From 1973-1978 Gregg Wallick attended the University of Miami on a football scholarship where he competed and completed his education (BBA, MBA). His senior year he was elected as the defensive team captain and led the team in tackles. After he completed playing, Wallick worked for two seasons as an assistant football coach at the University of Miami. The fundamental concepts of recruiting, teamwork, practice, game plans, statistics are life lessons Wallick learned while participating in team sports and incorporated these concepts into every leadership opportunity he encountered.

After leaving the University of Miami, Wallick joined his father, and they started a roofing business in Orlando Florida. From 1979- 1987 Wallick worked for his father’s Company and learned the specialty contracting business from the ground up. In 1987, Wallick moved back to South Florida to pursue his dream of owning his own roofing business. From 1987 to 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’s best practices clashed with the Venture Capital firm's short-term bottom-line performance objectives.

In July of 2001, Wallick purchased Best Roofing, a South Florida-based commercial roofing contracting company. Best Roofing was a $6,000,000 / year roofing contracting company that had lost money the previous two years. Over the next two years, Wallick completely re-engineered every department of Best Roofing. Like a football coach taking over a losing team, Wallick’s first step was to change the culture with a focus on getting back to basics. From 2004-2008, Best Roofing enjoyed three years of “contracting gluttony.”

Florida experienced 3 significant hurricanes that generated more roof replacement work than Best Roofing and every other specialty contactor in Florida had ever experienced. From 2005- 2008, Best Roofing tripled in size. Storms create an artificial construction market. Normal business cycles get disrupted. Best Roofing didn’t have a lead tracking system in place and wasn’t paying attention to the fact that the majority of our leads and business were coming to us as a result of storm damage funded by insurance companies. Like all good parties, they eventually end.

All the damage caused by the storms eventually got 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 in the 1930s.

Best Roofing and every other contracting company started shedding overhead, cutting margins, and trying to ride out the financial storm. After about a month of sleepless nights and having exhausted every idea possible, 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 towards 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 “Throw enough at the wall that something would stick”. Best Roofing’s selling strategy was, in reality, 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 the Sales Coach, Wallick had seen the light. He set out to transform Best Roofing into a professional selling organization.

The journey begins. Step one was to get a measurement system in place. 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, Wallick 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 following the same workflow requirements. 
• The system must be easy to learn and easy to use. He wanted the users to feel the system helped them be more efficient and effective vs. something that hindered their performance and slowed them down.  
• A system that promoted teamwork and tracked workflow from the time a lead comes in, to the time of take-off, estimating, and sales presentation and followup.

• No more paper files. Everything must be online and a place to store all the required documents. 
• Cloud-based, so the system could be accessed from anywhere that had internet access.  
• He wanted everyone involved in any aspect of the selling process to have a dashboard report that showed each user when tasks were due to insure never missing a deadline or bid date. 
• The system must have the ability to bid to multiple general contractors and keep things organized.

• No more sales reports required from the salespeople. The system needs to do all the reporting. Let the salespeople sell!  
• The reporting needs to turn the data into information so that informed management decisions could be made.   
• The system needed to be flexible so it could adapt to any company's selling process if we ever planned to sell the system commercially.

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 professional 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 4 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 named “Followup CRM”. The company is a Florida Based L.L.C. with the vision of transforming the sales teams in the Specialty Contracting industry. Followup CRM is a sales management and sales automation company built around the fundamental ‘Best Practices” that Gregg Wallick, an industry leader, has shared with trainers and software coders to transform other companies in their respective specialty contracting industry.

In 2013, Followup CRM sold its first system and today 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