Ridgeworth Roofing Blog

Greenbuild 2010

DAN S. — Mon, 22 Nov 2010 13:30:01 +0000

Last week I had the honor of representing the Chicagoland Roofing Council at Greenbuild, which took place at McCormick Center. I was really surprised at how large the convention was and the amount of exhibitors that were there. The CRC’s booth got a lot of traffic and people were very interested in green roofs. It seemed that a lot of our visitors associated garden roofing systems with green roofing. It was a great opportunity to inform the public about other roofing systems that are also considered green (ex. reflective roofing, r-values, etc).

Door Knocking In the Heat!

DAN S. — Fri, 16 Jul 2010 15:50:58 +0000

Wow! It has been hot… really hot in the Chicago area this week. No rain though, which is great to keep our crews working. I think I may have picked the wrong week to start going door to door. However, it has been a great experience getting out there and meeting prospects face to face, dropping-off brochures and magnets to all. I just hope it cools down a little next week so that I can visit with more people in a day. Hope you have a great weekend; stay cool!

Rideworth Roofing Review – “Green” Edition

DAN S. — Wed, 30 Jun 2010 19:28:42 +0000

The summer edition of Ridgeworth Roofing Review, our seasonal technical newsletter, has been written and is ready to go out the door. My Dad and I thought it would be good to move toward less paper, in an effort to eliminate waste.

Using MailChimp, an online e-mail marketing solution, I was able to create an electronic edition of our newsletter in the form of an e-mail. MailChimp has a free edition, which allows for up to 500 contacts and 3000 e-mails a month. Since our newsletter is seasonal, this edition was perfect for us. Uploading our contact information was as easy as it was to download it from Highrise, our CRM program. The two programs integrate, but I haven’t gotten that far with them yet.

The electronic newsletter went out this morning and I was surprised how easy it was to send. We had e-mail addresses for about a third of our mailing list. Another forward step toward taking Ridgeworth Roofing “GREEN“!

So Many Brochures

DAN S. — Thu, 24 Jun 2010 18:49:50 +0000

Using Adobe InDesign we created a new brochure for the company. When we started sending them and handing them out to new customers we quickly realized there was no way we could keep up with printing and folding them in-house. So now we’re off to the presses and Ashley is very happy!

We also quickly went through the 500 magnets we previously ordered. I went back to JH Specialty (fourcolormagnets.com) to order more (a thousand this time). I highly recommend JH Specialty. The communication is great and we get our order processed quickly.

Mailing Done!!!

DAN S. — Tue, 25 May 2010 12:00:40 +0000

With my sister done with her spring term at UoI, she has come on-board to help us during the Summer. With her assistance, we were able to get our entire mailing out within a couple days. The great thing is that so far we have only gotten a few returned back to us. They were pretty easy fixes though and we sent the Ridgeworth Roofing Review out to those customers. We’ve already gotten positive feedback on the Ridgeworth Roofing Review and our new addition to the logo (the superhero). It’s really great to get the feedback to know that the marketing is having a positive effect on our image. I think in the future we’ll be doing more of our own publications. As the founders of 37 Signals state in their book, Rework, “Emulate chefs”. Share your knowledge with your customers; we agree.

Roofwatch Error

DAN S. — Mon, 17 May 2010 15:56:08 +0000

As I had previously reported, we’ve been gearing-up for our first mailing. I ordered 200 copies short of our mailer, Roofwatch, through the Midwest Contractor’s Association (MRCA). MRCA was kind enough to request that the printer send us all of the overruns, so we are now 53 copies short. Not wanting to go back to the printer, I had to come-up with a solution.

I created a one-page newsletter of our own. It actually turned out really great. We were able to use our own pictures and make it very specific to Northern Illinois spring roof issues. The 53 will also be getting a promotional magnet with their “Ridgeworth Roofing Review”. I think we’ll probably also be sending the newsletter out to everyone else in a couple weeks, it turned out so well.

Crisis adverted.

First Mailing

DAN S. — Fri, 07 May 2010 12:50:30 +0000

Ridgeworth is gearing-up to send out a mailing called “Roofwatch”. It’s a small brochure, educating customers about roofing, tailored to the season. The last page also provides some background information and capabilities of Ridgeworth Roofing. In the past, our mailing list was maintained by my Mom and Linda in an excel spreadsheet. The spreadsheet was actually quite good, but there was no connection to Dataforma, which in the past had been used for CRM. There was no easy way to ensure that new contacts were added to the mailing list, which hadn’t been updated for at least the past year. I tried multiple times to pull a list out of Dataforma (ex., by date created), but it wasn’t “clean” and there was no easy way to identify contacts by type of work, who the main contact was, etc. The process just wasn’t working all that well for us.

