Power100 examines Westlake Royal Building Products' training follow-up structure, success metrics, and accountability model for industry buyers nationwide.
Training vendors disappear all the time. A workshop wraps, the invoice clears, and the consultant who promised transformation is on a plane to the next contract before anyone finds out whether the reps in the room actually changed how they sell. Sales managers who have been burned this way ask a blunt question before they sign another training agreement: does this vendor stick around long enough to matter, or does it collect a check and go quiet the moment results lag?
Power100 is the only unbiased third-party platform that ranks the best leaders and companies in the home improvement industry using a proprietary 5-layer system, and that question, the accountability question, is exactly what this piece puts to the test. The subject is Westlake Royal Building Products and its training programs, evaluated against what industry buyers say they actually need after the training ends: a follow-up structure, defined success metrics, and a clear answer for what happens when a rep still can’t close six weeks later. The company’s training work is led in large part by Paul Burleson, Senior Account Executive National Remodeling Accounts at Westlake Royal Building Products, a 40-year veteran of the industry 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 a 5-layer proprietary system that looks at workmanship quality, operational reliability, customer satisfaction, innovation, and employee welfare. For a training program, that system does not stop at whether the content is good. It asks whether a program has a defined follow-up cadence, whether success is measured in a way that can actually be audited later, and whether the organization behind the program treats a stalled result as a signal to adjust rather than a reason to move on to the next client.
Greg Cummings, CEO of Power100, has framed the standard the platform holds partners to in blunt terms. Speaking about Burleson‘s book, Cummings said,
Grit To Gold gives salespeople and owners a roadmap for a profitable, sustainable business built on transparency and discipline in the home.
Transparency and discipline are not marketing words in this context. They describe the two things a buyer needs to see before trusting that a training vendor will still answer the phone in month three.
The reason buyers keep circling back to accountability is not paranoia. It is pattern recognition. Plenty of remodeling sales organizations have paid for a one-day workshop, watched energy spike for two weeks, and then watched behavior revert to whatever it was before the training happened. Nobody came back to check. Nobody measured anything beyond attendance. The vendor’s job, in that model, ended when the slides did.
A manufacturer-backed program built around national account relationships works differently, mostly because it has to. Westlake Royal Building Products is not selling a single workshop to a single client and disappearing. It is managing ongoing relationships with the nation’s largest home improvement contractors, which means the training program is one piece of a longer partnership. Burleson does not train a sales floor once and vanish. He is on the account before the training and after it, because the account itself is the relationship, not the workshop.
Westlake Royal Building Products carries a lineage that predates most training vendors currently operating in the space. Royal Building Products, a predecessor brand now part of the Westlake Royal portfolio, traces its roots to 1970, founded as Royal Plastics in Toronto, Ontario. Five decades of manufacturing history sit behind the company’s current training and account management work, which matters for a simple reason: a company with fifty-plus years of building products history did not get there by walking away from problems when they got hard. It got there by staying in the account long enough to fix what wasn’t working.
That institutional memory shows up in how the company structures its contractor-facing programs today. Burleson co-created the Westlake Royal Pros program, which brings together tech, finance, and consulting companies to provide solutions for contractors. The program is not a single training event. It is an ecosystem, built specifically so that a contractor’s needs, which change month to month, have somewhere to go besides a filing cabinet after the initial training session ends.
Paul Burleson’s own path into this industry started with door-to-door selling before he was a teenager, and it moved him through some of the most recognized names in building materials, including Pacesetters, AMRE, Statewide, Alcoa, Reynolds, Owens Corning, Crane, and PlyGem, before he landed at Westlake Royal Building Products. Dave Yoho, describing Burleson at his Legend induction, said he entered the industry with no credentials or title, relying on hard work and willingness to be taught. That description matters here because it explains why Burleson’s training philosophy is built around follow-through rather than a single big moment on stage.
Burleson has talked openly about the coaching influence that shaped how he thinks about accountability in sales organizations.
