Top 10 Tips for Roofing Contractors

Any roofing contractor faces a minefield of challenges everyday. But, our top 10 tips for roofing contractors can help you avoid or mitigate many of them.

Tend to Sales Basics

Every new day is a new opportunity to reinvigorate sales. Keep your website and sales materials up-to-date, and make sure phone calls get answered quickly. Put special emphasis on optimizing your website for local search.

Know Your Ideal Customer

You can waste a lot of time and energy trying to be a roofer for all people, and for all types of projects. Instead, focus your sales and operations where you have the best success. Find that out by carefully analyzing projects over time and rating them on a simple number scale. Rate them based on criteria like profitability, how well they matched your company’s expertise, and how well you met the project goals.

Manage Change Effectively

The only thing that’s for sure is that everything will change, often by the moment. If you’re smart, you’ll find opportunities in change by looking beyond the obvious pain points. Just consider the typical construction business cycle with its well documented ups and downs. You might get tempted to reduce sales or staff at the beginning of a downturn. However, when you do that, you end up limiting the sizes and types of projects you can take on. So when deciding how to respond to change, consider your previous responses and then maybe, change it up.

Stay Up-to-date on Everything About Roofing

If you want to offer your customers the best roofing solutions for their needs, then you need to know the materials and processes at your disposal. New research on roofing provides valuable information you can use to improve project outcomes. Stay up-to-date by following roofing publications and roofing associations.

Have Legal Counsel

Construction is a risk management business, and roofers get risks passed through to them by other project participants. Get competent legal counsel on your side. Build the costs into your overhead so that every contract gets the scrutiny it needs to minimize the risk you have to carry.

Deeply Qualify Your Subs and Suppliers

You can remove many headaches when you take the time to work with professionals. But since every sub will claim they’re the best, you need to dig deeply to find out if it’s true. Talk to others they’ve worked with, ask for financials, and check other available records like the Better Business Bureau, banks, and court records. Check up on your suppliers too. Can they deliver what you need, when you need it, and at the quality you require? And, can they do it consistently?

Take Care of Your Employees

Make safety the top priority, and make sure people are covered for life’s unexpected events. But also, tend to their career growth needs. Find out from them what they aspire to, and help them map their progression. Don’t overlook training, or your workforce will eventually become obsolete.

Make Quality Control Immediate

Put an expert on the roof to approve, or direct a redo of any critical installations like skylights, flashings, chimneys, and all penetrations. Identify other operations where you can’t afford to go back and redo something once work has moved on. Add those to your list of immediate quality control items.

Develop New Revenue Streams

A good place for you to start is with roof maintenance. For many installations, regular maintenance extends the roof’s life. Your maintenance activities become a profit center while saving the client money in the long term.

Improve Your Estimating

By one account, 90% of roofers underbid jobs. That’s because they rely on a price per square, which is really only an averaging exercise. Per square prices might make it easy to hit a competitive number, but your overhead costs are not the same as your competitors’ overhead costs. Your price per square needs to include your unique overhead costs.

Do you have some tips for roofers? Share them with us by leaving a comment!

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