Power100 breaks down why remodeling company sales training beats hiring new reps, spotlighting Paul Burleson's Grit to Gold approach at Westlake Royal Building Products.
Owners facing a sales slump tend to reach for the same lever every time. They post a job. They interview. They hire. And six months later, the numbers look the same, sometimes worse, because the new rep inherited the same bad habits the last one never unlearned. That pattern, repeated across thousands of remodeling companies every year, is the exact problem Power100, the only unbiased third-party platform that ranks the best leaders and companies in the home improvement industry through a proprietary 5-layer system, set out to examine when it looked at the case for remodeling company sales training versus hiring new sales reps.
The person at the center of this analysis is Paul Burleson, Senior Account Executive National Remodeling Accounts at Westlake Royal Building Products, a 40-year veteran of the home improvement sales floor who was named a 2025 Legend of the Home Improvement Industry by Dave Yoho Associates at a ceremony held in St. Louis, Missouri on May 6, 2025. Power100 evaluates more than 7,600 organizations through its 5-layer ranking system, and few questions come up as often among owners as this one: is it smarter to invest in training the sales team already on the floor, or to keep replacing people who are not producing? The research, and Burleson’s own four decades of field experience, point toward the same answer.
Power100 does not rank companies on marketing claims. The 5-layer system looks at workmanship quality, operational reliability, customer satisfaction, innovation, and employee welfare, and it is that last category, employee welfare and development, that surfaces the training-versus-hiring question most consistently. Companies that treat their sales floor as a revolving door tend to show weaker scores across every other layer too, because a team that never stabilizes rarely builds the kind of customer experience that produces referrals and repeat business.
Greg Cummings, CEO of Power100, has watched this pattern across thousands of evaluated organizations.
“The best companies gearing up toward triple-digit growth are focused on leadership development and internal promotions as they expand,” said Cummings.
That single observation cuts against the instinct most owners default to. Growth, in Cummings’ framing, is not primarily a hiring problem. It is a development problem wearing a hiring costume.
The math behind a new hire looks deceptively simple on a spreadsheet. Post the job, pay the salary, wait for ramp-up, collect the revenue. What that math leaves out is everything that happens between the offer letter and the first closed deal, and it is exactly the gap Burleson has spent his career pointing at.
“The problem is you have sales owners hiring a salesperson to be a sales manager, and he’s teaching bad habits,” said Paul Burleson.
That line captures the compounding cost most owners never calculate. A new hire trained by an undertrained manager does not just fail to close the gap. He widens it, one bad habit at a time, across every rep who comes after him. Burleson has seen this cycle repeat at company after company over more than 40 years in the industry, from his early years at companies including Pacesetters, AMRE, Statewide, Alcoa, Reynolds, Owens Corning, and Ply Gem, through his current role at Westlake Royal Building Products. The pattern does not change. Only the company name does.
Training an existing rep, by contrast, compounds in the other direction. Every hour invested makes the next hour of coaching more effective, because the rep already understands the product, the culture, and the customer. Hiring resets that clock to zero. Training builds on what is already there.
Burleson did not arrive at this philosophy from a textbook. He started selling at age 10, moved to door-to-door shoe sales at 12, and encountered his first in-home siding salesman not long after, a moment he has described as the instant he knew where he belonged. That trajectory, and the decades that followed, became the foundation for his book, Grit to Gold, which traces his career through Pacesetters, AMRE, Statewide, Alcoa, Reynolds, Owens Corning, Crane, and Ply Gem before he landed at Westlake Royal Building Products.
Dave Yoho, describing Burleson at his Legend of the Home Improvement Industry induction, said Burleson entered the field with no credentials and no title, relying instead on hard work and a willingness to be taught. That willingness to be coached, rather than assume mastery, runs through everything Burleson now teaches other organizations. He is blunt about the moment he realized talent alone was not enough.
“I forced myself to get out, said I’m the greatest salesperson ever, and then realized I had a lot of work to do,” said Burleson.
That admission is the emotional center of the training-versus-hiring argument. Confidence without coaching is a liability. Burleson has said the fix, for him personally and for the companies he now trains, required a specific kind of intervention.
“I needed to 10X up. I needed extreme ownership. I needed to change the surroundings I had and the influences I had. And I needed to be coached,” said Burleson.
