Window Sash Replacement vs Full Window Replacement

A contractor comes out to look at your rotting window. He measures it, writes a number on a form, and hands you a quote for a full replacement. What he does not tell you is that the frame sitting in your wall is probably fine.

The part that failed is the sash. That is the moving piece with the glass in it. And it can be replaced on its own.

Ryan Schwartz has been making replacement sashes in Noblesville, Indiana since 2000. In this episode he sits down with Jason, the Fenster delivery driver who hands those sashes to homeowners at their front doors, and makes a blunt claim: a lot of window replacement companies are not telling you the whole truth about your options.

The Big Idea: You Are Being Sold a Window When You Need a Part

Ryan splits the problem into two causes, and only one of them is dishonest.

The first is that a lot of the industry does not know the repair option exists. Salespeople go through a training program and come out the other side without ever learning what a sash is. As Ryan puts it, he has talked to people in the window industry who genuinely think a window is a window.

The second is margin. A full replacement job is worth far more than a part. Nobody has an incentive to mention the cheaper path.

That is the whole reason Fenster exists. Just replace the part that’s broken.

Why Windows Built in the 80s and 90s Rot Faster Than Older Ones

Before Fenster, Ryan worked in the warranty department of an Indianapolis home builder, investigating out-of-warranty complaints. Wood windows in brand new houses were failing, and the wood window warranty was one year.

Some of those homeowners had never touched a paintbrush. But Ryan kept running into people who were maintaining their homes properly and still watching their windows go bad.

The reason was a change in the industry in the early 1980s.

Before that, window components were treated with heavy chemical preservatives, the kind of stuff soaked into railroad ties. It was awful material, and the windows did not rot. Then the industry moved away from those chemicals, the EPA changed what was acceptable, and chemical companies had to develop new treatments from scratch. At the same time, faster growing lumber species replaced old growth stock.

New wood, new preservatives, and a gap in between. Ryan calls it a perfect storm. Nobody in the industry was going to open that can of worms, so the failures got explained away one homeowner at a time.

Your Window Brand Went Out of Business. That Is Not Your Problem.

Caradco. Norco. Pozzi. Fifty others. These brands are gone, and the companies that bought their assets have no reason to tool up a machine for a sash they stopped making twenty years ago.

That is where the fine print earns its keep. A lifetime warranty is only as good as the sentence that says the model has been discontinued.

Fenster took the opposite approach. Ryan built templates off the originals and replicated the parts as aftermarket products. In 2008, he bought out a supplier and brought all manufacturing in-house. That was the moment the company became what it is now: the last aftermarket wood sash manufacturer in the United States.

Windows is all we do.

The Insurance Discussion Nobody Has

Hail damage claims are where this gets expensive fast.

An adjuster comes out. A contractor bids the job. The bid is to tear every window out of the house. Ryan has been sent in as a consultant by claims managers who had heard of Fenster, and describes the contractor pulling up to defend a bid he has already placed, because he does not want to lose the job.

Ryan’s word for what happens next is Swiss cheese. A whole house can be gutted and re-windowed in an afternoon. The drapes never even come down.

A sash replacement is a professional repair. The insurer pays for what is actually broken. The installer still gets paid to install. The homeowner keeps the frames that were never damaged.

The Part That Actually Matters

Late in the episode, Ryan lands on the thing that has bothered him for 25 years. Homeowners ask if Fenster knows what it is doing.

His answer: nobody walks into a dealership and asks GM whether they still know how to build Cadillacs.

You are not the first Caradco sash Fenster has ever made. You are somewhere around the fifty thousandth.

Your home is worth saving. Most of the time, the frame in your wall already agrees.

Measure your sash and send it over. We’ll tell you straight whether we can make it.

EPISODE TRANSCRIPT

Ryan: Replacement companies are lying to you. Their profits are not built on solutions. Their profits are built on selling you windows you may not need. Today we’ll show you how Fenster can change your perspective on window replacement.

