Meredith: All right. Well, this is Digital Marketing for Contractors, and I’m Meredith Medlin.

Caitlyn: And I am Caitlin Noble. We’re with Fat Cat Strategies, and our whole job is helping replacement contractors, the roofing, siding, window, gutter, and door companies, turn marketing dollars into booked appointments.

Meredith: And most of what we talk about on this show is about inbound, your website, your Google ads, your Google business profile.

Caitlyn: Exactly.

Meredith: Homeowner searches, they find you, and they raise their hand.

Caitlyn: Today flips that. Today is about going out and finding the homeowner before they ever start searching, before they ever fill out four forms and get four quotes.

Meredith: And the company that we’re talking to does it from about 200 feet up in the air.

Caitlyn: Is that right, Jarrett? 200 feet?

Jarrett: Yeah.

Caitlyn: Yes.

Jarrett: Typically 2 to 300 feet.

Caitlyn: That is amazing. This is Jarrett Foote. He is the chief revenue officer at Viaskai. Viaskai uses drones and AI to show roofing contractors which roofs in their market actually need work, who owns them, and how to reach to, reach out to them. Welcome to the show.

Jarrett: Thank you. Thank you, guys. I appreciate you for having me. Excited to talk to you today, excited to talk about Viaskai.

Caitlyn: Same, so excited.

Meredith: Okay. So be honest, could you tell me what’s going on with the roofs on my street?

Jarrett: If we’ve flown it, yeah. Yeah, we absolutely could.

Caitlyn: That’s a good point, though.

Meredith: Okay, so Viaskai’s pretty young. Your site says that the company started in 2024.

Jarrett: Mm-hmm.

Meredith: So what was the, “Wait, why doesn’t this exist yet?” moment that you had?

Jarrett: Yeah. Yeah, it was funny. Our, our founder, Anthony Chiuso actually was consulting for a roofing company about two years ago. Watched a inspector fly a drone over one individual roof.

Caitlyn: Yeah.

Jarrett: And he said, “Hey, why don’t we keep flying that? And like, let’s see what other roofs there are in the neighborhood that we should go door knock and go see if there’s damage to, and see if we can get another appointment and see if we can schedule another inspection.” And the poor drone operator was like, “Well, nobody does that. I don’t know anybody that does that.” And fast forward about two weeks later, our founder Anthony had written a 50-page white paper on how you can fly drones at scale across the entire country. He looked at all sorts of different ways to capture the best image you could get at scale. He looked at balloons. He looked at airplanes. He settled in on drones, and here we are after, you know, almost two years of really hard work building out the foundation to be able to understand how to fly drones at scale. And now our clients are out there sourcing all sorts of opportunities to your point, prior to them going and getting four bids and having a highly competitive, what I would consider late stage inbound lead.

Caitlyn: Correct.

Jarrett: clients are taking those same leads further up the funnel.

Caitlyn: Awesome. Okay, so satellite images of every roof are already on Google Maps.

Jarrett: Mm-hmm.

Caitlyn: So why isn’t that good enough?

Jarrett: Yeah. They exist out there, and there’s a need for every kind of data set. We could get really deep into the whole geospatial, you know, data and all of that. But for the purpose of today’s conversation, the idea is that our level of imagery is all what we would consider sub one inch GSD. Or that’s that’s really the, the idea of resolution when you talk about aerial imagery. So that’s ground sampling distance. It’s the distance between pixels within a specific picture. Really nerdy talk for the sense of we’re gonna be

Caitlyn: Yeah, yeah

Jarrett: detail off of that imagery than what you’re gonna be able to get off a satellite image. Satellite image shows you that a building exists and can tell you it’s white and not black. Where our imagery is gonna actually be able to show things like missing tiles, cracked shingles, curling shingles, discoloration, underlayment being exposed, bubbling on that flat roof. All of that level of detail is what we’re able to provide, and with AI today, we’re able to utilize AI to go find so much more data within those images. So for us, what we always talk about is, you know, people say, “Oh, a picture’s worth a thousand words.” To us, a picture’s worth a thousand data points.

Meredith: I love that.

Caitlyn: I know. It’s the coolest tool. I’m so excited

Meredith: nerding out Like, right here.

Caitlyn: So walk us through it. Just like, like, I signed up this morning, I’m a roofer. What happens?

Jarrett: Yeah. You tell us what areas you’re trying to focus on, where, where your strategy is of, “Hey, do we wanna go after this specific area of town that we haven’t had lot of success in, or do we wanna double down on an area that we have had a lot of success in?” You draw a circle on a map, we go fly it, and about two to four weeks later, depending on weather, depending on you know, all of those different variables that come into play, you’re gonna have an entire data set in a cloud-based software platform with Viaskai, where you’re gonna instantly be able to filter down every single roof based on all those different data points that we are gathering off of that imagery.

Caitlyn: Wow.

Meredith: That’s insane.

Caitlyn: I

Meredith: It feels like science fiction a little bit.

Caitlyn: I know. But here we are. This is the world we live in

Meredith: and so that is fantastic and exciting, but who’s actually flying the drones and doing this?

