Making Millionaires Through Roofing, Owning a 9 Figure Business and Surviving a Massive Flood | Lee Haight DSH #241

If someone has a problem on their roof, that it's an opportunity.

And if you fix big problems, you'll get big paychecks.

Since they can't get up there and see if the damage is bad, it can actually be a good thing for construction because one of the biggest problems in construction, if a customer can come out and point at something that they don't like because they can see it, then you might have to go back and listen to a bunch of Karen talking.

Roofing is very cool.

That's true.

Because you can knock it out in one day.

It's an exterior.

People ain't up there picking your work apart.

And as long as it doesn't leak, then you're you're good

welcome back to the show guys got a great guest for you guys someone today that's going to change your perspective on the roofing industry lee hate how's it going what's up my man how you doing brother good man it's good to see you yeah it's great to be here yeah man so it's always these old school businesses that you don't really see much on social media it's a boring business boom out there buddy yeah but there's guys making tens of millions with it so i'm excited to learn from you about it hundreds of millions man yeah i mean how did you first get involved with roofing well uh my dad was a car salesman uh where i'm from in texas there's a lot of hailstorms and tornadoes and uh basically when he got into the business it kind of changed my family's life and uh ever since i was a kid the people i grew up with were roofing salesmen and they were my heroes so i just kind of like watched what they did my dad made me read personal development books the next thing i knew uh I failed out of college, didn't have anywhere to go, and I had to start from scratch making my way selling roofs.

Wow.

So what age were you?

I was 18 years old, failed out of college, basically, no work ethic, the example of millennial.

But, you know, it's funny what you can find when you lose everything and you have to go door to door.

Right.

So you were rock bottom just going door to door selling roofing services.

Yeah, man.

And what we do is a little different.

We get the insurance companies to pay for replacement, whether it's a hurricane, hailstorm, some sort of a wind damage.

Got it.

There's a multi-billion dollar industry out there.

And, you know, we call it sky diamonds when money falls from the sky, but a lot of other people call it like chaos and natural disaster.

But it's a lot of fun.

Yeah, so like after these hurricanes, I'd assume a lot of these roofs get completely destroyed, right?

Oh, yeah, dude.

This year actually was the craziest story ever.

For the first time ever, my house got hit by the storm.

The storm chaser got taken out, dude.

You know, when the storms happened, we started doing these like really sick dances.

We're like, I mean, I'm just saying, really, we're like, or watching the storm, like everything.

And this storm turned towards my house.

And I really didn't think there was going to be anything wrong because it was hitting further north.

But the storm surge was so bad that there was like two and a half feet of water in my home.

Damn.

Yeah, we rode out the hurricane.

It was a great party.

Lots of roofs got messed up.

But then you go and your house is completely full of water.

And it's like, all right, it's time to go to work.

Yeah.

Ironically, one of your buddies, Jeremy, he flew in probably like two days later.

And only with a little bit of training, he bird-dogged or kind of got me on the door of a two and a half million dollar roof.

Anyways,

with like two weeks of training, I wrote him a six-figure check.

Crazy.

But that's how it is, dude.

Whenever there's a hurricane, a hailstorm, there's sometimes billions of dollars in opportunity.

You just run up to people and you fix their problems and then you make a lot of money.

Yeah.

And you've made over 10 people millionaires doing this, right?

A lot more than that, actually.

As a matter of fact, when I first started coaching other contractors,

my whole principle was I was going to sell Grant Cardone a roof.

And

in order to pay his bill

and all that content and everything ain't cheap, but

it cost me to have to get in the business of coaching and creating content and selling my services as a consultant.

And I started coaching other contractors and helped them

with the same things that were helping me.

But then in adding paid advertisement, adding social media as an unfair advantage, all of us grew together.

And so we've got probably 20, 20 plus blue-collar millionaires that have been made in the system.

Incredible.

Yeah.

So say someone watching this is in an area where there was just a big storm, big weather event.

How can they get involved with this?

Well, you can look me up at Lee underscore hate, hit me up on the DM.

We'll get you some free training.

I've actually partnered with Bradley.

