Page 30 - BusinessWest September 2, 2024

“I have pretty ambitious plans to grow the business. But, most importantly, I don’t want to lose touch with our mission and our core values.”
had a really great work ethic. It was just work he did, and then, about 10 years ago, he started using subcontractors, so he was able to run one or two jobs a day for the whole roofing season.”
It was a model that appealed to her and Tim, who are among just four full-time employees — Tim is the sales manager and roofing and siding specialist, while they also employ a general manager and business manager — and the field work is subcontracted.
“She really did a lot of homework, and then used that to evaluate 50 or 60 businesses of all types,” Tim said. “She had a very elaborate spreadsheet to evaluate how much they make, what their staff looks like, all this different crite- ria. And by looking at so many in so many different sectors, she could see this was a good one. You have to see a lot to know what’s good and bad. She put in the time.”
A year later, they’re growing their presence in the region, and while the anxiety of going into business for oneself never completely goes away, it’s also been tempered by a steady flow of roofing jobs, as well as siding, windows, and doors.
“We were kind of buried with learning how to run it last year,” Sasha told BusinessWest. “So we spent a lot of our offseason really thinking about that, and trying to refine our core values, our mission.”
That mission, posted on the wall of their office, is simple: “to change the way people think about the roofing industry, one roof at a time. We lead with integrity, treat everyone like family, and strive to make a positive impact on our community. By taking extreme ownership of our roles, we lift our team members up and pave the way for a better future.”
When asked what extreme ownership means, she responded, “it really just means that we don’t make excus- es for anything. We see something, and we solve the prob- lem. We don’t wait for things to become a problem. This is
a small business; there’s only four of us. So there’s no one else to do the thing. If we see a thing that needs to be done, we have to do it.”
Getting Up to Speed
Under new ownership, Sexton expanded quickly, Sasha said.
“When we got the business, he just did roofs — asphalt shingle and flat. We quickly ended up expanding into sid- ing, windows, and doors because the salesman we had at the time really wanted to sell those things. And we said, ‘OK, let’s try it.’
“For the most part, we spend most of our marketing budget on roofing. That’s what we like focusing on,” she added. “But people will come to us for siding, windows, or they want to do their roof and their siding, or their roof and their gutters. So we like being able to be that one-stop shop for them so that they don’t have to go and deal with mul- tiple contractors to try to get a project done.”
Like under Everett Sexton’s ownership, the company’s bread and butter is asphalt shingle roofing for residential and commercial clients, and it also offers EPDM rubber membranes for flat roofs.
“We have a couple different flat-roof options that we offer,” she said. “There’s a mineral-roll roofing, which is also an asphalt product that you can use on low-slope and flat roofs. And we’ve expanded our roofing services; our crew installs corrugated metal, and we have a relationship with a metal roof company, so we can do standing seam as well.”
In many ways, Sasha is satisfied with how the first year has gone. “I say that thoughtfully because I’m not sure what expectations I had going into this. Last year was
just pretty wild, with us executing as fast as we could and learning. This year, it’s been a lot more thought and a lot
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