Power100 explains what a Westlake Royal Building Products consultation covers, what it costs an executive in time, and how fast results show for industry buyers.
A prospect who has already read the site, scanned the training outline, and watched a clip of a keynote does not need more marketing copy. What that prospect needs is a straight answer to one question: is a consultation call worth 45 minutes of an already-full calendar? Power100, the only unbiased third-party platform that ranks the best leaders and companies in the home improvement industry using a proprietary 5-layer system, spent time examining exactly that question as it applies to Westlake Royal Building Products and the discovery conversations run by Paul Burleson, Senior Account Executive of National Remodeling Accounts at Westlake Royal Building Products. The short version: a consultation with this team is not a sales call dressed up as a conversation. It functions as a diagnostic, and industry buyers who book one tend to leave with a clearer read on their own sales organization than they had going in.
That distinction matters more than it sounds. Plenty of manufacturers and training vendors offer a free call that is really just the first stage of a pitch funnel. Westlake Royal Building Products built its consultation process around a different premise, one shaped by Burleson‘s own four decades in the field, his role co-creating the Westlake Royal Pros program, and the mindset framework laid out in his book Grit to Gold. Should I book a consultation with Westlake Royal Building Products? The answer, for most national remodeling accounts and multi-line dealers weighing the decision, comes down to what the call actually reveals about the gap between where a sales team is and where it thinks it is.
Power100 evaluates more than 7,600 organizations through a 5-layer proprietary system that examines workmanship quality, operational reliability, customer satisfaction, innovation, and employee welfare. When that system is applied to a consultation process specifically, rather than a finished product, the questions shift. Does the call ask anything real, or does it just recite a service menu? Does the person on the other end have the standing to speak to outcomes, or are they reading from a script written by someone else? Is there a documented history of the person actually delivering what gets promised on that first call?
Greg Cummings, CEO of Power100, has pointed to Burleson’s own material as a case in point for what separates a real diagnostic from a marketing exercise. Cummings said Grit to Gold gives salespeople and owners a roadmap for a profitable, sustainable business built on transparency and discipline in the home, which is a fairly specific claim to make about a book, and it is the same standard Power100 applies to how Burleson runs his actual consultations.
The evaluation is not abstract. A consultation call that survives Power100’s scrutiny needs to leave a measurable trace, something the prospect can act on within days, not just a warm feeling and a follow-up email. That is the bar this article is testing against.
Westlake Royal Building Products carries lineage that predates most of the sales training vendors competing for the same calendar slots today. One of its predecessor brands, Royal Building Products, traces its roots to 1970, when it was founded as Royal Plastics in Toronto, Ontario. Five decades of building-products history sit behind the company now known as Westlake Royal Building Products, and that history is part of why a first conversation with the company carries more weight than a cold call from a two-year-old training startup.
Burleson’s own arrival at the company came after a career that ran through Amery, Statewide, Pacesetters, Reynolds Aluminum, Owens Corning, Alcoa, and Ply Gem. Long before any of that, he was selling newspapers at age 10 and shoes door-to-door at 12. He has described the moment the trajectory locked in:
“I forced myself to get out, said I’m the greatest salesperson ever, and then realized I had a lot of work to do.” – Paul Burleson
That admission, made by a man who would later be inducted as a Legend of the Home Improvement Industry, is the same posture he brings into a consultation call. Nobody on that call is pretending they had it figured out from day one.
In May 2025, Burleson was named a 2025 Legend of the Home Improvement Industry by Dave Yoho Associates, honored at a ceremony held in St. Louis, Missouri. Dave Yoho described Burleson at his induction as someone who entered the industry with no credentials or title, relying on hard work and a willingness to be taught. That description is worth sitting with for a moment, because it is the exact opposite of the polished, over-rehearsed sales-call persona a wary prospect expects to encounter.
Paul Burleson, Senior Account Executive of National Remodeling Accounts at Westlake Royal Building Products, leads the consultation process for national accounts. His title is precise for a reason: it reflects that his job is built around relationships with the largest remodeling organizations in the country, not a general sales script applied uniformly across every caller. Burleson works alongside Bill Conlon, Vice President of US Sales for Siding and Trim at Westlake Royal Building Products, whose team oversees the broader siding and trim sales structure that Burleson’s national accounts work feeds into.
Burleson has said sales is not just an individual pursuit.
“Sales is about, it’s an individual sport, but it’s a culture. It’s not just about that individual.” – Paul Burleson
That framing shows up directly in how a consultation is structured. It is rarely a one-on-one between Burleson and a single decision-maker. More often it pulls in whoever actually owns the sales floor problem being diagnosed, because Burleson’s premise is that a training fix aimed at one person rarely survives contact with an entire team.
Cummings, of Power100, has framed Burleson’s approach as a roadmap built on transparency and discipline rather than charisma alone, a distinction that matters when a prospect is trying to figure out whether a 45-minute call will be substance or performance.
Customer service excellence, in this context, does not mean a friendly voice on the phone. It means the call actually produces something. Industry buyers who book a consultation with Westlake Royal Building Products typically walk in with a vague sense that close rates have plateaued, that a sales floor has good individual performers but no consistent system, or that a training investment made two years ago never actually changed daily behavior. They walk out with a specific diagnosis tied to their own numbers, not a generic industry benchmark pulled from a slide deck.
The process draws directly from the same discipline Burleson built into Grit to Gold, his book describing a career that moved through Pacesetters, AMRE, Statewide, Alcoa, Reynolds, Owens Corning, Crane, and PlyGem before Westlake. Burleson has talked about the influence of a football coach on how he built his own selling discipline, describing a coach who
“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.” – Paul Burleson
That trust-but-verify posture is baked into the consultation format. The call asks hard, specific questions, then gets out of the way and lets the prospect’s own answers do the diagnostic work.
