More leads won't fix a leaky system. They'll just cost you more money to lose more deals.

That's the hard truth Brad Strawbridge learned building Capital City Roofing from the ground up, and it's the insight that drove him to build something most contractors don't have: a full AI-powered sales and operations engine that works before, during, and after every job.

Brad is the owner of Capital City Roofing and co-founder of BuilderLync, a CRM built specifically for contractors. He spent over a decade in corporate America, including as the District Manager of In-Home Services for Lowe's in the Atlanta metro, before going all in on roofing. Today, he's running a 10-agent AI team, scaling Capital City Roofing through a licensing model, and preparing to launch BuilderLync publicly in June 2025.

In this episode, you'll learn:

• Why speed to lead is still the #1 revenue leak for most contractors and the two-part system Brad uses to stop deals from rotting on the vine
• How Brad structures his AI phone coverage: real humans during business hours, AI agents after hours and why he thinks the general public still isn't ready for more than that
• The 10-agent AI team that books appointments, orders measurements, generates proposals, sends follow-up sequences, and flags tasks for human review — without replacing a single salesperson
• How Brad’s AI system generated a complete commercial proposal, annotated photo report, capital improvement plan, and presentation deck instantly for a $200,000 job his partner won before competitors even had their bids ready
• Why Brad uses Claude + NotebookLM + Google Drive together as a hallucination-proof production system and how to set up the same checks-and-balances approach in your own business
• The exact advice Brad gives contractors who want to start with AI: pick one model, read the documentation, and get disciplined, stop jumping between tools every time something new drops
• Why Brad's AI is always transparent with customers that they're talking to an agent, and why he believes that's the only responsible way to deploy it right now
• How Brad built an in-house marketing team from scratch, and the two things every contractor must own before outsourcing a single dollar of marketing
• The marketing budget benchmarks Brad uses: start at 5%, grow to 10%, but only after you can track ROI on every lead source
• Why Brad treats AI-driven social media posting as a consistency play, not a brand play, and what he focuses on instead for commercial and multifamily growth
• BuilderLync's public launch pricing: $500/month for unlimited seats, with a full CRM built for contractors
• The Capital City Roofing licensing platform: three tiers from $2,500/month (tech + website) up to $12,000/month (full back office, front office, and accounting, you just sell the roofs)

This one is for the contractor who’s been getting leads for years but still feels like they’re stuck and suspects the problem isn’t the marketing.

with Brad Strawbridge. Welcome to the show, Brad.

Thanks man, thanks for having me on.

I'm super excited to have you on. We've had a great conversation so far before that. I think you're one of the most tech savvy contractors that I've come across in a while. So I think you'll be a great fit for all the things that we're to be talking about because I think a lot of people really need technology for the home service. It's going to help them a lot.

Yeah, I mean, I'm excited to talk about it.

Yeah, yeah. One of the things that we talked about last time was that you said that sometimes a lot of contracts are getting leads, but they're not growing. They're getting a lot of leads, but they're not growing. Why do you think that's the case?

Yeah, there's a lot of small businesses and not necessarily contractors only, but contractors are a big one just because they're so busy being contractors and you have a lot of revenue leakage, right? I mean, the first thing is speed to lead.

I mean, that's the name of the game, especially with how competitive home services is, right? The first person that can get on the phone with that customer, there's a good chance that they'll at least be able to go sit at their kitchen table and give them a quote, right?

And then a lot of times homeowners, once they talk to someone, they feel comfortable, maybe they stop looking. And that's what you hope for, right? You want to get in front of them, hope they don't get too many more opportunities that can confuse them or force away their opinion. So speed to lead is one. And then having a consistent follow-up sequence, right? Because you go, you present to the customer, you do your inspection, you give them a proposal. That's great. But if you can't,

close them on the first sit, then what does your follow-up sequence look like? Is it consistent? Is it structured? What type of sales psychology do you have behind it? Is there a strategy? A lot of times, probably not. And in most cases, it rots on the vine, so to speak. And so there's lot of missed opportunities to drive revenue, just those two simple things.

Yeah. And, and based on my experience, I've been working with contractors nine years. think before you can get away with having a missed call or having a lead come in and maybe call them an hour later, 30 minutes later. Now with the event, with the competition, the amount of people are spending with private equity, getting to the game. Basically what's happening is that you have to have your tight operations to really maximize leads.

Thanks.

because it gets more expensive. A lot of people are not even doing Google Ads because it gets so expensive with the amount of doing they're doing. So having that process in place is very important. Now, what tools are you using for that, Brad?

So I have a team of human beings that still answer my phones, because even though I'm a huge advocate for AI, but the general public just has not, they don't have the warm and fuzzies yet for AI to be answering the phones during business hours.

in my opinion, unless there's a few exceptions, right? So if my intake team is busy, then it will go to AI assistant and the AI assistant will explain, you know, we're on the phone. You can, I can try to help you. You can leave a message, whatever the case may be. Puts the ball in the homeowner's court. The homeowner is, if they're a reasonable human being, they say, okay. Well they're busy. And quite frankly, the AI that's better than an answer machine, right?