And, you know, the cool thing about it is, you know, I've done it all over the country.

You don't have to have like a recent storm.

The one thing and reason why banks, Wall Street, everyone's all into my business is we're essential.

And roofs sort of recession-proofs.

If it's leaking, you got to take care of it.

If it's damaged, the insurance company's got to pay for it.

And so, you know, these jobs are highly duplicatable.

They're very expensive.

And they lead to opportunities like solar where you can double profits.

And so what I would do is get them access to the training.

They wouldn't need license, insurance, or any type of experience.

They just need education and people that could do the jobs.

Really, all you do is learn to sell the jobs, get the contract, and someone else does it all.

That's cool, man.

There's not many industries where you don't need capital to be able to make six figures a year.

Yeah, or six figures in two weeks.

Jeremy's a beast, though, man.

It just takes somebody hungry, that enthusiasm, that energy out there.

Yeah.

When hard work meets opportunity, you get lucky.

And that's what we did.

But, you know, talking about that project, it was a two and a half million dollar job.

You know, just because it was easy to acquire the lead on a project like that doesn't mean that it's easy to do the whole sell, build, collect.

Right.

You know, I probably got fired off that project five different times.

You know,

people overreact, especially when it comes to multi-million dollar decisions.

Right.

And insurance companies are the most evil companies in the world.

But we persevered and won.

The good guys won.

Nice.

And that had millions in profits.

So six figures to Jeremy.

There you go.

Did they send PIs after you, the insurance company?

Oh, dude, I'm always under investigation.

I'm public enemy number one.

Do you go up to them and say, like, oh, dude, I have my best YouTube videos are videos where I fight them on multi-million dollar fights, $10 million fights.

And I recently roasted them, won a huge lawsuit on one that basically I deposed the lawyer.

I mean, I deposed the adjuster on site like an attorney, and he just ratted on himself.

And just basically in court, it caused him to lose the whole settlement.

And yeah, it was a lot of fun.

Wait, so he was just exaggerating numbers, basically?

Well, he, no, what they do is they delay, they deny, they defer responsibility.

And there was 48 people that were outside of their home.

And he was trying to get us to reuse old building material.

He was trying to like ignore responsibility and people couldn't get moved in.

So when we got out there with a camera and he got caught in a bunch of lies, it documented something that when it came out in court caused the jury to say, nah, give these guys millions of dollars.

Wow, that's nuts.

What happens when there's like mold or like rats in the roof?

Well, if there's mold in the house, like, dude, this thing is, is it's, it's literally something that can cause sickness to the home.

And, you know, when hurricanes cause a lot of water coming in like that, you can't even move back into the property until, you know, the roof's complete.

And so, you know, you have to actually get the insurance to pay.

And it's the only way that you can get it done is through the insurance.

So it ends up meaning that there's a lot of profit in the job in the end.

Right.

And you scaled this company to a nine-figure valuation.

How long has this company been around?

Company's been around for 20 years.

We kind of were a regular door-to-door company, did just insurance for a long time.

After me selling Grant Cardone, I started buying all these coaching programs, Russell Brunson, and really helped scale my paid advertisement.

But, you know, from each different little mentor, I learned.

And through coaching other contractors, I got the best practices of some of the best people in the industry.

And

basically, I would say over the last eight years that it's through growing companies, partnering with companies, and then my own company going from a company that does 10 million a year to 100 million in top line revenue.

Wow.

But it's all about leads.

And whenever you can get like an incredible offer in front of a lot of people, like Grant Cardone could not refuse this offer.

Hey, Uncle G, if I can get your insurance to pay for your roof, can I be your roofer?

He's like, f, man.

Yeah, sure.

Why not?

Why not?

Yeah, Hormosey talks about this, right?

When your offer is so good, like people got to be dumb not to take it.

Yeah, man.

And so I think a lot of people are on the internet and they're thinking that they they need to be a coach, they need to be a digital marketer, they need to be a podcast guy, but maybe they don't have the personality, the focus, what you do is not easy, and monetize it, it's even harder.

But, you know, there is vehicles, and I say dirty jobs make clean money, and my purpose is to raise the status for some of these dirty jobs.

