Adam Sand (RBP)

Adam Sand is the owner of RBP, a consulting firm that provides roofing companies and other businesses the tools and training necessary to build their companies.

Raised in Stony Plain, a rural community 40 miles west of Edmonton, Sand’s interests as a child didn’t rival his peers.

For starters, he found no appeal in lacing up a pair of skates and gliding around a hockey rink, and consequently, he wasn’t part of the Edmonton Oiler fandom that permeated around The Oil Capital of Canada.

Even if he had been interested in Canada’s national pastime, watching an NHL game on TV would have been challenging.

“We only had two channels on the TV,” Sand recalls, but thanks to his entrepreneurial-minded mom’s internet café business, Sand was always able to jump online.

“I got really good internet at a time that nobody had access to it.”

An introvert who enjoyed business books as much as surfing the web, Sand would read classics like Think and Grow Rich and become inspired to undertake his own business pursuits, but the city of Stony Plain didn’t present ideal conditions for his aspirations to be fostered.

“There is a lot of nepotism, and people stay the same,” Sand mentions of his hometown.  

“The shit families stay in the shitter and the rich families stay rich, and nothing really changes.”

After high school, Sand enlisted in the military because it offered a steady paycheck, but once his commitments were over, he went to work on oil rigs.

His income increased when he began working in oil, giving him enough capital to later invest in a tanning salon business, which was in the West Edmonton Mall, the world’s largest shopping center.

As the owner of a tanning salon, Sand generated sustainable revenue, but an array of unfortunate events led to Sand losing his business.

He spent the next nine months in a dark state, during which he wrote an article that chronicled his first business venture.  

“I basically unloaded all my emotions onto this blog,” Sand says.

“I told all the stories of the tanning salon, ranging from smoking weed with billionaires, to hanging out with rockstars who came to the mall because they hung out with the billionaires, to girls sleeping with me in tanning beds.”  

The blog, while captivating, did little to remedy Sand’s perpetual dismay, but eventually enough of his concerned friends intervened, worried that their talented and business-minded friend was now just floating through life without a purpose.

In true Adam Sand fashion, he rebounded by creating an app, and it became so successful that he later sold it for a significant sum of money.

But for as plush as his bank account was, once again Sand was devoid of purpose.

An associate pushed Sand to go into car sales, and while he was initially reticent to delve into another unknown, eventually Sand acquiesced and became a car salesman.  

Less than a year later, Sand was one of the top car sales reps in all of Canada, but still his ambitions were not sated.

Upon having several conversations with his friend Joe Sargeant, a roofer in Edmonton who had at one point let Sand sleep on his floor while Sargeant, his wife, and his child slept on the couch, Sand decided to leverage his resources and business aptitude to elevate his best friend from the depths of financial despair.

“I had made money, lost money, and made it back, and meanwhile Joe is still fucking broke because he’s a roofer,” Sand says.

“But I never forgot the fact that when I was down, he let me come and have a safe place to stay.”

Sand injected momentum into Sargeant’s life by convincing him to start a roofing company.

Sargeant didn’t know how to get a business license or register his company, so Sand handled the necessary paperwork, and shortly after, Sargeant’s Roofing was open for business in Edmonton.

Sand initially thought that getting the company registered and giving his friend some money would be enough of a springboard for Sargeant’s Roofing to move forward, but Sand quickly realized that unless he took a more proactive approach, Sargeant’s Roofing would eventually dissolve.

For context, Sand knew nothing about the roofing business, but he was intuitive enough to look for unique ways to acquire customers.

This included exploring the viability of Facebook ads, which at the time were not being utilized by roofing contractors.

“Everybody said that Facebook ads were for dog toys and weight loss programs, but I saw an opportunity,” Sand says.

To learn more about how to run a successful Facebook ads campaign, Sand tried to enlist the help of several “gurus,” to no avail.  

“Nowadays, you can’t throw a shingle off a roof without hitting ten gurus in the head who do Facebook ads. They’re waiting in the dumpster to teach you Facebook ads, but back then [2015] I was paying money to try to find a guru,” Sand says.

