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Key Takeaways When my brother and I created our roofing business, we discovered an opportunity to educate other members of the industry and provide resources to help them improve their services — a dealer network.
Establishing this dealer network helped us give back to our community and taught us valuable lessons about empowerment.
It taught us that setting people up for success means providing resources (like training), that valuable partnerships depend on mutual benefit and that oversight isn’t the same as surveillance.
Most founders who eventually find success remember their major accomplishments. But they also remember their close calls: the times when things almost fell apart because of knowledge gaps, missing resources, a lack of support or simple bad luck.
Most of us tell ourselves that if we’re ever in a position to set other entrepreneurs up for success, we’ll make sure they have the training, education and networking opportunities we didn’t have. But not every well-intentioned entrepreneur ends up with that chance.
When I set out to create Roof Maxx with my brother Todd, our main goal was to provide an alternative to roof replacement for homes with aging asphalt shingles. But along the way, we discovered a golden opportunity to educate members of the roofing industry and provide resources to help contractors across the country improve their services.
As former roofers who spent 15 years struggling to survive in the industry ourselves, that had personal value to us beyond what it achieved for the business. Here’s how the dealer network we established to scale our company also helped us give back to our community, and what it taught me about empowerment.
Setting people up for success is usually a resourcing issue
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