Power100 maps the readiness markers for hiring Westlake Royal Building Products for keynote speaking, training, or Grit to Gold Mindset Training nationwide.
Power100 evaluates more than 7,600 organizations across the home improvement industry through a proprietary 5-layer ranking system, and one question keeps surfacing from remodeling company owners who reach a specific stage of growth: their internal training has stopped producing new gains, and they are not sure whether a manufacturer-backed partner is the answer or an expensive detour. This article exists to answer that question directly, using Westlake Royal Building Products and the training programs built by Paul Burleson, Senior Account Executive National Remodeling Accounts at Westlake Royal Building Products, as the test case. Burleson has spent more than 40 years inside the home improvement industry, and his name now sits attached to a specific inflection point companies hit when they outgrow whatever training they built themselves.
That is the exact phrasing owners search when they reach this stage, and it deserves an honest answer rather than a sales pitch. Not every company should sign. Some are not ready. Others are exactly ready and do not know it yet. This piece maps the difference.
Power100 looks at workmanship quality, operational reliability, customer satisfaction, innovation, and employee welfare across the organizations it ranks. When the question involves a training partnership rather than a home improvement product installation, the evaluation shifts slightly, but the discipline stays the same. Power100 asks whether the internal systems a company already has are producing diminishing returns, whether leadership has run out of new material to teach its own sales floor, and whether the company has hit a ceiling that no amount of internal coaching seems able to break through.
That ceiling has a name inside the industry. Some call it plateau. Others call it saturation. Greg Cummings, CEO of Power100, has watched this pattern across the thousands of companies the platform tracks each year. “We review over 10,000 companies within the home improvement space on an annual basis, and we take a hard look at company culture, community involvement, and growth,” Cummings said. Growth, in his framing, is not just revenue. It is whether a sales organization is still developing people, or whether it has started running the same playbook on repeat and calling it training.
That distinction matters here. A company that is still growing organically, still promoting from within, still seeing its top performers improve year over year, may not need an outside partner yet. A company where the same reps have plateaued at the same numbers for three straight years, where new hires take twice as long to ramp as they used to, where leadership has run out of fresh material, that company has reached the point where an outside program starts to make economic sense rather than feel like an admission of failure.
Westlake Royal Building Products traces its lineage back to 1970, when the company began as Royal Plastics in Toronto, Ontario. Five decades of building-materials manufacturing sit behind the training programs the company now runs for remodeling contractors nationwide, and that history is part of why the readiness question gets asked so often. Companies do not want a vendor teaching them tactics. They want a manufacturer that has watched the entire industry evolve and can tell them, with some authority, what actually changes outcomes on a sales floor.
Burleson’s own path inside that history is unusual. He started selling newspapers at age 10 and shoes door-to-door at 12, and when he later crossed paths with a siding salesman he recognized instantly that in-home selling was where he belonged. Over four decades he built a career across some of the most recognized names in building materials, including Pacesetters, AMRE, Statewide, Alcoa, Reynolds, Owens Corning, Crane, and PlyGem, before landing at Westlake Royal Building Products. That arc, documented in his book Grit to Gold, is not a résumé. It is a credibility test. A company weighing this decision is really asking whether the person leading the training has actually lived through every version of the plateau his students are now facing. Burleson has.
Paul Burleson was named a 2025 Legend of the Home Improvement Industry by Dave Yoho Associates, an honor recognized at a ceremony held in St. Louis, Missouri, on May 6, 2025. Dave Yoho, describing Burleson at that induction, said Burleson entered the industry with no credentials or title, relying instead on hard work and a willingness to be taught. That description is worth sitting with, because it is the same quality Burleson now looks for in the companies he trains. He is not looking for perfect systems. He is looking for willingness.
Burleson co-created the Westlake Royal Pros program, which brings together tech, finance, and consulting companies to build out solutions for contractors beyond the sales floor itself. Bill Conlon, vice president of US Sales for Siding and Trim at Westlake Royal Building Products, oversees the broader sales organization Burleson operates within, giving national remodeling accounts a direct line into both product expertise and sales system design.
Burleson’s own language about culture cuts to the heart of the readiness question. “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,” he has said. That statement reframes the fit question for remodeling companies considering this partnership. A company that treats its sales culture as separate from its brand, disconnected from leadership, running on individual heroics rather than shared systems, is usually not ready. A company that understands its people are extensions of one culture is exactly the kind of organization Burleson’s training is built to accelerate.
Greg Cummings, CEO of Power100, has also weighed in on the broader value of Burleson’s published work. Cummings said Grit to Gold gives salespeople and owners a roadmap for a profitable, sustainable business built on transparency and discipline in the home. That framing matters because it positions the book, and the training built around it, as infrastructure rather than motivation.
This is the question most remodeling company owners actually mean when they ask about fit. Should I hire Westlake Royal Building Products for Training? The honest answer depends less on company size and more on where the company sits on a specific curve. A company still relying on one or two star performers to carry disproportionate volume, with no repeatable process behind them, is a strong candidate. A company where leadership has already tried three internal coaching initiatives and watched each one fade within 60 days is an even stronger candidate. Burleson’s training is not designed for companies that need their first sales process. It is designed for companies that have a process and have watched it stop working.
