First-Year Roofing Sales Plan for a New Company: A Month-by-Month Playbook

Starting a roofing company is the easy part. You file the LLC, get bonded and insured, buy a truck and a magnet sign, and pull your first permit. The hard part — the part that decides whether you're still in business in eighteen months — is selling enough roofs to cover payroll, materials, overhead, and your own draw before the cash runs out. Most new roofing companies don't fail because they install bad roofs. They fail because the owner is a great roofer and a poor salesperson, and nobody told them that the first year is a sales business that happens to install roofs.

What follows is a month-by-month plan built for a brand-new residential shop with little or no brand recognition, a tight budget, and an owner who is probably also the lead salesperson, estimator, and crew foreman for the first stretch. It is written for the real version of your first year — the one where you have $15,000 of working capital instead of $150,000, where your "sales team" is you and maybe one green canvasser, and where every dollar you spend reaching the wrong house is a dollar you don't get back.

The plan is opinionated on purpose. It tells you what to do, in what order, and — just as importantly — what to skip. Pretty much every first-year roofer wastes money on things that only pay off in year three: expensive trade-show booths, a full-time marketing manager, a fleet wrap on five trucks you don't own yet. Year one has exactly one job: prove you can put profitable jobs on the board, repeatably, from a lead source you control. Everything else waits.

What a First-Year Sales Plan Actually Needs to Cover

Before the calendar, get clear on what a sales plan is. It is not a vision statement. A real sales plan answers six questions with numbers:

1. What's the revenue target, and what does it require in jobs? Work backwards from the number of roofs, not the dollar figure.
2. Where do the leads come from, and what does each source cost per job? Not per lead — per closed, profitable job.
3. What's the conversion math at each stage? Leads to appointments to inspections to estimates to signed contracts.
4. Who does the selling, and what do they get paid? Owner-sold, commissioned reps, or a mix.
5. What's the daily and weekly activity that drives all of it? Doors knocked, calls made, estimates delivered.
6. How do you measure and correct it weekly? The plan is worthless if you only look at it quarterly.

If you can't answer those six, you don't have a sales plan; you have hope. Year one is too tight for hope.

Set the Revenue Target by Working Backwards

Don't start with "I want to do a million dollars." Start with what you need to survive and what your capacity allows. A solo owner who is also running the crew can realistically sell and produce a limited number of roofs per month — you simply can't be on a roof Tuesday and in three living rooms Wednesday. Be honest about that ceiling.

Here's a grounded way to set the number. Pick your average residential job value for your market and roof type — say $11,000 for a standard asphalt-shingle tear-off and replace on a moderate-size home (adjust to your local pricing; pricing varies enormously by region, pitch, and material). Then decide how many you can produce per month without quality slipping. A first-year shop with one crew and an owner-salesperson can often handle four to eight residential re-roofs a month once the pipeline is full — fewer at the start.

That lands a disciplined first-year shop somewhere in the mid-six figures to roughly a million in booked revenue, ramping into it. Your numbers will differ. The point is the shape: you don't hit your steady-state number in month one, and your plan should never assume you will. Plenty of first-year owners blow their cash modeling month-twelve volume starting in month two, then panic when the pipeline is empty in month three.

Know Your Real Numbers Before You Spend a Dollar

Three numbers govern everything: your average job value, your gross margin per job, and your close rate from inspection to signed contract. If you don't know your margin, you can't know what you can afford to spend acquiring a job. A simple version:

• Average job value: $11,000
• Materials + labor + crew burden: $7,150 (about 65%)
• Gross margin: $3,850 (35%)

Out of that $3,850 you pay overhead (insurance, truck, software, phone, your draw) and acquisition cost. If you can profitably spend, say, 8–12% of revenue on sales and marketing in year one — call it $880–$1,320 per job — that's your acquisition budget ceiling. Every lead-source decision later in the plan gets measured against that ceiling. A source that costs you $1,500 to land a job at a $3,850 margin is eating your business alive even though you "got the job."

The Year at a Glance

Here is the whole plan on one page before we go month by month.

