The #1 CRM
for commercial contractors

Gregg Wallick learned the value of recruiting, teamwork, practice, game plans, and statistics during his years at the University of Miami, first while attending as a student and football player, then, after graduating (BBA, MBA), as an assistant coach. Wallick applied these principals from team sports into every leadership opportunity he encountered.

After leaving the University of Miami, Wallick joined his father in starting a roofing business in Orlando, Florida. For eight years, he learned the specialty contracting business from the ground up before moving back to South Florida to pursue his dream of owning his own roofing business. From 1987--2000, Wallick grew General Roofing Services from a start-up in Fort Lauderdale to a multi-office national contracting and service provider. According to industry publications, General Roofing Services was the largest roofing contracting company in the United States.

In January of 2001, Wallick resigned as the President, CEO, and Chairman of the Board of Directors of General Roofing Services after a disagreement with the venture capital firm that had financed General Roofing’s growth. Wallick’s desire to build a national contracting business based on fundamental industry best practices clashed with the firm's short-term, bottom-line performance objectives.

A few months later, Wallick purchased Best Roofing, a $6,000,000/year, South Florida-based commercial roofing company that had lost money its previous two years. For the next couple years, Wallick reengineered every department at Best Roofing. Like a football coach taking over a losing team, Wallick’s first step was to change the culture by getting back to basics. By 2004, Best Roofing began to enjoy a three-year period of “contracting gluttony.”

Florida experienced three significant hurricanes that generated more roof replacement work than Best Roofing and every other specialty contractor in Florida had ever experienced. From 2005--2008, Best Roofing tripled in size.

Storms create an artificial construction market that, in turn, disrupts normal business cycles. Best Roofing didn’t have a lead tracking system in place and wasn’t paying attention to the fact that the majority of its leads and business were coming to it as a result of insurance companies funding storm damage.

All the damage caused by the storms was eventually repaired or replaced, and the insurance money ran out. In June of 2008, the financial markets went into a tail-spin as the country experienced the worst recession on record since the Great Depression.

Contracting companies nationwide, Best Roofing included, started shedding overhead, cutting margins, and trying to ride out the financial storm. After exhausting every idea he had, Wallick hired a professional sales coach, someone who might see something he was missing. As Wallick tells it, "In comes Bernie, the sales coach. He said, 'Before we get started let me ask you a few questions: 

• 'How are you managing your sales team’s behavior?'"  Wallick’s answer: “What are you talking about? We measure results. Eat what you kill.” 
• 'What kind of skills does your sales team have? Have you ever profiled your sales team to understand if they are wired to sell?'" Wallick’s answer: “No--what do you mean?” 

• 'Do you have a compensation strategy?'" Wallick’s answer: “Yes, but I’m not happy with it; sometimes I feel like we are over-paying, and sometimes the salesperson feels underpaid. I have people fighting over leads, and I can’t seem to get everyone to work toward a common cause.” 
• 'Do you have a defined sales process, and do you have position descriptions for your salespeople?'" Wallick’s answer: “Sort of… they should know what to do, I think?” 

Best Roofing’s sales strategy, like most other specialty contractors', believed that if they “Throw enough at the wall, something will stick,” which is really a pricing strategy. Best Roofing, like so many other specialty contractors, was a professional “bidding and begging organization”. They had no clue what it meant to prequalify, find the decision maker, or manage their pipeline & closing ratio. After a few sessions with Bernie, Wallick had seen the light. He set out to transform Best Roofing into a professional selling organization.

Step one of that journey was to establish a measurement system. Wallick explored the market for a CRM. After extensive research, Wallick concluded that nothing commercially available was designed to support the specialty contracting industry, so he decided to build his own system that he could use for Best Roofing. Wallick defined the “must haves" that he wanted in an automated system:

• The system must standardize the selling process. Everyone should follow the same workflow requirements. 
• The system must be easy to learn and easy to use. He wanted users to feel the system helped them be more efficient and effective and not be something that hindered their performance or slowed them down.  
• The system should promote teamwork and track workflow from the time a lead comes in, to the time of take-off, estimating, sales presentation, and followup.

• No more paper files. All required documents and data should be organized and stored online in a central place.
• Cloud-based, so the system can be accessed from anywhere with internet access.  
• Everyone involved in any aspect of the selling process should have a dashboard report to show each user when tasks were due to ensure deadline and/or bid date weren't missed. 
• The system must have the ability to bid to multiple general contractors and keep things organized.
• No more sales reports from the salespeople. The system should to do the reporting. 
• The reporting should turn the data into information so that informed management decisions can be made.   
• The system should be flexible so it can adapt to any company's selling process.

In 2009, Best Roofing became the first Beta application for the new cloud-based application, then called “BID LOG”. From 2009--2012, Wallick’s vision of combining the functionality needed to coordinate the workflow requirements of the specialty contracting industry married with the fundamentals of a professionally-managed sales organization evolved. Wallick was the industry expert, and he worked with programmers to create a CRM/sales automation tool written specifically to meet the needs of the specialty contracting industry. After four years of extensive evolution and testing, the application was ready to be released to the public.

In 2012, a group of investors led by Wallick raised the initial capital required to commercially launch the company, now named Followup CRM, with the vision of transforming sales teams in the specialty contracting industry. Followup CRM is a sales management and sales automation company built around the fundamental best practices that Wallick, an industry leader, has shared with trainers and software coders to transform other companies in their respective specialty contracting fields.

In 2013, Followup CRM sold its first system, and today it is helping thousands of specialty contractors around the world. Followup CRM is now led by Erick Vargas and a team of dedicated software designers, trainers, and support staff working with specialty contracting industries such as:

• Roofing 
• Electrical 
• Remodeling 
• Glass & Window 
• Waterproofing 
• Security Systems 
• Pest Control 
• Disaster Recovery 
• Concrete 
• Flooring