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do the right thing, even if others don't.
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I think that's one of the great pitfalls in life that it can happen in family relationships.
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It can happen in business, that when other people behave in an inappropriate way, we somehow can fall into a trap of giving ourselves permission to act in an inappropriate way ourselves.
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Hey, uncommon Leaders, welcome back.
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This is the Uncommon Leader Podcast.
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I'm your host, john Gallagher, and I've got a fantastic guest for you today.
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I'm very grateful to be able to call this gentleman, a friend, barry Sutliff, who's the founder and CEO of Reliable Roofing in Georgia, and I can't wait to get a chance to talk with him about his story.
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One of the things we'll talk about today is from when he started this organization with $100 in his pocket and today, as it sits as a multimillion-dollar organization.
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And while that's a very important part of the journey for Barry as the CEO of a company, what I really appreciate in our friendship and our conversation today is how he is committed to living out his purpose, his God-given talents and gifts inside of his organization and his life that I think are going to be inspiring and encouraging for all of us to listen to today.
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So, barry, welcome to the Uncommon Leader Podcast.
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How are you doing today?
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I'm doing great and thank you for having me.
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Absolutely.
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Again, looking forward to our conversation.
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So many things about your business and I got all kinds of questions to talk about, but I always start my first time guests with the same first question asking you to tell me a story from your childhood that still impacts who you are today, as a person or as a leader.
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Yeah, you did give me a heads up that you'd be asking that question, so I thought about it a lot and there's a lot of places I could go with it, but I think probably the most I think, like so many people, you start back with your parents and you and they form so much of who we are and even whether the things are tough or the things are easy, it forms who you are.
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So I think about my father was a foot soldier as an 18 year old, with his first assignment being the battle of the bulge and and and how that molded him and his personality and and his just way of looking at life.
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And I think in some ways that were challenged but in other ways that were super positive, dad became a, came back from the war, spent one year in college and then went and worked for a corporation which he ended up working there 40 years and he started in the factory and when he left, after seven moves, he was in New York running the entire 23 plants of the company.
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So he was willing to sacrifice and he was willing to and he worked hard and he also stuck with stuff.
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So I think that had a big influence on me.
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I think also my mother just realizing what she went through and trying to move seven different times was a lot of resilience there and a lot of sacrifice that she demonstrated.
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And there were six kids and so it was not an easy thing, but I think I'm really grateful to both of them.
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There was a lot of trials in the life.
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I had a brother who passed away at age seven and brought a lot of pain into the family and so that sort of shaped some of the childhood too.
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There was a lot of wounds that came out of that.
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He did pass away before I was born but it just impacted the family greatly and some of that manifests itself later.
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But but I think the beauty of moving a lot for me was that that I I got to hone my skills and meeting new people and and also maybe reading people and understanding like how do you see what's going on in a new and different situation, and I think that's been.
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I think that's been very helpful and I think my parents has been role models for for how to push through with a lot of different change has been very helpful.
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Barry, I love that and I think about those six moves.
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It reminds me a good good bit of even some of our journey.
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I cannot imagine with six kids.
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I know that we moved as a newly married couple three times before we settled into Virginia twice and then, even in Virginia, I had 11 different addresses within 17 years, never leaving the zip code.
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So those moves can be challenging on family dynamics, no doubt about it.
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But with six I can't imagine how that even tries to flow.
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So and I think that, again, that even frames a little bit then some of that grit that your father had to go from the shop floor up and up into running the company is something that you guys started on as well.
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I love the story and full disclosure.
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Barry and I have worked together now for a little over a year on some of the consulting that I do and as I got a chance to know him, I knew that I wanted him to be a guest on Young Common Leader Podcast to share his story.
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But one of the stories that I hadn't heard before was really the ultimate startup of reliable roofing, where you started with $100 in your pocket 35 years ago and ultimately have led it to the success that it is today, with hundreds of employees and hundreds of people impacted as well many more impacted.
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That's an incredible story of grit in and of itself.
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What were some of the challenges that you had to overcome early in that journey to get where you are today?
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Yeah, I think the beauty of being 25 years old and starting a business and having this idea is that you don't know what you don't know, because had I known what some of those challenges would be, I might not have done it, because it was a lot of pain and I think any entrepreneur watching this is like, yes, they can totally relate to that.
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But we were encouraged early on.
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The business was started out of an apartment with $100.
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It's actually an interesting story we like to share, because my wife actually lived in an apartment.
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She was my girlfriend at the time and she lived in an apartment below me and I had borrowed her typewriter.
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When she came home from work and found out to type up a flyer and she asked me what I was doing and I told her I was going to start a roofing company.
