The
2024 storm season struck early and often across much of the Great
Plains and Midwest, meaning roofers are already hard at work — not just
repairing homes and restoring communities but also that other seasonal
specialty — wrangling with insurance carriers.

Built Strong
Exteriors has a team driving multi-million dollar returns on insurance
coverage approvals in Minnesota, which is no stranger to wild springtime
weather and wicked winters.

RC recently caught up with
Michele Meier, Built Strong’s project analyst director, and Rachel
Markley, the company’s leading sales producer, on how they added more
than $10 million in revenue last year while solidifying relationships
with homeowners for years to come.

Through meticulous organization
and notetaking, Markley developed a system that delivered an additional
$3.2 million in insurance approvals last year, driving in more revenue
than any of Built Strong’s skilled sales reps, Meier said.

“This
is pretty impressive when you figure that the average contract a sales
rep brings in is just shy of $26,000, and her average overage is just
over $6,000,” Meier said.

The company has an entire team dedicated to the new approach to working insurance claims.

[Editor’s Note: The conversation has been lightly edited for space and clarity.]

RC: Briefly describe how you got into the roofing industry. 

Michele Meier (MM): I
went to college and earned a bachelor’s degree in retail merchandising
and management. My long-term goal was to be a buyer, but one of the last
classes I took in college was logistics, and I fell in love with it.
Out of college, I became a logistics broker and did that for 14 years,
but there’s a very high burnout rate.

I have a good friend who
connected me with Tony Flattum (Built Strong’s managing director). I was
just doing overflow or helping out anywhere I could. There was no
actual position, but we were killing it, and he needed the help. That
was 2017, and I’ve been there ever since.

Rachel Markley (RM): A
good friend told me about this position. I came from an insurance
company where I had nothing to do with claims and knew literally nothing
about construction. I started three years ago and haven’t looked back.
It gave me so much freedom in my life and so much knowledge in an
industry I had no idea about.

RC: Would you explain what “supplementing” means in insurance parlance?

MM:  These big insurance companies are a business; like any business, they’re trying to cut costs any way they can.

Between
that and having unknowledgeable adjusters in the field, we’ll get a
statement of loss back, and we’ll find out that the insurance company
had an adjuster from Texas looking at a roof in Minnesota. He doesn’t
understand how much snow we get and that we need all these different
code components. Our job is to ensure that insurance is cut for the
items needed to do the work.

RC: You raked in more than $3 million in supplement revenue last year. What are you doing, and how are you doing it?

RM: I
attribute my success to how I organize my day. I split my day up into
sections and know that with this job I have to use my brain differently
for different activities. When I first started, it was trial and error. I
learned pretty early on that the way my brain worked was to split the
mental actions I would have to take for each activity into a solid chuck
of time. I really learned how to just harness my day better.

I
also use my calendar and make many notes. If I didn’t do that there’s no
way I could keep track of what I’m doing. And I want to go back to that
file, to that day and say, “This is what I did, and this is why I did
it.”

RC: Would you give us an idea of the volume of work you’re performing and what it means to Built Strong? 

RM: Last
year, I sent a total of 562 supplement requests to insurance, and I
closed 510. That doesn’t mean the others weren’t successful either; it
just means they might still be open this year. The average supplement I
bring [in] is about $6,400. Our whole department brought in $10.3
million last year.

RC: How do you set up that process?

RM: So,
on the calendar that I create for every single supplement, I also
create a note. And I never get rid of those because oftentimes you might
supplement a file, but then later, something else comes up during that
repair, and you have to supplement again. I want to know who this is,
who the adjuster was I worked with and how it went.

This is huge for me because I’m juggling quite a bit, and I won’t remember everything, but my notes are extensive.

RC: What top tips could you offer roofers considering supplements as a revenue stream?

MM: For
me, it’s about offering the “silver platter.” You need to have the
supplement in order: all the documents, all the building codes, all the
tech bulletins [together] so you can just hand it off to the adjuster,
and they don’t have to search for anything. Don’t give them a reason to
say “no” is the way we try to go about it.

RM: The three things I would recommend are:

• Read
  through your file thoroughly before you start. You get a lot of
  information from that and know kind of what you’re looking at before you
  start it.

• Start making notes on those key things that you’re finding.

• Communicate very well with your own team, because you’ll need them, and the homeowner – because they need you.

RC: Any other thoughts about supplementing insurance?

RM: I
would like to just say if there’s a construction company or restoration
company wondering if this is something they would want to do, it’s
completely another income stream for your business and you’re already
out there doing the work.

So why wouldn’t you review what
insurance has approved and make sure for the homeowner that the home is
repaired to code, and the damages have been appropriately assessed?

You’re
creating lasting relationships with the homeowners. You’re helping them
navigate through a pretty stressful process, and many homeowners do not
know how or what to do with what insurance tells them.

MM: Take
this away from the sales reps. Let the sales reps do what they do best:
[out of the office] selling and getting that next contract. Bring it
in-house and have someone strictly do those supplements because the
sales reps don’t know the building code like our team would or all the
tech bulletins … so don’t bog them down. Let them keep making millions
and have another department making more.