Jarrett: Yeah. We have an amazing pilot network. And this is really when you talk about why something like this hasn’t come to existence yet, is that there weren’t the drone pilots out there to, to be able to accomplish this. And the technology wasn’t there, and now we are. And so this concept of Part 107 certified drone pilots didn’t even exist in 2016. Now there’s over Part 107 certified drone pilots out there. And so we have a great pilot network across the entire country of over 1,000 pilots that have specific hardware that matches our mission types. So obviously flying over one individual roof is a little bit different than when you’re flying 6,000 acre missions on our behalf. So requires different types of hardware, but it’s been amazing getting to work with all these different drone pilots that exist, and that’s been the most fun part about this entire job and building out this whole company, is getting to work with all these amazing drone pilots that are out there across the country that they just wanna fly. And, and we help do that and give them some of the biggest missions that they’ve ever and will ever accomplish.

Caitlyn: That’s awesome. And it just like, it keeps the, the system going, you know?

Meredith: Yeah.

Caitlyn: I mean, it’s amazing.

Meredith: So it’s not, not your team driving around in a van or flying all

Caitlyn: No

Meredith: country doing it. You’re tapping these, these pilots, these networks that are already across the country

Caitlyn: That are benefiting from it too

Meredith: that’s brilliant.

Caitlyn: I love it. Okay. So once the images come back, what is the AI actually doing?

Jarrett: Yeah. So what we’re doing at that point is we’re actually running… We’re, we’re taking all that raw imagery, which is thousands and thousands and thousands and thousands of pictures, right? And we have to take that imagery and we also have to pare it down to the individual parcel so that you are getting a picture with nine different houses in that one image, right? You know exactly what house is tied to what parcel. That’s a lot of legwork that goes into this. Then you also start thinking about for those commercial roofing clients, when we’re flying a drone at 300 feet and you’ve got a 200,000 square foot warehouse, it’s probably gonna be more than one photo that makes up that entire warehouse. So we’re gonna go through what’s called photogrammetry to actually stitch that image together so that our clients are able to get one image of that property, which again, the highest quality image that we’re able to get at scale. And what we do then is we take that image and we run it through a computer vision model on trained AI models that we’ve trained from more image or more drone imagery than anybody else has, ’cause we’re the guys flying at scale. And we are then taking that roof and we’re parsing it down and saying, “Okay, is there debris on that roof? Is there underlayment that’s exposed on that roof? Is there missing tile? Is there cracked tile?” “Is there solar panels? Are there skylights? Are, is there discoloration?” And we’re taking all of those variables combined to bucket these into focus levels for our contractors. So being able to say, “Hey, is this a severe roof that needs be fixed now? Is this a moderately damaged roof that needs to be fixed soon? Is this a minor damaged roof that, you know, needs to be, you know, maybe rejuvenated or maybe needs to be restored or recoated? Or is this a roof that, hey, you know, this is a great you know, potential maintenance contract for us, right? And let’s go focus on that route that doesn’t need, doesn’t need to be fixed right now, but that’s a future lead that we can continue to nurture over time.”

Caitlyn: Exactly.

Meredith: As you go through those buckets, I’m already thinking, you know, the more severe you have those flagged as, you know, the hottest leads or even, you know, in the CRM different opportunity levels and the ones that are more minor. You know, you talked about nurture over time. I’m just, now my brain is exploding with all of the

Caitlyn: Right

Meredith: options that this brings once a contractor has this data in their CRM.

Caitlyn: Yeah.

Jarrett: Yeah.

Caitlyn: And the damage levels, like

Meredith: Mm-hmm

Caitlyn: that’s huge because, I mean, I know we are obsessed on data.

Meredith: Mm-hmm.

Caitlyn: Most of our listeners are, if not are, will be obsessed on the data, on the quality of the leads. So where does the

Meredith: Mm

Caitlyn: contact info come from, and

Meredith: Right

Caitlyn: fresh is it?

Jarrett: Yeah.

Caitlyn: Am transitioning too quickly, or I think that’s… Yeah, that makes sense.

Meredith: No, think that,

Caitlyn: Yeah.

Jarrett: No, that, that makes great sense.

Caitlyn: Okay

Jarrett: there’s a lot of our contractors out there and a lot of folks that have actually tried to kind of accomplish what we’re doing, right? People are getting really good at, at vibe coding and being able

Caitlyn: Right

Jarrett: you know, code these different data aggregation options and applications to where they can go find there’s clients we talk to all time, they’ve found permit records in their states and they’re pulling from different sources to gather permit records. There’s people gathering contact information, things like that. We already have it fully embedded in our platform for our clientele. So they can go in and when they get their data set from us, they will be able to fully enrich all of that contact information from the data

Caitlyn: Mm-hmm

Jarrett: the data vendor that we utilize within our platform. So it is fresh to when we go and capture that imagery. And then for our commercial clientele out there, we got some feedback of, hey, you know, commercial decision isn’t necessarily made by the actual owner of that property. Like, it might be made by a property management company, it might be made by the maintenance lead on that specific property. You know, we need a little bit more. So we actually developed an agentic contact search function, which I actually haven’t even shown you yet, Caitlin. It’s brand new.

Caitlyn: Yeah.

