Start a Roofing Company

Starting a roofing company can be a very lucrative business and despite what you may think, you can start a roofing company with almost no money by following the steps we will go over in this section. We will outline how to find roofers to work for your company, as well as how you can find customers that need their roofs replaced.

The first thing you will want to do is build a brand and website for your business so that people can get in touch with you for your services. You can go on Chat GPT online and ask it to give you some roofing company names for some ideas. You can also ask it to provide you with a logo for your roofing company based on the name you have chosen. Once you have a logo, you can go on photopea.com to remove the background and download it as a PNG to use for your site and other social platforms. You can check out our section on how to build a professional site to learn how to build a site yourself or you can pay someone on fiverr.com to make it for you. Your site should showcase some nice-looking roofs and talk about the services you offer and the areas that you work in. It should also allow them to easily set up an appointment so that you can come out to give a quote for their roof. You should have them fill out a form with their address, and contact info so that you can reach out and confirm a time you will come out. You should also make sure that your contact info is listed clearly on your site so that they can get in touch with you right away.

The next thing you will want to do is set up an LLC and a business bank account which you can learn all about in our how to start a business section. You will use your business bank account to accept payments for your services and to pay for your shingles, materials and all the other expenses for your roofing company. You can even open a business credit card once you have some income, attach it to your bank for auto withdrawal and start earning points and cashback for all your expenses. You will also want to start thinking about liability insurance for your roofing company if you are going to be hiring your own employees starting out. You can search roofing company liability insurance online and call around for quotes on your business. Once you have all this setup, you should also setup a Google My Business Account and list your business with Google with an address and phone number listed, so that people can find you and leave reviews once you get customers.

Once you have your site and your business entity set up, it is time to find people that will install roofs for you. Even if you have some money saved up already do not jump into spending a fortune on a truck and tools and everything else right away. Instead, you should call around to small roofing companies in your area that will most likely be looking for more work. Look up roofers on Google and Craigslist and call roofers that have good reviews who may want to do work for you. You should negotiate with these roofers and come up with a price that you will pay them per square foot for their work. In today’s day and age you should make sure that you are offering architectural shingles like Owens Corning, GAF or some Tamco shingles so that your customers are getting a quality product that will last. A good deal to set up with a roofer would be anywhere from $2.50-$3.00 per square foot for architectural roofs which should include everything from the materials to the installation itself. You can charge customers and insurance companies as much as $7 per square foot, which leaves you with amazing profit margins without having to do any of the work or maintenance. You should also make sure that the company you end up working with has a warranty on both the shingles themselves and the work and be sure to get this in writing as well.

Now that you have a company that will do the work for you, it is time to find customers for your roofing business. The best way to get customers for roofing is to go to areas that have had storms recently (use a service like Hail Trace to find these) and start knocking on doors to talk to them about their roofs. The best way to get your foot in the door when knocking for roofing is to let them know that you are in the area helping their neighbors and you noticed that they have some storm damage like they did. You can tell them how you have helped a lot of their neighbors through their insurance, so they did not even have to pay for their roof out of pocket but were able to just pay their deductible. This will not always be the case, but it should be enough to peak their interest so that you can set up a time to give them a quote. You should coordinate available times for inspections with the roofer you are working with and make sure they will be available before even knocking on doors. Then you will have them come out and check out the roof for any damage that may be covered by insurance and give a quote for the work. If the roof does have storm damage, they will submit a claim to insurance and see if they will accept liability for the roof cost. If insurance will not cover it, you can work with them on price by allowing them to pay your cost up front and make payments on anything beyond that if they need to. You can also show them how they can get a loan from companies like GreenSky so that they do not have to come out of pocket for the entire roof. Green Sky has an app that they can download on the spot and you can walk them through how to fill out an application very easily.

Once you have started bringing in some money from knocking on your own, you can start hiring on Indeed, Craigslist and in Facebook groups related to roofing. You can check out our full section on hiring and recruiting to get some great tips on this as well. You should focus on creating a business structure focused around your sales team that you build so that they can sell and you can focus on expansion. If you pay well enough per sale, you may be able to find experienced roofing salesmen that you can pay only when they sell a deal. Keep in mind that if you do pay this way, then you should offer them a generous cut to make it worth their wild. You can pay 10% for every sale for example and that will give your reps about $1,000 per sale on average. If they sell just 2 deals per week, they could make 6 figures pretty easily and you can make even more for yourself while outsourcing your work. Once you become profitable with your sales team you can start hiring recruiters and sales managers that you pay salaries to and start growing even faster. Just keep in mind that you should keep your sales and operations teams separate so they focus on selling rather than how easily you are running your business with outsourcing. If you are bringing in people to sell you can take them to lunch for your interviews or rent office spaces for a day on a site like peerspace.com. You can then simply send them an area each day to work in every morning and have them use an app like Spotio (which is free) to track their knocks and contacts. Once you have grown your team enough to warrant a fulltime office space, start by looking in lower middle-class areas near you that you can rent an office space in for cheap. You can look on sites like loopnet.com or contact a realtor to find these offices that are for lease. Just make sure that you are not growing too quickly and that it makes financial sense to rent an office when you are thinking about doing so.