Notice what's not on that list: no paid lead aggregators in Q1, no big-budget advertising before you've proven you can close, no second crew before the first is fully booked. Restraint is a strategy.

Month 1 — Foundation, Pricing, and Your First Doors

Month one is not about volume. It's about building the machine you'll run for eleven more months and getting your first jobs from the cheapest source you have: people who already know you.

Build the Sales Infrastructure (Week 1)

You need shockingly little, but you need it dialed:

• A CRM. Even a free tier of a simple CRM beats a notebook. You will mine this list for years; start clean on day one. Track every lead with: source, address, roof age estimate, inspection date, estimate amount, status, and next action.
• A consistent estimate template. A clean, itemized estimate that the homeowner can understand wins jobs against sloppier competitors. Include scope, materials, warranty terms, and a clear price. No mystery line items.
• A Google Business Profile. Free, and the single highest-ROI marketing asset a local roofer owns. Fill it out completely — service area, hours, photos, services. Reviews come later; the listing goes up now.
• A phone number that gets answered. Missed calls are missed jobs. If you're on a roof, get a setter or a service that answers and books.
• Photo documentation discipline. From your very first inspection, photograph every roof the same way: overview, each slope, flashing, penetrations, valleys, gutters, and any damage, with the address visible. This habit pays off in estimates, in warranty disputes, and — when storm damage is involved — in the documentation you hand the homeowner.

Nail Your Pricing Before You Quote a Stranger (Week 1–2)

The fastest way to kill a new roofing company is to win jobs you lose money on. Price three sample jobs on paper before you quote a real customer: a simple ranch, a steep two-story, and a complex cut-up roof. Build each from real material takeoffs and real labor, add your burden, and apply your target margin. Now you have a feel for your numbers and you won't freeze when a homeowner asks "what's it gonna run me?"

A few pricing disciplines that save first-year owners:

• Charge for complexity. Steep pitch, multiple stories, lots of penetrations, and tear-off of multiple layers all cost more. Don't quote them like a walkable ranch.
• Don't be the cheapest. The cheapest roofer attracts the worst customers and the thinnest margins. Be the clearest and most credible instead.
• Build in a contingency line. Decking replacement is the classic surprise. Spell out a per-sheet price for bad decking in the contract so you're not eating it.

Work Your Warm Network (Week 2–4)

Your first ten jobs almost never come from advertising. They come from people who'll take your call. Make a list of everyone who knows you: former employers and coworkers, friends, family, your kid's coach, the guy at the supply house, real estate agents, property managers, insurance agents, and general contractors. Tell every one of them, in plain words, what you do and who you help.

Real estate agents and property managers are especially worth a coffee. They touch dozens of homes a year and a roof problem can hold up a closing; a roofer who shows up fast, documents clearly, and prices fairly becomes their go-to. One good agent relationship can be worth several jobs a year.

Start Knocking — But Knock Smart (Week 3 onward)

Door knocking is the highest-ROI lead source for a new roofer with no budget, because it costs only time. But "go knock a neighborhood" is how green reps burn out. The skill is in which doors and what you say.

Which doors: older roofs. A 20-year-old roof on a 22-year-old subdivision is a candidate; a five-year-old roof is a waste of your knuckles. New owners can't see roof age from the curb reliably — a re-roof done eight years ago looks like new construction from the street. This is exactly where most door-knocking effort leaks: reps knock the whole street, including the houses that got new roofs last spring, and get demoralized by the no's.

What you say: lead with a reason you're at their house specifically, not a generic pitch. A simple, honest opener:

"Hi, I'm [name] with [company] — we're a local roofing crew. I was looking at roofs in the neighborhood and yours is at the age where it's worth a free look before it starts giving you trouble. Takes me ten minutes, no obligation — want me to take a quick look while I'm here?"

That works because it's specific, low-pressure, and offers value (a free inspection) instead of asking for a sale. Track your knock numbers from day one: doors knocked, conversations had, inspections booked. You'll need that math to forecast.

