From Roofer to Entrepreneur: Ruben Ochoa’s Inspiring Journey in AZ

Dylan Silver (00:01.036)
Hey folks, welcome back to the show. I’m your host, Dylan Silver, and today on the show I have Ruben Ochoa out in Arizona. Ruben, welcome to the show.

Ruben Ochoa (00:12.735)
Thank you Dylan.

Dylan Silver (00:14.21)
Before hopping on here, we were talking a little bit about the vertical that you’re involved in. So you do construction and work a lot with inspectors out in Arizona, is that correct? And so when I think about this space, I think about oftentimes you’re dealing with potentially damaged properties, other times you’re dealing with potentially remediating. Which vertical are you playing in in Arizona and then in general?

Ruben Ochoa (00:25.394)
correct

Ruben Ochoa (00:42.197)
So our vertical is specific to agent requests in the sense of being able to clone a house. that can range anywhere from all the above, remediation, minor repair, handyman, large construction projects, roofing. We dabble

Dylan Silver (00:57.762)
So when I think about this space, you mentioned, know, dabbling in it all. I think about how I started and it was, you know, on the outside looking in and I got an opportunity and I ran with it. What was your start like in the real estate space? How did you get involved in real estate?

Ruben Ochoa (01:15.125)
We started in the roofing industry and our name kind of grew throughout all agents and brokerages and so forth and we just became the one-stop shop for everything they needed roofing wise and then we just started expanding our services into overall general construction so building that reputation was a big portion and a big start of.

Dylan Silver (01:39.278)
In the roofing space, how’d you get in the roofing space? Did you have, you know, people that you knew that were already involved in roofing? How did you get in the roofing?

Ruben Ochoa (01:47.081)
Yeah, I was actually born into this. a fourth generation roofer actually. So I’ve just always been a roofer.

Dylan Silver (01:55.894)
always and always in roofing. So you kind of took what you had seen from, you just mentioned fourth generation, right? And then you expanded it into other other areas. You mentioned kind of a Swiss Army knife of a builder, if you will, and working with, you know, different inspections. These days, what is the scope of the work that you’re doing? Is there anything that you’re seeing that you’re getting more requests on and

Is there anything that you’re focused on day to day in the business these days?

Ruben Ochoa (02:28.02)
Roofing is always prevalent of course, it’s a big thing for real estate, that’s one of the biggest things they look at. think high ticket items, water heaters, just general handy stuff, we need this tightened. It comes down to whatever the agent needs for their specific clientele to be able to close that deal. So we get probably on average 10 to 20 items to get just generally corrected and they’re usually pretty community style stuff.

Dylan Silver (02:56.236)
So working a lot with listing agents, folks who have a property and there needs to be some improvements made in order to get it ready for the next owner.

Ruben Ochoa (03:05.448)
lot of buyer and listing agents, so we actually work with the buyer’s agents more than anything. Listing agents always get thrown into the mix once they come up to their deal. The buyer basically wants to know what’s it going to cost to get this taken care of, and we provide those.

Ruben Ochoa (03:25.374)
they go through their nagoos.

generally is the one.

Dylan Silver (03:31.15)
So that’s an interesting way, right? So you’re they’re coming to you because they see maybe an issue with the home, you’re going out there, you’re providing them a quote. And then the buyer’s agent is going to the listing and say, Look, my client’s interested, but you got to get this fixed. They might go back and forth right haggle a bit. And then the seller and the listing agent and then going to you and saying, Okay, let’s do this. That way we can sell this home.

Ruben Ochoa (03:55.605)
Exactly. That’s what makes us unique. We provide that upfront service and product. I think that’s probably 50 % of what we do is just getting them to be able to close their deals. The other half.

Dylan Silver (04:09.496)
think that’s unique in the roofing space probably, but definitely in in general, having that relationship with real estate agents and then building business that way is a great way to expand. In roofing, the majority of the people that I’ve seen do roofing are

are finding damaged areas and areas hit by storms and so on and so forth and going after it that way. And you may have done that, but also adding in this arm of working heavily with real estate agents. How did you get the idea to start working with real estate agents involved with submitting offers on behalf of buyers who are looking at maybe I need a new water heater or maybe that roof needs to be replaced?