It's a little more personal than answering machine. So okay, this is fine. And then after hours. So after normal business hours on the weekends, we have AI agents that that answer our phones because again, it's reasonable, right? It's after hours. It's better than the answering machine. It can actually troubleshoot. It can help. can do things and most homeowners are finding that out.

and then the, the, the followup sequences, that's all AI driven, right? It'll, it's going to wing to prompt our sales reps to call on the phone at a certain interval, but in the event that they don't, which unfortunately happens, I think we all, think everybody that owns a home services business knows that,

At least they'll get a structured email and text message sequence afterwards. And if the homeowner responds, then the AI will carry out a conversation with that homeowner.

you know, to get the desired result. So those are the two, the two main things that we do right now that in, they're easy things to do quite frankly. And in, in, in it's, is it a 100 % solution? No, probably not. But does it stop a lot of the leads from falling through the cracks? You betcha.

Yeah.

Yeah, yeah. What tool did you build to yourself? Because I know we talked about that, that you actually have AI agents building tools. Did you build these tools yourself? Or are you using a specific company for that?

Yeah, so both. I build a lot of the agents and we actually wanted the other. I own a roofing company, Capital City Roofing, but I also own or co-owner of a technology company, which is a CRM and it's called Builder Link and we're in beta right now.

So my partner, his name's Sean, he's a wizard when it comes to coding and all that stuff. And so our native AI agent inside of BuilderLink, her name is Sierra. So now Sierra pretty much handles the majority of things. I still have the one that I built, her name's Megan.

So between Sierra and Megan, they're able to handle most of the things, most of the needs for the business, quite frankly.

Got it. And you said that you have this build a link is a CRM that connects a bunch of different tools together specifically for the roofing industry, right?

Yeah, so it's roofing specific right now. And here's the reason why. There's four owners of BuilderLink and three of us own roofing companies and the other is a developer. So obviously all the feedback and field testing and everything is roofing heavy right now. But the vision, and that's why we named it BuilderLink, is it's going to be able to do every vertical and then ultimately,

it'll even be able to do like a commercial building development or general contracting or any of those fields as well. because once we perfect a vertical, we're going to add another one, perfect that. And then once, once the data is there for all of it, then it, it, it should be able to do, do everything for, for trades and construction related companies.

Nice, I said this before, but marketing is actually pretty simple if you understand what you're doing. But execution sometimes falls apart. From your perspective, where does execution usually fall apart?

So.

bottlenecks, right? Home services companies are, you know, historic for having founder bottlenecks or, you know, owner operator bottlenecks, whatever you want to call it, because at the end of the day, man, you got to keep the lights on.

Right? You got payroll, you got people to pay, you've got to go sell roofs, you've got to put them on, you've got to do those things. And a lot of times, if a company isn't to the point where they have systemized things, they have core processes, they have SOPs, they've been able to recruit and train and develop and do those things that a business needs to do to be successful. If they haven't been able to do that,

that the things like marketing and those other very, important things, they become lower on their priority list.

What I have always said is, and I think the Navy SEALs have a very similar slogan, that might have been where I got it from. You gotta slow down to speed up. You know what I mean? I remember when I first started Capital City Roofing, after a decade long career in corporate America, I went from having a team and people I could delegate to, to me being the guy. So I was the one climbing the roofs and doing the inspection.

and I did everything. And if I would not have known better, I could have easily fell into that trap too, of not slowing down, taking a step back, saying, no, no, I need to document this process. I need to understand how it works. I need to see where I can make it better and I need to try to systemize it.

Because if I would not have done those things, I would still, I'd be stuck in a bottleneck, right? And you can only, as a business owner, there's a ceiling. Like you can only physically, mentally, emotionally have the capacity to do so much.

And you'll never grow or scale your business if you don't learn how to to do those things that are necessary to scale it which is having the discipline to to Take marketing seriously in in in these things, right?

So, speeding up to slow down, right? So you're slowing down to speed up, right? So you basically have to work. You do your regular job during the day, right? Eight to five, eight to six, whatever. And then the back office stuff, that stuff that you have got to learn, you basically do it after hours or on the weekends, right? That's what it means. That's what you're saying, basically.

Yeah, yeah, and you have to be okay with...

the, it seems counterintuitive, right? Because it's like, well I need to generate revenue. So everything I do should be pointed at generating revenue. Well, yeah, eventually, but before you can get there, you have got to figure out your systems. You have got to document these things and make it consistent and make it repeatable and make it scalable and get everything from out of your brain onto

a paper or type it in the computer, whatever. So that way when you hire somebody, have something to give them to duplicate. And that's the problem. That's what I see a lot is, companies have this tribal knowledge, right? The leadership in the company know how to do it. And then it's like, well, where can I find how to do that? And it's like, well, I just know. And it's like, well, that's great that you know.

how are you going to build a team if they don't know and you're too busy to train them. So you at least need to have an SOP to say, Hey, take this. It's written detailed enough that you can follow it from A to Z in those steps and you can execute this task. You've got to have those things as a business.

