dec-2017

94 95 HORIZON ROOFING INC. cally, customers would tell me they needed a new roof. I’d go up on the building and look around, and really didn’t feel they did. So, I’d say,‘You can do this, this, and this to extend the roof life.’At that time, not many companies were getting into service projects. They just wanted to replace roofs.” Following the premise of learning by doing, Scepaniak ran roofing crews, sheet metal crews, and the service department.He started estimating when he was only 18 years old. In 2000, he bought his father’s shares and took the reins of the company. At the time,Horizon Roofing had sales of around $2.5 million. Fast forward to 2017, the number will come in at $20 million, a significant amount of that growth happening in the last five years. Horizon Roofing services the upper mid-west from headquarters inWaite Park, and another office in Brooklyn Center,MN, and has approximately 90 employees on the payroll.The company deals only with multi-family, senior living developments, commercial, retail, and government buildings -no residential work. Scepaniak emphasizes the importance of inno- vative technology as a key differentiator between Horizon Roofing and its competitors.He states, “Roofing doesn’t change very fast, it’s a product we warranty for 30 years, and will last up to 40 years. When I talk about technology, it’s not that we’re creating new roofing systems. It’s about reporting to our customers, our inspection programs, things of that nature. I hired our first full-time programmer in 2007, and we’ve logged over 25,000 programming hours to date.What the programmers do is code systems that are built primarily for transparency in communicating with our customers.To try to de- scribe what we’ve invested over $600K into is tough without seeing it.There are hardly any construction companies in the nation putting that much effort into making sure their customers are well informed.” According to Scepaniak, their in-house technolo- gy is “quietlymarketed.”When they are called in to inspect a building, building representatives can do virtual tours that help the customer with budgeting and forecasting for upcoming projects, for instance, showing the life expectancy of specific roof areas on different buildings.When they do a project, com- munication with the client takes optimum priority. Not surprisingly,Horizon Roofing has earned many