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Her response was very dramatic oh my gosh, you need to get a job.
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I, like you, know I need to get a job.
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You have a few problems.
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You don't have any capital, you really know a little bit about roofing material, you don't really know about roofing and you don't have a ladder and that's probably going to be a problem.
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But I did have some crews to work with.
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But I did have some crews to work with and 38 years ago it wasn't common.
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There's a lot of people in the roofing business.
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It seems like today, but 38 years ago it was a little different world in the roofing business.
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Most of the roofers who were doing well were former roofers and not as much business people who had decided they would get into the roofing business with some exceptions but anyway, my wife quickly got on board and became a huge cheerleader for the business and was instrumental in those early years.
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But it's funny as we look back on it and it was a risky proposition.
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Well, there's so many things there.
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I mean again, if you'd have known then what you know now, you might not have started it.
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It's risky to start a business with $100 in your pocket.
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It's even more outlandish, maybe, to start a roofing company without a ladder.
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Okay, so here we go with some of the things that you've overcome in your journey, and there's many things that you've talked about as you move through that journey to today.
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You ultimately built a company with what I've seen in your notes of three Ts teamwork, trust and timeless values.
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So I want to start with those timeless values where we are.
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I mean, it's something that really drew me to you in terms of understanding.
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Tell me a little bit about how you established those values in your organization.
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Maybe it's part of who you were as you grew up as well, and how those values continue to drive who you are today in your business.
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And my values have grown over the years, but when I started, one thing that I was confident in was that people needed someone they could trust to do their roofing, that there was the process of getting it done, but that a service like roofing was after the job was done.
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The warranty and what happens over the next few years is every bit as important as what happens right when you're doing the job because of the weather.
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So really it was all about being trustworthy and it was about doing, you know, honoring, being honest with our customers and honoring them and doing everything you can do to make their experience good.
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And so the company and original values were based on the acronym TRUST.
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I did that early on and the TRUST stood for teamwork, respect, understanding, the idea of understanding, you know, seek first to understand, then be understood, just really understanding what the customer wanted.
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Service, you know, providing them what they wanted and, after you've listened to them and heard what they wanted, to provide that service.
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And then transformation and the idea that that that those processes really transform, just transform relationships like this idea of working together and and respecting one another, hearing one another, serving one another, that they really it's a transformed relationships.
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So so that was kind of that was my idea early on was like there would that we would build it on on the company, on trust, and you see, that common where people are like honest, trustworthy, whatever, but we really and nobody's we really worked hard on always honoring our customer, the trust that was bestowed upon us by our customers.
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And even to this day, as you know, we work all over the country practically with only locations in physical location Florida and Georgia.
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And it's an interesting concept of how people in Michigan big customers we work in Boston sometimes and in Dallas or wherever we're working, there's a lot of roofing contractors between our home office and those places.
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But why did they choose us?
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In a lot of cases it's because they trust us and we don't ever want to do anything to betray that trust.
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Yeah, Well, I know I've had a chance to meet with a few of your customers in the time we've been together and there's no doubt that relationship and that trust that's been built over the years is something that is foundational to your success, and I love the use of the acronym TRUST.
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I was another thing, that's two things.
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Now I wasn't aware of that.
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You had there the teamwork, respect, understanding, service and transformation, and for me, even the word that came to mind as you talked about it was integrity.
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I think about doing the right thing, even though it may cost a little bit more than you're willing to pay, or sometimes a lot more than you're willing to pay.
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You mentioned how you've done that with customers.
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Can you think of a story where you had to actually go above and beyond, where it cost your company more than you really wanted it to, but you needed to maintain that trust with a customer.
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Yeah, it comes up all the time.
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You can imagine that where there's examples all the time where there's some kind of problem with a roof that may not have manifested itself Even in time if we, for instance, have a five-year warranty on a roof, it may be six or seven years and we see something that was actually something that was not correct in the first place, that we will go ahead and correct that even though there's been, even though it doesn't.
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We don't technically legally owe that, but we try to do the right thing.
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I guess probably one of the biggest examples of that was a big owe that we found in Savannah, georgia, where we had done a property and I think it was possibly a year or so later when they were asking us we'd done about 50,000 square feet of roofing on this apartment complex and for some reason they didn't notice till the following year that it was the wrong color and it was a calamity of errors of how that happened and obviously it wasn't too clear to anyone, which is why it took them a year to discover it.
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But that was a big one where we had to go back and say, okay, we'll take care of it.
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We replaced the entire 50,000 square feet of roofing for them to make the color right.