And whether if you start doing the actual job yourself or you start with selling the job, becoming the nine-figure valuation is all about hiring and training and duplicating yourself along the way, which just just means giving to others what was freely given to you.

And I've been doing that for 20 years.

So I think just the compound effect of doing that for so long, like for me, a lot of times I think, man, I would love to be able to be this massive influencer over a really wide audience.

But the riches are sometimes in the niches.

And everyone's got a roof.

So, you know, I see myself in the next year combining 20 companies and having a company worth 400, 500 million.

In the next two, three years, selling that company for a billion dollars and creating hundreds of multi-millionaires.

Yeah, that's awesome.

What were some of the best hires and decisions you made along the way of this 20-year business?

I would say the best hire that I ever made was my first coach.

Hiring my first coach really, I paid because I paid it.

I paid attention because I paid.

I would say that kind of, you know, the one big thing that businesses need is they need to be able to hire and train.

If you talk about what does Hermose do for businesses?

What are they better at than anyone else in the world?

They're better at finding top talent, using marketing systems to get engaged potential recruits and then training them with systems and processes to be successful.

And so, you know, I would just say like that that's probably the most important thing.

Nice.

So when you're negotiating with these insurance companies, I mean, that must be pretty,

I don't know how to describe it, but.

Well, it can be crazy, man.

We had seven insurance companies go out of business.

There's actually been in Florida this crazy scam going on.

The biggest scammers in the world are insurance companies.

And Ron DeSantis,

Ron DeSantis is in on the take.

Oh, yeah, absolutely.

I mean, in Florida, it's well known that $500 million in

actual income from all these different insurance companies have entered the landscape to change the rules.

And a lot of these insurance companies will be small insurance companies, but the CEOs can take $20 million bonuses.

And what happens when a hurricane happens, they get something called reinsurance and they take money off the top.

And so what's happened is there's been seven insurance companies go out of business.

They've changed the rules all while Ron DeSantis says, hey, these rules are good for homeowners.

Well, truth is, is like the insurance companies are in his back pocket.

Wow.

That's scary, man.

Dude's running for president right now.

Well, I mean, look, they're all for sale.

You know, I think around the golf with Ron DeSantis costs $100,000.

But, you know, step your game up.

If a roofer wants to be recognized, then you got to fight a multi-billion dollar force.

Yeah.

It's just how it is in the world.

So is this industry recession proof?

Yeah, I would call it recession proof because there's always storms.

I would call it recession proof because a roof is a necessity.

I would call it recession proof because.

The one thing that a bank will always loan a person on is a home.

And so when your roof is bad, if you don't have the money for it, you can get get a loan.

And all across the country, there's been such a building boom.

There's so many storms, whether it's a hurricane, a hailstorm, or a windstorm.

There's

probably $100 billion in restoration opportunity of projects every single year from these insurance restoration projects.

Interesting.

Which types of roofs do you just see get wrecked completely the most?

Well, the asphalt shingles are biggest roofs that exist.

Which ones are those?

Those are just the roofs that you see out there regular that have granules, They're just your typical.

They get, you know, the

streaking on them.

You know, they can get blown off by the wind.

You know, in my house, I have a metal roof.

I believe like a metal roof will last three times as longer as a shingle roof.

So it's actually cheaper than a shingle roof.

And so, you know, figuring out how to get homeowners a metal roof.

at the same price as shingles has been one of my other best offers.

Like if anyone is watching this across the country and you want to, like the last roof that you ever put on your home, the thing is, is that you'll get your return on invalue out of the investment, but you'll also

probably save money on your insurance.

You'll have that roof for the next two, three years.

Where I'm from in Texas, there's a lot of hail.

So, these, these, these roofs, they stand up against the elements.

Right.

And, um, yeah, we finance them and we do them for the same price as shingles because we're such a big company and we advertise it online.

So, we got the leads, and uh, we just need the young people, the people that want to fix big problems for big paychecks that know, even though like nobody wants to get up on a roof and do the roof, but like, I'll sell out of it.

Yeah.

Have you ever been on a roof yourself?

