William T. Bosway
Yes. So Julio, when you think about wholesale and the contractor, there's 2 distinct ways business are being done. There's the traditional building and accessories work that we do, which is all the roofing accessories, trims, flashings, ventilation. And that has historically gone through wholesalers and/or big box, right? And 80% of contractors buy -- our contractors buy about 80% of their needs through wholesale, 20% through big box, which is why I think you saw folks like Home Depot buy SRS. That being said, yes, there are certain products around that have brands that contractors like and they stay with. Air Vent for us, as a good example, is probably the leading ventilation product in the industry. But that's in our core business. Now when you talk about metal roofing, it's a different -- there's 2 types of metal roofing business models, if you will. One, if you're just talking about panels that would go out on, say, a barn or some ag type application, those panels have traditionally been sold through wholesale and big box guys. There's very limited variety of what's available. So they're an inventory product, if you will. They're common size, common colors and there are very few colors that are offered. In fact, usually, it's a non-painted thing. And so when people talk about metal roofing through that channel, that's what they're really talking about. When you think about metal roofing of the companies that we have acquired in the metal roofing initiative that we're going into, this is a direct sale to a contractor, but it centers around a custom solution set for a home or light commercial facility or light commercial building. And that's not inventory product. That's a product that is made either on site, which we can do or it's made in our shop, but it really stems from a set of architectural drawings that then a contractor brings to us that we make for that specific home or that specific building. And obviously, as you might expect, wholesalers and big box retailers don't necessarily create demand. They actually serve demand, right? They support demand, but they're not out proactively creating demand, whereas the contractor in this case is. So this is a manufactured solution that a wholesaler or a big box retailer would not want to inventory because everything is unique to an individual site. And therefore, that's a direct-to-contractor engagement for us, which opens up a different profit and revenue opportunity being direct. So as you think about our broader strategy, we have transitioned from being heavily oriented towards wholesalers 7 years ago -- sorry, towards big box retail. We've rebalanced that to have a bigger portion of our sales going through wholesale versus retail, aligned with the way the contractor has historically bought our core product lines. And then we've added a new channel through metal roofing direct for specific homes and light commercial buildings. Those are the companies we bought. So now we've added a third channel. And my point is that gives us access to multiple channels, multiple aspects of revenue and profit pools that exist in each of those respective channels. As it relates to why would a contractor come back to us in a metal roofing kind of scenario, as I described, it's all about service. It's all about making sure that, that contractor gets what they need. It's done right, it's done well and they make their money, they get up, they get down and there's no quality issues. So it's speed, it's service. And of course, you have to make things well. And so you've got to have some competency around taking architectural drawings and fitting out an exact solution for a home or light commercial building. So that's how those -- sorry for the long answer, but that's how those 3 channels actually stack up for us, and our strategy is to be in all 3 for the reasons I said. And if you think about consolidation at the wholesale level with Home Depot buying what they bought with SRS and OXO buying Beacon, I would argue that, that channel has already been consolidated for years, but now you have 2 new owners. We want to be in a third channel as well, just so we have some sense of leverage of how do we serve this marketplace. It just so happens to be through metal roofing. But as you do more of that with a contractor direct, you become more -- they become more aware of you when they're doing a shingle roof as much as they are doing a metal roof. So they'll come direct to us for metal roof. They'll go through a wholesaler for a shingle roof. We're still making the same accessories that go on that roof one way or the other. The biggest difference at the end of the day is when that metal roof happens for us, our basket goes from $400, $500 for that roof to $40,000 for that roof. And that's my point earlier about getting access to a bigger profit and revenue pool by getting into metal roofing and going direct to a contractor. So we're not disrupting the wholesaler or the big box guy because they're not in that business today. We're actually going very local, and that's how we're building out our metal roofing business. Hopefully, that makes some sense.