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Wow that was kind of legendary in the reliable roofing history.
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That would be legendary.
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50,000 square feet worth, absolutely, yeah, wow.
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That's that was kind of legendary in the reliable roofing history.
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That would be legendary, 50,000 feet worth Absolutely and fixing that problem and definitely again, definitely a sign that I could understand how that would build trust with your customer base overall, because those those words get around to you know, small moral you're.
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You're in 35 States now in terms of providing the work that you do now.
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Back then maybe you weren't, but either way that's still a small community where some of those words get around as to how you're servicing those customers becomes a big part of it.
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And the customer worked with us to give us some other work to try to soften the blow of that.
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They were appreciative of that, but the main thing is doing the right thing.
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I had a mentor early on who would encourage me to get at least a $250,000 reserve which was laughable back then because he was adamant about it.
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Like you need to build this reserve, build a reserve.
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Build a reserve Because he said I know you want to do the right thing, but if you don't handle your finances well, you may find yourself in a lot of situations where you'd actually like to do the right thing, but you have to have to argue about it or not do it because you don't have the financial capability of doing it.
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So so that's been part of our approach with the business too, and keeping our really managing our finance, as well as trying to keep ourselves in a position to where you can, where where the lack of funds doesn't creep into a lack of character funds doesn't creep into a lack of character, barry.
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We could talk entrepreneurship a lot of the time through.
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Another characteristic of Barry Sutliff that I love is the I'll use the word balance.
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I don't know that it's a great word, but certainly the fact that you have the ability and you might judge yourself.
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I'll let you talk to it here in a minute.
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You've been married for 36 years to your wife.
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You have a large family, you have hobbies that you like to do, you're a golfer, you have sports that you like and you are involved in your community as a trustee for the Fellowship of Christian Athletes, chairman of the Young Leaders International.
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How do you balance all of those things in your leadership style, the demands of running a multi-million dollar business with the need to add value to others outside of work as well?
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Yeah, and I don't.
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As you said, balance is an illusion, right, you're never going to have personal balance with things.
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But I think two things.
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The first I would want to say is just the team that we have here at Reliable Roofing is just some really great people.
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We built the business with this idea that we need to create an environment where people can reach their God-given potential.
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We need to create an entrepreneurial environment where people can reach their God-given potential, and if we don't do that, then they should leave.
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We should want them to leave, but I don't really like people to leave because I really care about people and we've had some great people.
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My right-hand man has been with me for 33 years.
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He's an amazing person who's got honor, integrity, responsibility, hard work and done a fantastic job, had a right.
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And a woman who just retired, who was there with the company for 36 years, who also had just a ton of integrity and support.
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And then we have a lot of other folks who've been more than 25 years with the business that are just quality, solid people, and so without them, it's not even possible.
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Right Without the team?
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So that's the team.
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And the them it's not even possible.
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Right Without the team.
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So that's the team.
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When the teamwork it's not even remotely possible, because it's really largely true that they built the business.
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You know, I led it and did some had some vision, some ideas, whatever, but those are the, those are the men and women that made it happen.
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So so that's part of it.
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But then the other piece is is putting the putting the first things first.
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And I don't claim to have done this perfectly at all.
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We raised four sons.
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You can just sports and all that kind of stuff.
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You can only imagine the time schedules, especially being an entrepreneur.
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But to keep reminding myself to put God first, like to put that, to put God first.
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Once you get your head right around that, then that puts perspective on everything.
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And then family, my wife and then my family.
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And so early on there was some real intentionality that I had around limiting the hours I would work.
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For instance, I started in 1998 with saying after six o'clock I would be, I'd make every intention to be home by six.
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Now, that was at that time.
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That was a stretch to say that, and and I didn't always do it, but but putting that boundary in there made me much more effective up until six and I'd go home and be around the family and go to bed for a few hours and wake up and do bids in the middle of the night and whatever it took to get the job done.
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But I had that as a priority and I didn't want to miss my children's childhood and I didn't.
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So I think if I could just sum that up, it would be having the right priorities and then those things will fall into place.
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If you sort of seek God first, then the rest will fall into place.
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Hey listeners, I want to take a quick moment to share something special with you.
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Many of the topics and discussions we have on this podcast are areas where I provide coaching and consulting services for individuals and organizations.
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If you've been inspired by our conversation and are seeking a catalyst for change in your own life or within your team, I invite you to visit coachjohngallaghercom forward slash free call to sign up for a free coaching call with me.
00:17:35.817 --> 00:17:43.230
It's an opportunity for us to connect, discuss your unique challenges and explore how coaching or consulting can benefit you and your team.
