Two people wanted credit for the same solar referral. Somewhere between a grateful customer, an eager salesperson, and the promised reward, the truth had become a matter of opinion. Jamey Vumback, then running a solar business, saw more than an awkward conversation. He saw revenue moving through a company without a receipt.
This was 2013, when his business already got roughly a quarter of its work from referrals. The number looked respectable until he considered everything it failed to count. Customers were recommending the company. Salespeople were asking, sometimes. Names passed through conversations and landed in notebooks, inboxes, memories, or nowhere. The best leads in the building were also the least supervised.
Vumback's response was characteristic: give the handoff a system. He imagined a branded mobile app where customers could submit a name, watch its progress, and receive a reward. The contractor could see the chain rather than referee competing recollections. In 2014, the internal answer became a standalone company called Get The Referral.
“There's got to be a better way to use technology to manage and track referrals.”Jamey Vumback
Chapter oneBefore the app, there were poles and phone books
The route to referral software did not begin in software. Vumback has described early telecommunications work that involved climbing electrical poles, entering manholes, and digging cable. It is wonderfully literal preparation for a career spent thinking about connections. He progressed into sales leadership and served as a regional vice president at AT&T Advertising & Publishing from 2005 to 2008.
That era supplied a commercial education at scale: sales targets, teams, advertising, and the machinery required to keep many people moving in one direction. From 2008, he became a principal and partner at Valley Unique / RE)POWER Fresno, where the lessons acquired a contractor's dust. Solar customers were expensive to find. Margins could tighten. Cold calls, direct mail, radio, and television demanded cash before offering certainty.
Word-of-mouth behaved differently. A referred prospect arrived carrying borrowed confidence. The first conversation did not need to manufacture credibility from bare ingredients. Yet the industry often managed that valuable introduction with less rigor than it applied to an invoice. Vumback's useful irritation was that something so economically important remained operationally casual.
The operating insightWarm leads still need plumbing
Referrals are often spoken of as a compliment. Vumback speaks of them as a process. The distinction matters. Compliments are pleasant and fleeting. Processes have owners, timestamps, conversion rates, rewards, and follow-up. His company set out to give contractors each of those pieces without sanding away the human reason a recommendation works.
The GTR system grew into a branded homeowner app, a sales-rep app, an administrative dashboard, automated digital rewards, analytics, and integrations with contractor software and CRMs. Roofing, remodeling, windows, solar, pools, and spas became its favored terrain. These are considered purchases, often visible to neighbors, where a completed job can advertise itself up and down a street.
The idea sounds obvious once diagrammed. That is often the fate of good operating ideas. The work lies in persuading a busy sales team to ask, helping a homeowner share without friction, and ensuring the promised reward does not spend six weeks wandering through accounts payable. GTR's partnership with payment provider XTRM addressed that last mile. An XTRM case study reported a 2,400 percent year-over-year increase in referral payments after the integration.
Vumback's larger claim is more interesting than any feature list: a business should treat existing trust as an asset it can maintain. Paid acquisition rents attention from someone else's audience. A referral draws on a relationship the contractor earned. The software acts as a ledger for social capital, though thankfully it does not call itself that at the kitchen table.
The sales lessonAsk before everyone goes home
In a 2021 conversation with contractor marketer Tim Brown, Vumback pressed one of his recurring points: the referral program belongs inside the sales process, early and often. Salespeople commonly hesitate because they have just asked a prospect to buy. Asking for an introduction can feel like returning to the table with a second bill. Waiting feels polite. It also allows enthusiasm to cool and the habit of daily life to resume.
His proposed remedy is procedural rather than pushy. Introduce the program while explaining the customer journey. Mention it again when the customer expresses satisfaction. Let the branded app provide a simple place to act. The request becomes part of how the company works, with timing guided by real moments of approval rather than a desperate final script.
Vumback has framed the economics in terms a salesperson can appreciate. In a 2019 podcast series, he said the ordinary leads he encountered often closed in a 15 to 20 percent range, while referrals could close between 40 and 50 percent and sometimes higher. His point was not that salespeople should work less. Better context lets the same effort travel farther. Ten conversations with people who already understand why the call is happening offer a different working day from ten introductions beginning with suspicion.
Product by conversationThe founder who gives customers the credit
Founders are usually encouraged to narrate products as acts of personal foresight. Vumback volunteers a less theatrical account. “If you look at today's app, almost everything in that app came from our customers,” he has said. The admission reveals how he likes to operate. Build for a real problem, place the tool into actual work, listen when the work objects, and adjust.
That loop changed more than buttons. GTR reduced an onboarding process that once took more than 30 days to as little as five, according to Vumback's 2026 Power100 interview. The company also built ways to activate a contractor's past-customer list, rather than making a new client wait for future jobs before the referral program had anyone to ask.
His sales philosophy similarly favors timing over ceremony. A referral request need not be saved for a grand post-project flourish. Ask when the customer displays genuine satisfaction. Make the program visible early enough that the customer understands it. Keep the company present after the crew leaves. Small prompts preserve a possibility that good intentions routinely misplace.
“Almost everything in that app came from our customers.”Vumback on GTR's product development
Culture as mechanismTrust gets an acronym
As GTR expanded, Vumback gathered the leadership team to answer what culture meant inside the company. They produced TICC: Trust, Innovation, Clarity, and Collaboration. Acronyms can become office wallpaper with astonishing speed, but these four mirror the product's intended behavior. A referral depends on trust. Its capture requires innovation only when the old method fails. Participants need clarity about status and rewards. The whole loop collapses without collaboration.
The company itself remained relatively compact while spreading geographically. It has reported serving contractors across 35 states, Puerto Rico, Canada, and Australia. In 2023, GetTheReferral.com appeared at No. 2,794 on the Inc. 5000. By 2026, Vumback was a regular presence in Power100 conversations about lead costs, profitability, technology, and the health of the home-improvement market.
His public manner is direct and repetitive in the useful sales-leader sense. Referrals arrive with trust. Companies fail to capture them. Systems create follow-through. The message rarely wears a tuxedo. It turns up in a work shirt and asks whether anyone knows last month's referral rate.
What comes nextOwn the loop
Vumback's ambition has widened from the referral form to the customer journey around it. He describes a more unified loop connecting lead, sale, project, review, referral, reward, and repeat business. For a contractor already juggling a CRM, communications tools, photo documentation, review software, payment systems, and spreadsheets, the appeal is plain. Fewer seams mean fewer chances for trust to fall onto the floor.
He also wants sales representatives to cultivate their own networks of advocates. It is a subtle shift in incentives. A rep becomes less dependent on the next purchased lead and more responsible for the relationships created by earlier work. A book of business can begin to behave like a community, provided the company can see and honor the contributions within it.
There is a limit that software cannot cross. It cannot make indifferent work recommendable. It cannot automate affection into existence. Vumback's system begins after the contractor has earned satisfaction, then tries to keep that satisfaction from evaporating into a vague promise to “tell the neighbors.” The human experience supplies the energy. The workflow gives it direction.
That may be the cleanest reading of his career. The technician learned how connections are physically made. The sales executive learned how they create revenue. The contractor discovered how easily they disappear. The founder built a place to put them. One disputed referral, properly followed through, has lasted more than a decade.