids. It's not a tax increase on us. So we're very happy to pass the buck. Everybody's good with raising taxes on somebody else, but right now what every American is saying when they want to hold onto a tax good is I'm good with raising a tax on my kids.

Heidi Ellsworth: That is a great way to look at it. And I hadn't really thought about that, but yes, that is exactly it because we are. When we were there in April, we were talking about the main street tax and that it's going to sunset. And my only thought was just make us even, right? If you're going to stop a small Main Street folks, then stop the big corporations too, just make it fair. But that doesn't always come across.

Reid Ribble: Yeah, no, it doesn't. I mean, the tax code's never really been totally fair between large and small. And so quite frankly, the tax code has always favored C corporations, not S corporations. The tax cut and Jobs Act did a few really good things in trying to level that playing field a bit. And you can make the argument that, hey, at a bare minimum, let's just treat corporations as corporations and if we're going to tax them, tax them. But I've always been of the mindset, quite frankly, that on the corporate tax that all corporate taxes get passed on, it's a cost of business. And so the reality is every consumer who's buying a roof, whether it's a commercial building, but whether it's some homeowner, they're getting that roofing company's tax burden added to their bill.

Heidi Ellsworth: Yeah, that's true. That's true. It all trickles down, although I shouldn't probably use that terminology.

Reid Ribble: You can say it. You can say it. It's healthy for you.

Heidi Ellsworth: Okay. Okay. Let's talk about, speaking of, since we're on good topics here, let's talk a little bit about, okay, so we're through the elections and what are going to be some of the top issues and immigration is blowing up, but I've watched over the last however many years we've been going to Roofing Day that everyone says, nothing will happen, nothing will happen. What's your thoughts?

Reid Ribble: Nothing's going to happen. I know that really flippant, but it is going to take a leader with extraordinary moral character and one that can draw the public around this issue. But sadly, and this is quite frankly part of America's history, is the country has been anti-immigrant for centuries. Whenever whatever group of immigrants arrived, they wanted to be the last group to come.

Reid Ribble: Let me just give you a little bit of history on that. The Irish immigrants after the 1848 potato famine were aggressively opposed, and nobody wanted Irish immigrants in their neighborhoods. The Chinese immigration that occurred in San Francisco and the Pacific Northwest, people were adamantly anti-Chinese and the arguments were always the same. And if we even go back to the 1760s when my family came to Pennsylvania from Germany, Ben Franklin wrote a letter to a pastor in Pennsylvania complaining about German immigrants. And you know what he complained about? They're not assimilating to the colonial way of life. They're not learning the English language. What are we saying today about Hispanic immigrants? They're not assimilating to the American way of life. They're not learning English. And so these arguments have been going on forever.

Reid Ribble: However, every single economy has been improved when we've had waves of legal immigration. And so all the incentives economically are on Congress to actually solve this problem in increased legal immigration. And that hasn't happened. President Trump cut legal immigration by two million people in his four years, and Joe Biden did a better job on legal immigration, but he sent a signal that pretty much everybody's welcome. And then we had this mass rush at the border. And so I give a lot of credit to Senator James Lankford for at least trying to negotiate a bill that would improve border security and provide a pathway for people who wanted to come here and work legally.

Reid Ribble: And so I think at some point, the demand for labor is going to be so intense that it'll force the hand of Congress to deal with it finally. Because if you want to see inflation, go ahead and deport four or five million workers and you'll see inflation, it won't be 9%, it'll be 12, 13, 14%, in the very places that we need. Where's the one thing that we really need, and Kamala Harris brought it up in her speeches? We need affordable housing. But if you kick all the construction workers out, the last thing you're going to have is affordable housing.

Heidi Ellsworth: Exactly. Exactly.

Reid Ribble: And so these folks are willing to do this work. They're anxious to do this work. They're skilled at doing the work, and we need a more pragmatic immigration policy. But I'm extraordinarily skeptical that either one of these presidential candidates have the skill necessary to navigate that, especially with all the anti-immigrant vibe in the country and crime and all this and they're eating our pets. I mean, all this ridiculous stuff.

Heidi Ellsworth: Those are the things we have to get past. We are all immigrants. My family came from Ireland, your family came from Germany. We are all immigrants. And this is something for construction, for so many hospitality across the board. These are jobs that become American dreams for immigrants coming in, and that really make the economy what it is. And so I think that's one of the things that I also want to share with contractors out there as they are going to vote to really think about some of the top issues that really are affecting their business. So whether that's taxes, like we talked about, the national deficit, the immigration and the things that are regulations, the things that are doing there, what's some of your advice to contractors on how to research and to really find the truth so you don't get into those scary stories about the things?

Reid Ribble: Well, let's just take the Springfield, Ohio, example because I think it's very instructive. Someone puts out a fake thing on the internet about a Haitian immigrant taking their cat or whatever. Now there's just really no evidence of this going on. You've got candidate Vance saying that Springfield was flooded with 20,000 illegal Haitians. By the way, the number somewhere around 12,000, is not 20,000. It's still a big number for a city that size. However, those immigrants are there legally. And then he said the other day, "No, I don't care. I'm going to call them illegal because Kamala Harris did it with an illegal executive order." That's not true. The Secretary of Homeland Security can extend temporary protected status to any group of people around the world who have been endangered by whatever political unrest or violence or natural disasters in their home country. And so they're legally so they can work and they're providing a necessary workforce to a community that was shrinking in size.

