Shingle Minded

Adam Quenneville stands in his warehouse, which will expand soon when he moves office functions into a new building.

Adam Quenneville will soon open a new building next door to his South Hadley headquarters and move all the office functions there.

One benefit will be an expansion of warehouse space in the current building that currently stores about $500,000 worth of materials — basically, everything but the shingles that get delivered directly to project sites.

“When you see a roof, all you see is the shingles,” the president of Adam Quennville Roofing and Siding told BusinessWest. “There’s a whole layered system underneath the shingles. You have the edging, flashing, nails — all the stuff that is unseen, underneath the roof. The shingles are just the top coating. If you buy all this stuff in small pieces and they deliver it, it costs 30% more.

“Early on, the whole job got delivered, and we paid extra for all the small stuff,” he added. “They were delivering shingles with all this stuff.”

By stocking all that in-house, he said, customers are the ones who see those savings. “We’re buying in bulk to save money, and we pass on the savings to the customer. It’s a nice feeling to know we’ve kept our prices down because of that.”

Plenty of customers are benefiting from that efficiency; Quenneville typically completes four to six roof jobs every day, plus a couple of roof shampoo jobs, across a territory that encompasses all six New England states, the Albany region, and occasionally beyond. Part of the reason why is the ability for customers to get a quote without a visit.

“Now with the software we have online, if someone lives three, four hours away, we don’t have to visit them to price them out. We can use satellite imagery and give them a price.”

“Now with the software we have online, if someone lives three, four hours away, we don’t have to visit them to price them out,” he said. “We can use satellite imagery and give them a price, versus sending a guy there, who wastes a whole day to go there, look at it, measure it, give them a price, and come back. You can save people money by not having to do that.”

Residential and multi-family homes are still Quenneville’s bread and butter, though he does have a commercial division, with one crew that tackles flat roofs for businesses. And the company has even taken housing jobs on military bases as far-flung as North Carolina, South Carolina, Texas, and New Mexico. “That’s helped add some volume to the business,” he said.

So the business has certainly evolved in some ways over its 27 years. Another will be evident this month, when Quenneville sets up at the Big E for the first time ever.

“It’s more than 250 hours with four people there, promotional items, advertising around it. It’s a major undertaking,” he said, explaining that he’ll raffle off a free roof, a free siding job, a free roof shampoo, and a free Roof Maxx treatment. “Obviously, there will be thousands of people who don’t win, and we’ll re-market them with discounts to see if they want to buy a service from us.”

Down and Dirty

Roof Maxx is a low-pressure treatment derived from soybean oil that penetrates aged asphalt shingles and restores the flexibility necessary to facilitate daily expansion and contraction, Quenneville explained, noting that he’s been offering that service for 15 years.

“We spray it, and within a half-hour, it reaches into the asphalt, which is dry. If you think of asphalt on a road, you know that, when it goes down, it’s nice and pliable. Over the years, the sun gets it, and it cracks. It’s the same thing with shingles.”

Meanwhile, he’s been offering roof shampoos, a cleaning that removes algae and dark streaks from the roof, for 13 years. He said dirty roofs detract from curb appeal, reduce the ability to reflect sunlight — leading to super-heating the attic — and, increasingly, are being targeted by insurance companies, which see stains as a risk that can impact a roof’s integrity, and are instructing homeowners have them cleaned.

Both shampoo treatments and Roof Maxx aim to extend a roof’s life, which brings up the question, isn’t that cutting the legs out from Quenneville’s main business of installing roofs?

“We’re doing the right thing for the customer,” he said. “If it only needs a cleaning or a treatment, they can get five or 10 more years out of it. And it often fits the customer’s budget. A lot of people that don’t do these treatments and services will tell the customer, ‘I’m not going to clean your roof; you’ve got to replace it.’ And oftentimes, many roofs don’t need to be replaced. They can get five or 10 more years out of them.

“You can make a decision based on what kind of situation you’re in,” he went on. “You might be in a situation where you need five or 10 more years. Sometimes we deal with older customers, and they hear about a 30- or 50-year roof, and they say, ‘listen, I’m 85 years old. I don’t care about 50 more years.’ And we tell them we can get them five or 10, and they love it.”

That’s one way doing the right thing, as Quenneville calls it, can also be a competitive advantage.

“If someone else is trying to get them for 20 grand, we’re 25% of that cost to treat it. So we do a lot of those. It’s just doing the right thing for the customer and giving them options.”

Whether it’s a roof installation or a treatment (or siding, gutters, windows, or doors), the wide reach of Quenneville’s crews — typically within a five-hour drive — offers plenty of business opportunity, and homeowners aren’t charged extra for those miles. The company also charges the same rate for all customers, whether the project is sited in a wealthy town near Boston or a rural community where home values are much lower.

“Your price per square foot is the same,” he told BusinessWest. “And if you live in your home and we put a roof on it, we can guarantee it for the rest of your life.”

Slow and Steady

Since striking out on his own at age 25 after working in his father’s business, Quenneville, a BusinessWest 40 Under Forty honoree in 2009, has seen business steadily grow over the years, and now employs about 75 people between sales, service, office, and crews.

And while roofing is decidedly hard work — one of the three most dangerous jobs in the world, along with coal mining and deep-sea fishing, he noted — he has never had trouble finding workers to grow the company further, even today, at a time when businesses in many sectors are struggling to find help.

“I don’t like extremes; I like the nice, slow, steady growth,” he said. “I always say, we’re better today than we’ve ever been — we’re operating the best we’ve ever operated — but tomorrow, we’re going to get even better. We have meetings every week to talk about our processes and what we can do to make them better.

“At the end of the day, it’s just delivering the best customer experience we can, so that it’s done safely and seamlessly, giving them options to pay for it, and having a service team that’s there to back it up. It’s pretty simple.”