Ryan: Hello everyone. This is Ryan the Sash Guy from Fenster Components. I’m here today with Jason, our delivery driver, and we’re going to be talking about why wouldn’t you repair your windows if it saved you time and money. Most people think replacement is their only option. We believe there’s a better way. I’m going to go ahead and make a strong claim that a lot of window replacement companies are lying to you about what your options are. In this episode we’re going to talk about what those other options are and how Fenster can help. Jason, you’re our delivery driver. You’re the man on the street. Boots on the ground. The face of the company, if you will. Why don’t you get the conversation started?

Jason: That is quite an opening. Start somewhere. So it’s an incredibly bold statement to make that everybody else in the industry selling new windows is being untruthful. What’s untruthful about what they’re doing, or how they’re doing it?

Ryan: The biggest thing is they’re not offering a repair option. And the way you’ve got to think about that is it’s a combination of ignorance, that they don’t even know the repair option exists because they haven’t researched the available products. The more misleading part is their profits are built in. They’re not trying to solve the customer’s problem. They’re trying to make money off an overinflated remodeling job. So part of it is to their discredit and part of it is just ignorance. They don’t know those options are available.

Jason: Before I started working for you, I had no idea you could replace a window sash.

Ryan: Sure.

Jason: Or that you could do any of that. I thought it was just, you rip them out and put a new one in.

Ryan: Right. And another thing is there are a lot of window salespeople who don’t know anything about windows. There are plenty who are very knowledgeable and I don’t want to take away from their credibility. But I’ve met a lot of window replacement salespeople who have gone through some training program and they’re not well versed in window terminology or the industry. We talk about a lot of legacy brands that we represent. These are all window brands that have long since gone out of business. So we’ve come up with the templates and we’ve made our own replicated versions as an aftermarket product. All those companies are gone. Then you have the new replacement companies. The industry as a whole is forward thinking. They don’t want to worry about the product they made 20 years ago.

Ryan: Dare I say that’s the out on a lot of long term window warranties. “Oh, well, that’s got a lifetime warranty on it.” Well, there are three pages of fine print nobody ever reads. Right? Where you sign away on the waiver. The family was on vacation last week and we rented a boat, and the kids were like, did you read this? I’m like, who reads that? Who reads the waiver? We’re not going to sue you if we jump off the boat. You don’t read that fine print in those warranties. So that’s how a lot of them get out of it. “Oh, we stopped making that window four years ago, so we have no way of honoring that warranty because we don’t make that model anymore.” That’s where we really picked up.

Jason: Obviously you’ve been doing this for a while. How did you come to realize this product had a need in the marketplace? Were they building replacement sashes before you?

Ryan: No. No. Let me get into how the idea evolved and where it’s progressed over 25 years in business now. Second generation, family owned. So we’ve had a lot of time to figure this out. A lot of time to figure out what works and what doesn’t.

Ryan: Let me go back to the beginning. I do consider myself a bit of a pioneer. We’re based out of the Indianapolis area. I moved here right after college and I raised my family here, and it ended up not necessarily being the dream place to live, other than it evolved into this: we’re about as centrally located in the country as we could be to gain nationwide distribution. Which of course you have to drive. So that’s your part of the show, right? Nationwide distribution. You know what I’m talking about. It really ended up being the prime location to build this business as it exists today.

Ryan: So let me go back. We’re talking summer of 2000. Twenty five plus years ago I had worked for a local home builder here in the Indianapolis area that used a lot of wood window products in the eighties and nineties. And fresh out of college, actually, I went to school to be a dentist. I don’t know if we’ve ever talked about that. Graduated from Ball State with a biology degree and couldn’t get into dental school.

Jason: Oh wow.

Ryan: And I was done with school. Graduated, ready to move on. I had actually started my first remodeling company when I was in college. We were doing smaller projects. Anyway, not part of the story. So I got on framing for a local home builder, and then I quickly worked up into their warranty department. A year or so in I became an area manager where I oversaw several different communities. But part of that responsibility was investigating out of warranty issues. Back then you had a one year warranty on a house. You took responsibility for certain things and then you moved on.

Ryan: At that point in the history of that company we had started seeing a variety of issues come in with rotten windows. And it was the builder’s due diligence to follow through on a lot of that. We got the manufacturers involved. Well, there was a one year warranty on a wood window product.

