Three Steps to Unlocking Scale: How Daniel Young Catapulted His Contracting Business From 3 to 20 million In Annual Revenue… In Just 4 Years!

Daniel Young from Kingdom Roofing Systems joined us for episode 4 of the Growth Minded Contractor podcast. 

During this fascinating conversation, Daniel revealed the secrets to quickly scaling a residential contracting business. 

And if you want to develop impressive revenue…

Just like constructing a tall building, you need to have very solid foundations in place first. 

So, before we get into the technical and strategic side of those foundations, it’s important to cover the values and core principles everything was based on.

Daniel first started the company in 2012 with his partner Ryan just as a way to provide jobs for his community project – Hope City, which helped young men to get a better start in life.

And even though Kingdom Roofing Systems is now a large company doing 20+ million per year…they have always held the same Christian values at the core of everything they’ve been doing.

That being said, even though there’s Chrsitian meaning and symbolism in Kingdom Roofing System’s name and lion logo, Daniel doesn’t put this too directly in people’s faces. In fact, most of his customers have no idea of the religious meaning behind it. 

That’s because Daniel believes that even if their customers are not religious, they can still appreciate the values that the company operates on, like putting people first, having honor, integrity, excellence, and reliability at the heart of everything they do. 

And while these values played a key role in their success…

Without resolving key technical issues, Kingdom Roofing’s growth would have remained stagnant indefinitely.

Two Key Issues That Prevented Kingdom Roofing Systems From Growing

Within a few years of starting the business, Daniel and his partner Ryan had scaled up to around 3 million per year.

But then they brought a third partner into the company.

And although this person had 35 years experience in construction, while they worked with him over the next 3-4 years, revenue became completely stagnant. 

This happened because this new partner had a completely different philosophy when it came to business.

While Daniel and Ryan believed in growth through investment, this third partner believed in profits through savings.

As a result, their budget for marketing, lead generation, coaching and development faded away and so did their ability to grow to the next level. 

During this time, the company was also rebranded from Kingdom Exteriors, which dealt with storm damage to buildings…

To Kingdom Construction which would take on literally any kind of job from restoring barns to pouring concrete driveways.

This naturally created complete chaos when it came to their margins, trying to organize materials, create repeatable systems, and become more efficient in carrying out each job.

It was very stressful and certainly not scalable but Daniel made this decision because he was hoping to scale his business without a marketing budget and therefore trying to get any job he could get his hands on.

So now that we understand some of the problems that were preventing the business from growing, let’s look at

The Three Steps Daniel Took To Unlock Rapid Growth In His Contracting Business

By 2018, Daniel and Ryan had realized that the new partnership wasn’t working out, so they decided to buy them out of the business. 

And although this partnership stalled the progress of the business it also taught them a valuable lesson, which is why their next first steps were:

1. Aligning Partner Values
   Daniel and Ryan knew that if they weren’t on the same page it would only lead to further plateaus in growth for the company.

   They decided that developing a clear vision was the first and most important thing to cover before starting the next phase of the business. 

   So Daniel and Ryan made sure to clearly define what it is they are about, where they are going, and how they are going to get there before taking any further action.

   This led to two changes. First, Daniel was going to play to his strengths and step into the CEO role making key decisions (but only with Ryan’s approval and agreement).

   Secondly, it meant they would go back to their philosophy of investment in lead generation, marketing etc. to foster the growth of the company…

   Both of these changes allowed them to scale from 3 to 6 million in just the first year alone!

2. Re-Focusing Their Branding
   Now that they had their marketing budget back, they were able to narrow their focus on what services they specifically wanted to offer.

   So, they asked themselves who they were at their core, and the answer was: roofers.

   From here, they rebranded themselves to Kingdom Roofing Systems, which meant that when someone searched for them they were only getting calls about what they wanted to be selling.

   By focusing all of their efforts just on one type of work, every part of the business became more efficient, systematized, predictable, profitable, and scalable. 

   And the ironic thing is that although Daniel had chosen a broad name with Kingdom Construction because he didn’t want to pass up any opportunities…

   Now that they were branding themselves as specialists, a lot more people were choosing to hire them over more generic companies!

3. Realizing their limits
   Daniel acknowledges that you can’t be an expert in everything.

   Which is why it’s essential to find and hire experts in different areas, who are rockstars at what they do and then execute exactly what they say. 

   So, when Daniel partnered with marketing agency Web Runner and followed their 24 month plan for growth…

   This allowed them to go from waiting for the next storm to happen to being able to say “this is exactly how much it costs to acquire a lead or a new customer”…

   And then just investing that amount to create new business.

   This made growing the company’s revenue a completely predictable and scalable process.