Most roofing business owners do not have an effort problem. Their teams are busy, their managers are capable, and everyone seems to have plenty on their plate. Yet priorities still slip, processes are inconsistently followed, and the owner keeps getting pulled back into decisions that should happen without them.
According to Greg Cleary, the problem often goes deeper than accountability. Execution starts with having the right people, a clear purpose, and a shared destination that gives everyone something meaningful to work toward.
For roofing contractors trying to grow beyond an owner-dependent business, getting those pieces right can make the difference between simply adding revenue and actually building a company that scales.
Your Roofing Company Is Really a People Business
Many roofing contractors start their companies because they know roofing. Maybe they were great at sales, production, estimating, or managing crews and believed they could build something better on their own.
Then the company grows.
Suddenly, the owner is dealing with hiring, turnover, payroll, managers, communication problems, accountability, and employees who do not always follow the process. As Greg explains, there is an important realization that happens somewhere along that journey:
“I am no longer in the roofing business. I am in the people business.”
That shift matters because your ability to grow eventually depends less on what you personally know about roofing and more on your ability to build a team that can execute without constant intervention.
If every decision still has to reach the owner, adding more employees will not necessarily create more freedom. It may simply create more people for the owner to manage.
Hire People Who Already Believe What You Believe
One of the biggest mistakes Greg sees companies make is waiting until they desperately need someone before they begin hiring.
When a project is behind schedule or the owner is filling an empty role, the goal quickly becomes finding somebody who can do the job. That urgency makes it easy to prioritize experience over alignment.
Greg recommends taking a different approach. Build a pipeline before you have an opening. Know the next key position your company will need and keep an eye out for potential A players.
More importantly, hire around your core values.
Experience can be valuable, but Greg argues that many technical elements of a job can be taught. You can teach someone your estimating process, how you present proposals, how you handle change orders, or how your company asks customers for reviews. Changing the beliefs and behaviors underneath those actions is much harder.
“Before you can change anybody’s behavior, you’ve got to change your beliefs.”
If someone already believes what the organization believes, teaching the process becomes easier. If they fundamentally disagree with the process or the reason behind it, the owner may find themselves fighting the same battle repeatedly.
Stop Choosing Core Values That Sound Good
Core values only help your roofing company execute when they actually mean something.
Words like integrity, excellence, safety, and responsiveness may sound right, but they do not necessarily explain what makes your organization different or what behaviors you expect from your people.
Greg suggests discovering core values rather than simply choosing them.
Think about several people you genuinely admire. What qualities make you respect them? Maybe they are competitive, dependable, resourceful, ambitious, humble, or willing to jump in when something needs to get done.
Those qualities can reveal the characteristics you naturally want around you.
You can also approach the exercise from the opposite direction. Think about people who did not work out in your organization. Why did you ultimately have to let them go? The opposite of those behaviors may help identify what matters most to your company.
Once those values are clear, they can become a practical tool for recruiting, hiring, managing, and making difficult people decisions.
Your Team Needs Another Mountain to Climb
Even a strong team can lose momentum when it no longer knows what it is working toward.
Greg uses mountain climbing as an analogy. A team might rally around reaching $1 million, $3 million, or $5 million in revenue. Everyone knows the destination and works together to reach it.
Then they get there.
If leadership never defines what comes next, that shared challenge disappears. People can become territorial, politics can creep in, and departments may begin focusing on their own priorities instead of the company’s.
The solution is not simply to push everyone harder. Leadership has to give the team another meaningful destination.
That does not always mean chasing a larger revenue number. The next mountain could involve improving profitability, building a self-managing leadership team, entering a new market, improving customer experience, or creating a company that no longer depends on the owner every day.
What matters is that the destination is understood.
Purpose Gives People a Reason to Execute
Before setting the next goal, roofing owners also need to understand why the business exists in the first place.
Why did you start it? Was it freedom? Providing a better life for your family? Creating a better experience for homeowners? Building a workplace where great people could have meaningful careers?
A strong purpose becomes part of the company’s story and gives people something bigger than a revenue target to connect to.
Greg shares the example of a roofing entrepreneur who suffered a serious skiing accident but had built a leadership team capable of keeping the company operating while he focused on recovery. That experience shaped a larger purpose around helping entrepreneurs build businesses they could step away from when life demanded their attention.
That is a much more powerful destination than simply telling a team to sell more roofs.
Give Your Team the “Where” and the “When”
Owners often become frustrated because employees are not accomplishing what leadership expects. But sometimes the team has never been given a clear enough destination.
Greg illustrates this with a simple example: if a group is meeting for lunch, everyone needs two pieces of information. They need to know where to go and when to arrive.
Once those things are clear, capable people can determine how to get there.
The same principle applies to your roofing company. Your leadership team needs to understand where the business is going, what success looks like, and when important goals need to be accomplished.
Without that clarity, owners often respond by micromanaging. But high performers generally do not want someone directing every step. They want clarity around the outcome and enough ownership to figure out how to achieve it.
That is where execution begins to improve.
Company Goals and Individual Goals Need to Connect
There is another layer to alignment that roofing owners can easily overlook.
The owner may have a goal of reaching $4 million in sales, for example, but that does not automatically mean the sales team has adopted the same goal. Each salesperson has their own motivations, financial targets, and ideas about what they want to accomplish.
If you add up the individual goals of the salespeople and they do not support the company’s overall target, you have an alignment problem before the year even begins.
Leadership needs to understand what employees want to accomplish personally and connect those goals to where the company is headed. When individual ambition and organizational purpose reinforce one another, execution becomes much more natural.
Better Execution Starts With Better Alignment
When a roofing team repeatedly fails to execute, another SOP, meeting, or incentive may not solve the underlying problem.
Look deeper.
Do you have people who genuinely fit the organization? Do they understand your values? Does everyone know where the company is going? Is there a meaningful purpose behind the work? Do individual goals support the company’s goals?
As Greg’s mountain-climbing analogy makes clear, reaching the summit is only part of the journey. A scalable roofing company needs a team capable of continuing together after one goal has been achieved.
The goal is not to build a company where the owner pushes everyone uphill. It is to build one where the right people understand the destination, believe in where they are going, and take ownership of getting there.
