You Can Fight City Hall

I have never met anyone who loves the DMV.  Tolerate, yes.  But no one really likes going down there and having to wait for something that should take ten minutes but always takes hours.  Some people really dislike the place.  There was a guy in Virginia who got into an epic beef with his local office in 2017.

Nick Stafford was mad that he had to pay sales taxes to the Virginia DMV on two cars he had purchased.  Like super mad.  He filed three different lawsuits against the Lebanon, VA, office.  This didn’t even include a separate Freedom of Information request he filed just to discover a phone number there.  Mr. Stafford started to lose his various battles, but he decided to fight back even in defeat.

He agreed to pay the money but when the time came he rolled 5 wheelbarrows into the DMV to pay the $2,987.14 fine with 300,000 pennies.

Pretty sure the employees that were there that day were not super excited about it. Stafford made his point, that some fights are worth having all the way to the end.  I wouldn’t do what he did, but I do think that there are situations where you have to go to the mat.

Insurance Companies Know Not Everyone Wants To Fight

There is a line for each person that if you cross it, they will not back down.  This is different for everyone.  Conflict can definitely be draining so for some, you have to really hit a soft spot to get pushback.  Guess who knows this more than anyone?  Insurance companies.  It is not only the DMV that does not care about customer service.  Big giant corporations understand the advantage they have in manpower and money.  Most importantly, a corporation does not die.  It goes on forever and ever.  Time means nothing to an insurance company.  

Regular people, on the other hand, have regular people things going on.  They worry about paying bills and how their kids are doing in school.  Insurance companies know that if they stretch out claims for a long time, a certain percentage of people will either give up or settle for less. 

This is wrong.

A lot of our potential roofing customers are dealing with insurance companies because they have to wait for them to pay a claim before they can get a new roof.  After people kept repeatedly telling me “I am waiting for the insurance company before I can move forward” it got me thinking.  Is this a problem I can solve?

A Solvable Problem

 I started to ask: “How can I do things differently than everyone else?”  I realized that my company had manpower and resources.  And I always have time for a just fight.  What if I could take away the waiting by just installing the roof right away?  I knew that some potential customers would go for this idea but I was not ready for the massive amount of positive feedback I got.  I found out that it wasn’t just the waiting that was bothering people.  There was a ton of worrying going on.

Everyone knows that insurance is a necessary evil and that the companies will try everything they can not to pay a claim.  Just knowing this does not remove the anxiety that is caused by the process.  When we started removing the “what ifs” of the process, getting a new roof was transformed from a stressful experience into a pleasant journey.  People could not stop talking about how much they loved the fact that we just put the roof in and would sort the rest out later.  Our referral business started going through the roof (pun very much intended lol).  

The internet gurus like to try and make business complicated.  This is so that they can create demand for whatever they are selling.  At the end of the day, entrepreneurship boils down to one simple thing:  Who can solve problems efficiently?  My company solves more than just the “roof problem”  and that is why people choose us over the competition.  I took what looked like an unsolvable problem “waiting on the insurance company” and fixed it by thinking outside the box. 

Visionaries Think Differently

You used to be able to get away with being only a businessman.  Then came the entrepreneur.  After that, the techpreneurs took over.  This is where we are at now.  Each stage made the previous one less important.  Most people think that this current stage will last for a long time.  It won’t.  Why?

Because technology is simply moving too fast for anyone to keep up.  As a business owner, you can do almost anything you want now.  There is no such thing as the “best way to do something”.  All there is now is how things have been done before.   People who are not trapped by how things have been done.  You no longer have the luxury of solving problems in the same way everyone else does.  The next stage is for the visionary. 

Visionaries spend all day thinking about new ways to do old things.  Like paying your taxes in pennies, or adding a completely different service like landscaping to what you are doing.  Now multiply this by 100, a 1000, and you see where things are going.  All you have to do is dream big enough and let everybody else catch up.  Get to dreamin’. 

To your success,

Taylor

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