Jarrett: That allows us to understand a true decision-making hierarchy on that individual so that we can understand our exact strategy of how we wanna reach out. And hey, does this property management company, do they also manage other properties that I capture too? Like, are there 10 of these properties that are managed by X, Y, Z property management company and we could be going

Caitlyn: Yeah

Jarrett: taking the imagery of all 10 of those properties and delivering it at one point to that property management company. So we just wanna provide and package up all this data in the most easy and efficient way for our clients to use.

Caitlyn: That’s awesome. Okay, transitioning a little bit because this is something that is also extremely attractive to our audience. I know it is when our clients are looking or vetting for other agencies. You offer… Is, is exclusivity a fair word in terms of the territories that

Jarrett: Yeah.

Caitlyn: Yeah. Like, that’s huge.

Jarrett: Yeah. Yeah. For us, we offer exclusivity for each of our roofing contractors, so they’ll be the only roofing contractor that has access to this imagery. So it is something that, you know, we want roofers to be able to build long-term predictable pipeline. I come from a software background. I’ve been in software sales a long, long time, and in software we’ve always been able to, you know, go out and generate outbound business. Now, we do it based on intent data. You guys use intent data all the time too, right? If people are searching, we’re looking for intent data. There hasn’t been a great way to show intent data further up the lead funnel until Viaskai. What we do is our imagery is the intent. Our imagery tells you that that roof needs to be fixed and needs to be repaired. So it allows us to go hit that lead way further up the marketing funnel than what’s ever been hit before. So this concept of outbound and utilizing intent data has existed in other industries for a long, long time, and I think we’re finally there with the data that we have in this industry to be able to do that accomplish that.

Caitlyn: That’s awesome.

Meredith: That is awesome. And when… I wanna go back to the territory real quick.

Jarrett: Yeah.

Meredith: How, when you’re working with a contractor who’s signing up with you, how do you determine what that territory is? How big it is? Small? Is it, you know, like, detailed

Jarrett: Mm-hmm

Meredith: or is it more of a radius? What does that, how do you decide on that?

Jarrett: Yeah. It’s all the above, and it’s kind of our expertise paired with their expertise, right?

Meredith: Okay.

Jarrett: If we talk to, if we talk to a roofing contractor that’s primarily doing residential work today, and they’re like, “Hey, I wanna get into more commercial,” great. Let’s circle some areas that are heavy commercial. Let’s circle some areas that are heavy residential. If I’ve got somebody that’s like, “Hey, I’m killing it in this area. I wanna just keep hammering this specific neighborhood or this gated community that I’ve never been able to get access to before or never had a job in at before.”

Meredith: Mm.

Jarrett: Or, “Hey, this area that has a lot of flat roofs that I can’t see, I really wanna go hit those spots specifically.” We have clients that they understand what hailstorms have happened historically, which I’ll give a little bit of teaser there. We’re gonna be able to, to layer in that information here shortly as well. But being able to, you know, understand from the local roofer of, hey, that area, all those homes were developed about 20 years ago. I know that area, and those homes, they’re due for a re-roof. Great, let’s go capture that area. And we can tell you, based on our understanding of the globe as a whole, we can tell you exactly how many buildings and acres fall into that specific area. So between the two of us, we can kind of you know get to a perfect territory of where our clients wanna fly.

Caitlyn: Okay.

Meredith: So it’s a collaboration between both of you bringing your expertise, and that’s how you’re making the decision.

Jarrett: Correct. And we have a lot of clients utilizing this for a lot of different ways and purposes, right, when they talk about growing their business. We have companies that are you know, large groups that they wanna go establish in a new market, but they don’t wanna go ahead and put boots on the ground in that market. They wanna generate business before they go and, and put that capital towards expanding into that new market. And so they leverage us to go fly an area that they have never had exposure to, and we get them awareness and we get them leads in that area before. So, yeah, lot of different ways that we’re seeing people from a strategy perspective decide on what territory they wanna go after.

Caitlyn: Okay.

Meredith: That’s brilliant.

Caitlyn: Okay, okay. And, and just to confirm too, so you just fly once a year, right? So you’re how does that work? Remind everybody.

Meredith: Yeah, cadence.

Jarrett: Yeah. So, so you maintain exclusivity of that territory as long as you recapture that area within 12 months.

Caitlyn: Okay.

Jarrett: Now, let’s say that we, we capture an area and it gets hit by a storm, and you want us to go fly that right away, absolutely, we can go do that. Heck, if we wanna go track spaghetti string models on a hurricane, and we wanna go fly areas the week before a hurricane hits, we can do that. So a lot of different

Caitlyn: Okay

Jarrett: in, in how we can go about capturing. But what’s great for us is that we’re gonna give our clients a, a 15% loyalty discount when they wanna recapture that same area. Because for us, you know, we’ve, we handle all of the mapping process for our drone pilots, so we take that off their plate for them, and we wanna be able to, knowing that we don’t have to recreate that map and we can go fly again in that same territory, in that same area, we wanna pass along that, that discount to our clients of us not having to recreate that map. We’re gonna pass those savings along to our clients because we want them go capture more area. We want them to be able to go capture more leads and go build their business. So that’s how we handle exclusivity and how we handle you know, renewal essentially of that territory.

Caitlyn: Okay.

