Wise men have told me about “The Secret”… the idea that positive thinking drives your beliefs, actions, and destiny.
That what your heart desires is limited only by your beliefs.
And for decades the engineer in me stubbornly clung to the safety of proof— repeatable science.
The woo-woo of manifestation sounded more like healing crystals and shakras than something I could rely on.
Darryl Isaacs told me how he gets the benefit of electricity without needing to understand how it works.
I look back with sadness at my life and see how many times I had massive opportunities placed in my lap, only to be rejected by me because I didn’t think it was possible or more commonly, because I didn’t think I deserved such a good thing.
I scoffed at entrepreneurs who paid $50,000 to attend mastermind groups, mainly to up their “mindset”.
Now that I’ve had a taste of success, I realize that I was the idiot all along.
++ Why hire only 20 people just for me when we can create a million jobs for all our friends?
++ Why believe I’m “too busy” to help a friend, when doing so will pay me back 10 times that in ways I’d never imagine right now?
++ Why not give generously not because you want the attention, but because it’s the right thing, which God will reward you handsomely later?
++ Why not drop the grudge against that jerk who screwed you over, not because you’re a saint, but for your own well-being?
++ Why not openly share everything you know how to do, even to direct competitors, since you know there is more than for everyone?
++ Why not be willing to learn from everyone around you, especially the young adults, since we don’t know everything?
My hope is that you realize and reap the rewards today of what has taken me a lifetime to finally be open to accepting.
Zach Reece describes himself as a “CPA gone rogue.” The tongue-in-cheek phrase creates an intriguing image of the mastermind behind Atlanta’s Colony Roofers, who took a sharp turn in the road in 2018 when he veered away from his flourishing, high-speed career in the financial world to partner with his father in running a fledgling family roofing company.
What inspired Reece to take on the leadership role of one of Atlanta’s fastest-growing roofing companies?
A Man on a Mission: Why Roofing?
After earning his Economics degree as a Tarheel at UNC in Chapel Hill, Reece started his career as a CPA at Deloitte, the esteemed financial services firm, where Reece focused on tax compliance and mergers & acquisitions (M&A).
When he left Deloitte, his aim was to “try on” roofing for a change of pace. Entering an entirely new field proved challenging, but the highly driven Reece persevered through grit, determination, and curiosity. Even as he took on ownership of Colony Roofers, he partnered it with his family’s real estate development and investment firm, Guided Capital, for which he served as Vice President of Finance.
Yes, this man does everything at full tilt. “I actually never intended to get into roofing, or construction at all for that matter,” he says. “When the opportunity presented itself, I thought it might be a good thing to try on. The only problem is I don’t know how to ‘try on’ anything. I only know full-speed and overdrive!”
As to what rewards him in his role as a small business owner and contractor, Reece gives us a hint when he says, “The satisfaction that my team brings to the owners, PMs, and GCs we serve is now something I take great pride in.” Reece has built Colony Roofers into one of the best roofers in Atlanta in just a few years.
Achievements of This CPA-Turned-Roofer
Reece and his team at Colony Roofers are closing in on 3000 completed roof installations, repairs, and replacements in the greater Atlanta metropolitan area, including over 500 storm damage claims.
A native son of Atlanta, Reece learned a lot from his father’s expertise in construction. He’s made it a top priority to hire employees with roofing experience, a strong work ethic, and integrity. Under his leadership, the Colony Roofers team has built a reputation for quality and workmanship, with an A+ rating by the BBB.
A Life of Experience Leads to Expertise
In shaping his family-owned-and-operated roofing company, Reece developed the Colony Way of customer service, including a dedication to quality, trust, and value.
While growing up in Atlanta, working as a CPA and with his family’s investment firm, Reece learned what it would require to take his roofing company from the ground level to the top as one of Atlanta’s premier providers for residential and commercial roofing.
Now, in 2022, Reece has acquired roofing contracts with FirstKey Homes, Resipro, and two Nissan dealership locations in South Union City and Morrow, on top of countless commercial and residential accounts across the greater Atlanta Metro area.