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Okay, let's get back to the show Love that Seek God first, but also again putting those other things in your calendar first as well.
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After that time.
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I know that it won't be perfect.
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I mean, there are seasons in an entrepreneur's life, there are seasons in a business leader's life where you have to be investing a significant amount of time in your business, but when you can have those priorities, first for children, wife, god those are the right ones to have and now grandchildren for you as well.
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Very important, speaking of those values Romans 12 plays a significant role in your company's values.
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How have you look, I say, practically integrated those principles into your business on a daily, daily basis?
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Yeah, well, so for those of your listeners who don't know what basis yeah, so for those of your listeners who don't know much about Romans 12, it was a letter written to the Romans.
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I think maybe Paul wrote it from prison.
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I know Paul wrote it, if I remember correctly, but he describes a lot about the theologies that he's discussing with the Romans.
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But then he does a background on that and then in Romans 12, he says in a chapter and I highly recommend anybody go read it and digest it but he says now, here is how you're supposed to live.
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And that became a life chapter to me in 1989, when I became a believer and had a faith for the first real time in my life.
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This is a life chapter is that this shows you and it's it's a really beautifully written and and I took it and shortly thereafter and took it and put it into 12 directives that I believe would help us live out that trust acronym and our values.
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So this was really the behaviors that would support the trust acronym.
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So I, so the they're the trust acronym, so they're really rich and at Reliable Roofing.
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You don't have to have a faith to work here.
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We don't think any different of you.
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We're wide open to that People of all faith.
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There's no theocracy here at the company, but people understand my faith and that I'm attempting to do a good job at walking that out Not always, sometimes better than others.
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But the very first R12 directive is it all belongs to God.
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But I always explain during our meetings, if this comes up or to new hires or whatever, that that doesn't mean you have to have a faith and you have to even believe in God.
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Maybe we'll start with that by saying that's a stewardship issue.
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Like we're all stewards of whatever we're doing.
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We're stewards of our lives.
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We're stewards of our children.
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We're stewards of the properties that we have.
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We're not going to have them forever.
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Like it's everything's almost a temporary assignment when we're the leader and we're going to be, we're going to be in charge of them.
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But but for those who do have a faith, we understand that the perspective that you gain with with when you truly just say you know what.
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He owns it all.
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There's such freedom in that.
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Even right now, as you and I were talking right before the show, the terrorists worldwide terrorists are hitting everyone.
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We're all business people.
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We're invested in different businesses.
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This is just really a lot of chaos going on, we step back and take a deep breath and understand God owns it all.
00:20:49.993 --> 00:20:52.878
Whatever happens here, we trust him.
00:20:52.878 --> 00:20:54.580
We do need to do what we need to do.
00:20:54.580 --> 00:20:56.022
We need to take action and do whatever.
00:20:56.022 --> 00:21:03.336
That doesn't mean we sit back and do nothing but at the end of the day, we're going to be all right.
00:21:03.355 --> 00:21:03.917
I love that, Barron.
00:21:03.917 --> 00:21:04.839
I love that like a reset.
00:21:04.839 --> 00:21:06.082
I mean it's a calibration.
00:21:06.082 --> 00:21:18.836
It is Because, if we watch the news and all that stuff going on in the chaos, fear will set in on all sides in terms of what's happening.
00:21:18.836 --> 00:21:19.257
We just don't know.
00:21:19.257 --> 00:21:32.537
The stock market going down so low, the news telling us who's bad and who's good and all these different things, and when we have a chance to step back and say it all belongs to him is really powerful and we can have that perspective.
00:21:32.537 --> 00:21:33.191
No doubt about it.
00:21:33.752 --> 00:21:35.537
Yeah, it's a truth, and that's the thing.
00:21:35.537 --> 00:21:36.680
The truth sets you free.
00:21:36.680 --> 00:21:37.501
It just is a.
00:21:37.501 --> 00:21:40.596
It's a, it's, it's, it is there's.
00:21:40.596 --> 00:21:46.311
It's not a platitude, it's just, it's just true that you can, when you rest, on things that are true.
00:21:46.311 --> 00:21:54.605
And and I think right now, with just the world in general, with the news cycle, it is designed to make you afraid.
00:21:54.605 --> 00:22:13.481
It is designed to breed fear, because fear attracts eyeballs, and that's what they're trying to do is capture eyeballs and we can kind of get addicted to it and whatever side of the political aisle you're on, you can just argue and get all worked up about what the other side is doing and how disastrous it's going to be, and they feed that.
00:22:13.481 --> 00:22:19.278
So, but it's always good to put it back, to have a true north and a center that says all right, this is not.
