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Show Summary
In this episode of the Real Estate Pros podcast, host Q Edmonds interviews Jason Blair, a roofing expert with four generations of experience in the industry. Jason shares his journey from trying to avoid the roofing business to becoming a successful entrepreneur. He discusses key strategies for success, the importance of quality and customer service, and the challenges he faced while building his company. Jason emphasizes the significance of relationships in business and his commitment to community service through his Covering the Community program, which provides roofing services to those in need.
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Investor Fuel Show Transcript:
Jason (00:00)
And when I first started making this kind of money, I went out and bought Corvettes, I bought big Jeeps, I bought big gold chains and Rolexes and took my wife on crazy vacations. I mean, did so much stuff, and I did a lot of charity stuff too, but I felt like I was still missing out on doing some good. And I wanted to find a way that I could reach directly into the communityQuentin (00:08)
Yeah, yeah.Jason (00:26)
like when I sat down and decided to do that roof for these people, I was like bursting with pride. know, I mean, I felt like, I mean, it was like God was showing me like God’s telling me like, this is what you should be doing.Quentin (00:31)
Yeah.Hello everyone. Welcome to the Real Estate Pros podcast. I am your host Q Edmonds. And you know what I’m gonna say? I’m excited to be here. Excited about my guests. ⁓ this gentleman right here. Listen, this gentleman has four generations of roofing experience rushing through his veins. So much so that he’s dominated his market pretty much. This guy is an expert in the industry of roofing. has
a boat full of people that he can go to whenever there’s a problem. But it seems like there’s not too of a problem too big that he can’t solve. listen, I’m pumping him up. watch when he start talking, when he start telling you about what is it you’re going to see exactly what I’m talking about. And so I want to introduce you guys to Mr. Jason Blair. Mr. Jason, how you doing today, sir?
Jason (02:59)
Doing awesome, thanks for having me on.Quentin (03:01)
man, so excited to have you here, man. And listen, I’ll be honest with you, I want us to dive in. I want you to take us into your world, man. Tell us what your main focus is these days. If you want to tell us a little bit of an origin story, we love origin stories. So you want to tell us how you got started. We would love to hear that. And then tell them where you from, man. I was going to shout it out, but I’m going let you do it yourself, man. Tell them where you from. So yeah, man, the floor is yours,Talk to us and tell us about what you do,
Jason (03:28)
Well, like you said, we are four generations in into this roofing tradition thing. And I’m actually the first one in my family that started a roofing company. So don’t come from roofing contractors. I come from actually a family of roofers. And my whole family is roofers. And as I told you the story, a lot of people find it humorous when I tell this story. when I was in high school, my parents got divorced. My father was a roofer.My grandfather was a roofer and my mom and dad got divorced and she actually married another roofer whose father was a roofer. was very like roofing was in my blood. So I don’t know if I’m actually cursed, but, uh, you know, I didn’t really want to be a roofer to start. Uh, I really tried hard to stay out of the industry as a young man, because my, my family, basically, since you were like 12 or 13 years old, you’d be on roofs working on the weekends and stuff.
helping out with side jobs and things like that. as ⁓ a very, like as a pre-pubescent teen, realized real young, I did not want to do roofing, but because it was so ingrained in my DNA, it was very hard to stay away from it. So probably by the time I was 20, early twenties, I mean, probably right around 20 years old, I was a full-time, full-time roofer. And.
I come from Detroit, so we’re in South Florida now, but that journey started in Detroit, Michigan.
Quentin (05:45)
I love it, man. Listen, you said you’re the first one to start the business. Listen, you said, I’m a work. I’m a hard worker, but I’m working smart and not hard. And I’m going set up the business. And that’s beautiful, man. so building that business, I know you had a ton of experience that was in your ear. But now that the business is here, you’re dominating. What have you identified as some of the key strategies that kind of keep that machine running smoothly?Jason (06:14)
Well, I think quality product and customer service are key. know, the, the roofing industry is very difficult, not, not just roofing, but any service industry is very difficult. And you’ll find this out very quickly when you need a project done around your house and you try to start calling people to get it done. It’s very difficult to find high level service. And I really feel like, ⁓ that’s kind of what has set us apart from the beginning. I never really wanted to be the cheapest guy. really just wanted to focus.and concentrate on putting out craftsmanship, having the highest trained qualified technicians out in the field working for me. And, ⁓ you know, was lucky enough because I was in the industry, I could recruit these guys, but also, ⁓ treating our team like partners as we were just speaking about this before the interview is really feel that’s, know, because I’ve come up in the industry and I’ve had every position in, in, roofing, you know, from helper to foreman.