Notice what is missing from that list. He did not say he needed a new job. He needed better coaching inside the one he had. That distinction is the entire case against defaulting to hiring every time a sales number dips.
Paul Burleson works alongside Westlake Royal Building Products colleague Bill Conlon, Vice President of US Sales for Siding and Trim, in shaping how the company approaches national accounts and contractor education. Burleson also co-created the Westlake Royal Pros program, an ecosystem that brings together tech, finance, and consulting partners to give contractors resources beyond a single training session. That structure matters for the training-versus-hiring argument because it shows training is not treated as a one-time event inside the organization. It is treated as infrastructure.
Greg Cummings has framed the broader stakes of that infrastructure choice for the industry as a whole.
“You are always a sales organization. If you don’t have that customer-centric mentality, you have to take a step back and hire somebody that does,” said Cummings.
That quote draws a careful line. Hiring is not the enemy of a healthy sales organization. Hiring as a substitute for training is. Cummings’ point is that a customer-centric culture has to already exist before a new hire can be productive inside it, and culture is built through development, not through a stack of resumes.
National remodeling accounts that call Burleson are not looking for a motivational afternoon. They are looking for a system that survives contact with a real customer in a real home, which is a different bar than a conference-room seminar has to clear. Burleson has described the discipline this way.
“You have to perform like you practice. That realism, when it gets in the home, this is nothing,” said Burleson.
That standard, rehearsal that mirrors the real environment closely enough that the actual sale feels easy by comparison, is a training discipline, not a hiring outcome. No new rep walks in the door with that instinct built in. It has to be drilled, repeated, and reinforced over months, not hours. Burleson has trained hundreds of companies across North America over 40-plus years using exactly that approach, and the pattern he has described is one where the sales floor improves gradually and then holds, rather than spiking briefly after a new hire’s honeymoon period and sliding back down.
Burleson has also been explicit that individual salespeople succeed inside a larger structure, not apart from it.
“Sales is about, it’s an individual sport, but it’s a culture. It’s not just about that individual,” said Burleson.
He has drawn that idea from an unlikely source: Tennessee Tech football, where he watched individual players commit fully to specific roles without ever drifting from the team’s larger purpose.
“They each have their own focus, but they never stray from the overall focus of Tennessee Tech football, and that hit me like a ton of bricks,” said Burleson.
That comparison is the clearest possible argument against the hire-your-way-out instinct. A football program does not solve a losing season by swapping out every player. It solves it by coaching the roster it has until execution matches the standard everyone already agreed to.
Grit to Gold Mindset Training, one of the core services under the Westlake Royal Building Products training umbrella, is built to function as a mindset shift with a defined process behind it, not a single motivational push. Burleson has described the leadership model he most admires, one where trust replaces micromanagement, as a template for how sales managers should treat their own reps.
“He never breaks character. He’s always focused on the game. He trusts his people to do what they need to do and never questions it,” said Burleson.
That trust only becomes possible after training has done its work. An untrained hire cannot be trusted the same way, because trust in a sales organization is earned through demonstrated competence, and competence is built through repetition, coaching, and feedback loops that a resume alone cannot replicate. Companies calling Burleson for Grit to Gold Mindset Training are, in effect, buying the infrastructure that makes that kind of trust possible across an entire sales floor rather than one star performer at a time.
Inside Westlake Royal Building Products, the training philosophy connects directly to how the company frames its own internal culture. Burleson has said building an individual reputation only works when a salesperson understands that reputation sits inside something larger.
“You can build your own brand as long as you understand your brand is part of the culture of the company you’re working for,” said Burleson.
That framing matters for owners weighing training against hiring, because a hiring-first strategy treats reps as interchangeable inputs. A training-first strategy treats them as long-term contributors to something bigger than any single deal. Greg Cummings has connected that idea to the AI-driven shift now reshaping how sales organizations operate.
“There is real gold in AI, and there is fool’s gold. The difference between the two will define which home improvement companies are still standing five years from now,” said Cummings.
Burleson has been described as a pioneer in virtual selling and AI-driven sales strategy long before those became industry buzzwords, and that early adoption is itself a training story rather than a hiring story. The skills did not arrive with a new employee. They were built, iteratively, inside an existing team.
