How to Scale Your Roofing Business for Long-Term Growth

At the end of Peter Pan, the character of Wendy goes home — flying over the rooftops of London — and announces to her parents that she’s ready to grow up. At your roofing company, you might have recently made the same decision. (Maybe it just comes from seeing a lot of rooftops.)

Like growing up, growing your roofing company takes time and effort. But what kind of effort? If you’re not sure how to scale your roofing business, you might be wondering where to start. The good news is, we’re here with some helpful tips to get you started.

Here are 8 steps to scaling a roofing company:

1. Dominate local roofing company searches
2. Expand your reach to new property owners
3. Attract qualified roofing professionals
4. Stay ahead with next-gen roofing tech
5. Deliver an outstanding roofer customer experience
6. Set up a referral flywheel
7. Standardize and streamline your process
8. Track roofing job and marketing performance

Here’s a quick breakdown of how each of those steps benefits roofers:

Now let’s take a more detailed look at each of those strategies.

1. Dominate local roofing company searches

No roofing company scaling strategy would be complete without digital marketing. Marketing is essential for getting your brand in front of your target audience. Without it, you won’t have much luck earning new jobs or driving revenue.

Think about it: When a storm rolls through and damages someone’s roof, the first thing they’ll do is go to Google and search for a term like, “roofing repair services near me.” They’ll probably go with the first company that comes up in search results, so you want that company to be you.

For that reason, local marketing is particularly important for roofing companies.

Action steps to take

To dominate search results, you can use local SEO strategies like filling out all the information in your Google Business Profile (such as services, service area, photos, and more). You can also target local keywords in your website content.

In addition to those local SEO tactics, you can also run Local Services Ads (LSAs), which are a form of paid advertising. All of those methods help you reach the population of your local area, which is where all your potential customers are.

In addition to targeting standard “near me” keywords, roofers can also include urgent search terms like “emergency roof tarping” or “wind damage roof repair.” These are terms people commonly look up when they’re in urgent need of a roofing company.

Whichever methods you use, make sure to speak to customer pain points. Address seasonal concerns (e.g., hail), and show off “before” and “after” photos of the roofs you repair to demonstrate the quality of your work.

2. Expand your reach to new property owners

To grow your roofing business, you first need to grow your customer base. There are lots of ways to earn more customers, such as better marketing (which we’ll come back to later), but one of the simplest ways is to target a wider audience.

Action steps to take

One way to expand your audience is to begin offering commercial services in addition to residential services. Or, if (for example) you’re currently marketing solely to HOA boards, you might start marketing to property management companies or real estate investors as well.

Other roofing prospects you could start targeting include:

• Warehouse owners
• Shopping centers
• Apartment complexes
• School systems

Those are just a few examples of new markets you could expand to. However you choose to expand, though, make sure you have the necessary resources to do so. That might mean bringing in new tools or hiring a larger team — which brings us to our next tip.

3. Attract qualified roofing professionals

You won’t have much luck scaling a roofing company if your team stays the same size it is now. Growing your business also means growing your team. And to do that, you need to attract fresh talent. Moreover, that talent should be highly qualified — new employees should know their way around TPO welders, shingle guns, and all the other necessary equipment.

Action steps to take

Finding qualified talent can be a challenge, particularly given the ongoing labor struggles within the roofing industry right now. So, how can you draw in more talent? Ultimately, your best move is to create a positive and well-organized work environment that sets you apart from your competitors. You can also offer benefits like:

• Paid safety training
• Tool stipends
• Year-round work
• Storm season bonus pay

Among roofers, those benefits are highly prized. When you offer them, qualified workers are more likely to gravitate toward you, making it less of a struggle to grow your roofing business.

To make it easier to find those workers, you can list job postings on industry-specific job boards like RoofersCoffeeShop and iHireConstruction. You can also partner with local trade schools or apprenticeship programs to create a pipeline of prospective employees straight to your business.

4. Stay ahead with next-gen roofing tech

One surefire way to hurt roofing company scaling is to fall behind the curve technologically. There are a lot of advanced tools out there that can accelerate your business processes, and you can bet your competitors are using them. To grow your share of the roofing market, you’ll need to adopt those tools, too.

Action steps to take

When it comes to which tools you use, it’s up to your needs and budget. But some of the most helpful roofing tools include:

• Thermal imaging cameras for identifying hidden leaks
• Aerial measurement tools (e.g., EagleView) for error-free quotes
• FSM software (e.g., AccuLynx) for real-time data tracking
• 3D modeling tools for roofing material simulation
• Storm-tracking tools for highlighting areas most at risk of roofing damage

A drone paired with a tool like EagleView or Roofr lets you assess a hail-damaged roof without even stepping on a ladder, while FSM software like AccuLynx keeps all your project notes, measurements, and crew schedules in a centralized location. When you use several of these tools together, it can really cut down on the time each job takes.