Yeah, yeah. And that's very common in the home services space is that they rely on a lot of hard work and hustle, which can get them to a certain number. yeah, but you know, after a certain level, you have to kind of slow down and step out. It's kind of the old saying it's working outside the business and versus inside the business, right? Having a bigger picture overview, right? Doing the actual task.

At the same time too, you're, I mean, as a business owner, see yourself, you're still going to be doing things that you need to do because sometimes things need to be done. You're just not saying that, that you don't stop doing those things. I'm saying that you have to step outside sometimes and actually do that. And one of the things is marketing, right? So I had, I'll leave you on the podcast. I don't know if you know him, he's a home service coach. actually mentored Tommy Mello a few years ago. And he, one of the things he's mentioned is something that I really understood is that there are seven

role if you're looking at work charts, there's going to be seven roles and as an owner, there's going to be two roles that you're not going to be able to outsource in the beginning. The financial role and then the marketing role. Those roles you have to take ownership and then in terms of actually owning that role, you have to, you can hire someone and in your case you actually brought it in house, but you can, have to own that role in terms of actually understanding what are the KPIs, what are the actual metrics you look for. That's what people actually

don't understand. I see a lot of times where contractors, delegate the marketing role to their office admin or to the secretary to look for a marketing agency to hire them or whatever. As an owner of the business, have to be involved. You have to be involved. And that's where a lot of things get turned around. What led you to, because we talked about this before the meeting, that

what led you to actually build, because you're one of the few people that I've talked to, built an actual marketing team in-house.

Yeah, because you know, to your point, your brand as a business owner, your brand has got, it's got to be the most important thing to you. It's, I mean, it's everything. It's who you are. It's what you stand for. It's what you show your customer. It's, it's, it's, it's your identity, right? And, and, and somebody else can't build your brand for you. they can or they can, but it wouldn't be your brand.

Right? And so for me, knowing that that was important, I did hire a bunch of marketing agencies, but I was very involved. was, quite frankly, I was annoying them. I was so involved and engaged. And what I found was nobody was able to...

I'm trying to say this the right way so I don't come across as rude or something like that. But I ran into, I just ran into a lot of marketing agencies that either didn't care as much as I did, which they're not, but not even close, right? Or just, just they were, they were okay with it being good enough. Yeah, that's good enough. And that's not acceptable to me.

and it shouldn't be acceptable to a business owner, right? And so that in the beginning, yeah, you have got to, you've got to figure out what's your brand, what's your brand guidelines? What fonts do you use? What's your colors? What's your hex codes? Like you, like that is, that's part of your SOP process. Like what is your brand standards, right? What's your voice, right? What, who is your ideal customer? What do they look like? Where do they live? What do they like to do?

Like these are things that, you've got to figure out yourself that people, nobody else can figure it out for you. People can do market data. They can analyze trends. They can do these things that are, that are tools and those are valuable tools that you, and this is my opinion, that you as a business owner need to learn how to do. You need to learn how to do those things. And then you come up with the truth, right? This is the truth for capital city roofing.

And now once you have a high level understanding of it, then start vetting some agencies, right? Interview a bunch of agencies, get to know them, see if their core values align with yours, see if they buy into the vision you have for your company, see if you buy into the vision that they have for their company, and find a partner that can be a true partner, right? Because when you think about outsourcing things in your business to third parties, what you're doing,

as a contractor you're already used to it. You're just subcontracting, right?

So if you're not gonna, but you still got a quarterback it, right? You've got to, you still have to lead it. You can't just hire a marketing agency and take your hands off the wheel and be like, oh, this is just gonna be great because it probably won't because they're not you, right? They don't care about your business as much as you do. And you have to be able to be engaged in that process enough to where they have a deliverable and it needs to be tweaked. And you know at a high level,

what needs to be tweaked and you partner with them and you correct it, right? And that, think that's what a successful symbiotic relationship would look like. I unfortunately was not able to find that agency. And so I was very intentional about learning it all myself and doing it and then bringing people on and teaching them and then building it in house. And that's the route.

I went? Is it the only route to go? Is it the best route or whatever? No, probably not. It's what worked for me. And I was engaged in that process to learn and to know what was going to work for me better. And so I would say that's the biggest takeaway is be engaged in the marketing of your company because it is the most important.

It's the most important. So you said that actually it is the most important. And if you actually say what in our experience, my experience working with contractors for an I apply to your small business owners, not just any contractors, the owners that are most engaged, they actually care. They actually review the things that we send them to actually talk about the feedback and talk to us on a consistent time are the ones that benefit the most. The ones that are just

they ghost or they just go away or they stop caring or whatever reason. At the end of the day, marketing is a queen of the chessboard. If you're playing chess, marketing is a more important piece. And it also comes down to the budget. So it's perfectly illustrated with the budgeting. I'm not saying you should be spending 10 % or 15%, but if you take it really seriously in your marketing, should, that's what private equity does. That's what these guys do.

they're spending 7%, 8%, 10%. It comes to budget. So if you're top line revenue, you're spending one or 2%, it's not important enough to you. I'm sorry, it's not good enough. that's the thing. So if you're like, that's the other thing. So I know cashflow is a big issue with contractors. It's the number one issue is finding that the sum, because they're not really charging enough money for their services. But that's the other thing too, is that, hey, if you're gonna do this, you need to spend.