Oh, yeah.

But every day.

Yeah.

Not every day, but.

How scary is that?

Oh, man.

This is what makes it fun, dude.

I'm an adrenaline drink.

At our conferences, I help contractors grow.

We have something called the Blue Collar Fight Club.

We, you know, what do we do?

We do cage fights.

We settle beefs in the cage.

That's crazy, man.

But a lot of us just train and have fun and like to fight for fun.

But, but

yeah, man.

Are you tied up there or are you just free walking up on the roof?

Oh, on the roof, dude.

I'm a spider monkey dog.

So you're not tied to anything?

No, dude.

And the steeper, the taller, the better.

No, not really.

But because the insurance company is not going to climb it.

And if I can document the claim correctly, then I'm not really going to have to worry about it.

There's all kinds of tools, ropes and harnesses.

There's this thing called a goat you can use.

But, you know, me, I just like to get in the valley and, you know, have three points of contact and have some good Nikes with some soft souls.

That's ballsy, because you've probably seen some people fall off, I'd assume.

Yes, I have to knock on wood.

Never actually fell off a roof myself.

But

the thing is, is like

you know, there's some sweat equity involved when you get up on someone's roof.

Not only do you get to get a little adrenaline,

you know, have a little fun, but the customer respects the fact that you're up there.

Right.

Since they can't get up there and see if the damage is bad, it can actually be a good thing for construction because one of the biggest problems in construction, if a customer can come out and and point at something that they don't like because they can see it, then you might have to go back and listen to a bunch of Karen talk.

That's true.

But that's one of the reasons why roofing is very cool.

That's true.

Because you can knock it out in one day.

It's an exterior.

People ain't up there picking your work apart.

And as long as it doesn't leak, then you're good.

Wow.

And that's, you know, sometimes roofing is a track the bottom of the barrel.

But we try to set the standards for service and growth in roofing.

Yeah.

My old house had a leak.

I should have hit you up back then.

Yeah.

In Jersey.

Yeah.

It rains a lot in Jersey.

Have you,

what's like the most expensive roof you've had to fix?

Most expensive roof that we had to fix.

We're doing a $4 million roof right now.

It's a condo association.

It was fought with the insurance company.

The insurance company went out of business.

So it was a four-year fight.

We're currently replacing this roof.

This one's got millions in profit.

There's another one we just finished.

It's a $5 million roof.

It was a casino.

Damn.

In Vegas?

Yeah, dude.

That was not in Vegas.

it was in uh even scarier it was in uh louisiana and it was uh it was a cashada casino it was ran by um indians on a reservation a group that was a great group to work for but a lot of people had a lot that said beware of having reservation owe you millions of dollars they can hold your money at any time so you had to be perfect you know of course you get a leak in one of these buildings

you're gonna have a lot of damages yeah so uh that was a five million dollar project over a year and we just got finished with it So, you know, doing the bigger jobs, you know, that that took time to work into that.

But, you know, the funny thing is, is that if you're new in the business and you just go out there and get a lead, you can still get paid off of doing one of these bigger jobs just by handing it off to my company, like Jeremy.

Dude, I was at the Miami airport like on the way to Bolivia a few months ago.

Massive leak.

Imagine if you landed up.

Yeah, dude.

The bureaucratic bidding that goes into the airport work in Miami.

I don't know.

But

you're right.

There's everywhere you look, you know, once you kind of get into the space, you start changing.

It reframes like what you start looking at as far as money.

You start looking at roofs differently.

Yeah, no, for real.

This day is going to change my life with how I V roofs.

Yeah.

I'm going to be spotting them now.

So you also do solar, right?

Yeah.

Solar is something that a lot of people say is a scam.

And I'll be real with you, a lot of solar salespeople, they oversell it.

And I wouldn't say it's a scam, but sometimes they make promises that aren't true.

And as a roofing contractor, you know, I've seen the problems solar causes, leaks, people not staying in business.

And so with roofing and solar being installed through one company, for one, you got a warranty that lasts forever.

For two, you've built a lot of really like rapport with the customer when you do a good job with the roof.

So you can double the profits by helping them save money on solar.