5. Deliver an outstanding roofing customer experience

Your customer experience is one of the biggest deciding factors when it comes to your company’s growth. Offering quality services isn’t enough. The whole experience, from an initial quote all the way to the end of a job, should be optimized to help customers and address their pain points.

Action steps to take

To start with, you should design a high-quality website and make it easy to contact you. Ensure that you use good web design principles — like making your site mobile-friendly — and allow for people to reach you through both phone calls and online contact forms.

You also need to speak to common roofing customer pain points, such as:

• Insurance claim confusion
• Fear of leaks during rain
• Noisiness during installation

Reassure your customers that they won’t have to worry about those issues with you. And if customers do have questions or concerns about a roofing job, ensure that it’s easy for them to speak to your team and get a fast resolution.

You can help keep customers at ease by offering real-time job progress updates — maybe through an online customer portal, for example. You should also use magnetic sweepers to pick up loose nails at the end of each job, leaving your customers’ yards clean.

When you offer these elements, you’ll find it a lot easier to attract and retain customers. Lots of companies can build a high-quality roof, but the ones that stand out are those that also offer a high-quality customer experience.

6. Set up a referral flywheel

Another of the most effective ways to grow your roofing business is with referral marketing. That’s where existing customers recommend your business to other people, who in turn become customers themselves. Roofers often find success with this method, since people looking for roofing services may ask for recommendations from their friends and neighbors.

Action steps to take

To get more referrals, you can set up a referral flywheel. Start by creating a basic referral program, which rewards customer referrals with something like gift cards or service credits. That will incentivize customers to recommend your roofing business, bringing in more leads. And as those leads become customers, the cycle repeats.

You can also target insurance adjusters and restoration companies for referral partnerships in the aftermath of major storms, with each of you recommending the other to your customers.

This method is so useful because homeowners will naturally trust word of mouth over ads — plus, it comes with much lower acquisition costs than other forms of marketing. That makes referral marketing well worth your while.

7. Standardize and streamline your process

Slow processes prevent your roofing business from growing. If you want to scale your company, you need to make things flow more quickly and smoothly. To do that, you can look for ways to standardize and streamline your operations.

Action steps to take

One action step you can take is to follow up with leads quickly. When you receive inquiries, try to respond to them within 5–15 minutes, whether by call routing or by online chat. This will help you avoid losing leads by waiting too long. You can even automate follow-ups using a tool like a customer relationship management (CRM) platform, which can also help you keep all of your lead data organized.

Speaking of staying organized, you can further streamline your operations by documenting all installation and inspection processes. Using that documentation, you can create more standardized operations for consistent results. Tasks you can standardize include:

• Shingle installation
• Inspection photos
• Tear-off procedure
• Leak diagnosis

You can also take advantage of job management software to assign crews, track progress, manage materials, and more.

Each of these steps will help you avoid disorganization, missed appointments, and overall poor service quality. Altogether, they’ll allow you to flow through your operations much more efficiently, so you can handle more jobs in less time.

8. Track roofing job and marketing performance

You may try several different things when scaling a roofing company. But for everything you try, it’s essential to track the results. Otherwise, how will you know what works and what doesn’t? For that reason, you should be sure to invest in a data tracking and analytics strategy.

Action steps for roofers

Here are some of the most helpful job-related metrics for roofers to track:

• Cost per square
• Labor hours per job
• Lead-to-job conversion rate
• Number of warranty callbacks
• Average job profit margin (by roofing material)
• Storm response conversion rates

Additionally, you should track the results of your marketing campaigns to see which tactics are bringing in the most leads and customers. You can also analyze customer data to see which demographics and locations make up the bulk of your customer base. These insights allow you to reevaluate your approach going forward.

There are lots of different data analytics tools out there to help you with this task. As mentioned in the previous section, a CRM is great for tracking and analyzing customer data. And for roofers in particular, a field service management (FSM) platform like Housecall Pro will allow you to more effectively track data related to the jobs you do.

Whichever tools you use, though, make sure you take advantage of hard data to assess your business performance and help you see what you can do differently in the future. That will enable you to continuously improve your methods and grow your roofing business over time.

Get help scaling your roofing marketing strategy with WebFX

Now that you know how to scale your roofing business, the next step is to make it happen. But that’s not as easy as it sounds. Even armed with the tips on this page, you’ll still have to invest a lot of time and effort to see the growth you want. And trying to balance that with your usual roofing tasks can be draining.

That’s the reason why so many roofers opt to partner with a professional marketing agency like WebFX. You can let us lift the weight of your marketing strategy off your shoulders, handing off the workload while still calling all the shots when it comes to how we optimize your campaigns.

With over 48,000+ hours of experience in your industry, we know exactly how to reach a roofing audience and help you earn more jobs. When you partner with us, we’ll help your business soar — like Peter Pan — above the competition.

If you’re interested in choosing us as your roofing marketing agency, just give us a call at 888-601-5359 or contact us online today!