Reece’s Three-Pronged Approach
Reece and his team have found technology solutions to streamline their operations at Colony Roofers and save their clients millions over the six years since they opened.
In the roofing industry, as in many other industries, the supply chain and staffing shortages are wreaking havoc on manufacturing, transport, and delivery timelines. Reece has developed a three-pronged solution, using technology to manage his supply chain issues,. These prongs include:
● Staying organized. Colony Roofers embraces a proprietary system to manage its workflows, using a Kanban board managed by the CRM and JobNimbus project management software.
● Maintaining customer communication. VoIP systems, automated email updates, review requests, and more help to maintain a constant stream of communication with customers so they never feel left out.
● Increasing efficiency in updating proposals. Inflation is causing constant shifts in pricing for roofing materials, which means that proposals often need fast updates to the current pricing. Reece uses software like SumoQuote to manage the current pricing of materials in the system and automatically update referenced material costs on job proposals for clients.
Industry Contributions in the Media
You may hear about Zach Reece and his team in the news, as they are publishing articles and writing press releases to grow their company into a roofing behemoth in the Atlanta Metro region.
Reece recently published an article on roofingcontractor.com titled “Using Technology to Deal with Supply Chain Issues.” In it, he describes the software and technological strategies for managing the operations at his roofing company to deal with supply chain problems, inflation, and communication with community developers, general contractors, and insurance companies.
Reece and his team also occasionally contribute to the online Atlanta Real Estate Forum, ensuring that local realtors, developers, and home buyers know what to look for in a professional Atlanta roofing company.
This rogue CPA seems to have found his niche as a roofing entrepreneur, and he and his company continue to make waves in the greater Atlanta Metro area as a winning roofing choice.
If you do a search on “learn Google Ads 2022”, you get get multiple videos on the first page. All of them are from Uzair.
And we made a video together using my favorite video AI tool, which lets you edit video as easily as typing. But I messed up saving the file, so you’ll have to go search on his name for it.
If we did things right, searching on “Uzair Kharawala” will reveal this post!
Over the years, I’ve hired hundreds of freelancers, VAs, and team members.
And here are the three big mistakes that candidates continue to make.
Hey, Dennis Yu here. And you’re watching this video because we want to improve your chances of getting a job with us. We’re hiring like crazy because we’re so fortunate to have so many clients and partners, but I want to tell you about some of the mistakes people make when they apply. So the first mistake is that they reach out to other folks or me in the team with zero preparation.
So if you send a canned message that says, dear, sir, it just has stuff that shows you didn’t put any time into researching what our company does. You’re not following us on social media. You haven’t clearly seen the kinds of projects that we have. Then you’re going to look like the thousands of other people that are just blasting their resumes out.
So number one, make sure you put in a little bit of time and personalize your message to say something specific about what you’ve learned. It will show that you stand out, and that will put you in 95% of the other candidates. Number two is grammatical errors and other kinds of mistakes. So we’re looking at your ability to communicate.
If you have errors in there and capitalization and punctuation, that’s going to hurt your chances, even if English is not your first language. That’s totally okay. We have a lot of folks in the Philippines, Pakistan, Brazil, and other places, but you have to show that you can communicate very clearly.
It doesn’t mean you have to be a writer or you have to be able to write books or things like that, but just avoid things that are sloppy or have grammatical mistakes. Number three is the follow-up. So when you want to know how you’re doing, then you want to make sure you’re paying close attention to the instructions.
The instructions for any particular job are going to be something like sending a note to Juan or making a one-minute video and posting it on LinkedIn. Or send something with a subject line that has a squirrel in it. These are all ways where we are testing your ability to follow directions. So, that’s what knocks out most candidates because they can’t pay attention to detail.