Jason: Even back then?

Ryan: That was it. Of course, none of them were going to open that can of worms. And from my perspective, there were a lot of windows I looked at where I’m like, folks, it’s a brand new house, I get it, but you still have to take care of it. Not a lick of paint on any of it. No maintenance at all. You didn’t take care of them. They probably still should have lasted. Nobody told you how to take care of it. I get that part of it. But the people I really had sympathy for were the guys who were really taking care of their house and the windows were still going bad.

Ryan: I don’t want to get too far off topic, but it’s probably notable to say there was a turn in the industry in the early 80s. The additives they could dip the wood into, creosote and things like that. Window products and home building products were soaked alongside railroad ties. Horrible, horrible stuff, but windows didn’t go bad. You didn’t have the rotting issues and the failure issues that old growth lumber had. Then you had a lot of new species of lumber coming into the market. They need to grow it fast and turn it fast. So a lot of those factors played into the quality of the products coming out in the 80s and early 90s. They were going organic, away from the chemicals, and a lot of the chemical companies had to play catch up because they had to develop new treatment chemicals the EPA would accept. So it’s a perfect storm of newer species of wood, change to chemicals, change to preservatives.

Jason: Okay. That makes sense. Got it.

Ryan: Exactly. So that played into a lot of why the industry saw such an uptick in wood window failure through that timeframe. No one’s going to open that can of worms.

Jason: Right. The manufacturers aren’t going to talk about that.

Ryan: The home builder wasn’t going to talk about it either. But that’s when I’m like, what if? There’s got to be a better way. Shark Tank, right? I missed out. So that’s where the idea came from. There’s got to be a way to fix these. I came from a carpentry background. My father was a fireman, but he was a part time carpenter and did a bunch of stuff like that. The joke in my family is we’re all carpenter musicians. We can’t hit a baseball to save our lives, but give us an instrument or a piece of wood and we know what to do with it.

Jason: The world needs ditch diggers too.

Ryan: Right. So I just kind of had that skill. It came naturally. How to work with your hands, problem solving. And there were a lot of internal company politics where I worked at the time, and those entrepreneurial juices started to flow. I’m like, okay, how do I take this idea and put it together with that? Ultimately when I left that company I was a handyman of sorts. I didn’t have any employees. I built decks and screen porches, stuff I could do by myself. But I had a lot of ties with management and the guys out in the field. Sort of like, hey, we’ve got this guy who can do this. So I’d get a lead, be working on something, and then there’d be that rotten window on the side of the house. And I’d get to investigating and looking at it.

Ryan: So I just took a chance on a couple of jobs. Tim Burns, if you ever see this, you’re the guy. You’re the guy that let me get away with this. Tore windows out of this guy’s house.

Jason: Double hungs or casements?

Ryan: They were double hungs. But I just figured it out. It’s nine o’clock at night, dark, and I’ve got this guy’s window laying in the yard.

Jason: Were you trying to rebuild it?

Ryan: Trying to rebuild it. Got it back together, because I was figuring everything out from scratch. I wasn’t pre-making anything at that time. So that whole idea evolved into, man, I see these parts over and over and over again. As that developed and I worked my way away from the remodeling handyman side to just focus on windows, it got to the point where I could start mass producing components. There was a switch from being custom to being more universal fit. Like our double hung product, it’s made to work with a lot of stuff. So parts and pieces back then, I developed a universal fit model where I was still working from home. Built a shop onto my house and I could mass produce parts over the winter.

Jason: Were you just replacing the rotten part, or were you making a whole new one?

Ryan: No. Glass and a whole new sash. It was a piece by piece type of thing. Then I developed a system where I could replace the parts without tearing the window out, which is the whole culmination of what we’re doing today, back from 25 years ago.

Jason: How do you repair them without having to tear them out?