00:22:19.278 --> 00:22:26.795
You know, I'm a steward of what I'm supposed to be a steward of and I'm going to do the best that I can do, and then after that I'm going to trust God, I'm going to honor him and trust him.
00:22:29.700 --> 00:22:32.402
Well, I love that in terms of saying, too, we're not going to roofing For all measures.
00:22:32.402 --> 00:23:03.994
You've had a very successful company, yet you've come to us over a year ago and said and I want to do better.
00:23:03.994 --> 00:23:11.605
We talk about the framework of developing self, developing your team or developing others, implementing new structures and processes.
00:23:11.605 --> 00:23:15.053
Ultimately, what leads to sustainable success?
00:23:15.053 --> 00:23:17.488
Kingdom impact, as we've often talked about it.
00:23:17.488 --> 00:23:23.270
But what was the catalyst for you to say we're doing okay now and I want to do more.
00:23:23.270 --> 00:23:24.212
I want to do better.
00:23:26.202 --> 00:23:27.788
Yeah, there's a few catalysts to it.
00:23:27.788 --> 00:23:33.980
Some of it is just my age and realizing that I need to really shore up the foundation of everything that is in the business age.
00:23:33.980 --> 00:23:49.288
And realizing that I need to really shore up the foundation of everything that is in the business and I want it to continue, that I don't know that my my years are are certainly on the short end of the years of how long I'll be here and and having the opportunity to to improve it and make it as sustainable as possible was important to me.
00:23:49.288 --> 00:23:52.983
That for the future, I also have had more time, the kids are out of the house.
00:23:52.983 --> 00:24:02.682
Some of the demands are still big, but some of them the day-to-day demands of when you had four sons have changed dramatically.
00:24:03.364 --> 00:24:20.828
The other part is that our industry's changed and the world has changed and everybody's experienced in this consolidation of there's like this money machine out there that is gobbling up every business and entity to have those assets producing returns for them and that's okay, that's their job and that's their business.
00:24:20.828 --> 00:24:22.666
But they're also doing that in the roofing industry.
00:24:22.666 --> 00:24:42.471
Major suppliers are being purchased, our customers are being purchased and our competitors are being purchased, so we need to be the best version of ourselves to just position ourselves and to be a great competitor in those environments and to serve our customers.
00:24:42.471 --> 00:24:45.220
And our intentions are to continue just to serve our customers as personally and as honestly as possible.
00:24:45.220 --> 00:25:00.548
And while the world is changing with who owns what and what, the world is changing with artificial intelligence and I'm a proponent of using that wherever it's possible to still value people but to bring efficiencies.
00:25:01.441 --> 00:25:04.930
But what we're really going to focus on at Reliable is the stuff that doesn't change.
00:25:04.930 --> 00:25:06.173
You know we're going to change.
00:25:06.173 --> 00:25:23.388
That's valuing people and being honest with people and serving them and trying to meet their needs and putting them above yourselves and trying to be a good friend and a good vendor and a good employer to our employees and a good contractor to our contractors and that kind of stuff.
00:25:23.388 --> 00:25:24.826
So those things will never change.
00:25:24.826 --> 00:25:29.449
People will always want those kinds of things and that's where we're trying to focus on things that won't change.
00:25:30.903 --> 00:25:32.568
Excellent To be commended for that.
00:25:32.568 --> 00:25:40.621
I mean oftentimes, especially on the entrepreneurial side, I believe that folks can be seduced by success and just kind of keep riding it along there.
00:25:40.621 --> 00:25:48.468
But you've made a hard choice to do hard things to make it even better, and I'd love the discussion you talk about in terms of your team.
00:25:48.468 --> 00:25:54.230
You mentioned that person that's your right-hand person that's been there for almost as long as you have on that journey.
00:25:54.230 --> 00:25:59.853
You have many 25-year employees in your organization and you like to keep it that way.
00:25:59.853 --> 00:26:03.609
You know the team is something that's very important to you.
00:26:03.609 --> 00:26:07.911
Is there a time that you were most proud of your team and what they were able to accomplish?
00:26:09.621 --> 00:26:14.403
We've been through a lot If you think about the time since 1987, we started in 87.
00:26:14.403 --> 00:26:16.984
There was a stock market crash in October of 87.
00:26:16.984 --> 00:26:18.164
That was a lot.
00:26:18.164 --> 00:26:23.548
In 1990, there was a big recession that was really damaging to the roofing business.
00:26:23.548 --> 00:26:26.672
A lot of people went, which just shook everyone in the economy.
