June 6, 2025
Welcome Back to the Lavahot Podcast | with special guest Carnie Fryfogle of CR3 American Exteriors
Carney Freyfogle, CEO of CR3 American Exteriors, returns to the Lava Hot Podcast with a powerful story of transformation and growth. Since his last appearance, CR3 has evolved from a fledgling franchisor with six locations to a thriving enterprise with 15-16 active locations across 14 states, earning recognition as #65 on Entrepreneur's list of top new and emerging franchises.
Behind this success lies a fascinating journey of reinvention. Freyfogle candidly shares how they discovered that what works for a single location doesn't automatically translate to franchise success across diverse regions with franchisees of varying skills. This realization triggered a complete system overhaul, with CR3 investing "almost every single dollar" back into infrastructure—rebuilding their foundation to support current franchisees while positioning for future growth toward 100+ locations.
The conversation takes a deep dive into CR3's approach to franchise culture, where they balance system compliance with allowing franchisees (whom they call "strategic partners") to put their personal stamp on the business. "Take things away from this, but make it your own," Freyfogle advises during training, fostering authenticity while maintaining brand integrity.
Perhaps most compelling is CR3's pioneering integration of artificial intelligence. They've developed an AI chatbot aptly named "Rufus" that's been fed their 400-page operations manual and years of training videos. This innovation allows franchisees to get immediate answers without waiting for corporate responses, accelerating business operations while maintaining consistency. Freyfogle shares broader insights about AI's transformative impact on business, noting, "It's not just a buzzword, it's very real," as he discusses how it's reshaping everything from customer support to legal document preparation.
The interview also offers valuable economic insights from someone with visibility across multiple states, noting that while Q1 showed slower activity, recent weeks have brought encouraging upticks. For entrepreneurs considering franchise opportunities in the exterior remodeling space, CR3 presents an attractive option with average ticket sizes exceeding $15,000, with Texas representing a particularly appealing market for expansion.
Ready to learn more about franchise opportunities or CR3's services? Visit CR3Franchise.com or find them across all social media platforms as CR3 American Exteriors.
Joseph Connell Jr.
00:00 - Welcome Back to Lava Hot Podcast
01:47 - CR3's Journey: Growth and Infrastructure
06:45 - Building Franchise Culture Like Chick-fil-A
11:13 - AI Integration: Revolutionizing Business Operations
20:10 - Economic Outlook and Industry Trends
31:28 - Franchise Success and Future Markets
38:30 - Closing Thoughts and Contact Information
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Hello and welcome to the Lava Hot Podcast.
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I'm your host, joseph Connell.
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First thing I want to hit on.
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You're probably sitting there wondering, joe, where have you been?
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Where has the Lava Hot Podcast been?
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And I'm here to tell you that we are back.
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Baby, I'm excited to just be back in the studio.
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We've made a lot of changes inside of the studio and we have a lineup of guests that we're excited to bring onto the show as we got into 2025, content the podcast.
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At some point I'll give you guys a State of the Union on the agency itself, but I'm just excited to be back in this chair bringing in great guests, and we're kicking off with a guest that we've had on the show previously and I'm excited to have him back to give his State of the Union.
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So Carney Freyfogle is the CEO of CR3 American Exteriors.
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When he was here last, he was at about six locations, I believe, and I know that you guys have seen growth all throughout the country over the last two years and I know that you guys are just crushing it and continuing to grow.
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But welcome back to the show man.
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Yeah.
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So last time we were here, like Joe said, we had right around six locations plus or minus.
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We were trying to do a little recon before the show and kind of couldn't really figure out exactly what it was.
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But since then we've made just drastic improvements.
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At that time we were a young and early franchisor.
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We're in the space of franchising, but it's an exterior remodeling company doing roofing, siding, windows, doors, gutters, and we just kind of got into it.
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Like it's funny, in franchising, the hot topic there is.
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We all kind of just stumble into franchising.
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So it's not like people go to school and say like I want to be a franchisor one day.
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It just kind of.
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It just kind of happens Right.