No.

certain amount of money to get the results, especially with competitive landscape today. Would you agree on that?

Yeah, you've got to spend at least five, in my experience, at least 5%. And then if you want to, that's just kind of to get to a certain level and then maintain. And then if you want to, if you want to grow, if you want to grow at a pretty decent velocity, then 10%, right? But.

but always somewhere in between five and 10. And don't spend 10 until you know what you're doing. And I'll say that, so please, if you're listening to me, don't just say, well, he said I should spend 10. Don't spend 10 until you do five really well, and then increase in increments.

and be able to know your metrics. You need to know what your metrics are. Like you need to be able to tell, you should say, hey, I have five main lead sources and I know what each one is doing. I know the ORI on each one. I know the customer acquisition cost. know everything about them. And so I know reasonably well if I were to add three more percent to this budget,

These are the predictions on what I could expect. You need to know those things. And if you don't, learn. And if you don't know those things, learn those things before, before you do anything. And then start at 5 % and work your way up from there.

Yeah, because you can, if you understand your numbers, if you understand your CAC, which is your cost per acquisition, your cost per lead, cost per book deployment, your booking rate, right? you're, sometimes there's an issues with somebody, your CSRs, how they're answering the phone, what's their booking rate, training that up, you know, different home services at different averages, but you can see as high as an 80 % booking rate or some industries. It just, if you just switch that number from 40 % to 80 %

you already, now you have to spend more money. You're just already doubling the revenue because you're booking more appointments from the calls that are coming in. Right? So that's the thing that, that really people have to understand. What, what, so you actually learned this yourself, which is rare. In my experience, it doesn't happen. A lot of people do not learn it, but it would make them much better clients and just make them better business owners. Right? What are the steps that you took to, get to that level? Exactly. What?

What exactly did you do to learn those roles?

Yeah, I mean, for me it was a necessity. And so I'm big on having discipline and to do the things you don't like to do if they're important. And then I was lucky enough that I ended up liking it. So I'm patting out now I'm passionate about it, right? And then when you mix those things, you can learn.

you can learn things pretty well, right? People like to learn things they're interested in. And I was lucky enough to, to that happened to me. But this is what, this is what I would say to a business that's thinking about bringing marketing in house. Do you have anybody on your team that's interested in it? That's the first step. Cause if they're not interested in it, they might learn it at like, if they have to, right?

but the results not going to be great unless they're interested in it. But if you have somebody that's interested in it, try it out. Like give them, give them, give, give them a little bit of runway and in some direction and say, I want you to learn this and you know, report back to me with some ideas and, and, and, and, and in a game plan. Right. And then, and then kind of take it from there.

because if you can find, because, and that might be rare too, I don't know, but that would be best case. And then if you don't have anybody that's interested in it at all, they're just like, ah, this is, it's foreign to me. I have no idea. I'm not willing to, or I don't want to take the time to learn it after hours. That's the thing too, like you still got to run your business, right? So like these learning activities really, especially if it's someone on your leadership

team it needs to be something they're interested enough that that's what they're going to do maybe in the evening times when they go home and they're instead of scrolling through TikTok they're

trying to learn about marketing, right? So again, it's kind of like it's not a one size fits all kind of path, but that would be the first thing is finding someone in your organization that's interested in it and then giving them a little bit of runway to start learning about it and implementing some things.

Yeah, my experience finding the right people is the hardest single part, singles, the most difficult thing of actually running a business is finding good, good talent. And it's actually very rare. Typically the founders of a business are. They hard, they work the hardest, right? They're, they're willing to learn, learn the most. They want to take the time to actually work outside business hours. I typical employees, even high level employees are not, they don't have the blood, sweat and tears typically.

So it is finding that right talent on that. if you're building an in-house team, right, so I'll break it down the way I look at it, is that there's different tiers depending on your revenue, right? If you're zero to three million, it's maybe hiring an agency but not spending a ton of money, but you should really learn how to do it yourself a little bit. If you don't have the time, then you can spend a little money on an agency, but I would recommend hiring a full

a little marketing agency, maybe about three million, then you can start looking at SEO and these different things. You're more established. You can start really spending some of that budget that you can. And then above six million, I would probably look at hiring internal videographers, like internal content people, because it's extremely important. The way I look at it today is that you have to be more of a media company instead of a marketing company.

