“This is my home.”

Dennis Yu and I flew out of Tucson to Orlando last week, then drove east to the coast to spend the day with Hippo Roofing in Melbourne. I run their marketing. I had never met them in person.

I expected a roofing shop. What I walked into was a building with 10 to 15 people in it, a fabrication area, a training room, and four businesses operating under one roof. I am young and I do not have a lot of reference points for this yet, but it was bigger and nicer than anything I had pictured from behind a laptop.

The person I could not stop thinking about on the flight home was Bill.

The name

Before Hippo Roofing was Hippo Roofing, it was something else, and that something else caused a problem with another business who did not like how close the two names were. Bill spent about $25,000 fighting it before he made a decision most owners never make.

He quit fighting.

I can’t spell it, can’t remember it. I need a new name.

So he got everybody in a room. The team came back with the safe options. Stillwell, after the family. S and S. Space Coast Roofing, after the region. All perfectly sensible. All completely forgettable.

Bill picked Hippo.

At the time they were operating out of a pink building, and his reasoning is the part I keep repeating to people:

If they don’t like the pink building, they don’t like the name. We can paint the building, change the name. It makes no difference.

Then he explained why Hippo won the vote. Because his was the only vote that counted.

Here he is telling it himself. Thirty nine seconds, filmed in their office:

The building is not pink anymore. The name stayed. And every single person I have told this story to remembers the word Hippo, which is exactly what his team, and most marketing advice, would have talked him out of.

The part that actually got me

The people who love Bill have been telling him, kindly, that he has earned the right to step back. That he could go home.

He looked around at everybody and said:

But guys, this is my home.

I almost teared up in a roofing office. I was there to audit a website.

What I took away

I do marketing. I spend my days on things like whether a page is indexed and whether a phone number actually connects. Useful work, and it matters more than most people think.

But nobody builds a company that a dozen people show up to every morning because their meta descriptions were the right length. Bill built something his wife Wanda helps run, and that he refuses to leave, because it stopped being a workplace a long time ago.

The marketing lesson, if you want one, is the pink building. Bill understood something most business owners never do: the thing you are afraid will look silly is usually the thing people remember. Space Coast Roofing would have been safe and invisible. Hippo is neither.

Thank you

To Mona, who chased Dennis for three months before he answered, which is the only reason any of this happened. To Wanda. To Peller, who sat with us at lunch. To Isabel, who answers the phones and is around my age, and who I ended up talking to for far longer than I planned.

And to Mona and Bill, who drove Dennis and me all the way back to Orlando airport at the end of a long day, which nobody asked them to do.

If you are in Brevard County and you need a roof, Hippo Roofing is the real thing. Florida certified roofing contractor, licence CCC1331992, and a man in the office who will not go home.