Jarrett: And then we can track year over year degradation, right? Which is really, really important as you start looking at this. When you start thinking about it from a new lead perspective, it’s really crucial. It’s even more crucial when you’re talking about it on your own warranty work. If you’ve got an area that you’ve done a lot of work in before, and we can actually be tracking year over year degradation on properties, and you can see how your work’s holding up, that’s another opportunity of how we can leverage our data.

Caitlyn: Okay.

Meredith: God, there’s, I feel like there’s a million different things that you could do with that,

Caitlyn: It’s, yeah

Meredith: and okay, so I’m thinking about our listeners specifically. They already have a CRM, these business, these company owners. They already have a CRM, a call center, and a canvassing crew. With Viaskai and the data that you’re bringing in the processes that you have, does anything need to change with the way that they have their CRM, their call

Caitlyn: Mm

Meredith: their canvassing crew?

Caitlyn: For that first point of contact, right?

Meredith: Yeah.

Jarrett: Yeah. Really great question. We have clients doing it several different ways.

Caitlyn: Yeah.

Jarrett: So we have some clients that have said, “Hey, you are my prospecting platform. I’m gonna leverage everything in here. You are the CRM before the CRM.” Right? I wanna track activity of my different door knockers and sales reps, see how many door knocks, see how many mailers we’ve sent, see how many emails we’ve sent through the Viaskai platform, and track that level of success, and then once we schedule an appointment, we’ll push that over to the CRM and create the job right there in the CRM. We have some clients of ours that are like, “Hey, we’ve got a, a fully built out marketing funnel that we’re leveraging. We just wanna understand what roofs have damage and what contact information is associated, and we wanna to put those into our CRM and hit go from there.” That’s great too. So those are the two different ways that we see clients leveraging it. We are looking we’re currently building out integrations with some of the largest roofing CRM players out there JobNimbus being, being the number one.

Caitlyn: Yep.

Jarrett: We are currently developing as we speak.

Caitlyn: That’s, and that’s how Viaskai found us, ’cause we’ve done an amazing couple podcast webinars with our friends at JobNimbus as well. So all right, cool, cool, cool. This is something that we talked about when you and I were first chatting about Activ8.

Jarrett: Mm-hmm.

Caitlyn: And you know, Fat Cat, like we said, we really are focusing on those inbound, you know, digital marketing leads.

Meredith: Mm-hmm.

Caitlyn: Through search ads, you know, SEO, you name it. You know, we also offer a lead nurturing part of our services where we’re following up with email, we can do direct mail, et cetera. However, you guys can do the direct mail side of things too. How does that work? I’m and I love this. I think this is a great addition.

Jarrett: Yeah. So for us, really what we’re trying to do is we are trying to hit all of those same channels that exist today, like direct mail, email, digital marketing.

Caitlyn: Mm-hmm.

Jarrett: Right? How can we use these channels, but how can we trim the fat in the sense

Caitlyn: Yep

Jarrett: let’s focus on the roofs that only have damage. Let’s provide different outreach to homeowners, to property owners based on where their property stands today.

Caitlyn: Yeah.

Jarrett: So for me, like, when you talk about a platform like this and people are like, “Oh, it’s creepy. You guys are flying over blah, blah, blah,” right? It’s like, well, I came back from my came back from a vacation to Arizona in July, and my HVAC unit started leaking because my condensate line got clogged. And for all the HVAC contractors listening, they know what that looks like, and sure enough, I’ve got a leak coming out of my roof. Well, guess what? I would’ve loved to have had a sensor on that and had my HVAC vendor know that that was happening and be able to contact me. It’s the exact same thing that we’re talking about in roofing, right? Now, I’m not gonna get door knocks from people because I replaced my roof last year. They have Viaskai, and they’re not coming to door knock on my property. I’m not getting bugged by those people because my roof was replaced last year, and they know that with data and Viaskai. So it

Caitlyn: knock through my windows?

Meredith: Yeah.

Caitlyn: I’m thinking, can, can the X company stop knocking on our doors? We got our windows replaced. Okay. Yes, go ahead, though. This is lovely.

Jarrett: Correct. So that’s exactly, you

Caitlyn: Mm-hmm

Jarrett: I see this industry going. When we talk about

Caitlyn: Yeah

Jarrett: if I can, if I can communicate anything to your group of listeners from an educational perspective, there’s more roll-up happening in the trades industries than what has ever happened before in history, right? We have private equity that is

Caitlyn: Yep

Jarrett: hunting these businesses like crazy.

Caitlyn: Yeah

Jarrett: how much higher is your multiple gonna be if you can prove that you have built long-term predictable pipeline in your business? A lot of the clients that we work with today, they do a really, really good job, and they are fighting so hard to pick up the phone or use AI agents on voice to pick up an inbound lead a half a second before somebody else, right?

Caitlyn: Correct.

Jarrett: And we’re hunting after that half a second. What if you hit the same lead way further up the funnel, didn’t have the competition, and you had it backed by data, and you’re able to save yourself all this efficiency of door-knocking and canvassing, focus just on the properties that have damage, and get to them with the right messaging six months prior to them realizing that they have damage or have a leak or whatever it may be, go out there? That is what we are doing here. We are building long-term predictable pipelines. So to your point about email nurture, to all of

Caitlyn: Yeah

Jarrett: we’re gonna notify you if a property that has moderate damage sells to a new owner. We’re gonna notify you of that so you can reach out to new owner, because we know that 25% of roofs get replaced within the first four years after a real estate transaction.

