Why Peer Groups Accelerate Success

John Jantsch (00:01.026)

Hello and welcome to another episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast. This is Jon Jantsch and my guest today is Victoria Downing. She’s the president of Remodeler’s Advantage. It’s the leading peer group and business improvement resource for remodeling company’s owners. For more than two decades, Victoria has helped thousands of remodelers improve profitability, leadership and work-life balance. Remodeler’s Advantage has really been known as

probably the leading peer group network, certainly in the industry for training and for helping folks grow their businesses. I actually have a couple of clients over the years that have been in this group and it really led me to wanting to interview Victoria. So welcome to the show.

Victoria Downing (00:47.33)

Well, thank you for having me.

John Jantsch (00:48.984)

So I guess let’s just start with kind of somebody said, so Victoria, what is Remidler’s advantage? Maybe just kind of set the baseline for what the group is and does.

Victoria Downing (00:56.581)

Okay, the baseline, let’s talk about the vision first, right? Our vision is to be the company that all remodelers turn to for a better life. We are all about looking at your business as a tool to help you build the life you want for yourself and for your employees while delivering a fantastic product to the community. So that’s our focus when we deliver that in a lot of different ways.

John Jantsch (01:21.902)

Well, it’s interesting to hear you say, because it, you know, I think I led in the bio, they’re talking about making companies more profitable, but you kind of led with work life balance. Do you feel like that’s those two are very, very intrinsically connected? Yeah.

Victoria Downing (01:36.349)

Absolutely. I mean, again, your business is a tool. So I always encourage our members, especially when they first come in, where are we trying to take you? What finances do you have to have to live your life now and into retirement and for your family and for college and all the stuff for your goals? How much money do you need to live that life? Well, that we back into that and say, OK, now how can we modify, manipulate this business to get you the funds you need? again, your employees, it’s not about

just the owner being greedy and taking every penny, it’s building a wonderful culture and future and lifestyle for the employees as well.

John Jantsch (02:15.704)

So the primary tool, guess, and correct me if I’m wrong on that, really is these peer groups. Talk a little bit about how that structure of bringing non-competing folks from all over the country together to really form a community.

Victoria Downing (02:33.775)

Well, I actually realized I have to update my bio because I’ve actually been doing this for since 1990. So for 35 years, I’ve been doing this. And it was, we started, started, I had a business partner at the time, Linda Case. She was very big in the industry for years and years and years. And I joined her then. And we would speak at trade shows and talk to a lot of people, write magazine columns and books and so on. And people started coming up to us saying, we’re looking for the next level.

John Jantsch (02:40.334)

30, mean, yeah.

Victoria Downing (03:02.341)

We’ve been coming to trade shows and listening to the speakers for 10, 15 years. We want more. What can we do? So we started a peer group. It was fantastic. And we slowly just added people and added groups over the years till now. We have over 200 companies across the U S and Canada that altogether produce over a billion dollars in revenue annually. So that’s a, they’re representing a lot of renovations, a lot of remodeling.

John Jantsch (03:02.872)

Mm-hmm.

John Jantsch (03:32.27)

So, I’ll give you a softball question here, because I know the answer to this, but I want to hear you answer it. know, people that get coaching, that participate in peer groups, participate in their community, participate in their industry, tend to be the cream of the crop of an industry. I’ve just seen that across the board. How have you seen that play out with the RA groups?

Victoria Downing (03:47.033)

Yes.

Victoria Downing (03:52.537)

Well, it certainly is the case that we have a number of people. So let me back up a step. We have two different sort of levels of our round table peer groups. And peer groups makes up about a little bit more than half of our business in total with the others being master classes and events and consulting and coaching. So, but in round tables, there’s the base membership and then we have the mentor membership. The mentors tend to be larger, more profitable.

and they tend to have been members of Round Tables for many years. I can’t tell you how many people in the mentor levels have been with us for 15, 20 years. And they just keep coming because they know that they’re always going to learn something. You know, and yes, is there some diminishing returns over from the first fire hose, those first five years to 20 years in? Certainly. But they know that they can still get the bits and pieces that’ll make the difference between

John Jantsch (04:31.566)

You

Victoria Downing (04:49.613)

a good year and an exceptional year. So it really does play out that way.

John Jantsch (04:55.254)

And one of the things I’ve seen you do that, that I think of course, I’m sure evolved or people asked you for was that, you you, these are owners initially in a lot of the peer groups, but then you’ve started to put together all of your marketing people are in a peer group, you know, with them or all of your finance people are in a peer group. And how I’ve got to believe that, that that gets everybody talking the same language, you know, pulling the same direction. Have you, have you found that that, if nothing else is an amazing retention strategy as well.