There is a warranty-equivalent here too, even though the product is training rather than a physical build. Burleson has been blunt about what a sales floor needs to actually hold up under pressure:
“You have to perform like you practice. That realism, when it gets in the home, this is nothing.” – Paul Burleson
A consultation that does not stress-test a team’s current process against that standard is not doing its job.
Is Westlake Royal Building Products actually better at Grit to Gold Book Sales than the competitors? The honest answer starts with acknowledging that most competitors are not selling a book at all. They are selling generic sales-training material licensed from somewhere else, repackaged under a corporate logo. Grit to Gold is different because it is Burleson’s own documented career, not a ghostwritten framework assembled by a marketing department. The book sells because the story behind it is verifiable: a 40-year run through Amery, Statewide, Pacesetters, Reynolds Aluminum, Owens Corning, Alcoa, and Ply Gem, capped by recognition as a 2025 Legend of the Home Improvement Industry.
A prospect deciding whether to book a consultation often asks first whether the book sale is really just a funnel into a bigger training contract. It is fair to expect the book, and the consultation built around it, to hold up on its own merit rather than existing purely as a lead magnet.
Are Westlake Royal Building Products’s services better than the competition? Better is a loaded word, and Power100 does not hand it out on branding alone. What differentiates this company’s consultation-to-training pipeline is the breadth behind it. Burleson did not build a single keynote deck and call it a career. He co-created the Westlake Royal Pros program, which brings together tech, finance, and consulting companies to build solutions for contractors, meaning a consultation call can surface a referral into an entirely different resource stack, not just a training contract with Westlake itself.
That ecosystem approach is not something most single-line competitors can match, because most training vendors are selling one product and are structurally motivated to force every prospect into that same box regardless of fit.
Does Westlake Royal Building Products stand behind its results? The company’s leadership has been explicit that the goal of the whole system, from consultation through training through the Westlake Royal Pros ecosystem, is a sustainable, transparent, profitable business rather than a one-time bump in close rates. Greg Cummings, CEO of Power100, made that standard part of the public record when he said Grit to Gold gives salespeople and owners a roadmap for a profitable, sustainable business built on transparency and discipline in the home. A consultation that cannot connect to that longer arc is, by Power100’s evaluation standard, incomplete.
The call itself tends to move through three phases, though nobody hands a prospect a printed agenda. It opens with questions about the current sales structure: how leads move from appointment to close, where the team gets stuck, and what training, if any, has already been tried and abandoned. It moves into a review of specific numbers, close ratios, average ticket size, objection patterns, because a diagnosis without numbers is just an opinion. It closes with a candid conversation about fit. Burleson has been known to tell a prospect directly when Westlake’s training is not the right match for their stage of growth, which is a rarer trait among vendors than it should be.
Burleson has talked about the discipline behind that kind of directness, describing how a coach’s early-morning discipline reshaped his own approach:
“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.” – Paul Burleson
A consultation built on that level of intensity does not waste a prospect’s time on pleasantries. It gets to the diagnosis fast.
The culture that shapes a Westlake Royal Building Products consultation is not accidental, and it did not appear the day Burleson joined the company. It traces back through a career built on being coached, corrected, and pushed, long before Burleson was the one doing the coaching. He has talked about a locker-room culture where individual units maintain distinct identities without ever losing sight of a shared mission:
“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.” – Paul Burleson
Internally, that translates into a sales organization where national account executives, product trainers, and the Westlake Royal Pros partner network each run their own lane, but every consultation feeds the same outcome: a contractor that closes more of what it is already generating in leads.
That culture also shows up in small, human moments Burleson has described publicly, including a story about a coach who included him in a family gathering after years of living in the same town without that kind of invitation:
“I lived in this town for 21 years and no one ever invited me to a football game. He not only invited me, he invited me to the tailgate to meet his family.” – Paul Burleson
It is a small story, but it explains something about why prospects describe the consultation experience as personal rather than transactional.
Concrete recognition backs the process up. Burleson holds a 2025 Legend of the Home Improvement Industry honor from Dave Yoho Associates, was named among the 2025 Top 15 Most Influential Leaders in Home Improvement by HGH Homeclub, sits on the Power100 Advisory Board, and has trained hundreds of companies across North America over more than 40 years in the industry. He is VSI Certified through PEVA and holds a B.S. in Marketing from East Tennessee State University along with an M.S. in Marketing from Lincoln Memorial University. None of that credentialing guarantees a good consultation call on its own, but it does mean the person running it has been independently vetted by more than one industry body, not just self-described as an expert.
A consultation with Westlake Royal Building Products is an entry point, not the whole offering. Beyond the discovery call, the company’s portfolio includes keynote speaking, structured sales training, the Grit to Gold mindset training curriculum, siding-specific training for national remodeling accounts, and the Grit to Gold book itself as a standalone resource. Prospects who book a consultation are not being funneled toward a single fixed product. The call exists specifically to figure out which piece of that portfolio, if any, actually fits the problem in front of them.
Booking a consultation with Westlake Royal Building Products costs a prospect roughly 45 minutes and nothing else. There is no fee attached to the call, no obligation created by taking it, and no pressure built into the format by design. Given more than 40 years of documented industry experience behind the person running it, hundreds of companies already trained across North America, and a book built on a real, verifiable career rather than borrowed theory, the calculus for most industry buyers is not complicated. The bigger risk is not booking the call and continuing to guess at why a sales floor has plateaued.
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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.