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So we uh, we had that point in business where we had a good model, we had a good concept, we knew that we were built for it and then we took what we did as a singular, singular location, packaged it up and went, went to market, right.
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So as a young franchisor is somebody who's never been in franchising before you believe that what you have is a foolproof system.
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But what works for you doesn't necessarily work for everybody and and people all throughout the United States, different geographical locations.
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Everybody's kind of wired a little bit differently.
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People have different skill sets.
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So what it did was it was a quick gut check pretty quick.
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Where we got into it, we had some early adopters that were very thankful for that um, that took a leap of faith on us and just kind of bought into the vision and the dream that we had and once again had a lot of faith in us, both professionally and personally.
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So those early adopters, they went on a little bit of a rollercoaster ride with us where we were getting our feet wet in the franchising space.
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We, over the last two years, have invested almost every single dollar probably more than every single dollar, to be truthful right back into the infrastructure of the business.
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I mean everything that we took to market in the spring of 2023, we just completely stripped down, rebuilt, revamped and almost every relationship and vendor that we had as a singular unit at that point in time.
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The whole landscape looks completely different, right.
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So just massive, massive injection of capital to rebuild and solidify the foundation and a really strong structure to help us as franchisors to support 100 plus locations but also help the franchisees that we have now and the franchisees that we're going to have in the future to chase their goals and their dreams.
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We always say that this is a vehicle for you, as a franchisee, to be able to chase your dreams and your goals, and if this vehicle is not working, then we have a problem Right.
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So we have to do our best as a franchisor to make sure that the operating system, all the vendors, all the right pieces and parts of this thing are intact and operating the way that they should, because if this vehicle is not running for you, then we have a problem Right.
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So we spent so much time, effort, energy, money on that, but where we are today is a very, very solid foundation that's primed for some really explosive growth.
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So I'm very, very, very excited and very grateful for that and to see where the next three to five years look like.
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I think if I come back here in five years, I think we're going to have a really different conversation.
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So I'm excited for that yeah, no, and I have a pretty cool perspective as well.
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After I met you, I started working with a couple of your franchises, just helping and supporting them in some marketing areas, and it's been cool even for markets that, like this market here, when I first started working with Brendan, was a little bit more established and he had things running pretty well, and then he expanded down to Ocala Florida with Jacob.
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And it's been really cool to see what Jacob's been doing, because he's really started to establish himself down there.
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I you know a lot of growth, keep in mind.
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I don't take any credit for what Jacob's doing because you know, I know he's out there grinding.
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He's hustling he.
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I know just from conversations with him he's knocking on doors, like he's doing what he can do to like get business, which is, you know, which is awesome, but it does speak to like one.
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I think that speaks probably to your culture as well.
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I mean, it seems like at least with the individuals that I've worked with from your company they all seem to have, you know, a large amount of drive and they're hungry and they're wanting to like get into the system.
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They wear the CR3 proudly.
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From what I've seen and and I'm thinking that's probably a cultural thing, I'm kind of curious, like for you in the business, like how important is culture and like how important is like just instilling that into the franchises and our franchisees and the future franchisees.
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Yeah, culture is is an incredible thing.
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Our goal and our mission is to create that Chick-fil-A culture.
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You hear about it so much, that consistency from location to location, the fact that you know that every single employee is going to say my pleasure when you say thank you.
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Right, so that that culture I mean it obviously starts at the top down.
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But the people at the local level, the, the we call them strategic partners, the franchisees are strategic partners.
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Those guys have their own little mini culture right.
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So they they all do wear that that CR3 badge on their, on their polo or on their hat.
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They do wear it proud.
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But like we can't take credit for all that, because they're still operating the business, they're still enforcing it from their level and it takes really good people to be able to take an operating system.
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They have to utilize it, they have to be the enforcer at a local level, but they also have to put their own little spin and their own little twist on it.
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At the same time, our big thing with franchising is driving compliance.
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We have an operations manual.
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It's like 400 pages long.
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So they have a lot of substance there and a lot to operate and go off of.
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But at the same time, we want them to put their own little twist on it.
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It's like sales pitches for me, trainings all the time.
