New Tools, Same Playbook

By Pam Torrey, Senior Director of Marketing at Leaping AI 

Aspen Roofing is one of the largest roofing and storm-restoration companies in the country, more than a billion dollars in sales over the last 12 years, spread across dozens of offices nationwide. For this episode of Built for Growth, I sat down with Tim Nussbeck, Aspen's Special Projects Coordinator, to talk about what happens when a company that's built its reputation on door-to-door trust decides to bring AI into the call center. 

Tim has a reputation in the roofing industry as the systems guy—the person other companies call when they want to actually operationalize growth instead of just talking about it. Even the company name reflects that instinct. “Aspen, the aspen root system, is one of the longest, strongest living mechanisms in the world,” Tim told me. “They're intertwined by the root systems, can survive forest fires, can survive anything that happens.” The philosophy stuck: build things so no single person is a point of failure and keep refining until the process is simple enough that anyone could pick it up. 

Treating AI Like a New Hire, Not New Software 

That systems instinct shaped how Aspen approached AI. Rather than treating their voice agent as a product to configure and walk away from, Tim's team treated it the same way they'd treat someone's first week on the job. 

“We looked at the AI as almost like a brand new employee that knows nothing, and we need to go through each single step and teach it along the way,” he said. “When the AI does something wrong, it's not that there's a major issue and the technology broke. It's an employee, and this is a teachable moment.” 

That reframe meant a wrong answer wasn't a reason to panic or pull the plug, but a reason to sit down and correct it, the same way you'd coach a new CSR. Tim credits that mindset—applying the same people principles his team had used for years of training humans—with why Aspen was able to move fast on a genuinely ambitious rollout instead of getting stuck the first time something didn't go perfectly. 

Where Aspen Draws the Line Between Tech and the In-Home Sale 

Aspen's core business is still built on people walking neighborhoods, knocking on doors, and sitting down at a homeowner's kitchen table after a storm. That hasn't changed in the years Tim's been in the industry, and he doesn't think it should. 

“The in-home sales experience, I think, is so unique,” he said. “You're going into somebody's home, sitting down with them at their kitchen table. I think introducing technology into that intimate setting is probably not the place for it.” Instead, he looks at technology as something that operates around the edges of that relationship, not inside it: how it helps crews perform better, how it improves communication, how it removes friction so the people doing the in-home work can focus on it. 

That's the same lens Aspen applied to deciding where AI belonged operationally. Tim doesn't describe it as a hard line they drew up front so much as a constant question they kept asking: does this support a better customer experience, or does it get in the way of one? Everything from rehash calls to appointment confirmations got measured against that standard before it went live. 

Betting on the Hardest Use Case First 

Most companies easing into voice AI start small: after-hours coverage, or a single narrow use case. That is not the approach Aspen took. Tim and his team decided to take on the hardest piece of the call center, inbound calls, before anything else. 

“We get anywhere from two to four hundred calls into our office a day,” Tim said, “very wide ranging, from spam to leads to questions about materials and deliveries, routed across a lot of different offices and managers.” His reasoning: once you've solved the hardest problem, everything after it gets easier. Confirmations, digital leads, and rehash all went smoother once inbound was live. 

Of everything Aspen has rolled out, Tim says the aged-lead “rehash” agent had the most dramatic impact. These are customers Aspen didn't convert the first time, sometimes because a follow-up fell through the cracks, sometimes because the timing just wasn't right. “We've 10 or 20x'd the results we're getting out of our rehash and re-engaging those customers,” he said. With dozens of offices and a volume of leads that kept growing, staying consistent by phone alone wasn't realistic for his team. AI gave them a way to reach more people, more consistently, than picking up the phone ever could. 

Tim's advice for another home improvement leader weighing where tech fits into their business is characteristically direct: “It's here, it's not going anywhere. Don't be scared of it, whether you like it or not. If it allows us to do our job better, and it allows our employees to perform better and be less stressed, that's a win for everybody involved, especially the customer.” 

Listen to the full conversation with Tim Nussbeck on Built for Growth, Episode 3, including how Aspen benchmarked results before and after AI, and what surprised Tim most once the system was running at scale.