Business View Magazine | December 2019

75 BUSINESS VIEW MAGAZINE DECEMBER 2019 EL I TE ROOF ING somebody is looking for a great home, we’re able to provide a great opportunity for them,” he shares. “Our motto here is to ‘hire character, and train skills,’ so we’re looking for someone with the right character that we can train how to be a great skilled tradesman.” “That’s one of our objectives over the next few years,” adds Reis. “We’re trying to build our service department. So, I see having a training and education department where we have facilities and can bring on anybody and have them trained up in four to six weeks to where we need them to be - fully able to do what we need them to do. That’s a part of our objective in growing our service department. There’s got to be a way and we’re determined to find it. Everybody says it’s not there, but we’ll discover it.” In addition, Brothers says that instead of trying to expand the business in order to capture other markets outside of its current territory, Elite Roofing has decided to extend the company’s culture and its training vision to other roofing contractors. “We created a consulting company that does training and coaching for other contractors to help them,” he explains. “We feel that all ships will rise if we can find good people with integrity that just don’t have the business skill that they need to build a roofing company. So, we consult with others all across the country and Canada.” Growing the service department is also part of a long-range strategy to increase the company’s market share in the commercial marketplace. Today, Elite Roofing’s client base is about 80 percent residential and 20 percent commercial, and Brothers believes that focusing on service can potentially even out the ratio, or, perhaps, one day, completely reverse it to 80 percent commercial and 20 percent residential. “That would put us on a whole other level, as far as revenue,” he states.