Today we’d like to introduce you to Joseph Ruby.
Joseph, we appreciate you taking the time to share your story with us today. Where does your story begin?
Growing up, I was always told there was something wrong with me. That I had a learning disability, I was dyslexic. I had ADHD, depression, anxiety, pretty much anything they could throw at a kid. they threw at me. So I never did good in school. They didn’t teach the way that I learn. Growing up I always thought that I was stupid or dumb but now that I’m much older, I know that not all humans learn the same way we all have our different ways that we learn things. I don’t learn from reading words I learn from being shown how to do something and actually doing it the best lessons in my life have been from what someone would call mistakes but I just called them lessons. Some of my lessons cost a few hundred thousand dollars so you could say i’ve invested a lot in my learning to operate a construction company as some people spend hundreds of thousands of dollars on college I just lost hundreds of thousands of dollars on mistakes made on big commercial projects. Some of the mistakes were ones that I made other mistakes I made weren’t 100% my fault. I just trusted people too much and didn’t get proper contracts. In the commercial construction industry, there are a lot of sneaky, dishonest, selfish people that will lie to you and use you to enrich themselves and help their company grow for them, not thinking about other people or the workers that do the work that actually build the company. I was 17 when I got my girlfriend pregnant. We grew up in Kansas City, Kansas, and not the best neighborhood so there is always violence theft gangs, a police department ran by a very bad person which meant we had to deal with corrupt police all the time. I remember going to cruise Santa Fe in Olathe when I was in high school and being pulled over by the police in Olathe and then telling us you guys do not belong here we do not want you here go back to where you came from. Then in Kansas City, Kansas, we would get pulled over all the time, get pulled out of the car have gun heads, have our cars completely ripped apart from the inside outwith cops screaming where are your guns at? We didn’t have guns. we didn’t have drugs we had skateboards. We were skaters we liked rap, music and punk rock music and we had a half pipe in my parents backyard where we all hung out. Anyway, so I got my girlfriend pregnant when I was 17 and my girlfriend was 15, we had our baby Brooke Ann Ruby a couple months after I turned 18. When my girlfriend turned 16 and I was 19 we got married and I started installing vinyl siding to support us. We live in a six Plex with two bedrooms for the first year of Brooke’s life then we moved back into my wife’s grandparents house off 63rd and Leavenworth Road. After installing siding for a few years, I decided I could go out and subcontract with a company on my own with my father. So my father quit his job and we borrowed money from my grandmother got a trailer all the tools needed and started in song siding for a company called exterior energy consultants. I sub contracted with them for quite a while and we did very good high-quality installation and the owner was very pleased with me. He would receive letters from his customers telling them how happy they were with work I did and how comfortable I made them while I was working on their home so one day he came to me and said you would make a good salesman so on Saturday he sent me out to sell a siding job. He didn’t tell me anything about pricing or how to sell. He just gave me samples and an address. So Saturday morning I went to these people‘s home in Kearney Missouri sat down at their kitchen table. Got my samples out, and I looked at them and I froze, after a couple moments, I didn’t say anything, and I grabbed my samples and got up and walked out of the house and went home. I felt like an absolute failure. It was so embarrassing but the next week I went out and tried again and did a pretty good job. Anyway, the story is really long and I think we should probably do it in person cause I don’t wanna keep typing this out :-)😆 I have such a huge story to tell and I promise there’s a lot of very interesting things in the story. I’ve been through a lot in this business and I know most of these businesses, sliding window and roofing companies, run scams, they lie to the customer they overcharge them. and sometimes do absolutely terrible work. Also two a lot of these companies treat the work workers horrible they don’t pay them what they’re worth so the worker/installer doesn’t really care about the work they do because they’re not getting compensated like they should so you get a bad install which leads to material failure which then leads to the manufacturer, voiding the warranty because it wasn’t installed right. so I’m gonna leave that right there and we can discuss this further in person because the story gets really good and I’ve got a lot to say, I’ve been wanting to tell my story for many years and I’ve been wanting to kind of whistle blow as they say on a lot of companies, not saying names of companies, but their sales tactics and how crooked they are because it is awful. What a lot of these companies do to homeowners. There is so much work out there and it’s not hard to do a good job at a decent price and everybody makes out very well and a homeowner gets a lifetime product. They don’t have to worry about anymore. Because the Holmes, well the ones in Kansas City anyway that I’ve been around are built with the cheapest materials. They can possibly get they look really nice but the houses fall apart fast. Homeowners have been getting screwed over for decades and I think it’s time for someone to do something about it, and I would love to be that person.
Can you talk to us a bit about the challenges and lessons you’ve learned along the way. Looking back would you say it’s been easy or smooth in retrospect?