Victoria Downing (05:08.911)

Yes.

Victoria Downing (05:23.909)

Yeah, yeah. You know, I mean, most of the people that are in those what we call tactical groups, there are people in positions in the companies. Most of those people are from member groups, but we do have some that are from outside the community. Right now we have nine groups for production managers, two groups for design managers, a group for CFOs. And then we also have a variety of what we call power meetings. We’ll bring administrators and office managers together for two days of intensiveness.

John Jantsch (05:29.326)

Mm-hmm.

John Jantsch (05:53.39)

Mm-hmm.

Victoria Downing (05:53.539)

And that’s another way they pick up the language. But we have found that the companies that are the most successful, and again, I got to go back to some of our longer term members, they invest in their team, right? We can see it. The people who were buying masterclasses, investing in consulting and coaching and all this stuff had better returns than the rest. So what we did about four years ago, I guess it was right around COVID time.

John Jantsch (06:05.592)

Yeah. Yeah.

John Jantsch (06:16.856)

Yeah.

Victoria Downing (06:22.179)

We changed our membership to include what we call professional service credits. So people get, I don’t know, $5,000 worth of credits that they can use for all sorts of other trades. They can use it for production manager round table membership dues. So that we’re encouraging them to follow the lead of the best of the best and invest in their people with, you know, dollars that they have in their pocket from us.

John Jantsch (06:50.606)

So I’ve worked with a lot of remodeling contractors and every business to some extent, it has a lot of this where people got into business because they knew how to do something. I think remodeling contractors in some cases are the ultimate technicians. mean, they were the ones building the walls and putting in windows and things. And then also had to try to build a business. Do you find that in many cases that kind of technician mentality holds them back a little bit? It’s like, I know how to do all this stuff.

Victoria Downing (07:20.128)

Well, it does in a couple of ways. One of the things I’ve found is that when people come to us at the beginning of their relationship with us, that one of the things that is almost 100 % true is that their financial reporting is a mess. You can’t tell what’s going on. So if I’m telling them your business is a tool, well, I got to be able to read the story in that tool, right? I to be able to tell what’s going on. So we have to start by

John Jantsch (07:34.607)

Mmm, yeah.

Victoria Downing (07:46.447)

helping them organize and learn how to read and understand the information that’s in those reports. So then we can say, I always tell people the numbers tell the story. And if they are clear and accurate, the reports can almost tell you what your next move is gonna be. But you gotta have them in a format that we can read and that their peers can read and understand. So that’s one way that being a technician holds them back, because they haven’t had that business training. But another way,

happens a lot with the area of control. The companies that grow, and you know this as well as I do, it’s nothing new under the sun, but those companies that are able to delegate tend to be able to grow. If one of these owners has their fists around every decision that’s made in the company, it makes it very difficult to grow beyond yourself.

John Jantsch (08:20.536)

news.

You

John Jantsch (08:39.884)

Yeah. They become the, they become actually the bottleneck for, for, for growth, even though they claim that that’s what, what they ultimately want. How has, how have you seen also, I know one of the things that you do, I have a little advantage of hearing a little bit more about what, you do from a very tactical standpoint. You know, you make people bring their numbers, you know, they, they, know, in front of their peers have to say, here’s where we’re.

Victoria Downing (08:43.481)

Yes.

John Jantsch (09:08.728)

winning, here’s where we’re losing. How does that kind of peer pressure, or if for lack of a better term, actually help them grow?

Victoria Downing (09:10.371)

Right.

Victoria Downing (09:17.455)

Well, it’s that there are nine other company representatives from nine other companies sitting there and looking at them and they’re saying, well, here’s where you’re down, but look at this guy over here, he’s really high in that, let’s get you two together. Or this guy who’s doing really well in that area gives advice. So it not only helps them get ideas and strategies for improving the lower levels, but…

It also helps these owners figure out what to work on first. You know, there’s that whole thing about just picking the things that are the most important things to work on. And a lot of business owners get confused. They they see them the next shiny object. They take their eye off the ball. They’re not watching their pipeline. They’re not monitoring the financial statements to know what carpenter’s producing profitable jobs and which one’s losing jobs. All of that stuff.

These groups help them pinpoint. Every time a member leaves their peer group, they have two or three written commitments that they have to report back to their group who hold them accountable for achieving those commitments. And then they’ve got the whole team of the peer group, as well as the support staff of us. If they’re having challenges in meeting those commitments, we’ve got resources. One of the beauties, as you know,

in being in the business for as long as we’ve been in the business, that you have a pretty good network of people and resources that you can share and you can help. So we’ve got a lot of that at hand.