And what we found is that roofers, they're probably the best at sticking at selling roofs and partnering with a solar company.

And that's really what I had to do.

I tried to sell my own solar forever, but what I've done is found guys that sell solar, built a team of specific solar closers, and then literally all of my students, me, everybody, we put all of our leads into an app and we just send them all to solar closers to nationwide.

So if anybody is a solar closer watching this, the best leads, the hottest leads, they're not solar leads.

They're roofing leads.

Dude, I got some people to connect you with.

Yeah, I got some big guys in the solar industry.

Yeah, dude.

And the big thing is, is they look away at roofing like there's not an opportunity to make money because solar is more expensive than roofing.

And sometimes when you're trying to get someone to approve for the loan, if you have to pay for a roof, it makes the payment more expensive and it's not as easy.

Well, these solar guys don't have a way to make just as much off of roofs as they do on solar.

And so my app that I've built called Roofing Redline, it allows a solar rep to get an instant roof quote, to do an instant roof measurement and to do like an instant quote.

And not just to have like like the ability to sign the contract but to have installers like direct installers that will do the roof along with the solar project so that that solar organization say say like i've seen edmund on here yeah so like so his guys they could they could just sell roofs and keep selling solar under their tool smart so is this business uh can this work in other countries you think because oh yeah absolutely dude like roofing and solar is everywhere and you really have to learn that uh

if someone has a problem on their roof, that it's an opportunity.

And if you fix big problems, you'll get big paychecks.

So like the really, I think the reason there's so much opportunity in roofing and construction is because digital technology is the biggest gangster in the room.

And I hate to say it, but my contractors, they're stuck in the times.

They're a little bit of dumb-dumb sometimes.

And I'd probably say 80 to 90% really aren't masters at Facebook and Google.

And so if you can come in without any experience, but really be a master at just sales, Facebook, and Google, well, you could probably beat 90, 95, 99% of the knucklehead blue-collar contractors that are out there doing it.

Absolutely, man, because the people in your space are probably older.

They don't use technology as much.

So if you've got that social media edge.

And here I am.

I call it being Captain Saveroofer.

They don't want to be saved.

They don't want to be saved.

You know, sometimes they don't want to be.

building their own personal brand.

They don't want to be creating video content and advertising it using AI.

They want to just stick with word-of-mouth referrals.

And so for a young guy to come into the business and partner with me, Brad Lee, what we want to do is we want to give you the tools to start your own roofing and solar business and scale it.

First, your first

million, then your first 10 million, and then to 100 million.

And the goal is that it won't take you as long as it took me.

Yeah, it won't take you 20 years.

No, man.

I think that there's going to, we have guys doing 10 million in sales in their second year.

That's insane, man.

Yeah.

And no one else has a course like this.

No, it's, and, and I, you know, it started off as a course.

It's a community though.

Nice.

It's, it's, it's that, you know, because we're not just training, we're providing the tools.

We're connecting people with installation partners and we're standing behind the work.

Everything's backed by me.

You know, we have the technology, we have the network, and we have the marketing.

And if the number one thing in business is the marketing, then f ⁇ ing man, you know, these guys, these young guys, and realize, I'm going to come in here and eat these guys' lunch in the roof in business.

I'm going to learn it.

I'm going to take over.

And so if you want to take over, if you're watching this right now, go to Lee underscore hate, send me a DM.

We'll get you some free training.

Hell yeah.

No, I love that, man.

I've never seen a roofing ad until I met you.

So I think the space is wide open for the taking.

Nice.

And for me, really, I'm trying to broaden it because it's not just roofing.

It's all home services.

Like solar is another huge one.

You've seen a ton of multi-millionaires made in solar, but you've got windows and doors.

You've got exterior HVAC.

You've got some of the guys that we have had just had a new dude, some multi-million dollar demolition contractor, general contractor.

And the idea is because these banks in Wall Street are suffering in real estate with the high interest rates.

They're suffering with technology a little bit.

It's applying that technology to a dead or kind of Wild West industry that these banks want to invest into.