repair guide, technician, to salesperson, manage. mean, every, every step of the way I’ve had that job. And I think it’s basically giving me ⁓ a very, you know, rare introspective into the industry and not just how to manage people in teams, but how to get jobs done and how to deal with customers, things like that. And I was just talking with one of my guys, I still get out on the roof a lot, not to work, but kind of rub elbows with the guys in the field.
just to try to keep my finger on that pulse. But I was just talking with one of the guys today about, you know, why, you know, why I’m better than him. And I, and, and I, and I’m not saying that braggadociously. I’m just like roofing is such a tricky thing. Like when you’re on the roof working and your face is buried in that roof, if you don’t have the ability to go see a job that’s 10 years old or see how other people have done things and how they’ve succeeded and failed over time.
⁓ if you haven’t dealt with customers, you know, you can’t, it’s, it’s such a gambit in roofing that you have to know all this stuff. even within our team, ⁓ you know, the first few years, you know, you’re, you’re building the company, you’re hitting 1 million, 2 million, $3 million in revenue. know, that’s all great. And you can do that with a very small team, but very quickly, once you suppress like five, $6, $7 million in revenue, now it takes systems and training and processes and there is no more kind of flying by the seat of your pants.
Quentin (08:37)
ThankJason (08:40)
doing things on the fly, all that kind of disappears once you get like once you start approaching the $10 million mark. So, you know, for us, like the strategies that have worked best is just being, you know, giving quality and having proper supervision, having the right guys on the job, implementing the newest technologies into our business, not just AI, but other platforms that help us help our team be better at their job.Quentin (08:45)
Yeah.Jason (09:09)
think from day one, giving your team the tools that are necessary to be successful. I a lot of guys want their team to produce at a high level, but they won’t give them the proper tools or environment to do so. So that’s definitelyextremely important to make sure that you can’t fly like an eagle if you’re surrounded by turkeys. So if you’re gonna create an environment…
Quentin (10:05)
Yeah. Yeah.Jason (10:10)
that’s non conducive for you guys to be successful and then you can’t expect them to be successful.Quentin (10:15)
Yeah, yeah. I wrote it down when you said it, man. Treat the team like partners. Like, I love that. But I also love how you said, you know, and you were just being honest, like, hey, I’m better than you because I got more experience than you, right? Like, and sometimes you got to call on that experience to see, like you said, a job that’s 10 years, you know, pack in the passion just to be able to see what needs to be done, how can we improve? And so I actually want to call on that experience a little bit.because of course you built a successful business and you we talked about the success, but I want to call an experience to talk a little bit about the journey to the success. Right. And so I know you know this, there are times when things get real deals go sideways times you have to pivot fast. And I just wanted to know if you, because you have the experience, if you can share moments without audience about times when you was
working your way to the success. Things wasn’t always the way that you wanted it to be. And I was just wondering, maybe if you could share a story like that. You smile like one come to mind.
Jason (11:18)
Well, look, well, I can, I can talk for days. You know, my work ethic and my motor, I’ve been blessed, you know, I know if it’s a blessing. Again, I, sometimes I call it a curse, you know, because I don’t know when to stop sometimes and I’m highly driven and I just feel like, you know, you need that, but all the experience and all like all the experience,Quentin (11:20)
YouJason (11:47)
all the technical expertise, all the business knowledge that I had. When I started Astro Roofing, was like, this is gonna be so easy. I mean, I’ve seen idiots succeed at the highest levels and I’m way smarter than them and I’m just gonna kill this, right? And I could not have been so wrong. It gave me so much more respect for those guys I thought were idiots running these companies that I had worked for before.Quentin (11:54)
Mmm.Jason (12:16)
When you’re looking at it from the other side as an owner, it’s definitely a lot different and it’s not for the faint of heart. Again, I’m gonna tell you a story real quick that just happened to us recently and it was tough, I wouldn’t say it almost put me out of business, but it definitely put us in a tough spot financially. It put us in a really tough spot for a little bit of time until we settled it. But we were on a large roofing project and it was two phases.It’s a flat roof and then some shingle or a tile roof that surrounded the flat roof. And when we did the flat roof first and when we did the flat roof, we had to like do some work into the tile section to kind of like tie them together. And when we were working on that tile section, which we knew was gonna have to be done like a year later, we were explaining to the community that…
You there was a lot of termite damage, a lot of wood rot inside that area. And it was going to be a large project, you know, it wasn’t just going to be removing and replacing the roof. Well, we got an engineer involved. We had the engineer evaluate the structural integrity of the building on that, on the tile section. And he came back and basically told the community that they should just tear it all down and start from scratch, you know, that, that tile section.
