From first inquiry to your first signed project

Everything starts with the dealer inquiry form. Tell us who you are, what trade you work in, and where you operate — the markets you already serve, the customers you already have relationships with, and what you want to add to your offering. We read every inquiry personally; no bots, no auto-responder sequence.

What we are looking for is simpler than most manufacturers admit: a real business, a real customer base, and a crew that takes pride in finished work. You do not need to be an awning company. Our strongest dealers started as deck builders, remodelers, pool contractors, outdoor-living retailers, and general contractors who kept hearing the same question from customers — “how do we shade this?” — and had nothing premium to offer.

Be honest on the form about your service area. It is the single most important field, because step two is a conversation about territory — and the only territories worth building are the ones with room in them.

A member of our dealer team will reach out — by text at (909) 325-3110 or by email from dealer@ajshadesinc.com — to schedule a real conversation. We will ask about your market, your competition, and your goals, and we will tell you honestly what the territory looks like from our side: which nearby markets are open, which are already spoken for, and where the demand is heading.

We recruit deliberately. We do not stack five dealers on the same zip code and let them fight over scraps, because that is how dealer programs die. When we agree on a territory together, it is a territory you can build a business on — with enough rooftops, enough premium buyers, and enough distance from the next partner that you are competing against other brands, not against each other.

This is also the conversation where we cover the business model plainly. Dealers sell AJ Shades products nationwide — product-only and wholesale, fulfilled by trusted local contractors. AJ Shades itself installs only in Southern California (San Diego, Los Angeles, Orange, Riverside, and San Bernardino counties); we never promise installation outside that footprint, and we never ask our dealers to name contractors on our behalf. If that model fits how you already work — you sell and install, we manufacture and support — then the rest is logistics.

Training is built for working contractors, not classroom students. Your crew learns the two product families — motorized power screens and retractable awnings, in open-roll and full-cassette configurations — plus the automation that completes them: wind sensors, LED lighting, and smart-home controls. We cover measuring, mounting, wiring, and the troubleshooting calls that come up most in the first season.

You launch with the tools that close premium buyers: professional photography of real installations (never manufacturer CGI), showroom display guidance so customers can operate a working awning and a working screen before they buy, fabric samples customers can touch, and co-branded quote templates. The single highest-converting sales tool in the program is a working display — set one up and the product sells itself.

Most dealers run their first project within weeks of training. Your first order is supported start to finish: we review the measurements, confirm the specification, and stay available while your crew installs. After that first signed project, you are not a trainee anymore — you are a dealer.

After launch, the dealer team stays reachable for the moments that decide whether a job finishes on schedule: the stucco wall that crumbles behind the bracket, the pergola beam that is not level, the customer who wants the screens tied into an existing smart-home scene. Send photos, get a mounting plan back, keep the job moving. Our technical people have installed the product themselves — you will not get a script reader.

Dealers also get priority access to replacement parts and warranty processing, so a service issue becomes a same-week fix instead of a season-long embarrassment. And when consumer inquiries come to us from your territory, they go to you. We do not compete with our dealers for their own customers — the network only works if every partner believes that, and we prove it with every lead we route.

Growth inside the program is straightforward: sell well, serve well, and your territory grows with you. Dealers who build a reputation for clean installs and honest quoting get first consideration when adjacent markets open. We would rather grow with ten great partners than recruit a hundred average ones.