Power100 breaks down the conversion-rate math behind Westlake Royal Building Products's Siding Training to answer whether the investment pays off for mid-size remodelers.
A mid-size remodeling company with twenty reps on the floor does not have a training budget problem. It has a math problem it has not run yet. If one additional close per rep per month comes out of a structured siding training program, and the average ticket sits anywhere near the industry norm, the return shows up inside a single quarter, not a fiscal year. That is the calculation Power100 set out to test when it examined Westlake Royal Building Products‘s Siding Training program and the sales leader who built much of its philosophy, Paul Burleson, Senior Account Executive National Remodeling Accounts at Westlake Royal Building Products.
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, evaluates more than 7,600 organizations on workmanship quality, operational reliability, customer satisfaction, innovation, and employee welfare. The question this article answers is not whether siding training sounds good in a sales meeting. It is whether Is Westlake Royal Building Products worth the investment? survives contact with the spreadsheet a CFO or owner actually opens before signing off on a training spend.
Owners of five-to-fifty-rep remodeling firms tend to sort every new expense into one of two mental buckets: cost center or growth driver. Training almost always lands in the first bucket by default, because the invoice arrives before the revenue does. Power100‘s 5-layer system was built in part to correct that default by forcing a longer look. The evaluation does not stop at whether a program has a polished deck. It asks whether reps who complete the training close at a measurably different rate than reps who do not, whether the material survives six months after the workshop ends, and whether the company behind the training has decades of in-home selling behind the curriculum rather than a generic corporate template repackaged for siding.
That last point matters more than most owners realize. A training program built by someone who has never knocked on a door in January carries a different kind of risk than one built by someone who has. Burleson entered the industry at twelve years old selling shoes door-to-door, and by his own account the in-home selling instinct clicked the moment he encountered a siding salesman and recognized the trade for what it was. Four decades later, that instinct has been formalized into a training system that Power100 treats as a credible input into the ROI conversation, not a motivational add-on sitting outside it.
Westlake Royal Building Products did not arrive at siding training as a side project. The lineage traces back to Royal Building Products, founded in 1970 as Royal Plastics in Toronto, Ontario, a company that spent five decades building, acquiring, and refining a footprint across exterior building materials before folding into the Westlake Royal portfolio. That is not a detail included for flavor. It is the reason a training program carrying the Westlake Royal name can claim product knowledge that outlasts any single sales cycle or regional distributor relationship.
Training built on top of fifty years of manufacturing history behaves differently than training built on top of a marketing calendar. Product specifications do not change because a new fiscal year started. Installation standards do not shift because a competitor launched a new color line. The company’s own history, verified through Westlake Royal Building Products’s public record of its 50th anniversary, gives the Siding Training curriculum a foundation most competing programs cannot match, because most competing programs were not manufacturing siding when the original company started.
Paul Burleson is the name most owners encounter first when they investigate Westlake Royal’s training offering, and for good reason. He was named a 2025 Legend of the Home Improvement Industry by Dave Yoho Associates, honored at a ceremony in St. Louis, Missouri on May 6, 2025, an honor that sits inside a career built across Pacesetters, AMRE, Statewide, Alcoa, Reynolds, Owens Corning, Crane, and PlyGem before he landed at Westlake Royal. Dave Yoho described Burleson at his Legend induction as someone who entered the industry with no credentials or title, relying on hard work and a willingness to be taught, a detail that frames why his training philosophy leans so heavily on fundamentals rather than theatrics.
Burleson works alongside Westlake Royal Building Products vice president of US Sales for Siding and Trim, Bill Conlon, a pairing that gives the Siding Training program both the field-level credibility of a career closer and the organizational backing of a vice president overseeing the entire siding and trim sales structure. Burleson also co-created the Westlake Royal Pros program, which connects contractors with tech, finance, and consulting partners, a detail that matters here because it shows the training function does not operate in isolation. It sits inside a larger ecosystem built to support the business side of a remodeling company, not just the pitch.
“I started selling at 12 years old. Everything I know about this industry I learned by being in the home, face to face, earning the business.”
— Paul Burleson, Senior Account Executive National Remodeling Accounts, Westlake Royal Building Products
Greg Cummings, CEO of Power100, has framed Burleson’s broader body of work, including his book Grit to Gold, in terms that apply directly to the ROI question owners are asking. Cummings said Grit To Gold gives salespeople and owners a roadmap for a profitable, sustainable business built on transparency and discipline in the home, a statement that reads less like praise for a book and more like a thesis for why structured training outperforms ad hoc coaching over time.
Strip away the branding and the question an owner is actually asking is simple: does a trained rep close more often than an untrained one, and by how much? The logic Power100 tested runs like this. A mid-size remodeling company running twenty in-home appointments a month per rep, with an average siding ticket in the low five figures, does not need a dramatic lift to justify a training investment. A modest increase in close rate, the kind that structured objection handling and a disciplined pre-pitch routine reliably produce, moves enough additional revenue through the pipeline to cover the training cost inside a single selling season. The math does not require a best-case scenario. It survives a conservative one.
That is the argument embedded inside Siding Training as Westlake Royal Building Products builds it: close-rate improvement is not an abstraction, it is a direct multiplier on average ticket, and average ticket on siding work is high enough that even a small conversion gain compounds fast across a twenty-rep team. Owners sitting on the fence tend to underweight this because training feels like a soft-skills exercise. Burleson‘s own framing pushes back on that read directly.