Caitlyn: Uh-huh.

Jarrett: So there’s different events that happen that we wanna notify you. If there’s a storm that happens in that area, if there’s change of ownership that happens in, in that area, if there’s year-over-year degradation on that roof, we’re gonna notify you. If somebody you door-knock says, “Hey, this is really interesting, appreciate you coming to me with this information, but this year we’re not gonna do it. Come back and talk to me next year,” what happens to that lead? Where does it go? We all know that most likely it’s disappeared into the

Caitlyn: It’s gone

Jarrett: in our CRM system, if it even gets to there, right? If I create a task in Viaskai and schedule it for next year of, “Hey, had a great conversation. They told me to follow up next year. They’ll have budget to do this,” that task is gonna appear right at the due date that was set, so that, again, we’re not dropping these nurture leads. We’re following up on them exactly when we should be at the exact right time with the exact right messaging, and that’s how we build long-term predictable pipeline in the trades.

Caitlyn: Well, I completely agree. And I mean, like, again, from the digital side of things, like, we have our own, like, you know, trade, secrets of the trade.

Jarrett: Mm-hmm.

Caitlyn: But for this, correct me if I’m wrong, but, like, you’re able to have an image. They’re able to do a video, a Like, tell me about, like, what actually goes into this activation or this portion of the,

Jarrett: Mm

Caitlyn: the tool.

Jarrett: Great question. So every single property that is in, in your Viaskai platform comes with what we call a property landing page.

Caitlyn: Yes.

Jarrett: This property landing page is absolutely crucial for the homeowners and property owners, and it’s a great way for you to build brand awareness for your potential clients. So there’s a few ways in which you can get to that property landing page. You can send it via email. You can go door-knock to them and show them right there what that imagery looks like, right? Or we can send direct mailers right within our platform. Now, a lot of us have kind of preconceived notions about direct mail. Oh, they get tossed in the trash. Oh, they don’t go anywhere.

Caitlyn: Sure.

Jarrett: Oh, you know, conversion rate’s not great. What if every one of those direct mailers was custom? And by custom, I mean that it had an individual image of that actual property and that roof on that mailer.

Caitlyn: Love

Jarrett: And what’s great is on the backside of that mailer, there’s a QR code that will take them directly to that landing page. And then guess what? We can go ahead and reach out to that person at exactly that time because we’re gonna notify you that they hit that property landing page. So we’re always gonna notify you anyone that’s interacting with your content so that you can reach out to them again at the exact right messaging at the exact right time.

Caitlyn: That’s amazing. Marith, I saw one of the examples of the landing pages, and, like, literally the owner of the company is sitting there, like, talking to you about your property and what they’ve seen.

Meredith: That’s insane.

Caitlyn: It’s amazing. I mean, that’s what should be on the postcard, is like, even if you’re gonna throw this away, pause, scan this QR code, and just at

Jarrett: Yeah

Caitlyn: go watch this info video about how your roof is seconds away from giving out.

Jarrett: Yeah. And to your point, we… You do have the ability to do what we call video annotations in our platform.

Caitlyn: Right.

Jarrett: You can actually mock up the roof specifically, right? Now, am I saying that

Caitlyn: Right

Jarrett: for the 10,000 residential roofs that you have? Maybe not, right? We don’t want to do all of our properties, right?

Caitlyn: Sure.

Jarrett: But this is where, again, they fall into different buckets, right? A property landing page for a property that needs to be replaced now that’s a $40,000-plus roof, it’s probably worth me taking five minutes to annotate a video. And guess what? If you annotate it, all the mock-up that you do, all the circles you draw, the arrows, the text that you put on there shows up on the direct mailer, too. So even more reason for that homeowner to look at that mailer. But let’s say that I’ve got somebody that is more of a maintenance contract fit, which we’re having a ton of success with, of maybe I should be marketing to this person for repair, for maintenance, right? roofing a lot of times today is so focused on reroof, reroof, reroof, insurance claim, insurance claim, insurance claim. Insurance claims we all know are gonna get harder and harder to get approved and insurance is gonna come cracking down more and more and more, which again, we need to win that customer way further up the funnel now. Because if we get that maintenance contract now, how much higher is our conversion rate to actually get that reroof when it is the right time?

Meredith: Correct. 100%. I’m, you know, my brain is going to the CRM. I know you have you’re working on a connection with JobNimbus. I’m thinking about how the customers that are hitting these landing pages using the QR code you know, through Activ8, is there, do you have an open API? Is that something you’re working on, on some way to send that or even import it back into CRMs maybe if they’re not on JobNimbus, if they’re in Leapfrog action or, you know?

Caitlyn: And, and, and I’ll load that back up. So I guess, like, the contractors, they’re, correct me if, if we’re wrong, they’re getting a list of addresses with

Meredith: Mm-hmm

Caitlyn: information, like the homeowner’s name, maybe email, phone number, and then obviously the physical address. So you’re getting that first and foremost when you guys… And then what I’m imagining is you add that to your CRM, you tag it with a lead source.