So if you can build an eight-figure construction company, and it really doesn't matter if it's roofing or if it's HVAC,

if it's profitable, if it runs without you, if it has a good marketing system, system, then you have an eight-figure network.

Someone will write you an eight-figure job.

Really?

Yeah.

And that's really because it's a gold rush.

Wow.

And in home service right now in general.

Interesting.

Because we're essential.

We're not going to get taken out by pandemic.

We're not going to be taken out by recession.

We're not going to be taken out by, you know, technology is consolidating the business, but because it's such a like Wild West old man industry,

they got a long ways to go.

That's cool because some businesses are really hard to sell, man, and they're not liquid.

No, and like my coaching business.

I have a coaching business and it's all based off of me training.

And so a private equity group, they're not really going to come in and want to buy my coaching.

Exactly.

You know, they're not really going to want to buy my consulting company.

But you look at the roofing company that runs with a team of leaders that has a successful marketing system.

And then now I've bought a total of four different companies.

And so we'll do about $150 million in total value.

But what we're looking to do is grow other companies and partner with about 20 companies over the next year, two years, and achieve at least a half a billion dollar valuation.

Damn.

That's the goal.

That's awesome, man.

And you own 100% right now?

No, my dad is still 50-50%.

Oh, your dad?

Yeah, dude.

And doing business with family is a gift and a curse.

It's a beautiful thing.

He's actually here with me now.

The one thing I can tell you, he's been a great coach.

He gave me the opportunity and he coached me.

But one thing about it was, is, you know, whenever I had tough times, you know, he really kind of let me make mistakes and figure it out for myself.

And the one thing about it is, is like his coaching really got me to a certain point.

But it was when I started paying for coaching that my business went from good to great.

Next level.

And, you know, taking your family business to the next level means sometimes you have to fight for control of it.

Right.

And sometimes you have to live with the stigma that you had it all handed all to.

And, you know, the reality is, is that chip on my shoulder, if anyone out there has got that, that silver spoon stigma, dude, let that chip on your shoulder drive you.

There's nothing wrong with that.

Yeah.

My uncle, my dad's brother, was way more successful in roofing than he was.

And I was like, damn, dad, you've done it big, but Hunk's doing 100 million.

Why can't we do that?

And so, you know, whenever I got into the business, dude, I treated it like a sport.

I always saw it as an entrepreneur and sales opportunity.

I read this book one day and I realized, okay, I got to be the best in the world introducing people to this business and facilitating their success.

And then that's why I was like, I got to sell a grant card owner roof.

And then I got to do training just so I can pay the training bill.

And then the training led to a system.

The system helped me.

So I can't really take credit for it, but I can say like through helping people and trying to raise the status of my industry.

Man, we've built something that I'm really proud of.

And I wouldn't be able to do it without my wife.

I've been married for 13 years.

Saw that you just got engaged, right?

Yeah.

Congratulations.

Thanks, man.

Been a big part of it, man, is been married for 13 years, you know, and

I think a lot of times people overthink what it means to commit now and figure it out later.

Yeah.

You know what I mean?

Yeah.

Like, dude, like.

playing house and being halfway in and running around and thinking, is there something better?

Like, that's got so many guys.

And I guess maybe I got lucky because I was married before tender, before some of this crazy online dating.

Yeah.

But

yeah, I would just say I'm just grateful.

I'm glad you never had to deal with that.

Man, that is crazy.

Wild West.

Wild West out there.

I've heard.

I think expectations are just at an all-time high on both sides.

Nice.

Yeah.

But dude, it's been fun.

Where do people learn more and find out about you?

Well, they can go to Lee underscore hate on Instagram.

You can look me up on YouTube, LeeHate.

We document everything, got some fun there.

But I think the main thing is, is if you're a contractor, you want to grow your business, you want to start an eight-figure home service business so that you're going to have an eight-figure net worth.

Go to www.tothemooncontractor.com.

I'll help you grow your contracting business, double and triple sales.

Then we'll help you scale and exit that thing to the moon.

Oh, yeah, let's get it.

Thanks for coming on, brother.

All right, brother.

Appreciate you.

Yeah, thanks for watching, guys.

Peace.