Ruben Ochoa (04:54.932)
It’s kind of a long story, I’ll try to keep it as short as possible. Back in 2019 I sold my roofing company and I didn’t like the roofing industry specifically, I been in my whole life. So I started a lot of different companies, probably a dozen different companies trying to find out what my next trade was going to be. Which is kind of where I got the knowledge of everything I know now.

and started a non-profit organization to teach young entrepreneurs how to start businesses. We created a fake company essentially to teach them. And one of those fake companies was this Binzer idea, this real estate idea. It was just meant to be a fake company that they can start. And one of my students came to me and said, hey, I want to start this. I want to roll with it. And so this was actually student-based built company. It’s now gone nationwide, of course.

And so that’s how it was born actually. It was just born out of sheer sheer drive to build something cool. That’s really the starting of it all.

Dylan Silver (05:50.69)
Now when I think about scaling businesses and specifically, you in the real estate space, it can be challenging at times because you’re having to, I would say, work with finding the new deals, but you’re also having to manage the current pipeline of deals that you have. And so in your line of work where you’re working a lot with buyers and sellers,

you’re also having to nurture those relationships at the same point in time. And then I’m imagining you’re finding other businesses as well. You kind of mentioned the jack of all trades. How are you nurturing these relationships with the buyers agents and with the sellers agents to make sure that you’re continuing to build your book of business?

Ruben Ochoa (06:33.46)
Yeah, we have a very proprietary platform to where 90 % of our agents just log in, upload photos, upload an inspection report, tell us what they want, and then within 100 hours they get pricing. So there’s very little nurturing in that sense. That’s why I say it’s a product that we offer up front, that they get immediate gratification of pricing. From there, once they like that, they then use our services and then just by simply doing proper work and…

So we have a very, we integrate a lot of tech and AI into our system. So everything’s very quick, which is in real estate, that’s all that really matters is how quick can we do it. And then the secondary part is are you going to do it correctly? So as long as we can be really fast and really good at it, those relationships just naturally.

Dylan Silver (07:18.85)
So talking about the application that you have, is it online, mobile, how people submit in the photos and get in the…

Ruben Ochoa (07:25.998)
It’s a little bit of both. So we do have our own mobile app that we offer agents to download and they can download it from there. They also have our buddy bot so they can get instant answers to ask them questions and get instant gratification of a price if it’s small enough. And then yeah, they can obviously upload online to any one of our websites. again, within…

within those 15 seconds of transactions, get everything they need within a matter of hours.

Dylan Silver (07:58.178)
And so I imagine that makes you fairly unique. mean, I haven’t heard of a system like this before where agents are interacting with people who can get them quotes on the homes that they’re making offers on or listing and so on and so forth. I think the old school mentality is I got to have someone come out there, physically look at it, but doing everything digital, that’s a whole other way of looking at it. When did you have the idea that, Hey, I’m going to maybe make a application to digitize this.

Ruben Ochoa (08:26.524)
It was a dream idea. Like I said, this was a fake company when we originally built it. It was built to teach young entrepreneurs to learn business. So we thought of the fakes as company possible. And then when the students wanted to actually work on it, we created a proprietary system. created AI. We hired developers to create certain systems. And from there, they worked endlessly for almost over a year without a first job and just trying to build the back systems for it.

That’s really how it happened. It was really an accident is what it was, which is great. This, this launched a couple years ago, back in 2022.

Dylan Silver (08:58.572)
When did it launch?

Dylan Silver (09:06.242)
And what’s the scale that it’s at right now?

Ruben Ochoa (09:09.118)
Right now we’re going to be seven states this year in 12 different cities. Our primary headquarters is here in Arizona.

Dylan Silver (09:19.372)
And so I think, you know, when we talk about building, scaling businesses and, you know, extending olive branches to get new user engagement in your case, you know, new investors, if people are looking at networking with investors and so on and so forth. One of the focal points is, well, how can I reach out to people and build credibility and build trust when

they might not know about me. Well, I think one of the easiest and fastest ways is tech, right? And so interestingly, you you mentioned it was kind of like a, you didn’t see it come. And it was, you mentioned there was an exercise that really became reality. The level of credibility that I’ve seen people have when they have a mobile application specifically, like if you can get it on the iOS store is just huge. It’s a night and day difference.

Ruben Ochoa (10:14.216)
Yeah, exactly. When we first got it on our iOS system, of course, like you mentioned, that credibility shoots up through. If anybody requests an estimate from us within a couple buttons from us, that estimate automatically is uploaded.

Ruben Ochoa (10:32.276)
They’re almost, I wouldn’t say forced, there’s multiple options, but it’s readily available for them to look at it at any given time. And they can always go back to any property they’ve ever asked for an estimate for, or any job they’ve ever used this for, and see everything that’s happened on that particular.