The old saying that I used to say is that you're a home service business that sells plumbing or sells roofing or sells whatever. You're a marketing company that does that. Now I would say you're a media company that does plumbing, a media company that does roofing. So you're a media first. So you actually have the content team in the age of AI, which makes you much more unique, also makes your brand stand out. So I would go the in-house route with a videographer and then also the marketing manager and then I'll outsource

the high level things. I would outsource it to a marketing agency that knows what they're doing for media buying for SEO, because finding a media buyer is extremely expensive. The best guys are really expensive. They're also very skilled and high demand. I've hired like 20 media buyers, trust me, they're hard to find. And then hiring an SEO company, it's not the only one to do. Local SEO is not super complicated, honestly. Local business is not that complicated.

just hiring someone with a track record and then outsourcing that because typically the media buy in somebody who's a marketing manager is not going to be doing everything. They're not going to, they're usually specialists, right? If you're building marketing team, they're going to be either a SEO person or going to be a media person or a copywriter or an AI person. They're not going to be everything. There's doesn't exist unless you're a founder like Brad, which is rare. That's the thing. I'm myself, I'm not really a specialist either. I'm more of a generalist. I do have more the specialist people on the team. I actually learned it like yourself. I've done everything myself.

but I'm not really like an actual specialist. I actually learn everything a little bit like you did, but if you take the time like that, then it makes sense, right? Let's talk about AI. So obviously a lot of contractors behind AI, what are the biggest gaps you see with AI with a lot of contractors?

So a lot of contractors are just using AI as a chat, as a chat bot. it does way more than that. And I mean, it becomes better daily. mean, daily, it changes daily. And so you've got to, you've really got, here's.

same type of deal. Like if you're not interested in it, get interested in it. Like that's kind of one of those things where it's not about find someone that's interested. It's like, no, no, you gotta get, you have to get interested in it 100%. cause it's not going anywhere and it's, it's just increasing. I mean, exponentially the speed of which it changes and gets better and the capabilities that it has exponentially will get faster.

And then learn about it learn about it go pick pick a model and by model I mean like either clod or open AI chat GPT perplexity Gemini, whatever just just pick one pick one you that you like and Learn about it and don't jump back and forth back and forth this one's came out with this. Let me because the fact of the matter is is they're all going to Do this this is my opinion. They're all going to be they did this and I'm gonna do that

It's going to, they're, they'll be similar, right? right now, Claude is like amazing, right? But maybe next month, open AI will be amazing. Who knows, right? But pick one and learn it. Go on their website, read all of their documentation, read everything you can find on it. Right. And then start learning it and using it and then make it learn with it. Right.

I learn about marketing from AI, right? Hey, teach me about this. Hey, do deep research and give me the best, you know, authority, pieces that will actually teach me. Right. And then, and it will, right? If you don't know how to do something, ask it, it'll tell you fat check it, you know, make sure that you're, make sure that you're using it. And that's second thing learn it and then use it, be disciplined to use it.

with everything. Try to incorporate it into whatever you do. If you're gonna go shopping, have it make a shopping list for you. If you're gonna go shopping, ask it about what you're about to buy, right? Whatever you're doing, run it by there, get some information and see what it looks like. And then once you nail down that piece, then start looking at, well, how can I create a separate?

project or workspace for this specific topic and let me organize my thoughts and organize its output and give it specific skills and give it these things that it can do and keep growing with it. I mean, I have AI agents, I have a team of agents that run every non-human essential

part of my business. And I just learned how to do it by being interested in it and then learning about it. And that's it.

What are some cool agents that you built for your business?

So I've got a 10 agent team that'll do, it'll, it'll do everything except go to the customer's house and sell the roof and then nail the shingles on the roof. Do everything in between.

So it would analyze it, it send estimates, stuff like that, send proposals.

Book the appointment, put it on the rep's calendar, send calendar invites and appointment reminders, order the roof measurement, attach it to the proposal, generate the proposal. And then once it generates the proposal, it sends a task saying ready for human review, right? Because you don't, mean.

You don't want AI just blindly sending prices out right now. I can just tell you that. So then I, you know, we double check it, change what we need to change, send it to the customer. Once it's sent to the customer, then the agents take over with the followup sequence. And yeah, I mean it does, it does everything that doesn't require a human, you know, and we do it responsibly and, and, and tastefully. Cause again, remember,

Yeah, yeah.

the general public, don't have the warm and fuzzies yet about AI completely. Right? And so we're, we are transparent when an agent is talking to a customer, we're transparent that it is an agent. We always say that this is a, an AI roofing expert that's been a formal, formally trained by capital city roofing. Right?

But if you need to speak to a human we have a lot of them ready to answer your questions and then the agent can transfer that customer to a human, right? And so that's an important note to make as well because you don't want, this is my opinion, you don't want to trick the customer into thinking that they're talking to a human if they're not, right? Because...

Some people, that rubs people the wrong way, right? So learn how to leverage it. Try to infuse it into your workflow where you can. And, and then that's going to free up your team, you and your team to do what humans should be doing, which is human stuff. Like talking to customers, going out into the community and joining a networking group and, and, you know,

Business development. There's things that only human beings can do and only human beings will ever be able to do. So free up your human being employees from doing these manual, repetitive tasks and get them out into a customer facing opportunity that could drive more revenue for you.