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I do one biweekly for our entire system and I stress to these people hey, take things away from this, but make it your own.
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So it's natural, right.
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You don't want to just simply be regurgitating and be like a robot, because then it's not genuine to you and then you're not doing the things that you should be doing, You're not operating the same way, you don't feel the same way.
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So when you're able to take a really good system and make minor tweaks that don't jeopardize the customer experience, that don't jeopardize the brand as a whole you've got to be very cautious about that in franchising but you're able to tweak it and make it your own, have your own little culture.
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It's cool.
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Lexi's in here with us, my wife, and she's been traveling with me quite a bit.
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Congratulations by the way.
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Thank you Newly with me.
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Quite a bit Congratulations, by the way.
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So that was another newly married.
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Yeah, Over the last two years.
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I guess I should say that not only is Carney married, but if you don't know and you should follow him on on Instagram part time shark wrangler, by the way, like these two sharks out of the ocean, like it's not right back here, which also public service announcement Don't swim down at Assateague.
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I got some stitches to prove that's a bad idea, but no.
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Congrats to you both.
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Thank you, we appreciate that.
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But no, I'll let you go back.
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So she's been fortunate enough and fortunately the way that we have things situated at home and in business she's able to travel with me quite a bit.
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What she's been able to see is pretty cool because we'll go to each location and we'll pick up certain things that we like, we'll pick up certain things that we don't like, and it's cool to see how you go and you visit one of your locations.
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You have a strategic partner there and they have a team that's decked out in our logo, like we created the logo.
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You know what I mean.
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So it's super fun.
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It's super fun, it's super exciting and the ability to go to these locations and, as a franchisor, be able to learn from them and understand.
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Ok, this is the operating system that we were in Arizona and they had such a great team atmosphere, like they did a really good job of making sure their culture was intact.
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So it's just super cool to be able to see that and see how the different strategic partners have a different approach that is for them and their team and most of them.
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Regardless of that approach, it works right.
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Regardless of that approach, it works right.
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But culture is it's that never ending game and that goal line just continues to move, because it's something that you have to work on forever and always, and I don't think any of us will ever be satisfied with the way that the culture is, and I actually was just on a podcast yesterday and we were talking about culture and family, and that's what we're after is that family environment where people are taking care of each other, they feel that the other person has their back, whether it's their direct employee, the franchisee, the franchisor, their employees.
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We all want to feel that we're included.
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Our voice and our opinion matters and what we're doing together as a family is meaningful and impactful.
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So it all starts, obviously, at the top and it trickles down, but I can't take responsibility for it, because the strategic partners are the ones at the local level making things happen For sure.
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Yeah, I love that you keep saying operating system, like over the last two years, since we really started expanding our agency, you know, and integrating and putting Slingshot together and all of that, the one thing that we've really centralized our message in on.
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Our message on is that we are the marketing operating system for local to midsize companies.
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So like oftentimes, when we step into a company unlike like traditional, like digital marketing agency, so like I came from the world of USA Today where I worked with Local IQ and we would offer digital products and some print products the challenge of that is and it's really how LavaHot started is that local to mid-sized companies all their marketing is fragmented.
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So you have to billboard people here, you have TV, radio, like all of these things are all over the place and what we do is we act as that central hub to all of it where we help negotiate the rates, make the media buys the placement, and then we centralize everything to one system so that you can track the performance of those campaigns, you can drop them into automations, you can put them into nurture sequences.
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And I know before this conversation we were talking about AI and like how crazy AI has gotten over the last two years and how important AI is going to be going forward.
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Like I know for you guys, you have to be investing heavily into AI or even experimenting.
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I'm sure that you've probably put money towards things that didn't quite pan out, but you're going through that process or learning curve, just getting through, you know, the development of AI and how to integrate it Is that.
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Has that been a big thing for you guys?
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Yeah, yeah, ai is.
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It's not just a buzzword, it's.
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It's very real and I, most people like they on they I don't think most regular people truly understand the power of this type of technology that we're talking about.
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I don't even use google anymore.
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I don't trust google anymore.