Jarrett: Yep.

Caitlyn: Something that’s, you know, Viaskai, like and then is that what happens? Like, I don’t know, I’m just talking about through tracking.

Jarrett: Yeah, you can do that. You can do all the activity tracking right within Viaskai too. So you can understand how many door knocks, how many phone calls, how many emails. You can do all that in Viaskai and then again pass that to the CRM on the when the appointment has been scheduled, or if you wanna export that data out into your CRM right away and do all the operating out of CRM, you absolutely can too.

Caitlyn: Oh, that’s great.

Jarrett: And another reason my clients are leveraging Viaskai to handle a lot of that is that we can also do digital marketing and digital advertising down to the individual address level as

Caitlyn: Exactly

Jarrett: our platform. So everybody that’ll that is gonna listen to this is very familiar with the concept of a whole neighborhood, but here at Viaskai we know what roofs within that neighborhood have damage that we should be spending our marketing dollars on and we can actually provide banner ads, digital banner streaming video ads specifically to the devices within those physical addresses. So for us being able to get down and take it from geo-fencing down to the actual individual address level, again we’re just trimming the fat even further.

Caitlyn: Amazing. Amazing. And if you need an agency to, like, kind of just check out those metrics and how things are working, you We also can help with that. Okay. Absolutely obsessed. We’re gonna be skeptics for, for a minute here

Meredith: Play the devil’s advocate

Caitlyn: because our contractors, our clients whom we love are skeptical people, as they should be.

Meredith: Mm-hmm.

Caitlyn: Okay. So we’re gonna give you three things a skeptical contractor, business owner would

Jarrett: All right. Let’s hear it

Caitlyn: and you get to answer each one.

Meredith: No pressure, no pressure. Okay. First one is, a drone flying over my neighborhood and then a roofer mailing me a photo of my house, if I’m the… Like, that feels creepy. Is this even legal?

Caitlyn: Is it legal? Is… Yeah, that’s

Meredith: It’s, yeah

Caitlyn: skeptic.

Jarrett: Great question. We get it on every single demo. Every, every too. I think Caitlin you’re the, you asked it to me right away too.

Caitlyn: Yeah

Jarrett: yes. It,

Caitlyn: this is great. Are we all gonna get sued? Okay.

Jarrett: Yeah.

Caitlyn: Great.

Jarrett: We are flying in publicly available airspace.

Caitlyn: Exactly

Jarrett: we’re flying in publicly available airspace. The, the joke that we say internally, right, is like, “Oh man, if people are worried about our data, like wait until they hear about Google Street View.” Like that’s gonna blow their minds.

Caitlyn: Oh.

Jarrett: Right? It’s something that’s an education, right? A lot of this imagery already exists today, right? We’re getting it from fixed wing aerial imagery providers that have been around for 20 plus years. Our imagery’s just better and it, it is based on resolution. And so all of this exists today, it’s just a little bit different. When we talk about our drones, they’re flying at 29 to 32 miles an hour, 300 feet above your property once a year. Like, they’re over your parcel for less than two seconds. You wouldn’t even know that they’re there. So yeah, it’s, it’s very, very much one of those things that we hear about it on every single demo

Caitlyn: Of

Jarrett: frankly what we hear from our contractors is them being able to walk up there with data and with information when they’re door knocking is an absolute conversation

Caitlyn: Correct

Jarrett: more often than not. So that’s actually, it, it’s something that we get, again, on every single conversation and I would expect it to be more of a conversation from our clientele after they’re using our imagery, and it has not been surprisingly.

Caitlyn: Okay. Well, good. As long as we’re not all gonna get in trouble

Jarrett: Yeah

Caitlyn: this, then, then let’s keep promoting it. Okay. So I’m, I’m another, I’m a contractor. Love this one. Why wouldn’t I just keep buying leads? I already know what each lead cost me.

Jarrett: Great question and I will say getting into this industry I did not know how burned contractors on the lead gen side of the game. And I have been drinking from the fire hose there because

Caitlyn: You, you should listen to our earlier podcast episodes, Jarrett. Yeah.

Jarrett: Yeah.

Caitlyn: fun.

Jarrett: The, the biggest reason why, and, and what’s actually really interesting to me, I got into this business ’cause I was looking at acquiring a trades company.

Caitlyn: Okay. Yeah, that’s right.

Jarrett: trades. was looking at different businesses and there were some businesses that I was like, “Man, I don’t know if I wanna get into that business because I’m gonna get into a digital marketing spend game against private equity, and that’s a game that I’m probably gonna lose.”

Caitlyn: It’s hard.

Jarrett: And we’re seeing that, especially in roofing right now, that private equity’s buying up these buy leads and they’re pumping up the prices on all these paid leads and at some point in time it’s gonna teeter over to the other side of it doesn’t make sense to do that. Right? And when you start talking about why we were going after roofing first, obviously roofing is really easy to see from overhead, right?

Caitlyn: Of course.

