The Origins of Storm911

Searching through the local classifieds, I answered an ad in the Washington Post titled “Do you want to make $100,000 a year?” At the bottom of the ad it simply said Roofing Sales. I called the number and scheduled an interview. The job was straight commission but thanks to my extensive experience in construction, I was able to negotiate a draw of $625/week.

At the time I was driving a yellow Honda CRX. The ladder I needed to get up on the roof was longer than my car. With no money for a truck, I strapped the ladder on the roof and secured it the best I could. I looked pretty silly going down the road in a little yellow car with a ladder hanging of the front and back, but it got the job done. The company didn’t have a training program, so I hit the field with nothing but business cards, yard signs and contracts, figuring out the roofing business as I went.

I’d be lying if I told you I was successful right out of the gate. My first few months were tough. With little training or direction, I did just about everything wrong, from giving away deductibles, to saying whatever I thought the customer wanted to hear, to sell the job. With no training on how to recognize hail damage, and little knowledge of how the insurance side worked, I screwed up pretty badly in the beginning. In my first 90 days, I sold just 6 jobs. After gas and expenses, I was making chump change.

So, I decided to get some help. I reached out to the other salespeople in the company and proposed we all get together on a regular basis to share our knowledge and help each other succeed. As it turned out everyone in the group excelled at some particular area, but was struggling with something else. From knocking doors, to in-field marketing. From identifying hail damage, to selling jobs, I slowly started learning how to be an effective roofing salesperson. As the construction expert in the group, I was able to help the other guys who had only worked on the sales side, understand the construction side of the business. I built relationships with insurance adjusters in every zone I worked and learned as much as I could about what factors they took into consideration when deciding to approve or deny a claim. From gathering supporting evidence to proper documentation I quickly became the “go-to” guy for the best ways to get an insurance claim approved and how to get adjusters onboard. After a lot of trial and error, I developed a unique strategy for selling jobs. Instead of driving all over the city chasing leads, I’d scout out, and park myself in one area with plenty of hail damage and not a lot of competition. My first area had just 17 streets and I was committed to own that neighborhood.

I worked my butt of from early in the morning to late at night, and my yard signs covered the lawns of the homes on those 17 streets. Because I was in the neighborhood every day, knocking on doors, putting up signs, hanging door hangers and handing out business cards I became well known to virtually every homeowner in the area. I learned how to ask the right questions and how to overcome objections. Nothing was going to stand between me, and selling the job. The referral program I developed worked like a charm. By simply asking homeowners “can you help me” and by offering a small, cash referral fee, no more than $100, I started getting more jobs from referrals. Despite a slow start, I finished my first year with over $1.6M in personal sales

By February I had stopped knocking doors and working weekends. Thanks to the groundwork and foundation I put in place, I was able to focus on referrals Monday through Friday. I had plenty of time to supervise my jobs, get to know our crews, and make sure each homeowner was 100% satisfied. I was earning more money than I had ever thought possible. With access to real money for the first time in my life, I started spending weekends at the beach, staying in the best hotels, eating good food and partying into the night.

We finished that season with $23M in sales. It was the most successful season in the company’s history. To reward the sales team for our hard work, the company took us to Las Vegas for a week as a reward for our success. I took $10,000 in cash with me, basically my life savings. Lady luck was on my side, at the beginning of the trip. At one point, I had won over $19,000 over what I had brought with me. Although Shannon and my friends begged me to walk away, I stayed at the tables and lost every penny of my winnings and my entire savings. While it was a devastating blow to loose all my money, I knew I could go back home and start making money again. With a full pipeline of jobs in production, I had over $80,000 in commission checks coming my way. I was also owned $15,000 in pre-commissions that I had not been paid yet

The Monday morning after I got back from Las Vegas, I walked into my office and the girl at the front desk girl, told me the boss needed to speak to me. To make a long story short, I had gotten on the wrong side of a few people, and was fired that day because of company politics. The boss handed me check for $1,200, less than 5% of what I was owed.

After all my hard work I was broke and out on my ass. That was a brutal day. At one point, I broke down and cried. The next day I woke up and decided to take my $1,200, which was all the money I had in the world, and start my own company. If I could produce $1M in sales on my own, I’d earn at least $100,000 a year. With nothing but my truck, a couple of shirts, yard signs, and business cards, I started Radcliff Construction from nothing. Using the same system I’d used to succeed in sales, I went out, found a new area and started selling roofs. After a few successful months, I decided to start hiring staff and brining on salespeople one by one.

My first year as a business owner was brutal. I learned all the tough lessons the hard way. From figuring out how to hire good people, to dealing with people trying to rip me of to tax and accounting headaches, it was a quick education from the School of Hard Knocks.

I focused on working more effectively with homeowners and created a formal training program, teaching my salespeople how to identify storm damage, work with adjusters and create urgency with homeowners. We also worked to educate homeowners, many of whom didn’t know they couldn’t be singled out for an insurance rate increase for fling a storm damage claim. We calmed their fears and in doing so, set ourselves apart from our competition. I finished my first year with just over $3M in sales and a nice chuck of change in my pocket.

During my second year, sales had just started to pick up when an F-5 tornado hit the Washington DC area. I was standing on my back porch as hail starting hitting. In an instant my phone lit up with my salespeople calling me with reports of severe damage around the city. As soon as the storm was over, I jumped into action, calling a friend in the local fire department. He told me where the worst damage had occurred.

We got our sales team together, gathered all our gear and rented every chainsaw we could find. Then with a convoy of 18 trucks, lead by my Ford F-350 dually we headed to LA Plata Maryland, the most heavily damaged area. When we arrived, the police had set up barriers blocking the streets. No one was being allowed through, but our friend in the fire department arranged a special pass for our trucks to enter. We were the only non-emergency crew allowed in during the first few days after the storm.

We spent the rest of the day and all night going door-to-door with chainsaws and business cards. Neighbors volunteered to hand out our business cards to neighbors who needed help. In the end, we signed over 75% of the homeowners in LA Plata and were invited to participate in the local rebuilding parade, riding down Main Street with all of our trucks all stickered up, waving to the crowed and handing out candy to the kids. We were heroes. By the end of our second year in business we’d done over $15M in sales.

During the next few years we opened offices in Kansas, Colorado, Missouri, Ohio, Mississippi, Arizona, Maryland, Virginia, Indiana, Illinois and Florida. We continued to push the envelope, aggressively developing better sales systems and processes that made our success easy to replicate. The company just kept growing and growing. Later that year, we launched our first version of a custom built CRM system that helped manage the complexities of running a successful roofing company. At the time we had 8 offices, and we had no idea how out of control our company was until we got away from paper and started using cloud-based technology to manage our business.

In 2005 we opened an insurance adjusting firm called Insurance Claims Specialists with the goal of learning as much as we could about how the insurance system and approval process worked from the adjuster’s point of view. Even though we already considered ourselves insurance experts, there was a lot more to learn. Our newfound knowledge gave our sales team a huge advantage over other insurance restoration contractors when it came to working with adjusters, fighting insurance companies and turning denials into approvals.

In 2014 I founded the National Insurance Restoration Council (NIRC) to continue the fight against bad faith business practices against carriers that State Farm started me on.

During the course of the court trial it was discovered that State Farm had created an extensive fraud, with the intention of bringing our company down. From falsified documents, to altered adjuster summaries, to fake engineering reports, the orders to “crush Joe Radcliff and his company” had come down from the highest levels at State Farm. After denying over 49,000 claims, State Farm said I was hurting their brand and credibility with policyholders