One Customer at a Time

The first few years of Roof Time were lean ones. Payroll came around every Friday, whether or not the jobs were closed. There was no real ad budget. And, when Stan asked Brad what got him through it, the answer was the philosophy Brad still passes on to newer contractors two decades later. Build the business the only way you can. One happy customer at a time.

Stan pushed on the reputation angle. In an industry with its share of bad actors, what does a young contractor need to know about earning trust? “You only have your integrity until you lose it,” Brad says. “Once you lose it, it’s gone forever.” That was the philosophy that kept Roof Time going. When the referrals started showing up at his door, Brad finally let himself believe he might make it.

A Reality Check from the Gulf Coast

Brad then shared that Roof Time was barely a few months old when Hurricanes Katrina and Rita made landfall on the Gulf Coast within weeks of each other. Brad set up operations in Beaumont, TX, and in New Orleans, LA. Driving into downtown New Orleans, Brad saw sights that were hard to take in. “All the cars had been flooded out and stacked high up underneath the viaducts.” Brad continued, “For the people in the Ninth Ward, their houses were underwater. You would drive down the street, and there would be X’s marked on the door in fluorescent paint, which stood for the number of lives lost.” He had seen storm damage before, but he had not seen anything like this.

That kind of work changes how a contractor sees the job. For Brad, it made the customer real in a way no business plan could. Every homeowner he'd call on after that carried the weight of the ones he'd seen in the Ninth Ward.

Twenty Years of Relationships

Brad built Roof Time on relationships with homeowners, his crew, the industry, and the community. And the same principles that got him twenty years in are the ones he’d tell any contractor starting out today.

The Community

The same instincts about the importance of the relationship extended past the industry and into the community. Roof Time supports the American Cancer Society, an organization the company holds close because so many of its employees have lost loved ones to cancer, and donates a portion of the proceeds from each project to the fight. Roof Time also supports the National Alliance on Mental Illness, and for years, the company has helped organize bear drives for Cook Children's Hospital.
 

Passing the Torch

Stan asked what Brad wanted other owners nearing the end of their careers to understand. When private equity came calling with an offer twice what he eventually sold the company for, why did Brad turn them down? "They were finance people", Brad said. Careful with the numbers, they didn’t understand the work. His team did. “I had commitments to my employees, some of them since the beginning,” Brad continued, “…there was no way I was going to do that to the people who had helped me get to the pinnacle.”