Another way you can find new customers for roofing is by running ads on Yelp and setting up an account with Angie’s list which will allow you to bid on jobs. If you are still outsourcing work, you can charge almost anything above your minimum price and it should be worth your time. Just keep in mind that leads from these places will typically want lower prices than you can charge to door knocked customers unless you are able to get insurance involved. You should check these platforms each day and reach out to new leads as they come in and setting up a time right away to come look at the roof and close the deal.

You can also start by joining all the community groups on Facebook that are in your area so that you can monitor those groups for people asking about roofers. You can have friends comment and respond yourself to build social proof anytime you see a post related to roofing. You can actually use Facebook’s search function to search these groups for terms like roofers or new roof. There are even bots like Groouply.com that will monitor groups and alert you when someone mentions keywords that you give it! When you get an alert from Groouply you can quickly go to the post and respond to the person asking about roofers.

Buying leads is also an effective way to get new customers for your roofing business. I would recommend sticking to the free marketing tactics we have went over already until you have built up some business though, because roofing leads typically cost hundreds of dollars per lead. The most cost-effective lead services for roofing tend to be ones that forward calls to your phone from telemarketers that have gotten them interested. You can pay a subscription for a service like this rather than spending a bunch of money on individual leads. Service Direct is a great company that offers this service, and it tends to give great results if you have the money to start a plan. It can be a bit expensive to set up, but it is much more effective than buying individual leads if you can stay close to your phone and pick up the calls that are forwarded to you.

Once you have grown with your roofing partner and started bringing in good money, you can either simply expand to partnering with roofers in other areas as well (which we will talk about later) or you can begin hiring your own employees so that you can make even more profit on each job. If you want to hire your own employees, you will need liability insurance before even thinking about putting people on a roof. You will also need to buy a truck off Facebook Marketplace which you can get a loan for through your bank if you have been showing steady business income or you can pay employees to use their own vehicle if they have one that fits. You will also need to get a couple nail guns, an air compressor, a hammer tacker stapler, roofing hammers, shingle tear off tools, pry bars, tarps, measuring tapes, a caulking gun, ladders, reciprocating saw and circular saw, tin snips, drills, hard hats, a ladder hoist, roof brackets or toe boards, a magnetic sweeper for picking up nails, a rake, a broom and safety harnesses. This can cost you a lot of money obviously, so make sure that you are ready to take on these expenses if you are ready to start your own crews. You will also need to make sure that you are at a point where you are getting enough new business to keep your workers busy. If your employees don’t have enough work to provide for their families, then they certainly will not stay working for you very long.

Another tip that you can use to get more customers nowadays is to offer solar installation as a service if you are in a state that has a good program. If you are seeing a lot of people put solar on their rooves in your area that is usually a sign that it is worth doing in your state. Solar and roofing go together great because with financing, people save money with solar right away by replacing their energy bills with a cheaper solar bill. You can actually work the roof cost into a solar deal if they need a new roof and they can still save money right away and get a new roof out of it. This is an amazing alternative to getting roofs covered by insurance if they won’t cover it and they won’t have to put any money down at all! Even if you don’t offer solar yourself, make sure that you reach out to every solar company in your area and get in front of decision makers for these companies to offer roofing for their solar business. You can grow a company solely by using this strategy if you offer good prices per square foot to these companies and they will send you all their roofing business if they can get a good cut and you do a good job. You could start making a high 6 figure income just by landing 3 of these solar companies in your area and doing the work or outsourcing it to your roofing partner. You can also apply this same principle to realtors because they work with people moving into new homes that may need a new roof. Make some calls to them as well, send cards and cookies and introduce yourself as a top-quality roofer in your area while offering them a commission on any roofs they help you sell.

The last and arguably most important thing you want to make use of when growing a roofing company is referrals! You should always be sure to follow up with your customers to make sure they are happy with your services and correct anything that they may have had a problem with. Then you can ask them to leave a good review if they had a great experience and ask if they have any family or friends that are also in need of a roof. You can offer them a gift card for a few hundred dollars if they ever do find you a customer and keep communication with them open by checking in and sending cards on holidays. This will make sure that they think of you if anybody mentions needing a roof to them in the future.

Once you have used these industry secrets to grow a profitable roofing business, you can start expanding to new areas. You can continue opening new offices and hiring new employees for these areas, but I recommend going back to the partner approach when starting in new markets. You can always use a combination of these approaches and start with contractors in new areas until you start getting consistent work there. Keep reaching out to roofers in new areas that you have solid plans to market in and making new deals based on the volume you have shown to do in your current market. You can always continue to shop around per square foot pricing to make more money on your jobs as well while you grow and having partners in different locations will allow you to broaden your marketing areas.

If you follow these steps consistently you will be sure to have a thriving roofing company in a very short amount of time compared to most companies that figure it out as they go, and you will be able to relax as you continue to hire employees to cover your day-to-day operations. Be sure to check out our sections on door-to-door sales, marketing in general and our start a home services business section to learn even more tips on how to grow a roofing company as well.