Dylan Silver (10:47.352)
Do you know if you’re the first ones that have done this in a mobile app on the iOS store or one of the first ones mobile app on an iOS store that interfaces with real estate agents?

Ruben Ochoa (10:58.046)
You’re definitely one of the first, if not the first, I don’t know of any other company that’s doing more.

Dylan Silver (11:04.472)
I was gonna say, don’t know if there’s a, there may be a patent there if you don’t have it already, cause I haven’t heard anybody doing that.

Ruben Ochoa (11:11.976)
Yeah, we’re working on some pretty big things that may potentially be patented. I think it’ll be harder to patent just simply doing things on a mobile app, but we definitely have a lot of proprietary things that will make it next to impossible to ever compete with us.

Dylan Silver (11:28.566)
I think it’s interesting because one of the things I’ve noticed is as we’re digitizing and making society more interconnected in ways that were previously, you know, delays, getting estimates, you had to get someone out there, you know, they have to go back, they have to look at numbers, come back to it. It’s not a quick turnaround. As we’re getting more interconnected, I was thinking, well, what do single family homeowners do when they

need repairs, right? And what’s the process if you if I want to get a ride to the airport, I can click a button and I get an Uber and I’m in the middle of the country, you know, and that is pretty incredible. But we don’t have a lot of things or I wasn’t aware of anything yet, quite like that. And the in the repair space and so hearing you know about a business like yourself and the opportunities out there, it’s really pretty

It’s ripe for innovation.

Ruben Ochoa (12:30.15)
It’s our loss leaders. one of the things we price our things based off of photos, right? And so it’s, that’s one of the, the only things that we have to be careful on is because a lot of our AI decides, Hey, this is going to be this. Some of our estimators decide it’s going to be this. And we have to stick to that because anytime we tell a customer something on paper, we’re sticking to that. And so that’s the, the small loss leader we have that a lot of agents get to benefit from is when they get a slightly larger project.

to stick to it regardless. We may make $5 on it or we may make our normal margins on it or it may be even easier than we thought. We may get a little bit more and overall we have found through the data we’ve

Ruben Ochoa (13:15.668)
than where we need to be. So that’s another big thing is we stick by our prices regardless. So there’s never a guess. We don’t have to go out there five times and change our prices. And that’s why our reputation stays as good as it is because we don’t change our prices.

Dylan Silver (13:31.008)
Now, we are coming up on time here here in a sec, but I do want to ask you about Arizona. I’ve had a lot of people from the podcast or oncoming the podcast in Arizona. And I said, wow, Arizona is like country Florida. There’s so much. It seems like chill people in Arizona. I haven’t had a single person from Arizona who didn’t seem like they were enjoying it out there. Have you been a lifelong Arizonian?

Ruben Ochoa (13:55.252)
I have been a lifelong Arizona and I don’t like it though. Probably talking to people in December. That’s probably the problem. We get about six to seven beautiful, beautiful months. And then we get about four.

Dylan Silver (13:59.992)
Hahaha

Dylan Silver (14:05.656)
You’re the first person who said this.

Dylan Silver (14:15.349)
Scorched Earth.

Ruben Ochoa (14:16.936)
Exactly, and they love it so much because they trap themselves inside and they watch TV on.

Dylan Silver (14:23.734)
Yeah, you’re working out. It’s not easy. Sedona, I’ve been to Sedona. Scottsdale seems really nice to know they got a lot of golf out there in Scottsdale.

Ruben Ochoa (14:32.51)
Yes, Sedona is much better weather. You can go up there and have a good hike in the middle of the summer. But the second you come down to Scottsdale Phoenix area, it’s rough.

Dylan Silver (14:42.562)
You’re getting scorched earth absolute sun beating down on you. Yeah, it’s it’s I can I can understand. But we are coming up on time here, Ruben. Where can folks go if they want to reach out to you or maybe learn a little bit more about the business?

Ruben Ochoa (14:48.916)
are a little wealthy.

Ruben Ochoa (15:00.232)
Yeah, we have multiple different directions, RepairNation.com and then here in Arizona you can go to…

Dylan Silver (15:11.692)
Ruben, thank you so much for coming on the podcast here today. think what you guys are doing is super niche. great to see. Congratulations on all the success and to your continued success.

Ruben Ochoa (15:22.788)
and amazing podcast you guys got going on.

Dylan Silver (15:25.422)
Appreciate it. Thanks, man.

Ruben Ochoa (15:27.347)
Thank you.