They didn’t want to listen to them, right? So they hired their own engineer and come a year later, we get into it and now they want us to do the tile section. So it just coincidentally happens that I’m in Georgia on a baseball trip with my kids when this is going, when this starts, you know, I mean, we started it right as I was leaving and probably two or three days into it as I was leaving. And then I was gone for 10 days. I come back and it takes me about two days to get out to the job, you know, trying to catch up.
thinking about not even get back, like I didn’t get there the first day, like the second day I’m back, I get out to the job. And ⁓ I just see the same thing I saw a year before.
The engineer was letting us proceed. And I just felt like the engineer didn’t really know what he was talking about. And he was, you know, he wasn’t presenting the truth to the community. I feel like because he was just stringing them along so he could make his money. ⁓
So I get out there, I look, I say, hey, this ain’t right to our guys. I tell my guys to shut it down. I call an emergency meeting with the community and with the engineer. And I think that happens the very next day we get out there. The engineer is a lady. It’s not the actual engineer, but the engineer assistant has been out there. I didn’t want to get her in trouble. So I call her over and I asked her some questions about what I was seeing. You know, I felt like wasn’t right. And she’s like, yeah, I see what you’re saying.
Then she calls her boss over, boss comes over and I’m like, look, I mean, to me, this whole thing’s got to go. I mean, we can’t, we can’t just put a roof on this. This, all this has got to go. And he looks at, he’s like, yeah, I think you’re right. Let’s shut down the job and we’ll let you know. We’ll get back to you. So, and I, I’ve said, I have a contract, an ironclad contract with these guys, but they basically, they call me back in like a week or two and I’m in the middle of this job. I mean, it’s literally like, I’m not even sure.
Quentin (15:55)
Hmm.Jason (16:17)
If it’s, mean, it’s watertight, but it’s not watertight for long. Cause I’m thinking we’re going to go for a couple of days and come back. I mean, they can’t shut the job down. Right. So like two weeks goes by the job hasn’t started back up. We’re waiting to hear what’s going on. I’m calling them every day that they call me and they say, ⁓ look, we just want you to pack your stuff up and get off the job. We don’t want you to come back. Hold on a second. That’s not how this works. What are you talking about? You know,I’ll make a long story short. basically, they wanted to fire us for convenience, not because any work that we did, but they want it. There was a ⁓ clause in our contract, a clause in every contract that we have, it’s called termination for convenience by the owner. That’s what he wanted to do, but he didn’t want to follow the clause in the contract that said you had to pay me based on if you want to do this or not. know, now if he was trying to fire us or get us off the job for performance reasons or shoddy work or something like that, or shoddy product,
then that’s different, but he just wanted us to leave because he wanted to try to find somebody that could do this work for him a lot cheaper than we were going to. you know, it drug out for probably about six months. I mean, they owed us a few hundred thousand dollars, probably four, maybe as much as four, almost 500,000. It was between four and $500,000. And, you know, we argued it out. I ended up having to settle for less than that.
But I think I still came out on the good end of it. And, you know, I go by there a year later and it’s done, you know? there’s, I mean, somebody did some shoddy work there, you know? And again, when you’re most concerned about cost rather than quality in roofing, it’s like kind of going and finding the cheapest guy to give you heart surgery or finding the cheapest guy to put brakes on your car. I mean, it’s really not what you’re looking for, right? I mean,
Quentin (18:03)
Yeah.Jason (18:08)
Everybody thinks about price. not about price. It’s about, you know, what you’re getting. And, and, um, in that situation, it was tough because we were trying to do the right thing. We were trying to be forthcoming. We were trying to be clear. I we were trying to be proactive. We let them know everything that was going on,I mean, ⁓ but you can lead a horse to water which can’t make him drink. even though I felt like we did everything we were supposed to do, were on the up and up, it still didn’t work out totally in our favor. And we would have been better off doing the job and finishing the job obviously. But ⁓ it was definitely a lesson to be learned there.
