Initial Roofing Proposal Template Made Easy

Sign roofing proposal template

Now, let's talk a little bit about how you word your proposals. You know most contractors, when they give a proposal just basically think that they're giving a price. Well, that's part of it but that's not the whole picture. More than a price, what you want to focus on delivering to your customer is a feeling. A very specific kind of good feeling. We're going to talk about how you can do that. Now one of the simplest ways of going about that in a proposal is to keep in mind and answer three very simple questions: What, how and why. It's what you're going to do, how you're going to do it and why you're going to do it that way. So let's take a peek at it. Now in the program package, what you'll find is a template for putting together an asphalt shingle proposal. It's about 10 pages long. It's got drawings in it and as you can see on the first page, can you see it? It's got a table of contents. So we're going to dig into this and just pick something at random. How you put in your nails. It's on page four. So let's peek at that together. Give me your patience and we will learn something really important here. Read with me. This is crucial. The nails to be used will be inch and a half galvanized roofing nails with full round unclipped 3/8 inch heads. That's what. It's a what. Care will be taken to ensure the nails will be placed six inches above the bottom edge of the shingles. That's both what and how. How we're going to do it? Put it in the right spot. Roofing industry testing labs have shown that improperly placed nails leave the shingles vulnerable to wind damage. So there's some what, how, and why in that. Why are we doing it this way? So that we don't have problems with wind damage. Now that's a good feeling. Right at that one little point right there, your customer's feeling good about you because he knows that you're aware that those nails are critical in their placement. Because it's going to make sure that the wind doesn't blow off this roof. Alright. Next part. Also it's required that nails be driven directly perpendicular to the shingles. When nails are driven at an angle, the sharp edges of the nail heads can tear through the shingles. Now let's take a look at a couple of pictures. Now here's a picture of a house. It's not in need of a new roof. The roof on this house had at that time about 10 to 15 years' life left in it but it's a friend of mine so I got up on his roof and took some pictures, looked around and found some nail heads that were sticking up through the shingles. This first picture you see here, far away shot. We're going to zoom in. This is the same nail. So can water get in around that nail? Yeah. A lot? Probably not. Depends on how much rain still on it. Here's another one. Different now, far away. Close up and you can see that's sticking up. Now if you are getting a new roof for yourself and you are paying somebody else to do it, would you want nail head sticking up through your new shingles? No, you wouldn't, and your potential customer feels the same way. This one's driven in at an angle so you can see that the edge of the nail is poked up through the shingle there. And now your customer's getting a very keen mental impression of what can happen if nails are not put in correctly. Alright. Another common difficulty in fastening asphalt shingles is to drive the nails exactly flush with the surface of the shingles, as you saw in the picture. Every nail driven too deep will tear through the shingles and every nail not driven far enough will eventually poke through the shingle above that overlaps the nail. Hmm. Therefore, the utmost care will be taken to drive the nails at a true 90 degrees with the nail heads flush with the shingles. This will ensure that no nail heads will puncture the shingles. Now the how and the why. Let's just look at the last two sentences. Here's how we're going to accomplish what we want. Therefore, the utmost care, utmost care is how we're going to do it. We'll be taken to drive the nails just right. Last sentence. This is the answer to the why question and this is vital. This is the key that creates that feel-good feeling in your customer. This will ensure that no nail heads will puncture the shingles. Now think about this for a minute. When your customer reads that, he automatically feels that you're the company, you're the guy. You have the people that are going to be very careful about how those nails go in. He's feeling good about you because you're the one that brought that to his attention. You're not scaring him, you're just bringing it to his attention. Now, let's say he's looking at three bids: yours is one of them. He looks at the other two and they don't mention anything about the nails. So now he's thinking well, gosh, are these other guys aware? Are they going to be careful about these nails? He's feeling more and more that you're the guy that he wants because anybody that's going to pay that much money for something wants it done right. Alright. So the response that your customer is going to feel, a response, a responding feeling is this. This makes sense. I get it. This is the one. I feel good. Now in the program package, we take you through just about everything that is important on a roof in the template, this proposal. Now what's cool about this is you can just copy and paste. You can use the whole proposal or any part of it. But it goes on and talks about plumbing vent, pipe flashings, chimney flashing, stands, skylights, about everything there is, installation of ridge vents. And when you look at the detail on these drawings, you can see they're really good. And they're done in Microsoft Word. So if you have Microsoft Word, you can change anything. Minor adjustments, major adjustments to the drawings, the text. Anything you want. That's why it was drawn with Microsoft Word. Now, let's suppose that your customer receives a proposal like this with a table of contents and all the drawings and it's 10 pages long and it's just like wow. And these other proposals are just five lines of information. Tear off the old roof, put on this kind of shingle, clean up, cover the bushes, whatever. So he's got five lines with five items. And then he's got how much small print? How much small print is there in your proposal? You know, does it say what's going to happen if he doesn't pay on time? Is there a penalty of one-and-a-half percent interest per month? If he's slow paying. Well, that fine print does not give a good feeling. So the more fine print, the more he is feeling a bit uncomfortable. And it's robbing him of the good feelings. So I would say reduce that fine print to just about nothing if you can. So good luck, good skill and we'll see you in the next video.