How to Grow Your Roofing Business

Roofing businesses face numerous challenges in their quest for sustainable growth, from a crowded market and razor-thin margins to high employee turnover and unprofitable slow seasons. Overcoming these hurdles requires a multi-pronged approach that targets marketing, operations, and sales. This may sound daunting, particularly for small roofing companies with overstretched staff. However, modern field service management (FSM) software like Zuper provides exciting technological solutions to your biggest growth challenges.

This blog describes how to grow your roofing business with 10 proven strategies, including how the Zuper platform can help.

How to Grow Your Roofing Business: 10 Strategies for Success

1. Build a Proactive Referral Program

Referrals account for a significant portion of residential roofing leads, making past and repeat customers critical to future growth. Some tips for a proactive referral program include:

• Send a text message immediately after job completion, requesting a Google rating while the customer’s experience is still fresh in their mind.
• Offer rewards, such as gift cards or service credits, to customers who write a review or refer a friend.
• Take before and after photos to showcase on your Google business profile alongside positive customer reviews.

A modern field service management (FSM) solution can help streamline your referral program. For example, Zuper can send automated rating requests as soon as the crew closes the work order, eliminating hassle while increasing the chances of a 5-star rating. Zuper also pulls all ratings into a live dashboard so teams can easily celebrate wins and address potential problems.

2. Automate Dispatch and Scheduling

Manual scheduling with whiteboards wastes countless crew hours. Routing inefficiencies can cost small roofing companies tens of thousands of dollars per year in fuel, labor, and crew idle time. A smart FSM platform with route optimization and recurring routes can increase technician utilization by 18-25% according to Zuper benchmarking.

For example, Zuper’s smart dispatching chooses the nearest qualified crew and sends automatic “on-the-way” texts to customers. It considers factors like traffic, crew skill sets, and ladder access constraints to automatically build optimal daily routes and recurring routes. It also receives real-time weather feeds and automatically shifts jobs to maintain productivity regardless of sudden rain or other climate volatility.

3. Target Local SEO

According to Google, 86% of people look up the location of a business on Google Maps. This statistic underscores the importance of showing up in local Google search results using local search engine optimization (SEO). Some tips for improving local SEO include:

• Create a Google business profile and complete every field.
• Routinely post job site photos with SEO keywords in the captions.
• Publish locally targeted, industry-relevant blog posts.
• Aim for the Google Guarantee badge to leapfrog Google ads.

Another important strategy for improving local SEO involves publishing case studies and customer success stories containing relevant local keywords. A platform like Zuper can help by providing structured job data like addresses and geo-tagged photos that can be used to create high-ranking SEO case studies.

4. Join Local and National Roofing Associations

Membership in roofing groups like the National Roofing Contractors Association (NRCA) or National Women in Roofing (NWIR) provides numerous benefits to growing businesses, including training opportunities, credibility badges, and backlinking opportunities to improve SEO. Sharing association logos on your website will help reassure potential customers that you follow industry-certified installation and safety practices. Both local and national associations also frequently host forums where members can share lead opportunities, marketing strategies, and other key resources.

5. Modernize Your Sales Technology

Homeowners are looking for instant quotes and want to close deals within hours, not days. This requires a modern software stack that can:

• Integrate aerial measurement tools to enable instant takeoffs.
• Offer digital proposals with e-sign to close deals on the spot.
• Feed won deals into your FSM platform to enable same-day production.

The easiest way to ensure your tech stack supports your growing roofing business is to use a field service management solution that integrates with your other software for a streamlined experience. For example, Zuper offers more than 60 integrations with leading service software tools and centralizes their capabilities in a single platform. It also offers a one-click conversion of closed proposals into scheduled work orders to further accelerate job start dates and improve customer satisfaction.

6. Increase Margins with Job Cost Tracking

Labor and materials represent a significant drain on revenue. Maintaining or even increasing your margins requires granular job cost tracking, which is too tedious to be undertaken manually. An FSM platform like Zuper helps by syncing timecards, purchase orders, and change orders back to your chosen accounting software like QuickBooks. It allows you to proactively address underperforming crews or suppliers to retrain staff or negotiate rates before it’s too late.

7. Automate Customer Communication

Punctuality and transparency are key to customer satisfaction, which is crucial for getting reviews and referrals, which helps drive growth. To ensure clear, timely communication without overwhelming your office staff, use FSM software that automatically sends:

• “On the way” alerts.
• Tracking links so customers can see their technician’s location in real-time.
• Status updates with photos at key milestones in the project.
• Digital warranty and maintenance reminders.

It’s important to remember that roofing projects disrupt your customer’s daily life, so providing proactive communication about the job status can help boost satisfaction. An online client portal where customers can access status updates, documents, and past messages helps provide this transparency while reducing the workload on back office staff. For example, Zuper offers a branded customer portal with automatic push notifications to keep homeowners informed at every step of the way.

8. Reduce Turnover with Training and Incentives

High turnover is costly and disruptive to business. Upskilling your staff with training and tying training milestones to clear incentives like bonuses and pay increases can significantly improve employee retention. It’s best to partner with a subsidized training program such as NRCA ProCertification® or GAF Roofing Academy to ensure crews get relevant training that aligns with industry standards and best practices. You can also use Zuper’s mobile app to share SOP videos and safety checklists to help techs install to standard every time.

9. Offer Recurring Service Contracts

Expanding your service offerings to include recurring tasks like annual inspections, solar panel tune-ups, and gutter cleaning can provide a regular cash flow even during the off-season. The Zuper platform makes it easy to offer these services by providing recurring work orders and automated renewal invoicing so you can create customized maintenance plans in minutes. You can also easily track renewal rates and attach upsell offers to grow recurring revenue organically.

1. Measure – and Act On – Key Performance Indicators

Measuring performance metrics will help you track your growth and determine where you might be falling short. Some of the most common roofing business KPIs to track are listed below.

Manually collecting and analyzing all the data needed to calculate and monitor these KPIs is far too challenging, even for smaller roofing companies. A field service management solution like Zuper makes it possible to harness valuable data from various sources and get near-instant insights on your most important KPIs. Not only can you measure your current success rate, but you can also get recommendations and tools for improving.

Experience Sustainable Growth with Zuper

Zuper is an intelligent field service management platform that offers all the features and capabilities you need to efficiently grow your business. We offer simple, affordable pricing that scales cost-effectively to support your expanding needs.

Schedule a demo to learn how to grow your roofing business with Zuper.