Jarrett: But secondarily it’s a huge ticket. Right? It’s a lot different than a lot of the, the trades that exist out there. Now, am I gonna say that spending money on our imagery or spending money to go hunt outbound leads if you’re an appliance repair business probably doesn’t make sense. But when we’re talking about a roof average of like 15 to $20,000 is like the staple average of a re-roof, it makes sense for us to do some outbound work to go get those leads. ‘Cause guess what?

Caitlyn: Yes.

Jarrett: As we continue to build up that brand, and as we’re doing it locally, and we believe that our data is gonna get people more hyper-focused into areas, just like what you’ve seen with real estate agents over the past how many years when they’re advertising on things like Zillow, and they’re advertising on things like Redfin and whatnot, gets them a lot more hyper-focused, we also see that happening because of our data long-term.

Caitlyn: Mm-hmm.

Jarrett: And so I think there’s various different reasons. It’s always funny to start out every single conversation with, “I hate paid leads.”

Caitlyn: Mm-hmm.

Jarrett: And then at the end of the, end of the conversation with every contractor, they’re like, “Well, so why should I use you versus paid leads?” And it’s like, well, you just told me how much you hate the fact that you’re competing with five other vendors out there. And number two, you didn’t even know that there’s damage on that roof. Those are the two things that are a huge difference maker for us. Every time I get a text message from a roofer, I always respond, because I know that it’s a lead generation platform for roofing out there. And I’m like, okay, let’s see, are they gonna tell me what the roofing company name is? Are they gonna tell me any of this level of information? Like, what is the experience that I’m getting as a potential client going through this process, versus if I’ve been nurtured by a company using Viaskai for multiple years, getting a couple mailers a year, getting sent my yearly property landing page from XYZ Roofing, gonna be more likely to call that person when something does come up. Or if I’ve got a maintenance program with that, with that company already, I’d be more likely to call them than I am to go with somebody who’s competing with me at that late stage process.

Caitlyn: Sure.

Meredith: No, that, that definitely makes sense.

Caitlyn: Okay, skeptic

Meredith: I’m, the last piece of this puzzle of, you know, obviously you’re, you’re, you’re focused on roofing right now. What if I’m, you know, hearing about this tool and I’m, I’m doing exterior work, but I’m doing siding or windows or gutters. Is Viaskai anything that I would be interested in at this point?

Jarrett: Yeah, great question. So a couple industries right out of the gate. Solar, absolutely.

Caitlyn: Oh, yeah.

Jarrett: We tell you every single thing about solar. And everybody that’s in solar, they wanna know if the roof’s good, too. So it’s kind of actually a win-win there for any of our, any solar contractors out there. We also are capturing whether gutters exist on properties, and we are gonna be looking at some different modalities of capture, different ways that we go about capturing, to where we’re gonna be able to get more exterior and siding and things of that nature over time. Right now, if you think about it pavement is a great opportunity for us. If you’ve got any asphalt, concrete pavement work, that we understand and can do assessments on driveways, and do assessments on parking lots, and things like that. But also on pools, pool decking.

Caitlyn: Oh, yeah.

Jarrett: The, the aerial imagery vendors that exist today, they can tell you whether a pool’s green or not. I can tell you how cracked the pool decking is. I can tell you all of that level of detail as well. So anything on the exterior that you can see from top down, absolutely a benefit. And then we’ll start getting into some other options of capture that will open up some of those other industries that you’re talking about, like windows and landscaping and things of that nature.

Caitlyn: That’s awesome. And, and I don’t know if we said this, but this is, can also be for commercial properties, too.

Jarrett: Absolutely.

Caitlyn: exactly. I think that’s point… I mean, I know we work with residential contractors most of the time, but a lot of our residential contractors do commercial as well, so.

Meredith: Mm-hmm.

Jarrett: Yep, yep. And that’s what we’re seeing. I, I would say, like,

Caitlyn: Yeah

Jarrett: our typical client at Viaskai is that contractor that’s looking to be more strategic. They’re looking to step up their game. They’re looking to go from residential to commercial.

Caitlyn: Absolutely.

Jarrett: Or they’re looking to expand geographically of where they’re at. That’s who, that’s who we find is our client most commonly.

Caitlyn: I know. I’m so excited. Okay. So if and when, because it will, there will be a when, we sit down again next year, what’s gonna be different about Viaskai?

Jarrett: Oh, there’s gonna be a lot. There’s gonna be a lot different. I would love for us to get into some different types of capture. Lidar is something we’re very very interested in the opportunities there. There’s gonna be all sorts of new drone technology that’s out in a year that’s just gonna make things that much easier, too. So that’ll be exciting. And then we’re just gonna continue to build out what we’re doing. And, you know, ideally we get to a point where we’ve actually got some areas captured in advance that we can sell to clients too, right?

Caitlyn: Yeah.

Jarrett: So we can actually notify you of areas that have storms and things like that. We’re gonna embed financing platforms into our

Caitlyn: Okay

Jarrett: that you can do, you can, can do live financing right within our platform. So a lot of those different types of things we’re working on, but we are we’re constantly changing, constantly growing constantly scaling, and we are trying to figure out, again, for us, at the end of the day, we wanna capture more imagery across the country so that way we can do more training on all of our models. That way we get the most accurate data and the best data we possibly can to our clientele.