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Oh, me either.
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So if I want to, if I want to do research or I want the answer to a question, I just go to chat gpt and I ask it the question and if I want more information or I wanted to dig deeper, it'll go cross-reference different things.
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It'll do.
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If I want it to, I can go send it on a man hunt and it'll do a 20 minute analysis and cross-reference stuff all over the internet.
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It's getting so powerful that you can take a photo of things now and it can analyze the photo.
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So, like we, we recently bought a property and I just planted fruit trees right, like cherries, peaches, apples, you name it.
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And the second I planted them, they all looked like they died, like they got brown and crazy.
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So I took a photo of it in chat, said hey, what happened to my tree?
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I just planted it two days ago and it starts going through transplant, shock and all this other stuff.
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And it says do you want me to help you to diagnose this?
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Say yes, and all this other stuff.
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And it says do you want me to help you to diagnose this?
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Say yes.
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It says do a scratch test with your fingernail.
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So I do that.
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Take a photo of it.
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It says it looks like everything's still green, it's still living.
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Nurture it.
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Do you want me to tell you how to take care of it over the next two weeks?
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Yeah, sure, give me a protocol, right?
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So it's like a friend or a consultant that you never had, but now it's at your fingertips and it's so powerful.
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Me and you were talking about using it for that customer experience and communication piece a little bit earlier before the show.
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Ai agents now have the ability to not just communicate with people via text message.
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People are using AI callers, where they're actually calling people and interacting with people, and some of these agents we actually have somebody in our industry right now that has trained agents to go ahead and write estimates for them, but it logs in autonomously in the system and then it goes and it does all the keystrokes like a human.
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It just does it a thousand times faster.
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So it has its own unique login, it logs in, it does all the key strokes like a human, and it's very, very, very interesting and very cool, but also kind of scary at the same time, because you start to scratch your head and wonder if, if, if I'm a clerical employee or we have clerical employees, what does the future look like for those people in the next three to five years?
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For sure, as this stuff matures and it evolves and some of these AI agents have the ability to do that, and I think that that's the thing that we need to really focus on Collectively.
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I think everybody needs to focus on it, not just the brand leaders, because we have good people who are loyal to the brand, who we care about.
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If the tasks that they're doing today are going to be replaced by technology in a year, two years, three years, five years from now, and it doesn't matter because, like our, if it's our business, it's going to trickle down to if I'm talking about it in roofing and exteriors I promise it's happened in hospitality, it's happening in medical, it's happening in all the other large corporations.
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So that's been a crazy thing too, like you know, if you go back 10 years ago and say like, oh, ai is going to be a thing, the first jobs you would think would have been like that physical labor or like manual labor stuff.
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And it wasn't.
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It was like a complete opposite.
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It was your, you know content writers, your copywriters, your, you know clerical staff.
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It was those people Attorneys man, you can go and you can write an NDA.
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You can tell chat to write you an NDA and you can send it to a client.
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It's just as good as if an attorney did it.
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It's scary, yeah, the other side to it too.
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But here's what I would suggest is, as quickly as possible, get your employees to be AI capable, meaning because any tasks that they're doing, they can do it probably better and faster by at least leveraging and using chat GPT Does.
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Is that end all be?
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All you know is everything you just said probably true, yeah, but in the interim, they're increasing their skillset at the same time, like the craziest thing, just because I have, you know, two, two high schoolers.
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One's in high school.
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One is sitting behind that desk right now producing this show for us, right?
00:17:02.663 --> 00:17:11.029
Because he's my homeschooler and I'm an advocate for teenagers or high schoolers to be able to use ChatGPD.
00:17:11.029 --> 00:17:29.733
It's crazy to me that they're not encouraging AI, because when they get out of high school and they get into the real world, ai is going to definitely exist and some of the jobs that they may have been considering might not be there or they may be in favor of hiring people that are AI capable, but it's crazy.
00:17:29.733 --> 00:17:33.288
I don't know if you have the ChachiPT app, but I love this.
00:17:33.328 --> 00:17:37.085
There's a little feature that you can download or that you could add to it.
