Growing a roofing company from just over $3 million in its first year to a projected $30 million-plus in year five takes more than finding more leads or adding more salespeople. For Lucas Poole, the growth has come from building the kind of company talented people actually want to stay with.
Lucas started on the insurance side of the roofing industry before moving into sales. With no formal sales training, he learned by knocking doors, talking to homeowners, and figuring things out in the field. Eventually, that path led him to Legacy Roofing, where he started as a sales rep and worked his way into ownership and leadership.
Today, the company operates across multiple markets, but Lucas says the bigger story is how they built the team behind that expansion.
Give People a Future, Not Just a Sales Position
Before joining Legacy Roofing, Lucas spoke with six different roofing companies. What separated Legacy wasn’t simply compensation or the promise of making good money. It was the vision.
Lucas felt that many companies were offering him another sales position. Legacy offered him a roadmap.
That experience now influences how he recruits. Instead of focusing only on a candidate’s roofing experience or immediate sales ability, Lucas wants to know where that person wants to be several years from now. He asks what they want their life to look like, where they want to live, and even what kind of truck they want to drive.
Those questions help uncover whether the candidate’s long-term goals can fit into the company’s direction.
For roofing owners struggling with retention, that distinction matters. If the only opportunity you can offer a strong salesperson is to keep selling more roofs, eventually that person may decide the only way to grow is to leave.
Lucas believes companies should create opportunities for good people to build something without automatically having to start their own roofing company.
Build a Championship Team, Not a Family
One of Lucas’s strongest philosophies is that he doesn’t view the company as a family.
He views it as a championship team.
“This isn’t a family. At least for us, this is a championship winning team that we’re building.”
The distinction comes down to roles and accountability. Everyone on the team has a position, and everyone needs to understand how their work contributes to the larger goal.
When something isn’t working, leadership needs to identify exactly where the breakdown occurred. Is there a prospecting problem? A closing problem? A leadership problem? Is someone simply in the wrong role?
Instead of allowing responsibilities to become blurred, Lucas believes leaders should identify what each person is responsible for, measure how well they’re performing that role, and provide coaching or redirection when necessary.
That clarity becomes increasingly important as a roofing company grows because the owner can no longer personally solve every problem.
Stop Hiring for Headcount
Like many growing roofing companies, Legacy once believed a bigger sales team automatically meant a bigger business.
They learned otherwise.
Lucas says retention now matters more than simply increasing the hiring rate. When someone leaves the company, leadership meets to understand why. They look at whether the problem came from hiring, training, retention, leadership, or a failure to provide the right roadmap.
That process has made them more selective about who gets hired.
Lucas looks heavily for work ethic and what he calls “relentless grit.” Roofing sales can take time to pay off, especially for a new rep waiting for jobs to move through the process and commissions to arrive. Someone who expects immediate success may not stick around long enough to develop.
That’s why Lucas wants evidence that a candidate can handle difficulty. Skills can be trained later. The willingness to keep working when results aren’t immediate is much harder to teach.
Train Salespeople in the Field
Once Legacy finds someone with the right mindset, training starts with the basics.
New reps receive a roofing crash course and work through the company’s SOPs, but Lucas intentionally avoids trying to teach the entire business in one week. The objective is to give new reps enough knowledge to begin having conversations and getting inspections.
Then the real training happens in the field.
New salespeople work alongside market leaders, assistant market leaders, and team leads instead of simply being sent into a neighborhood alone. Even the owners still get into the field with the sales team.
Lucas believes that matters because salespeople need to hear what successful conversations actually sound like.
Role-playing has a place in training, but eventually reps need real conversations with real homeowners.
He also avoids giving salespeople rigid scripts. Instead, he focuses on teaching communication skills and a framework they can follow through the sales process. A script can fall apart when a homeowner says something unexpected. Someone who understands how to communicate naturally can adapt.
Protect the Financial Opportunity for Your People
Lucas also connects retention to financial opportunity.
Legacy’s commission structure is intentionally designed around benefiting the salesperson, and Lucas describes that approach as non-negotiable. The company also emphasizes transparency so reps understand where the money on their jobs is going.
That doesn’t mean ignoring profitability.
Early on, the owners kept overhead low. They avoided unnecessary expenses, operated without an expensive brick-and-mortar location, and sometimes sold jobs themselves without taking commissions so the money could remain in the business.
The lesson for growing roofing contractors is simple: you can invest heavily in your people without becoming careless with cash.
Staying liquid, controlling overhead, and understanding job costs give you more flexibility to create opportunities for the team.
Leaders Have to Create More Leaders
So what helped take the company from roughly $16 million toward a projected $30 million?
Lucas points to one thing in particular: duplication.
“Leaders make leaders.”
If everything depends on one great salesperson or one strong manager, growth eventually reaches a ceiling. Lucas believes leadership becomes scalable when strong leaders develop other people who can lead.
That creates a domino effect. One leader develops another, who develops another, allowing the company to expand without every decision flowing back to ownership.
It also gives ambitious employees somewhere to go. New markets create leadership opportunities for people who might otherwise believe they need to leave and start their own company to advance.
For roofing owners, that may be one of the biggest takeaways from Lucas’s story. Scaling isn’t simply about duplicating a sales process. It’s about duplicating leadership.
Lead From the Front
Lucas is still in his early twenties, which created another leadership challenge: earning respect from people who may have significantly more life or industry experience.
His answer has been to lead from the front.
If he expects the sales team to be out early after a hailstorm, he is willing to be there with them. If he asks the team to put in a long day, they know he isn’t asking them to do something he refuses to do himself.
That credibility can’t be created through a title.
It’s earned through consistency.
And as roofing companies grow, that example set by leadership eventually becomes part of the culture itself.
Building a Roofing Company That People Want to Grow With
The jump from $3 million to $30 million isn’t one tactic. It’s the result of building an organization where the right people can see a future.
For Lucas, that means hiring for grit instead of headcount, training people in real-world situations, creating clear leadership opportunities, protecting financial opportunity for the team, and holding everyone accountable to their role.
The goal isn’t simply to recruit more salespeople.
It’s to build people who can eventually recruit, train, and lead the next generation themselves.
That’s when a roofing company stops depending on a handful of top performers and starts becoming a team capable of scaling together.