Ryan: Right. So that evolved into more of a mass production. To take us forward, I started hiring people, started growing the company, had multiple crews here in the Indianapolis area. Then in 2008 I had an opportunity to buy one of my suppliers. It was a small one man show. He was running parts and components for us. Well, it turns out we were one of his only customers and we weren’t buying enough to keep the guy going. So we worked it out. I bought his equipment, bought his customer base, and said, hey, I need somebody to run all this. We brought all of our manufacturing in house at that point. That’s really where the Fenster model took hold, because now we’re not farming anything out. All manufacturing done in house. That’s where the sash replication process really started to take hold, because I could see that was becoming the foothold of what the future of the company was going to be.

Jason: So coming full circle. Instead of repairing sashes, making sashes.

Ryan: Making sashes. Instead of trying to repair the bad parts and putting them back in, now it makes way more sense. New glass, new frame, new weather stripping.

Jason: Plus you had the advancements of technology. The glass was better, the sealants were better, the seals were better, the adhesive was better.

Ryan: Exactly. We were allowed to evolve as the technology evolved. So there was a switch in about 2012. That original company that was local to central Indiana, we had opened a couple of other locations in the Midwest. I sold that part of the business just so I could focus on the manufacturing side. That was really the time we transitioned from a local central Indiana company to engaging with a nationwide audience.

Jason: Thank God for the internet.

Ryan: That’s what it was. So now we’ve gained some nationwide recognition. Our marketing people are working really hard to grow that notoriety and that visibility within the market. That takes us up to present day, where since you’ve been with the company we’ve been able to expand to the West Coast. Huge strides in volume, and volume of orders coming out of particularly the Southeast. Huge market for our double hung product going to the Carolinas, Virginia, Georgia, that area of the country. Now I feel like we really have our stuff figured out. From the product standpoint, we’re going to talk about product particulars down the road in another episode.

Ryan: But where I wanted to switch is, how do we dig at the industry a little bit more? I want to do a twofold. One, I don’t know that there’s a lack of respect, but in the grand scheme of the window industry there are people out there who know who we are.

Ryan: We have a loose, unofficial relationship with JELD-WEN because we’ve replicated so many of their legacy brands. There’s no formal business interest.

Jason: There’s no formal connection there.

Ryan: We have their blessing, let’s put it that way. We have their blessing to do what we’re doing, and they refer us a lot of business.

Ryan: But I think more can be said for some other manufacturers who don’t see us as an opportunity to provide that service to their former customers. There are some who flat out don’t want to be involved with that. But I think more could be done. There could be other manufacturers out there who say, hey, this is the thing.

Jason: You’re taking a thorn out of our side for all of our warranty requests.

Ryan: Exactly. They don’t have to stockpile legacy windows. They don’t have to keep machines open. They just say, you know what, we run all our warranties through Fenster. They’ll send you a new sash. And when you look at it from that perspective, why wouldn’t you do that? It seems like a win win for everybody. The customer wins, they win, we win. So part of the new initiative, and really the core of why we’re starting these conversations, is to bring that awareness. Hey, this works.

Jason: I think I hear what you’re saying. It’s almost like throughout 25 years of doing this you’ve figured out how to do it, how to make them work, how to be a great option. We just need more people to realize this option exists. Maybe our enemy in that category is window replacement companies.

Ryan: Yeah. Because they’re not putting that repair option in front of their client. And that was really one of the motivations from the start. Okay, use us as another option. You’ve paid for the lead. Don’t let the lead walk away because you didn’t have something else to offer that fit their budget or made more sense to them.

Ryan: The success we’ve achieved to date is with the people who get it. They’re like, oh, there’s got to be a way to repair these instead of tearing them all out and starting over. You see that all the time.

Jason: Oh, firsthand. I have those conversations. People say, look at this, I’ve repaired this thing 17 times over the last five years because I didn’t know you guys existed. I didn’t know it was an option. So they’re tickled to death when they finally find us.

Ryan: And then they realize, oh, I can quit messing around trying to fix this thing with wood putty and everything else under the sun trying to keep it together. The easy thing to say is those are our happiest customers. It didn’t take any convincing. They knew it was a good idea from the start.