00:17:37.085 --> 00:17:40.373
It's in this menu or this slide down, drop down menu.
00:17:40.373 --> 00:17:41.981
No, I haven't seen that yet.
00:17:41.981 --> 00:17:47.913
You can just click on it and I could say hey, can you find me information about CR3 American Exteriors?
00:17:53.160 --> 00:17:55.205
the CEO, carney Freifogel, I just want some information that we could talk about on the podcast.
00:17:55.205 --> 00:18:01.022
Carney Freifogel is the CEO of CR3 American Exteriors, a leading exterior remodeling company in the mid Atlantic region.
00:18:01.022 --> 00:18:06.632
The company specializes in roofing, siding, gutters and other exterior home improvements.
00:18:07.333 --> 00:18:18.864
I wasn't about to cut off a good promo, right, but no, I mean, that feature is one of my favorite ones, because I will pop on there and I would just say like, hey, I need you to write me an email real quick.
00:18:18.864 --> 00:18:20.404
And she'll say great, what's it about?
00:18:20.404 --> 00:18:27.471
And I'll say it's going to be to Carney, it's going to be about making an adjustment to the website or the DNS records.
00:18:27.471 --> 00:18:29.513
I know that we're going to get that taken care of right away.
00:18:29.513 --> 00:18:32.477
She'll write it, I'll just copy it, paste it.
00:18:33.038 --> 00:18:39.644
So it has gotten to the point with us and, like our team of, like I'm not going to lie I was a little reluctant.
00:18:39.644 --> 00:18:41.046
I'm like chat GPT is silly.
00:18:41.046 --> 00:18:48.633
Then I started using it and understanding it more, and more and more and now, like our whole team, that's that's how they operate.
00:18:48.633 --> 00:18:49.673
Like we.
00:18:49.673 --> 00:18:58.886
One of one of our girls internally asked me a question yesterday and I'm trying to train them how to use it and go to it and I said it's a merchant company that we're working with.
00:18:58.886 --> 00:19:04.513
I said just go to chat GPT and ask it and it'll tell you how to do that inside of there, cause everybody has these intranets and stuff like that.
00:19:04.513 --> 00:19:11.345
So as long as it can scan the web, it can look at YouTube videos, it'll tell you how to troubleshoot just about anything that you're that you're up against.
00:19:11.345 --> 00:19:18.231
So we're training our own team, like our own corporate team, how to go to it to be able to get the help and the resources that they need.
00:19:35.140 --> 00:19:55.282
No-transcript you, because 95% of the questions that we get asked on a daily basis we have, we have some AI in the company, that is, it's the that the backend data sources are all fed with our operations manual and basically everything that you can imagine that you would need to run a CR three location is fed into this bot.
00:19:55.282 --> 00:19:58.730
But um, but anything outside of that?
00:19:58.730 --> 00:20:10.509
You can go to chat GPT and you can get almost anything that you need without having to rely on a third party who is tied up busy on meetings, other phone calls, and it might be three to six hours until that person gets to you.
00:20:10.509 --> 00:20:16.148
Well, if we can utilize technology and we know how to use it and understand it, it allows us to all just move so much faster.
00:20:16.469 --> 00:20:22.182
Yeah, so like when you said I guess it's pulling information for CRT, would that be like like your operating set?
00:20:22.182 --> 00:20:22.823
Like your operating set?
00:20:22.823 --> 00:20:23.483
What's the word?
00:20:23.663 --> 00:20:24.144
Ops manual.
00:20:24.384 --> 00:20:25.744
Yeah, your ops manual.
00:20:25.744 --> 00:20:30.888
Would it be something like that where they could go there and say, oh, what's the policy on blank, blank, blank, and it will be able to spit out.
00:20:30.909 --> 00:20:34.090
Yeah, so our ops manual is 400 pages and who wants to read that?
00:20:34.090 --> 00:20:38.794
I didn't even want to read it, but I had to, so we just uploaded it into.
00:20:38.794 --> 00:20:43.616
We have an AI chat bot that's on our intranet and his name's Rufus.