Quentin (18:29)
Salud.Yeah, yeah. Listen, Jason, thank you for the story. Listen, I know you said you try to do the right thing. You absolutely did the right thing. And sometimes doing the right thing hurts, right? But I know for a fact that you doing the right thing when you did has set you up for long-term success, right? It set you up for long-term stability. Yeah, it may hurt in the moment, but you know.
Jason (19:10)
Thank you guys.Quentin (19:11)
I think that’s going be their problem. They’re going to run into some problems some years down the road. And you know that. In this way, your integrity is still intact. Yes, it may cost you some money, but I think your integrity is going to make sure you actually make that money back probably tenfold. And so you absolutely did the right thing, And so let me ask you this, and I love it. I think this is a good time to ask. What’s the next real goal for Astro-Groofing? What are you looking to score?Jason (19:30)
in a thousand.Quentin (19:41)
to solve a scale next. What’s the next real goal?Jason (19:45)
Well, I think we’ll do 15 million next year. That would be our highest year. looks like that we’ll probably, we got a good chance of getting there. And once we hit that goal, 25 is the next goal. know, so our, our goal every year is to just grow. You know, we’ve managed to accomplish that every year, but like two, you know, so we’ve been in business for 10 years. We’ve grown eight of those years and we’ve recessed in two of those years. So we’ve, we’ve, we’ve done pretty well.One of the times we actually did that I did on purpose. The last time we did it was not on purpose and it was a painful, it was a painful lesson, you know, so, but, but yet the growth is, is, is the thing. And, know, when you, when you’re new in business and there’s nothing but growth, that’s easy. But when you hit the 10 and 15 and 20 million mark dollar mark, mean, you’ve already exercised a lot of these things that have gotten you the growth and
You know, can’t squeeze any more blood from that rock. So you have to find other avenues to try to create that revenue. know, and that’s basically our biggest challenge is trying to, you know, find ways to shake those bushes. First, we got to find the bushes, you shake the bushes and then we got to see what’s in the bushes, you know? So it’s a whole process and a strategy and it’s something that we actively, like we actively pursue.
Quentin (20:58)
Yeah.Yeah, that’s it.
Yeah, absolutely, man. Listen, I think one of last questions I want to ask because four years of generation within your bloodline, you treat your team like you treat them like partners. So I want to talk to you about relationships a little bit and how you value relationships. And so when it comes to building relationships and growing your network, what’s made the biggest difference for you?
Jason (21:34)
Well, I always say ⁓ profit follows relationships. You know, I think that’s the main problem with business today is people would rather sacrifice a relationship for profit. ⁓ you know, you can do that for a little while, but pretty soon you’re going to run out of relationships, you know, and, and I can tell you if you go out on a desert Island, you’re not going to make a lot of money, you know, so, ⁓ you want to, you want to surround yourself with good people and, good relationships and includes in business andQuentin (21:55)
more meh.Jason (22:03)
the people you’re giving energy to every day. mean, you don’t really, there’s a good saying that if you hang out with five idiots, you’ll be the sixth idiot. If you hang around with five millionaires, you’ll probably be the sixth millionaire. So surround yourself with good people, value your relationships. That’s another thing I feel like people don’t give enough energy to the relationships they have. Everybody’s an acquaintance and that’s cool. But if you really reach out and, ⁓Quentin (22:28)
YeahJason (22:33)
into people’s lives and try to affect them in a positive way, I can tell you that’s going to come back to you tenfold. If you’re just going to be superficial in your relationships, it’s not going to benefit you as much as it would if you really dug in. And that’s just common sense.Quentin (22:53)
Yeah.Yes, sir. Man, listen, sir, I appreciate you. think you have dropped a ton of zones and given a ton of value to this episode for people to actually pick from and glean from. So listen, Jason, before we wrap, man, if someone wanted to reach out to you, connect with you, collaborate with you, what’s the best way for them to reach out to you,
Jason (23:19)
I mean, they can always hit me up at my email, astroroofing at gmail.com or the letter J, Blair, B-L-A-I-R at astroroofing.com. It’s Astro with two As. Before we take off though, I really wanna talk about our ⁓ Covering the Community program. I was gonna talk about that a little bit earlier, but we kind of transitioned away from it. ⁓ We do this program and we’re trying to create awareness for it where…We give roofing services and construction services to people in need that can’t afford it, but maybe deserve it. know, so we’ve rolled out this program. We’ve been, I mean, we’re about to put on our first roof. just going through permitting right now with a young lady who named nominated her mom. ⁓ The young woman had become homeless. She had five children, two grand babies. The mom took them all in the husband.