Long story short, the solution was to pull a list of companies with warranties and manually look-up (and identify) the main contact in dataforma, pull a list of new customers from our accounting software (Peachtree), and use the previous Excel spreadsheet. After ensuring accuracy and manually identifying any duplicates, the spreadsheets can then be uploaded into Highrise CRM. Highrise works well in that once I have the good contact list(s) uploaded, I can add “tags”. For example, I can add tags for contacts that are getting Roofwatch, that are Churches, General Contractors, Homeowners, Property Managers, that have had their roof replaced in 2010, etc. This really helps because than we can pull a list any way we want to and across multiple tags.

It’s been a lot of work up-front, but will be well-worth it down the road.

Blackhawks Game 1

DAN S. — Tue, 04 May 2010 12:24:27 +0000

Rod and I were graciously taken out to dinner and Game 1 of the Blackhawks playoff game last Saturday. We had a great time and want to thank Jim Bone of Bone Roofing Supply, Inc. for inviting us. Unfortunately, the Hawks lost pretty bad. At least they pulled through last night, tying the series 1-1 with Vancouver! Thanks again Mr. Bone.

Promotional Magnet

DAN S. — Tue, 04 May 2010 11:40:19 +0000

My first promotional material order came in yesterday and I wanted to share my experience with the process. To create the artwork, I used both Scribus and Inkscape (both open-source programs). Once I had something I liked, I did a web search for “promotional magnets”. I decided to try-out fourcolormagnets.com, by jhspecialty because they were based out of Fort Wayne, IN, had great testimonials on their site, and had comparable prices.

A great experience and I’m glad we ordered through them. The communication about the artwork, format, and tracking was excellent. I had the magnets in-hand within one week of placing the order, even though I had communicated that we needed them no later than next week. My sister is going to be working with us during her summer break and I wanted her to help out with customer follow-ups. We are going to start-out by sending “thank-you” letters to customers we’ve done work for recently, with a magnet included (I’m using Highrise to track it). Here’s the artwork for the magnet:

Not too bad, right? If you click on the image, you’ll see that it actually has a white background. Hopefully people will hang-on to it longer than they would a business card.

Contact Relationship Managment (CRM)

DAN S. — Mon, 03 May 2010 19:30:04 +0000

I don’t know where to even begin on this topic. One of the most daunting tasks I’ve faced was trying to choose the right CRM program for us. When I came on-board, Ridgeworth was (and currently still is) using a cloud-based (new buzzword) program called Dataforma to manage their contact information and electronic document storage related to jobs. Dataforma states on their website “Software built by roofing contractors for roofing contractors . . .”. All I will say is that Dataforma and I do not click. Likewise, my brother shares my views. For CRM, Dataforma does not meet our needs. Therefore, I went looking for an alternative that was both cheaper and more functional for tracking prospective customers.

First off, I tried a couple open-source CRMs: SugarCRM and VTiger. They both took quite a bit of time to set-up and I was concerned about functionality. Did I really know what I was doing with Apache, MySQL, and the CRM program? I’m not really sure. I also had issues with importing our existing contact info from a Dataforma export. I think I spent about a half-day trying to get it all in there correctly.

My father, Rod, is a member of The Alternative Board (TAB), a group of small business owners that meet to help each other out with various aspects of their business. With TAB’s recommendation, I tried out Salesforce. Wow! Within 10 minutes I had signed-up for their free 30-day trial and had our contact information uploaded and ready to go. Being so impressed and always looking for alternatives, I went searching for other “pay-for” CRMs.

There are so many of them out there! I honestly have no idea how I found 37signals and their Highrise CRM through all of the others (I think I may have searched for “Chicago CRM”). I am so glad I did. It was such a relief to find a company and a program that shared the same ideas as me (minimal, functional, to the point, etc.) You have to read the book Rework from the founders of 37signals. Amazing. It will open your eyes to a new way to look at small business. By the way, 37signals is backed by Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos.

Nothing against Salesforce. It seemed like a good CRM and probably works for many businesses. We went with Highrise. Here are the main reasons: the structure is unique and uncomplicated, it is very easy to learn (important when trying to implement something new in an office with no IT personnel), there are so many neat functions, and the cost was $3312/year cheaper than Salesforce. I don’t know how much more to say about it; you simply have to try it for yourself.

By the way, we still use Dataforma for managing projects and associated documents. However, please check back. You may find a writeup on Backpack soon, also by 37signals.