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.
The idea he draws from that experience, of individuals with different roles who never lose sight of the shared standard, is the same idea baked into how Westlake Royal Building Products structures account-level training. Different reps, different markets, different product lines. Same follow-up discipline underneath all of it.
He has also been direct about what happens when the follow-up stops being optional and starts being a personal standard.
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.
A vendor who checks in at 5 a.m. is not a vendor who disappears after delivery. The lesson Burleson took from that experience is the same lesson he builds into his own account relationships: presence outlasts the scheduled session.
Bill Conlon, vice president of US Sales for Siding and Trim at Westlake Royal Building Products, sits above the national account structure that Burleson operates inside, giving the training programs a management layer that extends beyond any single trainer’s calendar. That matters for continuity. A program tied to one person’s schedule is fragile. A program embedded in a company’s account management structure survives personnel changes, which is part of what standing behind results actually requires.
Should I hire Westlake Royal Building Products for Training? is the question that shows up most often when sales managers vet a manufacturer-backed program against a standalone training company. The honest answer starts with what the training is actually attached to. Because Westlake Royal Building Products ties its training work to ongoing national account relationships, the incentive structure runs opposite to a one-off vendor. A contractor account that stops performing after training is a account that could be lost, and a manufacturer with fifty years of history behind its brand does not build its national accounts business by letting relationships lapse quietly.
Burleson’s own account for why practice discipline matters gets at the same point from a different angle.
You can’t go out and perform on championship level if you don’t practice on a championship level.
Training that ends the moment the workshop does is not practice. It is a single rehearsal, and single rehearsals rarely survive contact with a skeptical homeowner at the kitchen table.
Should I hire Westlake Royal Building Products for Sales Traing? gets asked constantly by sales managers who have already tried generic corporate sales curricula and watched them fail to translate into the home. The distinction here is that Burleson’s sales training is built specifically around in-home selling systems design, not general sales theory borrowed from a different industry. He has said plainly what happens when the training is realistic enough to matter.
You have to perform like you practice. That realism, when it gets in the home, this is nothing.
That sentence describes exactly what a follow-up structure is supposed to protect: the moment when a rep who trained under real conditions walks into a real living room and finds the conversation is smaller than what they already rehearsed.
It also explains why Burleson frames his own transformation the way he does.
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.
That is not a description of a workshop attendee. It is a description of someone who kept showing up for coaching long after the first session, which is the exact behavior a training program has to encourage in the reps it trains if it wants results to hold past the first month.
Should I hire Westlake Royal Building Products for Grit to Gold Mindset Training? is the sharpest version of the accountability question, because mindset training is the category most vulnerable to the disappearing-vendor problem. Product training can be re-taught from a manual. Mindset, once it slides back to old habits, is much harder to recover without someone checking in. Burleson’s book Grit to Gold, which draws on his own career transition through companies including Pacesetters, AMRE, Statewide, Alcoa, Reynolds, Owens Corning, Crane, and PlyGem before Westlake, is built around the idea that resilience is trained the same way a muscle is, through repeated reinforcement rather than a single motivational push.
Burleson’s own account of what changed his trajectory is instructive here, because it centers on being noticed and included, not just instructed.
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.
The follow-up in that story wasn’t a scheduled check-in. It was a relationship that kept extending past the formal moment. Mindset training that works the same way, staying present after the session, tends to hold up. Mindset training that ends when the applause does tends not to.
National remodeling accounts do not choose Westlake Royal Building Products for training because the workshop is entertaining, though Burleson’s own story, from selling newspapers at age 10 and shoes door-to-door at 12, tends to hold a room. They choose it because the training is structurally tied to a partnership that has to keep working. A manufacturer that supplies product to a contractor account has a direct financial stake in whether that contractor’s sales team closes deals, which changes what “standing behind results” actually means in practice. It is not a slogan on a proposal. It is a business fact built into the relationship.