Ryan: So what we’re trying to achieve now is getting in front of a larger audience. And I don’t want to say we’re the perfect fit for everybody. I’m going to go ahead and say not all windows can be repaired. There are certainly issues our product doesn’t solve, which we can talk about later on down the line. But they weren’t given that option as a repair. So that’s what we’re fighting against. Okay, replacement is an option, but repair is also an option. The replacement company isn’t giving them that option. Like I said earlier, if they used us, well, I really want to sell you six figures worth of all new windows. You’re not going to bite on that. Hey, I could do all new sashes in your house for a third of the price.

Jason: What’s a sash?

Ryan: Right. That’s what I said earlier. Does the window replacement company even know what a sash is? I’ve talked to people who don’t. “My window’s a window.” You’re in the window industry and you don’t know what a sash is. So bringing that awareness, hopefully not excluding the contractor side of things or the window replacement side, using us as another product source in that sales process.

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Ryan: Something very important. The insurance industry. We could be the biggest thing since sliced bread to the insurance industry for hail damage. And that has been such an uphill struggle. Again, it’s ignorance and just get out of your own way, because one, they’re not researching. It’s cringeworthy to say this is a new idea. We’ve been doing it 25 years. We know it works. It’s worked for thousands of customers for a quarter century. But the innocent ignorance, and I’m not saying that as a put down.

Jason: They’re unaware.

Ryan: They’re unaware. They’re unaware that we exist. Because we don’t really have any competition. We’re alone on an island, yelling as loud as we can. Again, the purpose of what we’re trying to accomplish in these conversations is, hey, we’re talking about this stuff. This stuff is real. It’s happening. So the ignorance there, and just the red tape.

Jason: If I’m a homeowner and I’ve suffered hail damage, I would imagine the process goes, you’ve got an adjuster who comes out and says, yes, you’ve got this, that, and this. Is it the insurance company’s job then to coordinate repair, or do they just give you a check and say, Mr. or Mrs. Homeowner, here’s your money? Or did the insurance company not agree that this is a suitable repair?

Ryan: That’s the red tape. That’s the red tape. So it’s a combination of all of that. You’ve got insurance companies with their list of rules and regulations they’re going by. It’s a fit, form and function type of umbrella they have to meet. Originally those parameters were put in place to protect the insured. To protect the homeowner. It was the insurance company protecting the insured from a crooked contractor or someone trying to be shady.

Ryan: Dare I say this out loud. It’s flipped the other way. It’s the contractor now. And I’m not saying all of them. The few make it wrong for the many. The overinflated bid. I’ve seen them. I’m like, what are you talking about? I have been thrown to the wolves so many times, Jason, in these scenarios. I get a claims adjuster or a claims manager who knows of us, who has found us, there’s got to be a way to fix it, and they send me out as a consultant. We want you to look at them. We want you to inspect them. Tell us what you can do and what you can’t do. And here comes the homeowner’s contractor who’s already put in his bid. They don’t want to lose their bid on that job. And they’ve already quoted to rip them all the way out. He’s pulled up in his $100,000 pickup with his $50,000 boat on the back of it on the way to the lake so he can throw me under the bus.

Jason: That never works.

Ryan: That never works. That can’t happen. I’m standing right here. I’ve got the clipboard. Here’s my samples. It doesn’t work. And I’m the bad guy because I’m there representing the insurance company now.

Jason: And the contractor’s already gotten in the home. They played you as the insurance man. Trying to go the cheap way.

Ryan: Right. Oh, no, it’s the insurance company cutting corners. And I’m just like, that sucks. They’re going to Swiss cheese your house. Because it can be boom, boom, boom, boom. You have this done this afternoon. Your whole house.

Jason: The whole house can be done in a day.

Ryan: When you didn’t even know what happened. Done. Gone. Didn’t even take the drapes down and the sashes are changed out. So again, we took another 10 minutes to have that part of the conversation, but talk about a soap box for the sash guy to get on. And again, it’s a win win win for everybody. The contractor. The insurance provider wins because they’re doing what’s necessary. But they’re providing a professional repair. A repair that solves the homeowner’s problem. You’ve got the contractor installer who could potentially mark up the product and charge for install. And I’ve been in the contracting world. Way less headache. You want to come in and just bolt some sashes in versus all the other work. Again, I understand the difference in the profit margins. I get that part of it. But we are so customer focused, and we just take all that other garbage out of it. It’s quick. It’s easy. That’s why we’re so DIY friendly. We can teach you to do it yourself. But if these other industries, these other companies could buy into how this whole thing works, everybody wins. Everybody wins. And that’s such a big point to get across.