Yeah, yeah. How long would it take to send the proposal before without AI? And how long, how much time does it save you?

so we, so we've always been pretty, we've always been pretty fast, but just because it's important, but, I mean, it's instant. I have, I have an orchestration layer built out right now that for like multifamily roofing. like picture, like, like an entire apartment complex or, know, a, an HOA, a town home community, whatever it is, I can generate a.

beautiful, complex, accurate, detailed proposal, a capital improvement plan.

photographic report with annotated images, a presentation deck, and then the script for each slide on that presentation deck. I can generate it instantly by just uploading a folder that I put all the data in, uploading a folder and the AI has SOPs or they have skills that produce

Instantly, essentially.

Yeah. Do you use Cloud for that, for the agent? CloudCore? Okay. So you have the SOP with the folder, all the information. It comes from the antique form typically?

I do, yeah.

Yeah. And so what I've done also is I've taken, I've taken Claude and I've taken Google anti-gravity and my Google drive, cause that's what we use. run Google workspace and then notebook LM and I have them all wired together. so that way notebook LM and my Google drive, that's a checks and balances situation, but

Notebook LM essentially becomes the persistent memory solve for consistency. And so everything lives in Notebook LM. And then we have the specific divisions of the company as a workspace and in co-work. And so when we prompt against, you know, those workspaces,

it pulls from notebook LM. And so that way there's no chance of hallucination. It's, it's based on our company data that we have uploaded these sources into the notebooks and notebook LM. And so that way the output is, is very consistent.

Did you build it through like a make or Zapier workflow through the entire process or just through, okay, was through the agents, okay. Okay, interesting. Okay, okay, got it, got it, Yeah, that's interesting. That's really cool stuff. What other thing, see, that's the thing. What kind of advantages does this give you versus a company that doesn't use AI? Talk about the advantages. What are the advantages you have versus someone who doesn't do this?

This is perfect example. So capital city roofing We are we're scaling by a pretty interesting business model. It's a licensing and shared services business model It's kind of like franchising, but it's it's it's everything that franchising is and then ten times more This is a prime example. So we just launched our location in Charleston, South Carolina

And he's actually my partner one of my partners with builder link Blake Grissom Blake Grissom with revive roofing and exteriors He's now revived roofing and exteriors powered by capital city roofing. So Blake called me. He said hey, I've got a shot at I Want to say it was a 10 or 11 building townhome HOA community Can you help me? with this proposal

I said, absolutely. said, all I need you to do is go is collect the data, go get the picture, go climb the roofs, get the pictures, fly the drone, get the pictures, however you want to do it. And then send me your, roof reports, right? measurement reports. So, then I, and I said, make a folder and a shared drive. That's, know, the, the, the community name, each building, and structure it.

And then I that, plugged it in to the system that I've built and it generated that, that, that output, right? He presented that to the board and they said, we have never ever seen something so thorough, so beautifully written in fast ever. And he won the job.

They didn't even entertain anything else because the other contractors had not getting their bids back and they wouldn't have gotten their bids back probably in seven to 10 business days at the, at the fastest. Right? So we won that job because it was fast. It was beautiful. It was accurate and it was authority. They, they knew at that point that they were dealing with a roofing organization that were professionals.

Yeah. Yeah. And just to context, how much, if you don't mind, how much was that job like a revenue wise to potentially revenue wise, just to, give some, some context on that.

200 grand. So 200 grand job just from using AI, right? Using AI to help increase the chances of you winning the sale, which you won the sale. That's the power of it, right? And honestly, like once you learn it, you implemented it, it's not really that hard to execute, right?

200 grand.

No, and it gets easier. It gets easier, then you learn it better, then you add to it, and it becomes powerful. That's the thing, like I didn't learn it. I just, like it didn't start out this way. You know what I mean? Like I started out just like everybody else, just chatting with chat GPT. But I was interested in it. And I knew that it was a necessity. And it gets better. I get better at it every day.

I apply myself to it and I get better at it every day. And then so will you, so will everybody else. But you gotta have the discipline to use it and learn it.

And it's powerful and it it doesn't replace human beings It doesn't replace human beings it might replace some but what it does is it gives human beings the opportunity to go be human beings because Blake could be He could have been wasting or not wasting. I mean you have to do it, but he could have been spending his time for a week

building all of those reports and doing the data analyzing and annotating all the pictures manually. He could have spent a week doing that, but he doesn't have to. Now he can spend a week going, meeting more HOA presidents and more realtors and more property owners and more, you know, he can spend a week generating more $200,000 sales. That's the power of AI.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. How are using AI in your marketing?

So all of, so like all of my, this is my strategy, cause you're right. I just started with the media stuff because I recognize like, it's like, man, if I want to keep up, I need to become like a, like a roofing, I don't know, movie star or something it seems like. So I just started, you know, filming content, getting back on roofs, you know.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

inspection, you know that kind of stuff and then all of my kind of regular posting because here's here's my philosophy on on the social media piece of marketing at least if Content is king Consistency is Queen right in the easiest way to be consistent and on brand is to automate it with AI and so I have

you know, creatives that are, you know, they're branded, they're consistent, and at least once a day, they get posted to all the channels and it's AI driven content. and it's not meant to replace the real human content and the, the, know, the, the reels and and those things that are way more valuable.

from an authority standpoint, but from a consistency standpoint to be able to post something that at least is branded, that's consistent, that looks good. can automate all of that easily. And so that's what we do with that. And then for me, the most important marketing piece for me is relationship driven marketing, right?

which the AI frees me up to be able to go do, right? So networking events.

community events, going to the farmer's market and meeting people. Like for me, that's the most important part of my business because I'm trying to get market share in commercial and multifamily. And these things, these things aren't driven by someone seeing a Facebook ad. They're driven by relationships and meeting somebody and earning their trust and those things. And I wouldn't be able to go do these

Yeah.

things if I were, you know, again doing those tasks that are those repetitive tasks.