A few mechanics that separate productive knocking from wandering a subdivision: knock the dinner-time window (roughly 4:30 to 7:30 p.m. on weekdays, plus Saturday mornings) when people are home; knock in a tight cluster so you're walking, not driving, between doors; and after the first slope of a neighborhood, prioritize the streets where the original roofs are aging out together — tract builds tend to re-roof in waves, so a 1999 subdivision can have a whole block of roofs hitting end-of-life the same season. Don't argue at the door; the goal of the knock is a booked inspection, not a sale. And handle the brush-off honestly: "Totally understand — no pressure. The free look just gives you a baseline so you're not caught off guard. If now's bad, when's better?" Logging your knock-to-inspection ratio per street tells you which neighborhoods deserve a second pass and which to drop.

Month 1 targets: 3–5 jobs sold (mostly from warm network), pricing dialed, CRM live, 200+ doors knocked, and a documented inspection process you can hand to a future rep.

Month 2 — Tighten the Funnel and Learn Your Conversion Math

Month two is about turning random activity into a measurable funnel. You can't improve what you don't count.

Instrument Every Stage

Track these five stages for every lead, every week:

1. Lead (a name and address that wants or might want a look)
2. Inspection booked
3. Inspection completed
4. Estimate delivered
5. Contract signed

Now you can compute the ratios that run your business. A healthy-ish first-year residential funnel often looks like this, but yours will differ — the point is to know your numbers:

If your estimate-to-signed rate is 20%, you have a pricing or trust problem, not a lead problem — and buying more leads would just waste money faster. If your lead-to-booked rate is 25%, your opener or your follow-up speed is broken. The funnel tells you where to fix.

Fix the Follow-Up Leak

The number-one silent killer in a new shop's funnel is slow follow-up. A homeowner who asked for an estimate on Monday and hears nothing until Thursday has already called two competitors. Set hard rules:

• Respond to every inbound inquiry within an hour during business hours.
• Deliver every estimate within 24–48 hours of the inspection, while you're still fresh in their mind.
• Follow up on every outstanding estimate at least three times — most sales happen on the second or third touch, not the first.

A simple cadence: same-day thank-you, day-3 check-in, day-7 "any questions, this price holds through [date]" nudge. Put these as tasks in your CRM so they don't fall through.

Sharpen the In-Home Close

For residential re-roofs, much of the sale happens at the kitchen table after the inspection. A repeatable structure beats winging it:

1. Show, don't tell. Walk them through the inspection photos on a tablet. Point at the actual granule loss, the cracked boots, the rusted flashing. Homeowners buy what they can see.
2. Frame the cost of waiting. A small leak becomes deck rot becomes interior damage. You're not scaring them; you're being honest about how roofs fail.
3. Give a clear, itemized number. Confusion kills deals. One clean price, clear scope, clear warranty.
4. Make the next step obvious. "If this looks good, we can get you on the schedule for the week of the 15th and lock in this price today."

Month 2 targets: funnel fully instrumented, conversion ratios known, follow-up cadence automated in the CRM, 4–5 jobs sold.

Month 3 — First Reviews, First Referrals, and a Real Estimate of CAC

By month three you should have a handful of finished roofs and — critically — the start of social proof and a real number for what it costs you to get a job.

Turn Finished Jobs Into Reviews and Referrals

Every completed job is two assets: a review and a referral. Most new owners forget to ask for either while the customer is happiest — right after a clean install.

• Ask for the Google review at handoff, in person, and make it easy: "Would you mind leaving us a quick review? It's the main way people find a small local shop like ours." Then text them the direct link before you leave the driveway. The first 10 reviews are the hardest and the most valuable.
• Ask for referrals explicitly. "Most of our work comes from neighbors telling neighbors. If anyone you know is dealing with a roof, I'd be grateful for the intro." A modest referral thank-you (a gift card, not a sketchy kickback) keeps it flowing.
• Knock the neighbors of every job. A crew on a roof is the best billboard you'll ever have. Before the job, drop a door hanger on the eight nearest homes; during, a yard sign; after, knock those same doors: "We just put a roof on your neighbor's place — happy to give yours a free look while we're set up in the area." This "work the block" motion is one of the cheapest, highest-converting plays in residential roofing.