Jason: It’s interesting. I know how I answer this question when I’m delivering to somebody, but I’m curious how you would answer it. When somebody says, man, I hope you guys know what you’re doing. I hope these work. And I say, well, we’ve done it tens of thousands of times. You’re unique to us, you’re special to us, but your problem isn’t unique to us. We see this every day.

Ryan: And sometimes they say, oh, okay, okay. Right. What I normally say, amongst us, is what do you think we’ve been doing for 25 years? And I don’t get upset at that anymore. I used to. That used to upset me. What do you think we’re doing over here? Like, no, Mr. and Mrs. Customer, you’re the first order ever. You’re the guinea pig. You’re the first Caradco we’ve ever made. No. You’re the 50,000th Caradco we’ve made.

Ryan: And I know we’re doing things different. Nobody is selling online direct to the customer like we are. We’re a different kind of company. Our process is different. And I get that part of it. There’s some apprehension. But I’m like, do you call Amazon when you order toilet paper?

Jason: Well, that’s not a capital expenditure.

Ryan: I’m just saying. I get it as a consumer. If I was going to make a $10,000 order without ever having shaken your hand or seen your product.

Jason: That’s a leap of faith.

Ryan: I get it. But I’ll use this analogy. I bought a new car this past fall. Bought a Cadillac. I equate that to, I didn’t walk into the dealership and say, hey, GM, after 100 years in business, do you still know how to build Cadillacs? I don’t have that question. So that’s where I struggle. I struggle as a salesperson to bridge that gap. Where’s that lack of buyer confidence? I certainly have conversations with a fair share of customers. A lot of that is done online through email. But whether it’s in writing or face to face, that has always been a core hurdle for us to get over. Can you think of an example where you met a customer who said, I wasn’t too sure about this?

Jason: Every week you hear somebody. Man, I’m so glad I found you guys. I really hope these work. I’m just doing a test drive. Every week there’s somebody in that category. And I say, I understand. You’ve done the right thing by purchasing one as a test. I’m sure they’re going to work out for you and I’m going to be back here in a few months with the whole delivery order. And they say, well, I hope that’s the case. And I say, well, I’m pretty certain it will be.

Ryan: And it happens regularly. To really touch on that buyer confidence, speaking for myself and for Ellie in the front office, we have so much due diligence built into our sales process. We don’t want to make them twice. We can’t afford to make them twice. We don’t have time to make them twice. We want it right the first time, just as much as the customer does. So I will go ahead and say the order issues we have are when a part of that process wasn’t followed. The very few issues we seem to have are when some part of that process, which has been put in place to protect the customer, has been circumvented. And again, that’s rare. But there’s always some piece of that that points to.

Jason: A contractor who knows better.

Ryan: Well. I think the whole point of doing this is to have another resource for people to see, okay, this is what it is, this is how it works. Even the Google reviews. Everybody looks at product reviews now. Because in an Amazon world, you can’t go feel it and touch it and hold it up and shake it and see if it’s right. You’ve got to rely on the reviews of others. So that’s been a fun part of it. Just telling people, hey, when you get these in, if you’re excited about them, if we’ve done a good job, if you’re happy, let the world know. You’re not putting yourself at risk. Just say, hey, these were fantastic.

Ryan: And a lot of those reviews are focused on you and the service you provide. That is so important to me as a business owner. It’s not only the user friendly front end that I’m such a part of. It’s that white glove delivery to the front door. That blows people away. Your guy is driving your truck with your stuff on it?

Jason: I was in Northern Maine last week and the guy looked at me like my head was on sideways. He said, wait a second, you work for the company? I said yeah. He said, when did you leave? I said, yesterday. He said, man, that’s crazy.