He reveals that he never found someone who could teach him how to run Facebook ads for roofers, but he did connect with one individual who was willing to teach him how Facebooks ads worked in other industries.

Essentially, Sand paid a guy to teach him techniques that he would then have to refine and implement in order to attract his target audience.

“After spending $50,000 and doing everything wrong, I figured out how to do it right,” Sand says.

“In turn, Sargeant’s Roofing started doing really well, and the rest is history.”

Sargeant’s Roofing was thriving after Sand mastered how to run an effective Facebook ads campaign, and soon word of Sand’s accomplishment got around the roofing industry.

Of course, marketers and roofing contractors alike wanted to learn more about Sand’s methods, and he ended up doing 28 podcasts in an attempt to encapsulate his efforts.

He then created a course where he taught roofing contractors how to do their own Facebook ads, which led to the founding of the aforementioned RBP, where he and his team created and managed ad campaigns for clients.

Unsurprisingly, RBP produced tremendous results for their clientele, to the point that roofing companies were inundated with too many calls for their services.

“We were getting roofing companies too many leads, and as a consequence they wanted to fire us,” Sand says.

Not wanting to lose his clients’ business, Sand pivoted, and instead of trying to convince his clients that having an abundance of leads was a good thing, he sought to figure out a way that roofing contractors could manage all the leads that were flooding in.

“It got to the point where I told roofing business owners not to fire me. Just keep paying me and I will solve that problem [too many leads] for you,” Sand explains.

Eventually, Sand developed a CRM (customer relationship management).

At first, the software struggled to gain traction in the marketplace, but by 2021 Sand’s CRM was in such high demand that, along with an oversaturated Facebooks ads market, RBP boldly opted to exclusively focus their efforts on helping roofers streamline their business processes.

Says Sand of the decision to spealize:

“The value of Facebook ads keeps going down, we were becoming less effective every year, costs were going up, the leads coming in were lower quality, and every roofer is on Facebook.”

“Meanwhile, the CRM started to get crazy results.”

Today, Sand still owns a 48% stake in Sargeant’s Roofing, but he’s no longer involved in the daily operations of the business.

Instead, his focus is solely on RBP and roofing contractors, a business and an industry that in many ways he inadvertently entered.

“My whole involvement in the roofing industry is one big accident,” Sand confirms.

“Everything prior to this year was just stumbling upon pockets of value, and then capitalizing on that opportunity so that my friend Joe had money to do cool things with me, and so that my roofing clients wouldn’t fire me.”

As Sand has continuously proven, his commitment to one industry or job title is short-term, but it’s not because he’s hungry for a bigger payday.

If anything, Sand is motivated by personal growth, and by the prospect of infusing unparalleled value into the world economy, and beyond.

“My dream is to go to space and do business in space,” Sand says.

Like Christopher Columbus, Elon Musk, and others who left their native countries in search of grandiosity, Sand possesses the requisite determination and foresight to do the unthinkable.

“Those people back then in Europe who wanted to leave looked pretty crazy, but within that group are the Rockefeller’s and the Edison’s of the world,” notes Sand, who for the record has given immense thought to a universe unencumbered by gravity.

“Right now, there are things in space that could crash the earth’s economy, and there are elements in space that could do things that we can’t even imagine here on earth.”

Business.

Habitat construction.

Resource collection.

Becoming interplanetary and insuring ourselves against self-destruction.

These concepts have all stimulated the right hemisphere of Sand’s brain, and if carried out successfully, may just afford Sand the sense of accomplishment he hasn’t seemed to embrace yet.

“I’ve always wanted my name to mean something because when I was a kid, I saw people whose names meant something, and then I saw how that opened doors and allowed them to have experiences that I was closed out of,” Sand says.

“I was so introverted and scared of people that I didn’t have a way to get myself there, so then I wanted to buy my way there, but along the way I got less vain and developed a greater sense of purpose, and so I still want to do something meaningful that will benefit all of society.” QS

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