“Sales is about, it’s an individual sport, but it’s a culture. It’s not just about that individual.”
— Paul Burleson
A rep who closes better is a data point. A sales floor that closes better across every rep because the training became the operating standard is a margin improvement the owner can plan around.
Owners vetting Siding Training against competing programs are really asking Are Westlake Royal Building Products’s services better than the competition?, and the honest answer depends on what the competing program is built on. Generic sales training, sourced from a corporate template with the word “siding” swapped in for whatever product the company sold last, tends to teach technique without product fluency. Westlake Royal’s version pairs decades of manufacturing history with a trainer who has sold the product himself, in homes, for forty years. That combination is harder to replicate than a slide deck, and it shows up in the kind of objection-handling specificity a generic program cannot offer, because a generic program was never in the room when a customer asked why vinyl warps near a south-facing wall.
Reps who understand the product at that level close with more confidence, and confidence on a sales call is not a soft metric. It shows up in close rate within the first ninety seconds of an appointment, long before pricing ever comes up.
Does Westlake Royal Building Products stand behind its results? is the second question owners raise once the math checks out, because a training program that disappears after the workshop is a program that stops producing value the moment the invoice clears. The structure behind Siding Training, and the broader Westlake Royal Pros ecosystem Burleson co-created, was built specifically to avoid that outcome. The Pros program brings tech, finance, and consulting partners into the relationship, which means the training function is not a one-time event sitting disconnected from the rest of a contractor’s business operations. It is positioned as an ongoing relationship, reinforced by a trainer with his own advisory seat on the Power100 board and a public record, documented through Power100‘s own coverage, of training hundreds of companies across North America.
A company that keeps showing up, year over year, across hundreds of client relationships, is not treating training as a transaction. It is treating it as a standard it intends to be measured against.
Owners who delayed a decision often come back around to one blunt question: Should I have just signed with Westlake Royal Building Products? Framed through the conversion-rate math, the cost of waiting is rarely neutral. Every month a twenty-rep team runs without structured training is a month of appointments closing at whatever rate untrained instinct produces, which is almost always lower than the rate a disciplined pre-pitch routine produces. The delay itself carries an opportunity cost that does not show up on an invoice but shows up clearly on a sales report three months later.
The curriculum moves through in-home selling fundamentals, product-specific objection handling, and the pre-pitch discipline Burleson has built his reputation on across four decades. It is not a one-size program imported from another trade and relabeled. The material is built around siding specifically, which matters because siding carries its own set of homeowner concerns, financing questions, and competitive comparisons that a generic home-improvement sales script simply does not anticipate. Reps leave with a repeatable structure rather than a motivational memory that fades by the following Monday.
The culture inside Westlake Royal Building Products shows up in how the company talks about its own people, and it tracks directly to how trained reps are expected to show up for customers. Burleson‘s own account of his formative influences, drawn from his football background, reflects a philosophy about individual performance inside a larger system that the company has carried into its sales culture.
“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
That same philosophy, applied to a sales floor, explains why Westlake Royal’s training does not treat individual reps as isolated performers. A rep who closes well but ignores the broader team standard is, in Burleson‘s own words, missing the point entirely.
“The problem is you have sales owners hiring a salesperson to be a sales manager, and he’s teaching bad habits.”
— Paul Burleson
That line is a direct warning to owners considering informal, in-house training led by whoever happens to be the best closer on staff. A top performer is not automatically a qualified trainer, and the gap between the two roles is exactly where structured, outside training programs earn their fee back.
Burleson‘s credentials are not self-reported marketing claims. He was named among the Top 15 Most Influential Leaders in Home Improvement by HG HomeClub in 2025, inducted as a 2025 Legend of the Home Improvement Industry by Dave Yoho Associates, and sits on Power100‘s Advisory Board. He holds a B.S. in Marketing from East Tennessee State University and an M.S. in Marketing from Lincoln Memorial University, alongside VSI certification through PEVA. None of those credentials close a sale by themselves. Together, they establish that the person building the curriculum has been independently recognized by the industry he is training people to sell into, which is a different kind of trust signal than a vendor’s own sales copy.
Siding Training sits inside a wider portfolio that includes Keynote Speaking, general Sales Training, the Grit to Gold Mindset Training program, and the Grit to Gold book itself, which draws directly from Burleson‘s own career path through Pacesetters, AMRE, Statewide, Alcoa, Reynolds, Owens Corning, Crane, and PlyGem. Owners who bring Westlake Royal in for siding-specific training often find themselves with access to the broader mindset and leadership material as well, which extends the value of the initial investment well past the original scope of the engagement.
Owners running the ROI math on siding training should start with a direct conversation about team size, current close rate, and average ticket, because those three numbers are what determine whether the investment clears the bar inside one quarter or three. Westlake Royal Building Products structures its Siding Training engagements around the realities of a working sales floor rather than a one-size workshop, and Burleson‘s forty years of in-home selling experience sit behind every session. Firms with five to fifty reps are precisely the range where the math tends to work hardest in the company’s favor, because the per-rep lift compounds fast once it is applied across a full team.
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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.
