There is a wall inside TruChoice Roofing’s Fort Wayne office that has given up on subtlety entirely. It is covered, floor to ceiling, in customer reviews printed directly onto the wall itself. Five stars, every one of them. Gratitude as permanent as wallpaper.
In an industry where a homeowner hands a business one of the most important components of their entire house, yet less romantic than literally anything else you could spend that money on, a wall of five-star testimonials vouching for you isn’t decor. It’s collateral.
We were here for LB Capital’s shop tour, a traveling roadshow that functions like a mini roofing conference: contractors who have already figured out how to scale presenting to a room of contractors wanting to learn the keys to their success. TruChoice Roofing hosted. Fort Wayne showed up. And that wall in the lobby turned out to be the thesis statement for everything said over the next few hours. Here’s what we walked away with.
“Sales is a sport,” said Mike Shelly, LB Capital’s Chief Revenue Officer. Not a metaphor he reached for, but an actual operating philosophy. You review what worked. You review what didn’t. You adjust. You do it again next week, and the week after that, because the market doesn’t hold still long enough for a playbook to calcify into scripture. Every week is game week, forever, which sounds exhausting until you consider the alternative, which is losing.
This deceptively simple reframe explains a lot about why some sales teams plateau. Athletes don’t improve by hoping for the best. They improve by watching tape of themselves looking slightly ridiculous, then fixing it. Shelly’s argument is that most sales organizations skip the film entirely. They just keep playing, at the same middling level, indefinitely, wondering why nothing changes.
Braxton Duncan, TruChoice’s sales lead, is what it looks like when someone actually watches the tape down to the individual word. He doesn’t say “financing.” He says “funding.” Same product, completely different psychology. “Financing” sounds like a consolation prize for people who can’t afford the roof, while “funding” sounds like a resource being made available to them.
What Duncan does next is frame roofing financing — excuse me, funding — as a strategy, not a fallback. Even if the homeowner has the cash, Duncan will explain what that money can do if it isn’t handed over up front for a roofing invoice. Take a 0% APR offer for twelve months, park the cash in a CD instead, and the homeowner can pocket something like 5% on money they were about to spend on shingles. It isn’t a trick. It’s arithmetic that most homeowners have simply never had explained to them, standing in their own driveway.
That, to Duncan, is the difference between an order taker and a salesperson. An order taker does whatever the homeowner says. A salesperson, a real one, guides the homeowner toward the decision that actually serves them while also serving the company’s goals. That guidance requires financial literacy. Knowing how to spot a failing roof used to be the whole job. These days, it’s just the entry fee. The rep standing in that driveway now needs to be as fluent in rates and terms as they are in shingles and flashing.
Financial literacy might be the newest line in the job description, but it doesn’t replace the oldest one. Technical skill is still the foundation, and the United States is running dangerously short on people who actually have it. That’s the issue Mervin Wickey, one of TruChoice’s owners, raised during the shop tour, with the weary specificity of someone who has been saying it for years to rooms that weren’t quite ready to hear it. The country has, in a fairly literal sense, stopped building the people who build things.
It’s not a new concern, but it’s become an urgent one, with a pipeline problem that starts well before anyone picks up a nail gun. The money moving toward that problem lately backs up the urgency:
The pipeline of people who know how to build things has been quietly shrinking for years, yet only recently has anyone treated it like an emergency. A roofing license was never a consolation prize for skipping college, no matter what a couple of generations of guidance counselors may have implied. And now that some of the most powerful corporations in the country, plus the federal government, have finally noticed, the trades might finally get the reinforcement they’ve needed for years.
Duncan’s personal rule for staying sharp is that he surrounds himself with people smarter than he is. He says that the moment he’s the smartest person in the room, he’s in the wrong room. That’s essentially what an LB Capital shop tour is: a room deliberately stacked with people who know something you don’t, arranged so you can find it out without the humiliation of having to ask.
It’s also why we made the trip ourselves. Getting out of Finturf’s office in Glendale, California is the only way to find out what’s actually going on on the ground. While we were there, we took advantage of it and surveyed attendees on how they’re incorporating financing into their day-to-day workflows. Here’s what they told us:
| Quotes per Week | |
| 10+ | 33% |
| 6–10 | 33% |
| 3–5 | 30% |
| 1–2 | 4% |
| Jobs Closed per Week | |
| 10+ | 15% |
| 6–10 | 11% |
| 3–5 | 33% |
| 1–2 | 41% |
| Average Job Size | |
| $25K+ | 11% |
| $15K–25K | 41% |
| $10K–15K | 22% |
| $5K–10K | 7% |
| Under $5K | 19% |
| Percentage of Jobs Financed | |
| None | 41% |
| ~10% | 37% |
| ~25% | 19% |
| ~50% | 4% |
| Lenders Used | |
| None | 37% |
| One | 33% |
| 2–3 | 22% |
| 4+ | 7% |
Most of the attendees are busy in the way that looks impressive from a distance and slightly less impressive up close. Two-thirds are fielding six or more quotes a week, but that volume isn’t converting cleanly. Forty-one percent close only one or two jobs per week.
Here’s the gap: The average job size clusters around $15,000 to $25,000, not exactly pocket change for a homeowner paying out of savings. 37% of the contractors in that room use no financing lender at all and 41% said none of their jobs are currently financed. That’s not a rounding error. It’s a room full of operators leaving money on the table. That’s the gap Finturf was built to close.
Stephen Pool, Finturf’s VP of Partnerships, was in Fort Wayne to explain exactly how contractors close that gap by using a contractor financing tool purpose-built to support the actual home services sales cycle instead of bolted on afterward. Change orders? Adjust without restarting. Side-by-side options? Pull them up at the kitchen table. Dealer fees? You set the ceiling. Finturf is designed for how contractors work.
As Pool’s presentation was wrapping up, a contractor from Home Energy Pros raised their hand, unprompted, to introduce himself as a customer and announce, “Finturf has added quite a bit of revenue to our company.”
A five-star review delivered into a microphone instead of printed on drywall, but the principle is identical: The people you’ve served become the reason the next person says yes.
That’s really what the whole day in Fort Wayne was about, once you strip away the sales scripts and the financing math. Whether it showed up as helping a homeowner through one of their biggest financial decisions of their year or as rebuilding a pipeline of skilled tradespeople that’s been quietly shrinking, the day came down to community, connection, and conversation. TruChoice’s wall isn’t really about the reviews themselves. It’s about strangers, satisfied with their roofing project, saying so permanently, where the next stranger could see it.
The contractors scaling past seven figures aren't just better roofers. They're better at making it easy for homeowners to say yes. Finturf connects you to the largest home services financing network in the country and sales training to teach your reps how to lead with financing from the first conversation.
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