These are the key elements that provide a competitive edge in the roofing contracting business are:

1. Excellent knowledge of a target market like Kent county, Michigan. This includes knowing the economics and demographics of the population, as well as having a good idea of the age of the housing stock, what the competitors are charging and level of competition one has to deal with on jobs.
2. Careful evaluation of jobs and accurate bids and quotes.
3. Optimum use of technology to ensure that the business is being productive.
4. Efficient collections - making sure receivables are being collected in a timely manner with very low bad debts.
5. Excellent customer service from the beginning of the engagement to the end of the sale.

James and Carmine have more than 50 years of combined working experience and are well know as seasoned roofing contractors. They know that the most common mistake that roofing contractors make is under-pricing themselves - it takes a keen understanding of the business to recognize that that besides time and material, the final markup for profit must also include some way to pass along the business overhead to the client while making sure that the business is able to break even and turn a buck.

Dependable roofing will also be charging their customers on a time and material basis and will be pricing their margins based to ensure that they are competitive but at the same time are at least making enough money on each job to cover part of their fixed overhead costs as well.

James has developed an excellent name as a restoration specialist - basically this allows him to replace existing roofs and give them an aged timeless looks. This expertise has been used to restore the roofs of buildings like churches, old historical landmarks etc. Carmine too has developed his own expertise in the metal roofing area - combined the firm will be using these niche specialties within the roofing trade to their competitive advantage.

Dependable Roofing will be requesting payment upon completion of services and each of the owners will have their own tablets fully equipped with a payment processing system that will allows them to accept credit cards at the clients location without having to wait to get back to the office and run the card later. The idea here will be to keep the collections down to a minimum. For large jobs, they may also require a down payment of 25% to 40%.

Keeping a strong customer focus and recording every item about the customer relationship into a database of client trackers is how Dependable Roofing will ensure that they have a superb competitive edge when it comes to customer service and satisfaction on every job they complete.

Quick Links:

1. Go to the Corresponding Questionnaire section for this industry.