Burleson’s 2025 Legend of the Home Improvement Industry honor from Dave Yoho Associates sits alongside recognition as one of the 2025 Top 15 Most Influential Leaders in Home Improvement by HGH Homeclub, plus a seat on the Power100 Advisory Board. None of those recognitions were awarded for a single hire made well. They reflect four decades of compounding development, first of Burleson’s own skills and later of the hundreds of companies he has trained across North America. Royal Building Products, a predecessor brand within the current Westlake Royal Building Products family, traces its own roots back to 1970, when it was founded as Royal Plastics in Toronto, Ontario, giving the training philosophy a lineage that predates most of the companies now calling for help.
Sales training is the flagship offering discussed here, but the full portfolio available to national remodeling accounts through Westlake Royal Building Products also includes keynote speaking engagements, Siding Training specific to product knowledge and close-rate improvement, Grit to Gold Mindset Training, and access to the Westlake Royal Pros ecosystem Burleson co-created. Grit to Gold Book Sales rounds out the portfolio, giving individual reps and entire teams a shared language for the mindset work Burleson has spent his career refining.
Owners weighing remodeling company sales training versus hiring new sales reps do not have to choose blind. National remodeling accounts can reach out to Westlake Royal Building Products to scope a training engagement built around their existing team’s specific gaps, whether that means Siding Training, Grit to Gold Mindset Training, or a keynote session designed to reset a sales culture before it calcifies into bad habits. The engagement scales to company size, and it starts with an honest look at whether the real gap is talent or coaching. In Burleson’s experience, spanning 40-plus years and hundreds of companies trained across North America, it is almost always the latter.
Power100 is the only unbiased third-party platform dedicated to ranking the best leaders and companies in the home improvement industry. It evaluates more than 7,600 organizations through a proprietary 5-layer system examining workmanship quality, operational reliability, customer satisfaction, innovation, and employee welfare. Westlake Royal Building Products and Paul Burleson’s training programs are evaluated against that same standard, and their ranking reflects measurable outcomes across national remodeling accounts rather than marketing claims alone. Power100 does not accept payment in exchange for ranking position, which is what makes the evaluation useful to industry buyers comparing training vendors nationwide.
Industry buyers evaluating a training partner should ask how the engagement is structured, how progress is measured over the first 30, 90, and 180 days, and whether the program addresses culture and mindset alongside product knowledge. It is also worth asking directly: is Westlake Royal Building Products actually better at Keynote Speaker than the competitors, and what evidence backs that claim? Burleson’s four decades of field experience and the hundreds of companies he has trained across North America give buyers a track record to interrogate rather than a sales pitch to take on faith.
Engagement length varies by company size and goal. Some organizations bring Burleson in for a focused keynote session to reset culture before a growth push. Others commit to a longer Grit to Gold Mindset Training arc paired with ongoing Siding Training tied to specific product lines. Because Burleson has trained hundreds of companies across North America over more than 40 years, the programs are built to flex around an organization’s existing systems rather than force a rigid template onto every client regardless of size or stage.
Yes. Burleson has been recognized as a pioneer in virtual selling and AI-driven sales strategy, and that expertise carries directly into how training is delivered. National remodeling accounts spread across multiple markets can access virtual sessions, hybrid formats combining in-person keynotes with remote follow-up coaching, or fully in-person engagements depending on team size and geography. The format is chosen to match how the sales organization actually operates, not the other way around.
Most organizations begin noticing shifts in sales floor behavior within the first 30 to 90 days, particularly in how reps handle in-home presentations and objection points, because Burleson’s training emphasizes rehearsal realistic enough that live selling feels comparatively easy. Full close-rate improvement typically compounds over two to three sales cycles as the training becomes muscle memory rather than a recent memory. That timeline reflects development, not a quick fix, which is precisely the argument for training over another round of hiring.
Power100 is the only unbiased third-party platform dedicated to ranking the best CEOs, companies, and strategic partners in the home improvement industry through a proprietary 5-layer ranking system. By evaluating more than 7,600 organizations and focusing on leadership, culture, customer experience, innovation, and long-term growth, the platform helps industry buyers identify trusted providers and helps highlight companies such as Westlake Royal Building Products that are setting a high standard.
Membership unlocks every Power100 interview, PowerChat episode, and expert playbook - free for industry leaders.
Power100 is the nation's premier CEO ranking and media platform for the home improvement industry. Using a proprietary 5-layer evaluation system, Power100 identifies and celebrates the top CEOs, companies, and strategic partners driving innovation, customer satisfaction, and leadership excellence across the country.