John Jantsch (10:52.002)

Yeah.

John Jantsch (10:58.946)

Let’s talk about technology a little bit. know, I mean, when I started my business, you’ve been in business as long as I have, you know, we didn’t have the web. Right. We didn’t have, yeah, exactly. And so obviously not only that kind of technology has changed, but even how you run, run their businesses. mean, everything from, you know, quoting to tracking, you know, some of the things that they do, know, inventorying. So, I mean, it’s all kind of technology driven today. How, how have.

Victoria Downing (11:07.257)

Yeah, I know. I can remember those days.

John Jantsch (11:28.386)

How have you been able to kind of keep up with that and not just keep up with it, but probably be seen as a leader in helping people adopt new technologies.

Victoria Downing (11:38.117)

Well, one of the things that happens is we try to stay a little bit agnostic on what technology they want to use. There are some outstanding project management softwares focused on the industry. There’s two major ones in our space right now. I listen to our members. I’m constantly reading. We receive information from them all day, every day. I get emails from every group. Every group has their own email thread.

John Jantsch (11:42.35)

Mm.

John Jantsch (11:48.302)

Maybe. Sure.

Victoria Downing (12:03.993)

and I get all those emails all the time. So I’m constantly reading about what’s working, what’s not working. Then I can reach out and ask questions and use that information to compile suggestions and share that information with the rest of the community. So I really relaxed. I mean, I don’t do estimates, right? But I pay attention to those who do and what’s working and what new things they’re finding. you know, so there’s, that’s a big, big one. The whole CRM sales management thing is a big one.

John Jantsch (12:04.129)

Hmm.

John Jantsch (12:25.422)

Yeah. Yeah.

Victoria Downing (12:32.737)

Recently, we had a members only webinar where we featured three of our members and how they use AI in their business. That was pretty fascinating. And now AI has taken over how marketing works and how all those searches and all that work. So we’re getting information on that and sharing it with our community as well. It’s just everywhere. It’s amazing.

John Jantsch (12:41.068)

Yeah, yeah. Yeah, yeah.

John Jantsch (12:53.826)

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It is, it is evolving. You know, not obviously all my listeners are modeling contractors or in the home services business, but it was, so I really, again, it’s this peer group idea that I think is really fascinating. I’m curious, how do you manage some of the dynamics? mean, I’m sure you’ve had times where like people just weren’t getting along in the group or somebody shouldn’t be in that group or, know, somebody’s dominating that group or something. Again, I, I’m sure you’ve seen it all.

Victoria Downing (13:07.343)

Yes.

Victoria Downing (13:22.895)

Yes.

John Jantsch (13:23.819)

How do you kind of manage some of the dynamics of making sure that you’ve got a really gelled group?

Victoria Downing (13:31.183)

Well, right for the last probably six years, my colleague Steve Wheeler has been managing the roundtable groups and he is excellent at first of all placement. When we’re placing someone in a group, we have to start out by making sure there’s nothing competitive in the match. Then we try to match them up with similar volume levels and similar job sizes and similar business models, like are they using all subs?

John Jantsch (13:38.083)

Mm-hmm.

John Jantsch (13:43.117)

Yeah.

John Jantsch (13:48.984)

Right. Right.

Victoria Downing (13:59.043)

or they have their own in-house labor, that sort of thing. And then we also look at a personality profile of each of the members that tells us how they like to give and receive information. We use DISC. All of our members take it. We use it internally. We use it for hiring. It’s all over the place. So that helps us also determine where to place people. So are you familiar with DISC at all? OK, so, you know, for example, it’s D, I, S, and C.

John Jantsch (14:05.944)

you

John Jantsch (14:12.023)

Hmm.

John Jantsch (14:23.425)

yeah, sure. Yes, I’m.

Victoria Downing (14:28.547)

The S people are slower to make decisions. They’re a little bit less outgoing. They like to do more one thing at a time. You get a whole group of S people. It’s pretty flippin’ quiet. So we gotta throw a D in there to ramp it up or throw an I in there to give it some jazz, you know? But we’re constantly monitoring that. And our members, first of all, it’s not a class. We’re not pablum feeding them.

John Jantsch (14:39.699)

Hehehehehe

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

John Jantsch (14:54.53)

Yeah, yeah.

Victoria Downing (14:54.671)

We’re setting up an environment for them to use the resources we make available. Our mission statement is to light the path of greater success for motivated remodeling professionals. We don’t do it for them. We show them the way. We give them the resources. We light the path. They have to do the work to get where they want to go. So we talk a lot about that. And that’s part of the process. making a commitment.