And so when we’re working in a team where it’s not just you, but a team of us working together in different groups, it’s absolutely critical that you can work closely with these other team members. If you come to me every single day, that shows that you can’t work in a team, right? It doesn’t mean I don’t want to hear from you, but if you can imagine, like the guy Jim, who started Costco, if everyone went to the CEO of Costco across all the different stores of Costco like they would just never get anything done.
Cause it would just be chaos. You’ve got to learn to follow directions and know whom to contact for whom, so it could be other team members. They could be someone who’s in a particular group. There are always some instructions. And you want to demonstrate that you can. Figure out who is the right person to contact or be able to solve problems for yourself or go through the training.
Certainly, reach out when it’s a question that does deserve to where there’s clarification that you need. But remember that if you’re applying, the team evaluates your ability to follow directions. And then, the questions you ask, tell us your comprehension and how well you understand.
So if you can follow those three, yes, there’s a good likelihood that you will be way ahead of everyone else. Who’s applying for a particular position, or maybe you want to be a project manager? Maybe you already have 20 years of experience running an agency, and you want to work with us. That’s great too.
I can tell you if it’s working for me, the first thing I’m going to do is see whether you’ve engaged with our content and whether you have the expertise, as opposed to wanting to get me on the phone right away, where I have to explain what our company does. Because I’m going to look you up before we meet in the same way, you should look me up and figure out how to make the best use of your time and the best use of my time.
So I hope that helps you. Good luck. There’s so much opportunity. I would love to find some way to be able to create a million jobs, which is our mission. And so glad to have friends like John Jonas of online jobs, not pH, our friends at five. Josh Nelson who’s got a bunch of seven-figure agencies in his group. So we’re helping agencies scale. If you’re an agency owner and you’re listening to this, watching this just for fun, by the way. Great. We would love to see you be able to hire more people. And the people that come through our program, it’s not just for us; it’s for all of us. So we want to create jobs together based on clear, fair instructions that anyone who can qualify, anyone who can get these things done, doesn’t matter where on the planet, doesn’t matter if there’s something.
It doesn’t matter if they’re broke; if you can get the job done, then we want to hire you. So I hope that is encouraging for you. And I hope that you can step ahead and be ahead of most of the people that make mistakes when they’re applying for a job, whether it’s with us or somebody else. So looking forward to seeing your progress, and if, for some chance, you don’t hear from us or you were declined because maybe you’re not ready.
We can always try again. We believe that people can always improve. The best thing is don’t make those mistakes in the first place. You want to accelerate your learning and invoice and avoid the pain that comes from making the kinds of mistakes that we’ve seen over the last 20-plus years in hiring. So go check it out, and I can’t wait to see your progress along the way.
There’s no way I would be where I am today if it weren’t for my mentor, former CEO of American Airlines, Al Casey. He took a chance on me, which opened the first door and put me on my path to success.
You know, the apprentice model has been around forever, way before the United States. That has always been the case. The folks in the United States don’t understand the apprentice model, where you’re going to school and you’re doing some kind of job to learn a skill, not because the businesses are trying to get slave labor, but because they believe in the careers and these folks who are apprentices or students or mentees understand that they’re going to be loyal and stay for a few years and learn a particular trade.
Apprenticeships can open up all kinds of opportunities, and the mentors can open their networks, and then these folks can then start their own shop, or do their own thing or, or actually go work at the company. But whatever they do, they do it prepared.
That way of thinking has been lost. Maybe it’s because of the loss of respect for your elders or the idea that millennials need a prize every 30 seconds for attending, for breathing, or loss of patience because of the whole, like distraction of electronic devices.
Whatever you want to call it, the lost art of mentorship is what I want to bring back.
But what I really want is to bring it back at scale.
When I say mentorship at scale, all the stuff that I’ve learned, how to do, which I’ve learned from other people, because you always start with the purest source, I have sought to write it down into checklists.
It could be a checklist on How do you boost a post. It could be a checklist on How you set up a website. A checklist on What do you do before, during, and after a client meeting. A checklist on How do you create a statement of work.
You can take that and systematize it, and that’s mentorship. You know, education and mentorship are really the same thing.