had gotten some type of accident where he hurt his back. He couldn’t work for like a year or so. ⁓ Heartbreaking and touching story. when I go over there to interview him, I mean, the ceilings are caving in in the house. I mean, it’s a nice house too. mean, in a nice neighborhood and ⁓ she keeps it nice. So it’s not like the house is bad. It’s just, it has a leaky roof.
They don’t have the money to fix it and they’ve really been struggling to try to find a way to make this happen. They’ve had some temporary repairs done up there, but the roof is basically passed its life. And, you know, this, this is something that I’ve always done for people that I kind of known friends and family, but I’ve never really rolled it out to the public, the people I haven’t known, but ⁓ at the beginning of this year, when we were trying to find a creative way to do, to spend our marketing money, I was like, you know,
You know what, let’s do something cool. Let’s try to find a way that, mean, and yes, it’s marketing, 1000%. Yes, we’re creating awareness for the program, potentially that would create awareness for our company. That’s a great thing if that happens. But the real thing for the program isn’t for the marketing. It’s really, I mean, we’re gonna spend the money in marketing anyways. It’s really because I felt like we have done so well that…
Quentin (25:27)
Yeah.Jason (25:31)
And when I first started making this kind of money, I went out and bought Corvettes, I bought big Jeeps, I bought big gold chains and Rolexes and took my wife on crazy vacations. I mean, did so much stuff, and I did a lot of charity stuff too, but I felt like I was still missing out on doing some good. And I wanted to find a way that I could reach directly into the community. we started.Quentin (25:40)
Yeah, yeah.Jason (25:59)
We’ve always done like youth sports stuff, but we started digging in more to like local youth sports organizations. Cause I really feel like that was a good place to put our money. Again, it’s advertising, but it’s doing cool stuff with your advertising dollars. So feel like, you know, giving it to Google and Facebook, you know, that’s awesome. If that’s what you’re going to do and everybody kind of needs to do that. And we’re going to do that regardless, but I feel like, you know, we were able to allocate some of that money.Quentin (26:12)
Absolutely.Jason (26:27)
to do some good feeling like community stuff. And I think to me, like when I sat down and decided to do that roof for these people, I was like bursting with pride. know, I mean, I felt like, I mean, it was like God was showing me like God’s telling me like, this is what you should be doing.Quentin (26:30)
Yeah.Yeah.
Jason (26:43)
Like, I mean, like slap me upside the head and say, see, this is what you do right here. You know? So to me, I want to put on more roofs like that. I don’t want to give away free roofs. You know, it’s not.Quentin (26:44)
Yes, sir. Yes, sir.Jason (26:54)
That’s not the point. What I want is I want to find people that are deserving of this and they can’t afford it. And I hope it inspires other contractors to kind of do the same thing, to ⁓ try to do a similar program. I challenge another contractor out there to do the same thing.Quentin (27:10)
Yeah.Man, thank you so much for taking time out to mention that, that initiative, that program, that servitude, you you say God hates you upside the head. And that’s one thing I know about God. He always wants us to serve our people. And so to hear you put yourself out there with that servitude, that servant’s heart, man, applaud you and applaud your business and you’re doing it the right way, brother. And so thank you so much, man. Listen, thank you so much just for being here. Thank you for your time, your story.
Jason (27:37)
Appreciate that.Quentin (27:43)
your perspective. We definitely need more people like you in this space. And Mr. Jason, this was awesome, man. Thank you so much for coming through.Jason (27:51)
Yeah, thanks for having me on. was awesome. Thank you.Quentin (27:53)
Absolutely. So listen, y’all got the value from Mr. Jason Blair. Check him out. See how you can get involved with what he’s doing. And also make sure you subscribe to our channel. We’re going to continue to bring up awesome people, just like Mr. Jason. We don’t want you to miss it. So Mr. Jason, thank you so much again. And to everyone else, we will see you on the next time.