So anyway, so this is a group of peers that need to be holding one another accountable. And overall for things like commitments, they do a pretty good job. Like, hey dude, you made the commitment, we didn’t hear from you, you didn’t ask for an extension, why are you coming here without your commitment done? That works pretty well. It’s when they don’t like someone or there’s a personality conflict that then it gets a little bit dicey. It’s awkward oftentimes to address that within the group.

So they’ll go to their facilitator or they’ll come to the staff and we’ll help fix it or move somebody to a group that’s a better fit. So we do that when they, because we have 25 owner groups, we can do that.

John Jantsch (16:05.218)

Yeah. Yeah. Do you have, and you don’t need to name names here at all, but do you have some examples of businesses that you’ve just really seen grow and flourish, you know, by directly by being a part of a peer group? Yeah.

Victoria Downing (16:21.727)

Absolutely. So as a matter of fact, I got an email this week and I printed it out so that I could read you some of the things that they said. Every year or as somebody’s been with us a year, I will reach out to them and ask them what are the changes, improvements that they have made since their time with Roundtables. So I did that with this particular company, which is a Canadian company. We have a number of Canadians in our community.

John Jantsch (16:37.698)

Mm-hmm.

Victoria Downing (16:47.439)

They sent me a list of 18 items that they have improved upon since they joined in one year. You know, I always tell people, like in our mission statement, we talk about greater success. I’ll tell people, we know you’re going to be successful, but this will cut your time in half. So just to give you a couple of things, revenue growth of 30 % on our rolling 12 month report, gross profit growth of 36%, complete company overhaul. We rebuilt every department in the company.

John Jantsch (16:50.702)

You

Victoria Downing (17:17.509)

We implemented the work in progress process and we meet monthly to review all key financials. We have 100 % better understanding of the financials, WIP, budgeting, et cetera. We’ve created department scorecards to track and manage KPIs and on and on and on and on. So then the owner goes on and he says,

RA, Remodeler’s Advantage, has certainly opened my mind as to what’s possible in this business. I feel we have a strong foundation to continue to build upon and our potential is just starting to be realized. We have a long way to go and RA is going to be an integral part in making that happen. That we get dozens of letters like that all the time.

John Jantsch (18:02.958)

You know, because you’ve been a pioneer in this particular business model, are you familiar and it’s okay if you’re not, but are you familiar with other industries or other groups similar to RA that you’ve run across?

Victoria Downing (18:13.871)

Well, funny you should ask, I belong to something called the Council of Masterminds, which is a peer group for companies that do peer groups. We think it’s kind of meta, you know? So in that, we’re all different industry verticals that we just came back from our meeting. We have peer groups for dentists, optometrists, computer service companies, insurance brokerages, and on and on. And there’s about 12 of us that come to this. And I’ve been going to that meeting.

John Jantsch (18:19.48)

okay.

Okay. Yeah.

Victoria Downing (18:43.429)

twice a year for 20 years. So I am walking the talk and I come back with pages of notes, just like I do even from our peer groups. It’s a different industry, but business management is business management is business management. So many ideas fit.

John Jantsch (18:59.416)

Yeah. Yeah. You know, I was thinking that I’m sure that a lot of your members kind of keep you, you know, like what’s going on in the industry. What’s the future look like? What’s the technology changes? I’m sure you hear a lot of that from your members and that probably helps keep you abreast of things because you’re hearing from kind of the cream of the crop. Yeah.

Victoria Downing (19:14.714)

Yes.

Victoria Downing (19:19.833)

Yes, yes, that does too. But again, we also follow all of the studies like the leading indicator of remodeling activity in Harvard and all of those things to try to stay on top. know, House just did a survey talking about what the future looks like for remodeling. We’re having a session at the summit on looking forward and how to deal with the uncertainty now and what to expect as we go through the next several years. we try to compile all that information for our members and make it readily available.

John Jantsch (19:24.44)

Yeah.

John Jantsch (19:49.612)

Yeah, awesome. Well, Victoria, I appreciate you spending a few moments to share with my audience. Is there someplace you’d invite somebody to, whether they’re in the industry or not, to learn more about what you do and connect with you?

Victoria Downing (20:04.837)

Well, I’d love them to visit our website, which is RemodelersAdvantage.com. I’d love to them to come to the summit, RemodelersSummit.com. And they can always write to me for more information. I’ll steer them in the right direction. And my email is Victoria at RemodelersAdvantage.com.

John Jantsch (20:25.155)

Well, again, I appreciate you spending a few minutes with us and hopefully we’ll see you one of these days out there on the road.

Victoria Downing (20:26.959)

Thank you.

Victoria Downing (20:31.139)

Thank you very much. Appreciate it.

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