Reid Ribble: And so for the most part, having the Haitians, there's been a pretty good economic win for the city 'cause they need to buy clothing, they pay rent, they need to buy food, they need to have all the services that everybody uses. And so these consumer goods that they're purchasing spurs the economy in Springfield in a way that they've not seen for years. And so my advice to contractors is you can't just accept the status quo or settle with it because here's what's happened in the roofing industry. It's more acute and residential rather than commercial, but it's even getting acute there, is that everybody's relying on undocumented subcontracted labor and it's just simple, right? You don't have to pay workers' comp. You can offload all the other forms of insurance. You get a fixed price for this roof, and they come and do it for you. And you don't have to worry about E-Verify 'cause they're not employees.

Reid Ribble: But what we've done willfully or without really paying close attention to it, or just out of sheer demand for workers, is we've now propagated an underground economy in our own industry that we've lost control over. If there is a deep recession, let's just say for some reason there's a really bad economic recession, those Hispanic workers who've been doing your work are not going home. They're going to your customer. They're going to go direct now to the consumer where there is no regulation for them.

Reid Ribble: You've got some responsibility to hire legal workers. The consumer has none. They just pay whatever crew they want just pure cash to do it. And those roofing subcontractors can go into a neighborhood and say, "Well, I did that roof, I did that roof, I did that roof, I did that roof." And they'd be telling the truth. They just did it for different primary contractors. And so we've created a mess. And it's in part because of the lack of response by the federal government and roofing companies have been desperate to provide services to customers, but we've flooded the zone. We're talking about Joe Biden flooding the zone with the immigrants. Well, the roofing industry, the landscaping industry, the masonry, the painters, the hotels, the restaurants, they've been all very willing to hire those workers because it's not like they've got thousands of people knocking on their door saying, "Pick me."

Heidi Ellsworth: Right, right. We need labor and we need it to be legal, and we need it to be in a way that helps all families grow.

Reid Ribble: Right. So we can train them, that we can make it safe. There's a million reasons why it'd be better if those people were employees rather than subcontractors. But the fact of the matter is contractors were desperate because they couldn't get anybody.

Reid Ribble: I'll never forget in 2009, I was trying to fill some positions and we had 54 applicants and out of those 54, right around 40 of them couldn't get through E-Verify. And so we had a problem there. All those people ended up getting hired, but mostly by my competition and of the 14 native born Americans that came here to apply for work, none, zero could pass the drug test. And so this creates a desperation in the construction industry because you can't put someone who's stoned up on a roof and you don't want to hire someone who's not legal to work, knowingly hire someone who's not legal to work. And so all the incentives are in the wrong place to fix this. The only place that actually can get fixes is through sheer leadership in Congress. We don't have that right now.

Heidi Ellsworth: So as you are going to the polls, or if you've already voted, please take the time to research these topics. No matter what side of the aisle you're on, it doesn't matter. It's this kind of research that really matters to know what's real and what's not, and demanding that from our leadership.

Reid Ribble: And the government agencies provide all kinds of data. You can go to the Department of Homeland Security's website. You can go to Customs and Immigration Services website and you can find what the actual data is. Illegal immigrants are not getting Social security, okay? They're not getting Medicare checks.

Heidi Ellsworth: They're not voting.

Reid Ribble: They're not getting food stamps. But this stuff gets into the culture and people begin to believe it, and it becomes an urban legend. Now, are there people who get federal aid? Yes, there are some that get aid, but they're specific from certain countries that are having incredibly difficult times and those immigrants have been given some form of status here with which to have the aid.

Heidi Ellsworth: Reid, this is going to be an interesting, where are we at, 60 days?

Reid Ribble: Yeah, it's less than 60 days now, so I mean, we're almost to October and so it's going to be a really challenging election, but I don't see lots of significant change. I really don't.

Heidi Ellsworth: Well, I hope they make some change to take a stronger leadership across the board. That's what I hope for too.

Reid Ribble: Yeah, well, we certainly could use that and the country could use that.

Heidi Ellsworth: Yes.

Reid Ribble: But we've got the candidates that we've got, and so we've just got to kind of move ahead and do the best we can and hope you make the right choice. But even if you don't make the right choice and your person doesn't win, getting engaged, you mentioned Roofing Day a couple of times here, Heidi, if the entire roofing industry would show up rather than just 300 people, we'd have 7,000 people show up or 10,000 people show up, you would move the needle in D.C. for sure. Numbers matter there. In fact, it's the only thing that matters.

Heidi Ellsworth: Yeah, it does. And we need to get more people there. The one thing I have seen, Reid, that has been so exciting is that there are a lot more state Roofing Days and I give you the credit because the associations are doing this in their own states too. So the roofing contractors are showing up there. We still need a lot more numbers, but it's happening.

Reid Ribble: Right. They're getting to be known, and that's 90% of the battle. If you build a relationship with your member of Congress or state rep or state senator, you're better able to be heard. And so it's just so essential. Rather than sending off an angry email, go ahead and invest the time and money. You're all making a lot of money, so go invest some time and money to go to D.C. at Roofing Day and let your voice actually count.

Heidi Ellsworth: Build the relationships.

Reid Ribble: Yeah, build a relationship. Invite that congressman to your office.

Heidi Ellsworth: Yeah, exactly. Have them come see how great the roofing industry is and all construction. So I, Reid, thank you. As always, oh my gosh, we could go for another hour. This has just been great. Thank you for your time today and your wisdom.

Reid Ribble: It's good to be with you Heidi, as always.

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