00:20:43.616 --> 00:20:49.663
He's a dog, so it's kind of fitting.
00:20:49.663 --> 00:20:51.953
And, yeah, we just fed him with all of our backend data sources and the ops manual obviously being one of them.
00:20:51.953 --> 00:20:57.166
But all of the trainings that I've ever conducted in the last five or six years I uploaded into them, because he can scan videos as well.
00:20:57.667 --> 00:21:20.317
So, really, any question that you could almost possibly have unless it's an anomaly you can go to Rufus to go get your answers, and it's a way for us to help to support our entire organization of right now I think it's like 125 to 130 people, without ever really having to lift a finger, which allows us to focus on bigger opportunities, more revenue generating activities.
00:21:20.859 --> 00:21:27.166
It allows people at the ground level to operate and move faster, get the same information, if not better.
00:21:27.207 --> 00:21:39.500
The problem with humans when you come to me or you come to one of my team members, or anybody for that matter is we have the ability to forget that technology is not going to forget the information that's fed into the back end of it.
00:21:39.560 --> 00:21:49.884
So not only can it get you the answer faster, but it's also more reliable because it's not going to forget, it's not going to confuse this warranty with this warranty, right?
00:21:49.884 --> 00:21:55.049
So super, super powerful stuff and people are kind of reluctant to embrace it.
00:21:55.049 --> 00:22:33.998
But if you can learn to embrace it for what it is, it allows all of us to focus our efforts on, in my industry, making sure the customer experience is unmatched, just investing all of that time into acquiring new customers, taking care of existing customers and then those revenue generating activities, versus the minuscule supporting type roles that a lot of us are used to in the past, at least within the last 10 to 15 years of business, for sure, yeah lot of us are used to in the past, at least within the last 10 to 15 years of business, for sure, yeah, and you know from the marketing side endless possibilities there, like one of the things we recently did, is we worked on like really fine tuning a Chachi PT prompt.
00:22:34.419 --> 00:22:35.461
It was like a two part prompt.
00:22:35.461 --> 00:22:38.931
So the first one was generate a bio based on this individual.
00:22:38.931 --> 00:22:49.986
We made it primarily for contractors, since that's who we work with where it would take background information of the business itself from like the website and social media and then input it.
00:22:49.986 --> 00:23:02.109
The individual input information about themselves, maybe how many years they've been in the industry, something like that, right, so they'll give all of their background which will create like this, like baseline bio for that individual.
00:23:02.109 --> 00:23:50.750
And then we have this second tiered prompt where you'll drop that bio into it and it's basically a short form video script builder and the way that we have it built out is so that it will create it'll create the scripting, but it'll have like hooks and we've pre-loaded like the hook that we want every single time, the closer that we want like follow for more value, the core of the information just based on the industry, based on the website based on that person's bio, but then it also has like a baseline of like, uh, like content pillars, like a video that's going to be educational, one that might be, uh, able to drive some emotion, another one that might be what's the word I'm looking for Entertainment, and it will come up with all of these different scripts.
00:23:50.789 --> 00:23:55.609
So at any given time, if a contractor's on a job site, they can go out there and say you know what?
00:23:55.609 --> 00:24:11.349
I'm just going to film like three or four short form videos I know I'm doing siding, roofing, and we're doing the gutters and drop it in there and just say, give me three different scripts, one for gutters, one for siding and one for the roof and it will spit out different scripts that it can go with.
00:24:11.349 --> 00:24:17.790
And you know, to go back to what you were talking about with scripting, the way that I, you know, position scripts to people are, use that as a baseline.
00:24:17.790 --> 00:24:19.894
You know, like, try saying that script, but the way that you would say it, correct that as a baseline.
00:24:19.894 --> 00:24:23.000
You know, like, try saying that script, but the way that you would say it, correct.
00:24:23.200 --> 00:24:33.844
And then, um, the other cool part is they'll say, like, say this line and then stop, and then say this line and then stop, and then you know they'll just batch that content, shoot it off to us and we'll take care of it from there.
00:24:33.844 --> 00:24:35.470
But it's, it's just really cool.
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