Have you built an agent that can prospect all the potential commercial property owners in area and have them reach out through email? Have you done that already?

Yeah, yeah, yeah, so we we have an agent that can scrape public data because you business to business is it's completely fine to do that if it's public data and then we're members of the apartment Association so I have

I have that data of, you know, all the apartment complexes in the area, who's building owner, who's the property manager, those things. And so we're able to, to get that data and, and put, put together a, a strategy for, outreach, right? And so emails and if we can get a mobile phone number, we'll do a text message campaigns. And it's the same type of structure and cadence as our customer

nurturing sequences and follow-up sequences but it's just geared towards cold outreach, right?

Yeah. Yeah. And just to give you context guys, like I've run agency for a while and I've done similar things, what Brad is doing, but instead of using AI before years ago, I would use a VA. would VA to kind of source the leads and hire someone and then basically look at all the people that are available on this list and then kind of scrape the leads and try to get the emails through that way. just, it's more, it takes, it took hours to do that. Now with an agent.

You don't have the VA can be do other things or you can not use them anymore. But if you use up your time and it gives you more authority on that and just gives you like, have the agent actually do that, that those tasks, which actually very important. And also can also write the emails for you and give it context to the person you're reaching out to where it actually make it specific to that person. It has a power to actually do that where it's actually specific to that person where it's not like you're sending random emails.

Yeah. Yeah, we enrich. It's called enriching, right? We enrich that data. We'll get the list and then have it enrich the data with some personal tidbits of stuff to make it feel personal. Yeah.

Have you used any AI for evaluating your marketing metrics like APIs?

Yeah. Okay. Okay. Well, that's something that you can cloud integrates with if you're into paid media. Well, Manas integrates. So Manas is a new, I don't know you guys heard of Manas, but Manas is a tool that Facebook acquired a few months ago. It's a brand new tool. It's amazing. It's an AI agent. Basically the way it works, it's just a connector. It connects many different agents together to give you 20 different agents all in one system. And it's acquired by Facebook. So it connects with Facebook automatically.

Not yet, no I haven't, that's a good idea.

as an API access so you can actually, if you're doing Facebook ads, you can actually review your performance on Facebook and see what the performance is. Just say, hey, I have this campaign, tell me the last 30 day performance, what am I doing well and what I not doing well, what can I do to improve? And if you're gonna do rad yourself, you're gonna do Facebook ads, that's actually the, as a local business owner, it's actually the least, it's not the hardest, like part of the, if you're doing high level stuff, it's definitely.

It's definitely hard, in terms of local businesses, it's not rocket science. It's like, if you're smart, you'll figure it out, Brad. You should be able to do it yourself. It's not the hardest thing. But most people don't want to do that, right? That's the thing. That's the thing that holds people back. Let's talk about that Builder link. You have a solution, right, where you have the ability to offer all the backend stuff, which a lot of...

business owners don't have for like a really good price, right? Like I think it's $12,000 a month you can offer like all this. Can you talk about that?

Yeah, yeah, so that's the

So that's the actually, that's the capital city roofing licensing platform. So which, which our technology stack is, is built on builder link, right? And again, kind of the same, I think I might've, I've mentioned it before when we were speaking before beforehand, an abundance mindset, right? So we don't want to just build all this technology and keep it for ourselves. We want other people that are interested to, have the tools

that they need to be successful. So BuilderLink, which is the operating system or the CRM, we're in beta right now. And then we'll be going V1 public launch probably in June, most likely is what it's looking like.

And that'll be available to anybody. So you can get the CRM and it's very affordable. There's two tiers, $500 a month with unlimited seats. And then for like an enterprise type account, it'd be $1,000 with unlimited seats. So it's fantastic use case. And like I said, it does everything.

And then taking a step further, you can have, cause we've got something for everybody. If you, if you want the technology, it's builder link all day long. If you want a full, a full blown roofing company, we can do that too with the capital city roofing licensing platform. And we have three tiers depending on where you're at in your journey of, of your business. If you're just starting out, it's just $2,500 a month.

And that includes the technology, includes the stack. It includes the website, includes all of the things that we do. Right. And then once you grow and you get to the point where you're like, man, I need, I need some help on the front end. I need someone to answer my phones. I need someone to book the appointments. I need someone to,

talk to my reps and make sure they're putting in notes in the CRM and updating the stages in the CRM and keeping it clean and organized and making sure people are following up all the stuff on the front end. We do. and then the last year is our motto on the last year is we'll run the company. You sell the roofs and we do the front and the back end. So

We do your accounting, we do your bookkeeping, we keep you compliant, we make sure your subcontractors don't let their insurance lapse. We file your warranties, anything on the backend, right? And that's only $12,000 a month. $12,000 a month, if you were to outsource that to other third parties, it would be significantly more expensive.

