“Do all the little things that no one else wants to do and then your success will follow,” said Tim Hershey, President of Thoroughbred Contractors of Shelbyville, Ky. When he spoke at the recent Roofing Contractor Best of Success Conference, he cited customer satisfaction as the focus of everything his company does.
Rod Menzel is the founder and co-owner of GreatWay Roofing Inc. in Moorpark, Calif. After attending the Roofing Contractor Best of Success conference in 2007, he implemented several ideas that revolutionized his business, and he shared his experience with this year’s attendees in a session titled “Rebranding: Expect a Great Experience.”
“Green is real to building owners today,” said Dr. James Hoff, Director of Research for the Center for Environmental Innovation in Roofing (CEIR). At the Roofing Contractor Best of Success event, he detailed ways contractors could use green programs and incentives to build their businesses in his session titled “Roofing Green.”
This week I met with Todd Foster and Chris Edwards of Ideal Recycling in Southfield, Mich. Ideal expects to keep more than 15,000 tons of asphalt shingles out of landfills this year alone. The shingles are ground up and re-used by asphalt companies, which can use up to 5 percent recycled asphalt in hot asphalt mix used for paving roads and parking lots.
The federal stimulus package has a lot of people in the mainstream media talking about upcoming federal projects, but experts will tell you there’s a lot of work involved in just getting on the list for U.S. General Services Administration contracts.
In June Tecta America Corp. announced the launch of Tecta Solar, a division of the company dedicated to the development of turnkey solar energy systems. Tecta America Corp., headquartered in Skokie, Ill., is the largest commercial roofing company in the country. It has more than 50 locations and more than 3,500 employees.
As health care reform becomes a key focus of the Obama administration, the media has been flooded with reports on the rising costs of health care insurance.
Yesterday was the live presentation of our Architectural Roofing & Waterproofing webinar titled “Proper Drain Design,” conducted by ARW Editorial Director and Roofing Contractor technical columnist John D’Annunzio.
For those of us in the Midwest, it’s been a cold start to spring. Winter has held on a bit longer than usual, and it’s just a hunch but I think that’s part of the reason the economy is still in the doldrums. It seems people have been in a sort of hibernation, waiting for things to pick up.
I just heard about an interesting new product the other day. Energy Alternatives LLC announced the introduction of its Greenward Ridge Vent. According to Ted Poulos, Vice President of Energy Alternatives, the patent-pending design harvests ambient hot attic air as it escapes through the ridge of the roof.
In the world of solar roofing, the solar panels commonly output direct current (DC), which is commonly channeled to an inverter, which converts it to alternating current (AC). One company looking to eliminate wiring to a large central inverter is Akeena Solar (www.akeena.com), headquartered in Los Gatos, Calif.
The concept is fascinating: You just send in the address of a residential or commercial building, and you receive a detailed report with an aerial photo and line drawings of the roof with length, pitch and area noted for easy and accurate estimates and professional presentations.
If you’ve been by the EternaBond booth at a trade show, perhaps Chris Margarites has flagged you down and given you this demonstration: He uses his EternaBond roofing tape to join a piece of metal to a piece of EPDM to a piece of PVC to a piece of just about anything and dares attendees to pull them apart.