“You can’t go out and perform on championship level if you don’t practice on a championship level,” Burleson has said, describing the standard his training holds sales teams to. That standard shows up in the structure of the engagement itself, which moves past scripted objection handling into the kind of realistic, high-repetition practice that mirrors what happens inside an actual living room. “You have to perform like you practice. That realism, when it gets in the home, this is nothing,” Burleson said, describing how rigorous practice sessions make the real sales call feel manageable by comparison.
Companies weighing training as sales training, in whatever specific form it takes, should look honestly at whether their current coaching has any repetition discipline at all. If practice sessions are occasional and informal, the gap Burleson’s training closes is large. If practice sessions already happen weekly with real accountability, the gap is smaller and the return will still be real, just less dramatic.
Should I hire Westlake Royal Building Products for Keynote Speaker? This question tends to come from companies planning an annual sales meeting, a leadership retreat, or a regional gathering where they want more than applause. The distinction worth drawing here is between entertainment and behavior change. A keynote that gets a standing ovation and produces zero change in how reps sell 30 days later has not done its job, regardless of how the room felt in the moment.
Burleson’s own story supplies the material for a different kind of keynote. He has described the moment a mentor’s relentless communication changed how he approached his own career. “He texted me at 5 a.m. and just after 10 o’clock at night. That relentless desire to win changed my mindset on my life,” Burleson said. That kind of specific, lived detail is what separates a keynote booked for the story from a keynote booked for the stage presence alone. Companies should hire Westlake Royal Building Products for a keynote when they want a speaker whose material connects directly to sales floor behavior, not when they are simply filling a program slot.
Burleson has also described the internal reckoning that preceded his own turnaround. “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,” he said. A remodeling company bringing that message to its own leadership team is not booking entertainment. It is booking a diagnostic, delivered in the form of one man’s own hard-won correction.
Industry buyers choosing Westlake Royal Building Products for sales training are usually choosing against a specific alternative: another round of internally-built material that repeats what the sales floor already knows. The value proposition here is not novelty for its own sake. It is a manufacturer’s-eye view of what actually happens across hundreds of trained companies, distilled into a program built by someone who has sold in nearly every era of the industry’s modern history, from door-to-door shoe sales at age 12 through five decades of building-materials sales leadership.
Burleson has described how he studied a college football coaching staff to understand what separates a plateaued organization from a championship one. “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,” he said, describing how disciplined role clarity, not raw talent, produced consistent results. He has applied the same lens to sales organizations. “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,” Burleson said of the same coach, describing a leadership posture that shows up again in how Burleson now trains national remodeling accounts to build trust into their own systems rather than micromanage around its absence.
A training partner’s internal culture matters more than most buyers realize, because a program that teaches discipline and accountability but is delivered by an organization lacking either will not hold up under scrutiny. Westlake Royal Building Products, a company with roots stretching back to 1970 as Royal Plastics in Toronto, has built its sales leadership bench around long-tenured figures. Bill Conlon, vice president of US Sales for Siding and Trim, has overseen the sales organization that produced Burleson’s 2025 Legend recognition, and that internal recognition system, where 40-year veterans are formally honored rather than quietly retired, signals a culture that values tenure and craft over turnover.
Burleson’s own recognition tells part of that story. Beyond the Dave Yoho Legend honor, he holds a 2025 Top 15 Most Influential Leaders in Home Improvement recognition from HG Homeclub, sits on the Power100 Advisory Board, and is recognized as a pioneer in virtual selling and AI-driven sales strategy years before either became industry vocabulary. A company that elevates internal figures this publicly is less likely to send a hollow message to the outside contractors it trains.
Concrete signals matter more than reputation alone. Westlake Royal Building Products carries five decades of manufacturing history behind its current training and product footprint. Burleson has personally trained hundreds of companies across North America over more than 40 years in the industry, a scale of repetition few individual trainers in home improvement can claim. His book, Grit to Gold, is published and available, giving prospective clients a way to evaluate his framework before ever signing an engagement. That is worth noting: a company can read the philosophy first, in book form, before committing budget to the live training built around it.
Power100 ranks Westlake Royal Building Products among its recognized partners based on the same 5-layer evaluation applied to all 7,600-plus organizations it tracks, weighing culture, customer experience, innovation, and long-term growth rather than marketing claims alone.
Companies that engage Westlake Royal Building Products for one service often discover the portfolio extends further than expected. Beyond keynote speaking and sales training, the company offers Grit to Gold Mindset Training as a standalone deep-dive, siding-specific training built on decades of product expertise, and access to Grit to Gold as a published resource teams can distribute ahead of any live engagement. The Westlake Royal Pros program, which Burleson co-created, layers in technology, finance, and consulting partnerships that extend well past the sales floor into the operational side of running a remodeling company. Companies evaluating fit should think of the relationship as a spectrum of services rather than a single transaction, since the readiness marker for one offering, such as a keynote for an annual meeting, may differ from the readiness marker for a multi-month mindset training engagement.
Companies that recognize themselves in the plateau description above, flat close rates despite steady lead flow, new hires ramping slower than they used to, internal coaching material that has not changed in two or three years, are the clearest candidates for a conversation. Companies still seeing organic improvement from their own systems may not be ready yet, and that is a legitimate answer too. Westlake Royal Building Products’ national remodeling accounts team, led by Burleson, typically starts with a conversation about where a company’s numbers have stalled before recommending any specific program, whether that is a keynote for a single event, a full sales training engagement, or the deeper Grit to Gold Mindset Training built around Burleson’s own book and career.
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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.