And then if you were to hire W2 employees to do all that stuff, it'd be even more expensive than that. And so it's really a no-brainer. And we're able to achieve that because we own those other companies that do it. We've developed a vertically integrated ecosystem. So the accounting company that's handling the back end, it's just one of our sister companies. Same thing with the front end. It's a staffing agency.

Because like I said, we have real humans. We have a team in the Philippines, a call center that is our front end. And they're all trained on capital city roofing. So it's consistent. They have the same SOPs that we have at the corporate headquarters.

And so we're able to provide tremendous value to people that want to join this vision that we have for scaling Capital City roofing across the nation.

You came from a white collar background. What made you get into roofing?

So I originally came from a blue collar background and then into a white collar background. So I started out, very first, actually the very first job I had was when I was 16, I got nationally certified as a personal trainer.

and I trained clients from four in the morning until eight in the morning every day at the YMCA and then I would go to school. Then when I turned 18, I started a painting company.

And I did and I did painting and I did it myself because I was 18. So So so I did painting and remodeling and things like that And then I went to work for Lowe's and when I went to work for Lowe's I was a delivery driver So I drove the flatbed with the truck with the truck mounted forklift on the back and I would deliver building material Then I had someone there who

who understood people and relationships and how those things work and ended up becoming my first mentor. And he, he came to me one day, I'd just gotten back from running my route and he came out the back of the store there and he's like, Hey son, what are you doing? I'm like, I'm in my early twenties at the time. And, and I said, I'm working, sir, what are you doing? You know? And, he's like, no, no, what are you doing? Driving a delivery truck? He's like, you've got leadership potential, you know, your coworkers look up to

you this and that, blah, blah. And he ended up talking me into being a department manager for Lowe's. so I did that and then got a series of promotions afterwards and store manager, general manager, district manager of in-home services. that's where I got into this. So I ended up running the home services for the Atlanta metro area as the district manager of in-home services for Atlanta.

And I noticed during COVID that two of my verticals, we weren't just positive. Like we were double digit comping, double digit increases.

And it was roofing in HVAC. And during that time, a recruiter reached out to me, a headhunter, I guess, or whatever, and said, hey, we've got this company that's looking to add director level leadership to the commercial roofing company in Atlanta. Would you be interested to have a conversation? And my faith is really important to me. I'm a licensed pastor.

I'm not currently serving in church, but I don't necessarily believe in coincidences, right? I believe that things happen for a reason. And so I knew, I was like, yeah, I need to have that conversation. And I did, and ended up leaving Lowe's, which I never thought I would, because it's a fantastic company, did a lot for me and my family. That's where I met my wife. We both come from Lowe's. Anyway, so I went and worked for this roofing company, and then absolutely fell in love with roofing.

Um, it was, it's a, it's a joke. always tell people that the guy who hired me, he was like, he was like, well, we got you now. He's like, you're in roof and you're never getting out. Um, and, uh, and he was right because I, I, and here's the reason why I like it. It's a real, it's it's a service man. And that's what home services is about. So if you're listening to this, maybe this is inspiring. I don't know. Home services, the service isn't

just the service you're performing. It's the service that you're giving to your community. It's the service that you're giving to your customers, the service that you're giving to your employees. It's about the service.

and we're helping solve such a important problem. mean, if your roof is leaking, like, man, it's everything. Like that's the literal roof over your head. Like if your roof is leaking, that is such a terrible spot to be in. And we get to give people solutions to that every day. And it's a, and it's great. And I love it. and then, you know, I guess the white, I guess that that, I guess that's considered white collar stuff. I mean, I'm, I can go put a roof on.

with my two hands, like I can do all this stuff, you know, but I've learned as a business owner that there are things that are more important to scaling a business than me going, putting the shingles on a roof.

Right. And I've learned how to do those things that I've become really good at doing those things. And now I'm very passionate about those things. And what I'm, what I'm more passionate about is teaching other people how to do those things. And that's why, that's why we came out with builder link. That's why we came out with the capital city roofing licensing platform is to be of service at a higher scale. The money will come. I know it's, you know, it's going to be wildly successful and it's going to be a lot of money, but the money is not what gets me out of bed in the morning.

The money, what gets me out of bed is being of service to somebody else. That's what does it for me.

Awesome, awesome. Brad, it was a pleasure talking with you, Where do people find you?

Yeah, likewise. Anywhere. We're everywhere, like I said. So capitalcityroofing.net is our main website.

We're on all the social media platforms. Builderlink.com and Builderlink is spelled L-Y-N-C. BradShroudridge.com, can Google my name Brad Shroudridge, Capital City Roofing, Builderlink. We're not hard to find.

Brad, thank you, man. Appreciate it.

Appreciate it.