Caitlyn: I love it. I love it. Okay. So I’m… Somebody listening to this podcast, and you have got me interested enough, I want to see and own my market from above. What are my next steps?

Jarrett: Yeah. Just go to Viaskai.com. Book a demo with us. Absolutely, come, come check it out. We’ll walk you through the entire platform from cradle to grave and show you what that looks like. We can draw out some territory together. We’ve got a quote building tool that we can send to you, and you can actually build it out yourself and kinda see what areas you wanna, wanna mess around in and, and see what makes sense.

Caitlyn: Oh, cool.

Jarrett: so we have all that, all that ready to go. So yeah, just come to Viaskai.com, book a demo. And we also will be at, at IRE, which is the largest roofing conference that exists, in February. So come see us. We’ll be exhibiting there at IRE as well. And that’s what we’re doing, is we’re trying to get ready and prep. And have a feeling, coming out of IRE, a lot of this area, because we talked about exclusivity.

Caitlyn: Mm-hmm.

Jarrett: First come, first serve. We just had a couple commercial groups fighting over an area in southern California, and

Caitlyn: What happened?

Jarrett: Only

Caitlyn: How did you, how did you pick? Who did you pick?

Jarrett: So we, we had a group that actually they, they’d purchased it already.

Caitlyn: Oh.

Jarrett: we had someone come, come back last week, and they’re like, “Hey, I want this specific area. It’s really highly focused of industrial properties. There was a fire there last year.”

Caitlyn: Yeah.

Jarrett: “We really wanna go focus there.” And I open, I open up our quote builder, and it’s like Sorry, that one’s gone.”

Caitlyn: Not available.

Jarrett: So…

Caitlyn: I need you to send me that quote builder, ’cause I wanna send it to our, some of our clients too, before we ever release this episode.

Jarrett: Yeah.

Caitlyn: Like, this is fabulous. ‘Cause

Jarrett: Yeah, it’s like real estate. It’s a commodity.

Caitlyn: Yes.

Jarrett: You know, when it’s gone, it’s gone.

Caitlyn: Correct. Yeah, 100%.

Meredith: Oh, amazing. And for those of you

Caitlyn: Yes

Meredith: and not watching, Viaskai is V-I-A-S-K-A-I.

Jarrett: Thank you.

Meredith: Correct? Okay.

Caitlyn: Perfect.

Meredith: .com.

Caitlyn: And, and of course it’ll be linked in the show notes as well. So.

Meredith: Yes, 100%. But thank you so much for coming on and talking to us, Jarrett, and explaining this product. It’s, it’s so exciting, and like Caitlin said, I’m sure we’re gonna

Caitlyn: I

Meredith: some these out to our clients right after finish recording this, and

Caitlyn: I didn’t know you had that quote, that quote tool. That’s awesome.

Meredith: Yeah.

Caitlyn: We always like to leave our listeners with some action items if they’re already not overwhelmed with the information they just learned. We’ve got more to do. Okay. So what, what, what I guess I’ll, I’ll ask even

Meredith: Yeah

Caitlyn: you were supposed to ask me.

Meredith: Hey.

Caitlyn: Before anyone knocks on a single door, what should they actually do this week?

Meredith: Number one, pull your last 12 months of sold jobs and look at them on a map. Are they clustered somewhere? That’s a good idea about your starting territory, whether you’re using aerial data or not. Draw around where you already went so you know.

Caitlyn: I think that’s a good move. So your second move, y’all, is you’re gonna go into your CRM and look at how you track outbound leads. Door knocking, mailers, anything you started yourself, if those all land in one bucket called canvas or, worse, other, fix that now. And any new outbound channel needs its own lead source from day one, or you’ll never know if it paid for itself.

Meredith: And the last, third, is take a look at the photos on your website. Are they real roofs from real neighborhoods in your service area, or are they stock images? Today’s whole conversation was about how powerful it is to show homeowners something specific and local and real. Your website should be doing the same thing.

Caitlyn: Yep. Map your wins, label your sources, show real roofs, book a demo with Viaskai. That’s four.

Meredith: That, that’s important.

Caitlyn: That’s four.

Meredith: Book a demo with Viaskai, exactly.

Caitlyn: That’s all you have to do this week. You don’t have much else going on. So those are four simple, simple things. All right. Jarrett, thank you again. Absolutely loved this. You’re from Viaskai. Marisa said Viaskai.com. We’re gonna have it linked to the show notes. Go check ’em out. See what they do. I, I think in a year from now you guys are… But even beyond, like, it’s just gonna be awesome. So.

Meredith: 100%. And if anybody

Caitlyn: Yeah

Meredith: wants help with any of this, getting in touch, other digital marketing, you know where to find us, at backoutstrategies.com. Check out the show notes, book a demo, and yeah, we’ll talk to you guys next week.

Caitlyn: Thank you.

Meredith: Thanks.

Caitlyn: Thanks, Jarrett.

Jarrett: Thank you, guys.

Caitlyn: Have a good one. We’ll talk soon.

Jarrett: All right.

Meredith: Appreciate you.

Caitlyn: Bye.

Outro: Digital marketing for contractors is created by Fat Cat Strategies. For more information, visit fatcatstrategies.com.