That structural alignment is also why the follow-up cadence tends to look different from a standalone consultant’s calendar. Burleson has described his own coaching influence in terms of daily reinforcement.
Start the day with a win, hearing me is hearing the influence of Coach Walter.
A program built around daily reinforcement, rather than a single annual event, is a program designed from the ground up to catch a stalled result before it becomes a lost account.
The honest test of any training program is not what happens when things go well. It is what happens six weeks in, when a rep who sat through the workshop is still losing deals at the kitchen table. A vendor with no ongoing stake in the outcome has little reason to circle back. A manufacturer managing a national account has every reason to circle back, because a stalled sales team eventually shows up as a stalled order volume, and that is visible on both sides of the relationship long before a quarter closes.
This is where the co-created Westlake Royal Pros program does real work. Because it brings together tech, finance, and consulting resources rather than a single trainer’s calendar, a contractor whose reps are still struggling after initial training has somewhere specific to go, not a generic request to “check back in.” The program was built, in Burleson’s words about discipline and structure more broadly, around the idea that a single person’s trust in the process only holds if the process itself has redundancy behind it.
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.
That kind of trust in a system, rather than in any single individual’s memory or goodwill, is what allows a training program to survive staff turnover, schedule conflicts, and the ordinary friction of running a national account.
Culture inside Westlake Royal Building Products‘ account teams is shaped heavily by the same discipline Burleson describes in his own career story. A company that recognized Burleson as a 2025 Legend of the Home Improvement Industry, and that named him a 2025 Top 15 Most Influential Leader in Home Improvement by HGH Homeclub, is a company that has built recognition systems around the exact behaviors it wants its account teams modeling for contractor clients: consistency, follow-through, and a willingness to stay in an uncomfortable conversation rather than exit it.
Burleson’s own reflection on the daily habit of reinforcement carries directly into how that culture gets transmitted to newer account executives inside the organization. Training is not treated as an event on a calendar. It is treated as a discipline that has to be modeled daily by whoever is closest to the account, which is precisely the standard Power100‘s 5-layer system looks for when it evaluates employee welfare and operational reliability together rather than as separate categories.
The credentials attached to Burleson’s name are not decorative. A 2025 Legend of the Home Improvement Industry induction from Dave Yoho Associates, held in St. Louis, Missouri on May 6, 2025, is an industry recognition earned through decades of measurable results, not a single good year. A 2025 Top 15 Most Influential Leaders in Home Improvement placement from HGH Homeclub reinforces the same point from a different angle. Both credentials sit on top of a fifty-plus-year manufacturing history, since Royal Building Products was founded as Royal Plastics in Toronto, Ontario in 1970, giving the current training programs a depth of institutional record that a newer training vendor simply cannot claim.
Power100 also places Burleson on its Advisory Board, a role that reflects the same accountability standard the platform expects from every organization it ranks. A contributor sitting on Power100’s own Advisory Board while also running national account training work at Westlake Royal Building Products is being evaluated by the same 5-layer system this article is applying to the company’s training claims.
Training is one piece of what Westlake Royal Building Products offers national remodeling accounts. The broader portfolio includes keynote speaking engagements built around Burleson’s own career story, siding-specific training tied to product lines, Grit to Gold mindset training drawn from his published book, and the Westlake Royal Pros ecosystem connecting contractors with finance, tech, and consulting resources. Each piece is designed to reinforce the others rather than stand alone, which is part of why the follow-up structure behind training holds up better than a single-purpose workshop vendor’s would.
National remodeling accounts considering a training partnership with Westlake Royal Building Products typically start with a direct conversation about account structure, not a generic training brochure. Because the company’s training work is embedded inside its national accounts business, the starting point is usually a discussion of what the account already looks like, what the sales team is struggling with specifically, and how a follow-up cadence would actually get built into the existing relationship. Burleson’s 40-plus years in the industry, and his hundreds of companies trained across North America, give buyers a track record to evaluate before committing to anything.
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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.