Ryan: And that makes me feel like we’re not just doing something different. We’re doing something better. We’re providing something in a marketplace that has really fallen by the wayside. And to bring that together with buyer confidence, the trust recession, I almost said desert again. Is it the big mega corporation you want to trust, or a blue collar family owned business? We’re raising families. We have mortgages to pay. Our suppliers all want to get paid. We have employees raising families and building their own futures. We have something at stake. We have something to lose. We’re the only shareholders.

Jason: The shareholders are showing up to the door.

Ryan: Right. So why wouldn’t you have some trust in that? Blue collar hardworking Midwestern families here putting these products out. I’m sorry that you just don’t hear a lot about that anymore. They’re out there. Praise the small businesses working hard and doing right by people, because that’s what we’re trying to do. And we get that feedback. Ryan was great, or Ellie in the office was really helpful, or Jason’s the greatest guy ever.

Jason: Jason is the greatest guy ever.

Ryan: You might as well.

Jason: Well, it’s the only opportunity they ever get to see somebody from the company. And I think that is so important. It makes it full circle. They trusted the process. They spent their money with us. They talked with us. They never met us. They didn’t come to our showroom. And so it ties the whole thing up to me being a nice guy who can answer their questions, shake their hand, thank them for their business, encourage them to tell their friends. It’s one of the best parts of my job, that interaction. I do like it. I like pleasing those people and representing the company and everything you’ve built.

Ryan: I think one more thing I want to touch on is a big thing we’re working on right now that you don’t always get to see because you’re out there, road warrior. Back to that buyer confidence and building it up, and the information we’re putting on the website. It’s interesting how my interactions on the front end, as far as sales go, I get the same questions over and over and over again. And it can get tedious at times, but you try to meet every customer where they’re at. That’s the best thing you can do. It’s like, all right, how do we say this one more time? How do we put this? PJ and I work on that a lot. What’s the best place to put this, or how do we make you read this 14 times? There’s no silver bullet. It’s different for everybody.

Ryan: So I’m just so focused now on buyer confidence, buyer confidence. I want to circle back on why wouldn’t you repair your windows if you had that opportunity, or knew you could do that. We’re really trying to focus on how do we get in front of more people to say, hey, this is what you’re going to be told. You can decide on your own after you want to ring that salesperson’s neck after three hours at your kitchen table. Oh, sign this, sign this. Oh, well, if you sign it today, I’ll cut it in half. You were here and now you’re here. Right? And I didn’t put in this price. These are expensive to make. You talk to people too. You can vouch for this.

Jason: Oh yeah. My lowest bid was $120,000.

Ryan: And it’s legit. And I want to say, folks come back and say, oh, those are more expensive than I thought they would be. Well, compared to what? Compared to what? You need to call some people and spend some time at your kitchen table with some salespeople who are forcing it down your neck.

Jason: Every once in a while somebody says, you’re pretty expensive. When I’m delivering I say, well, compared to what? Where else can you get these?

Ryan: You know how much a solid piece of pine costs nowadays? You can’t call the vinyl guy and then call the handcrafted metal and wood guy and think those are going to be the same. But the point we’re trying to make here is the other option you’re being fed is not the only option you have. So we’re trying to bridge that gap, informing more people about what those other options are, how we can do better, and how we can help those customers solve those window problems without tearing them all out and starting over.

Jason: I said we just do a Super Bowl ad next year.

Ryan: Super Bowl ad. Well, you’re going to have to take a pay cut for that.

Jason: For the next five years.

Ryan: Maybe someday. I think maybe we should aspire to HGTV. House Hunters or something.

Jason: I think that’s probably where we need to go next.

Ryan: Folks, if you gained a new perspective on window replacement by watching this video, then we’ve made some progress. We can give you, the common homeowner, the tools you need to have those options available and even do the work yourself. In later episodes we’re going to talk about how DIY friendly we are and how to put those tools in your hands so you can save even more money. On our next episode we’re going to dive into some common window issues most homeowners will face, how they can identify those issues, and why a full replacement may not be necessary. Subscribe now to learn more about the products and the process that Fenster has to offer. Thanks.