Expanding and growing a roofing business can take many different forms. One way that many roofers choose to grow their business is by branching out into new areas. Whether it’s expanding into a new part of the roofing industry or adding new trades to your roofing business, adding something new to your offerings can have a big impact on your revenue and improve your customer service. But it can also seem daunting, especially if you haven’t done it before. Here are a few ways to make the process of adding new trades to your small roofing business easier.
Have a Robust System
If you’re preparing to bring new business to your roofing company, it’s going to test the system you have in place for staying organized and efficient. You need to be able to smoothly handle the influx of extra work and make sure you’re staying on top of the jobs you’re doing for your customers. Your current system for keeping track of jobs, documenting information and scheduling your crews and deliveries may not be up to the challenge of adding new trades, especially if you already have a small staff.
One way to increase your capacity and make sure that your small roofing business is prepared for new work is to adopt a roofing software system. Roofing software like AccuLynx gives even small businesses the capacity to take on significant projects. Our dashboard gives you a quick snapshot of every job in your pipeline and its progress, so you can see the status of your work at a glance. AccuLynx has extensive tools for production management, making it easy to schedule a delivery or labor order and keep track of what’s happening when. And with our all-in-one cloud-based system, roofers can document all the details around a job and store them in one easily accessible place. When you have a tool that streamlines the process of documenting job information and keeping track of essential functions, you can scale your business quickly and efficiently.
Track Which Trades Are Most Profitable
Once you’ve started adding new trades to your roofing business, it’s important to keep track of how they’re performing. Making adjustments to your strategy around new trades if need be will help you keep things profitable and ensure that these new trades are benefiting your business. It will also help you prioritize leads as they come in and know which jobs are most worth pursuing.
In AccuLynx, it’s easy to keep track of how your new trades are performing. You can add additional trades to your account (e.g. “Shingle Repair” or “Gutters”) in your AccuLynx settings. Once you’ve added those trades, they’ll start showing up in the AccuLynx reporting dashboards. You can segment reports by trade to create a snapshot of your performance. One important report to generate is profitability analysis by job. This will help you see the impact of new trades on your bottom line. Analyzing the profitability of your trades on a regular basis can help you make any needed real-time adjustments.
Don’t Overlook Past Customers
When you start adding new trades, it presents a new marketing opportunity for your roofing business. You can offer a wider range of services to attract new customers and use your trades to promote your business. However, if you’re offering new trades that you haven’t offered in the past, you also have an untapped source of new business: your past customers. Getting back in touch with former customers to let them know about these new offerings could generate more business.
If you’re using a roofing software like AccuLynx, you can utilize the system to find past customers that would be worth following up with. Since AccuLynx keeps a record of all jobs and customers in one centralized place, you can easily look back at previous work completed and determine which customers might be good candidates for new work. And if you do more work for these customers, it can all be tracked in AccuLynx as well.
Whether you’re branching out into gutter repair, adding siding to your list of services, or offering more upgrades to your customers, your small roofing business can benefit from adding new trades. But when you are just starting out with these new services, it can seem like a lot of extra work. With these strategies and tools, plus a roofing software system, you can tackle these projects with greater confidence and manage an increase in your business.