I’ve made some really good money and I was able to take care of my family. We ended up getting divorced when the kids were three and six and we had 50-50 custody until they were 11 and 13 and then I took full custody of the girls. I still was ordered to pay child support even though I had a lawyer And the kids live with me. The judge didn’t care other struggles. I worked with a few partners on a multi million dollar project for a couple years and I was supposed to get a third of all the profit I ended up getting $45,000 and just used for my Knowledge of Siding and Windows so they could move onto selling millions on other commercial jobs that I bid. But I did all this with a handshake, and that was a mistake. Then I went out on my own in commercial construction and found out quickly that because I was a white male There were a lot of things I couldn’t bid on, well I could bid on them, but I had to run them through a WBE or MBE company and they got to profit off of my job for doing absolutely nothing at all and I made less money. I partnered up with a WBE MBE company ran by this woman named Latasha McCall her company is LM2 Construction I bid and we sold a job called Emmanuel Cleaver retirement Holmes. We did 18 buildings of Siding and I ran that entire job. I work seven days a week And at the very least I was supposed to get $70,000 during that job. I also helped build a duplex that was section 3 for Latasha, which I did the siding the installation and the drywall on both of the shops. I got $5000. I had to get money for my parents retirement to pay my subcontractors And pay for some of the materials. Eventually, someone I knew got a lawyer and went after her and she paid for some of the materials, but some of the subcontractors never got paid and that’s on me. I still owe them. But I never got paid either. She never gave me contracts. She always promised me. I’ll have a contract for you next week, but she just kept pushing it out and pushing it out and I trusted her, but she was just like the last people I worked with a liar and only there to enrich herself and use the system that was stacked in her favor so she could be a job higher than anyone else and still get it. She knew when I partnered up with her to do this job that I had lost a lot of money with my last partnership and that they never paid me, or they weigh underpaid me I mean, and I owed my parents money so the money I was gonna make off this project was going to go back into my parents retirement fund. She knew that from the beginning, and she also knew from the beginning she was never gonna pay me. She is a terrible person and does not deserve the success. She has it has nothing to do with her race or her sex it has to do with her as a person. I know a black male that was a Roofing sales rep at a roofing company who went out and started his own roofing company and he is selling multi million dollar jobs now and he did it all because he is very knowledgeable and knows what he’s doing and worked hard. He did it all without any special certification. They have a certification now out there for white men who were turned down by General general contractors because they were white men. And also it has a closet in it for white men that have mental disorders, like me. I got excited about that, and I almost went for it, but then I thought, no! I am totally against those certifications. They are unfair for everybody. It needs to be an even playing field for everyone. Nobody deserves special treatment. Nobody should be able to be the highest bidder and have the worst installers and hardly any knowledge at all of the job and win the bid. So anyway, after losing all that money I gave up on the company and I went to North Carolina to work for a company just as a salesman. That’s when I learned how crooked these companies are and their lies and sales tactics they used to get homeowners to buy products that they need or products they don’t need they didn’t care at this huge inflated price Telling them if they bought today they would get the huge discount, but they’ve inflated the price so much there was no discount. You don’t buy 15 windows and then get them installed for free. The price is already built into that. It’s all lies and I’m so tired of it. I don’t know why companies can’t just be honest with homeowners and say hey, this is what the job cost. We run out a 30% profit margin. That’s what we need to operate the company or whatever your profit margin needs to be stop lying to everybody.
How can people work with you, collaborate with you or support you?
We use subcontractors for our installation, I am the sales guy I look at all the subcontractors as just partners, equals without them we don’t have a company without me. They don’t have a job to do so we all are equally important. The subcontractors decide how much they charge for what they install, and all of our installers are extremely good craftsman and they are honest and they give fair pricing. People that find out what they make say they make too much money but they earn it. They’re very knowledgeable at what they do and just because they didn’t go to college doesn’t mean they don’t deserve to make a good living because they worked hard at learning their skill, and they are masters at it and the cruise that work with us were harder than anybody I’ve ever seen. I have nothing but admiration for them. I might be different because I installed for so long and I know what it’s like to be a subcontractor. Company owners are always trying to knock your pay down and pay you less and then they boast about how little they have to pay their installers. I went to try to install for Champion windows one time and he laughed at what I told him I charged and he said I don’t need to pay my installers. Is that much money I get them for this amount of money I would never pay that much for an installer. I’m sure it shows in their work, but I really don’t know how that company is doing right now, but I know that guy that was working there then was not very nice.
Pricing:
- We sell the highest quality materials at a very fair price
Contact Info:
- Website: https://www.roofingcontractorskansascity.com/
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/people/Ruby-roofing-windows-siding/61570327471697/
- Other: https://www.roofingcontractorskansascity.com/historic-window-replacement-kansas-city
