Roofing Contractor Blog

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This week I met with Todd Foster and Chris Edwards of Ideal Recycling in Southfield, Mich. Ideal expects to keep more than 15,000 tons of asphalt shingles out of landfills this year alone. The shingles are ground up and re-used by asphalt companies, which can use up to 5 percent recycled asphalt in hot asphalt mix used for paving roads and parking lots.

Roofing contractors love a good service truck story - especially one that helps the bottom line.

You will not often find this blogger linking to publications other than my own, but here is one for you: www.residentialarchitect.com/industry-news.asp?sectionID=0&articleID=1006682. Reason I share this piece, published in late June, is to compare it to a posting on this blog this past October: www.roofingcontractor.com/Articles/Blog_Rick/BNP_GUID_9-5-2006_A_10000000000000592463.

There is a lot of squawking these days about the “nationalization of the banking system” and the “nationalization of the auto industry” and the “nationalization of the health care system.” I do not know quite how to break it to you: that ship has sailed. It left the dock a long, long time ago and it will not likely return in my lifetime.

Last month, three single-family homes I pass while driving to work disappeared.

Poof.

Meet those pricing objections head-on and curb a customer’s urge to roam.

Trips to the old hometown are not infrequent as the roofing distribution company where I make my primary living has operations here. In fact, we still operate from the same facility we built back in 1989 when I was branch manager here. So much is the same and so much has changed.

Training, sales and marketing reinforce each other.

When times are tough, it’s often imperative to invest in your business. Of course, that’s also when cash flow might be tightest, so it makes investing difficult. I’ve read numerous studies that assert that drastically cutting marketing dollars in a downturn is a mistake, as keeping jobs coming in is more important than ever.

As distasteful as I find most things political, it seems that I spend more and more time trying to figure out what the federal government is going to do next. It might not ordinarily matter a lot, with the exception of things like wars or political upheaval in foreign lands in which we have an interest.