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Western Roofing Systems in 5 Useful Answers
>> Um, I kind of fell into it, to be honest. When I graduated high school, I'm originally from South Africa and moved back there and worked for my grandfather, who worked in construction. He supplied mining supplies to a lot of the construction companies down there. And when he passed away, I moved back to the States and was kind of looking for work and ended up working for Western Roofing Systems as an installer and then a project manager. Um, and then took a bigger job at a big solar company and was a sales manager for a number of years, but I didn't like it. It was a really big solar company. I didn't like the bigness and the corporate of the company and was looking for something much smaller. So, I got lucky that Mike Lenneberg, the original owner and contractor, his partner had retired as I was looking to leave out, and I just bumped into Mike. Um, and we partnered up in 2017 and have worked together great ever since. And now I really enjoy what I do and I enjoy working for a smaller company where my hours and my efforts affect the company directly. My favorite thing is definitely meeting all the new people that I get to meet every week. Um, I meet tons of homeowners to give estimates, to manage projects, and obviously you're working on somebody's house for a week. And I like to check in on my projects, so I'm seeing them every day. And I've made actual connections through work with homeowners and other contractors and gutter guys and installers. It's kind of become a small community for me. Um, but I definitely just meet the—I definitely love going out there and just getting to meet all kinds of people. One of the most important things I think that I see a lot of people miss, and if I have friends and family in and out of my area that ask me for advice, I always recommend verifying licenses. Um, I'm surprised how many homeowners don't actually check up the contractor's license, and it's very easy to do online. If you just put in the contractor's license number, you can see any complaints, if they carry workers comp and insurance. So the biggest thing that I would recommend is always check your contractor's license name. And another trick is you always want to check that the name matches the contractor that you're talking to. Some people will use their friends or their cousins. But checking contractor's license, verifying that they have general liability, workers comp, and insurance—those things are very easy to do. Most people are just looking at online reviews and trusting those. And I can tell you as a business owner, somebody tries to sell me reviews every day. It's very common. Um, you just, you know, research into the contractor as much as you can through his license number. One thing, and one reason I really enjoy working with Western Roofing Systems, is we really focus on quality of work. Um, we used to be a massive company back in '04, '05, '06, but since I've been on board in 2017, we try to run it as a small family business. We're all very close. I'm close with Michael Lenenberg. I'm close with all of my installers. Um, and we like just doing a couple projects a week. So we won't ever do more than two jobs a week because that spreads us too thin and it doesn't allow us to really follow and check in on all those details. So we like being a small company. We like really focusing on quality and doing a good job. Um, I'm going to kind of piggyback on the last question, is we keep things small and we keep things high quality. And, you know, a lot of roofers or not even construction companies, you'll meet with a salesperson, your job will get passed on to a project manager, and then you'll have like a foreman that you're working with. You never see the same people. Um, if you're working with Western Roofing Systems and I'm the person that came out there to meet with you, if you're working with me the entire way. And like I said, we keep the job small, we don't like to spread ourselves too thin. And I think a lot of people in construction try to grow and they try to grow too fast, and, you know, especially from the people I know, the quality drops and it ends up being kind of a lose-lose for the contractor and the homeowner. >>