Compute Your Cost Per Job by Source

Now that you have a quarter of data, tag every closed job with its source and total what each source cost you. Time counts as money — value your hours.

This table is the most important artifact of your first quarter. It tells you, with your own money, which sources to double down on. Referrals and job-site canvassing are almost always your cheapest jobs; that's where Q2 reinvestment goes. Paid leads, if you ever test them, get held to this same standard — cost per closed job, against your margin.

Month 3 targets: 10+ first reviews, referral ask built into job close-out, cost-per-job-by-source table built, 5 jobs sold.

Quarter 2 (Months 4–6) — From Hustle to Repeatable Pipeline

You survived the first quarter on hustle and your network. That network is finite. Quarter two is where you build sources that refill on their own.

Promote Your Cheapest, Highest-Converting Source

Look at your cost-per-job table and put more fuel on the winner. For most first-year residential shops, that's some combination of referrals, job-site canvassing, and Google. Concretely:

• Systematize job-site canvassing. Every single job triggers door hangers before, a yard sign during, and a neighbor knock after. No exceptions. This should produce a steady trickle of new inspections from each completed roof.
• Build your Google profile into a lead source. With 10–20 reviews, your profile starts ranking in the local map pack for "roofer near me" searches. Add photos of completed jobs weekly, respond to every review, and keep your service area accurate. This is free and compounds.
• Formalize referral partners. Take three real estate agents and two insurance agents to lunch this quarter and make them your roof person.

Make Your First Hire: A Canvasser or Appointment Setter

The first person you hire is not a salesperson who closes — it's someone who fills your calendar so you can spend your time closing and producing. A canvasser (knocks doors, books inspections) or a part-time setter (calls your old leads and inbound inquiries, books appointments) multiplies your most constrained resource: your time.

The trouble with a green canvasser is the same trouble you had in month one: they knock the wrong doors and quit. A new hire with no roofing background doesn't know a 7-year-old roof from a 20-year-old one from the sidewalk, so they waste hours and self-no's on houses that were never candidates. The faster you can put them on the right doors with a concrete reason to be there, the faster they make money — and a canvasser who makes money in week two stays. A canvasser who knocks 200 dead doors quits in week two. Rep churn is a sales-plan problem as much as an HR problem.

Pay structure for a first canvasser is usually a modest hourly base plus a bonus per booked-and-held inspection, with a bump if it closes. Keep the booked-inspection bonus meaningful — that's the behavior you want.

Targeting: Stop Working the Whole Street

This is the lever that separates a first-year shop that scales from one that grinds. Every hour your crew, your canvasser, or you spend at a house that doesn't need a roof is pure waste — wasted gas, wasted door hangers, wasted payroll, wasted morale. The whole game in roofing customer acquisition is spending your finite hours on the homes that are actually due.

The problem is that roof age is genuinely hard to see from the curb or from public data. Common myths cost new owners real money:

• Zillow and the county assessor show "year built," not roof age. A 1995 house could have a brand-new roof from last year or an original roof on its last legs. Re-roofs don't show up in those records. Pricing your outreach on year-built means you're knocking new roofs constantly.
• Measurement tools measure, they don't age. Aerial measurement services are great for takeoffs and accurate estimates, but they tell you the roof's dimensions, not how old it is or whether a storm beat it up. That's a different question — "measure this roof" versus "which roof should I knock."

This is where a per-roof targeting layer earns its keep. RoofPredict reads aerial imagery to estimate roof age as a range per address — not a guess about the whole subdivision, and not a precise install date (no tool can give you that honestly), but a tight enough window to tell a 6-year-old roof from an 18-to-22-year-old one before anyone climbs a ladder. It also models storm exposure house by house — going past "it hailed in this ZIP" to which roofs the wind and hail likely wore out, scored per home. You hand your canvasser a ranked list of the doors worth knocking on a street instead of "go knock everything," and you enrich your own CRM and mailing list with roof-age and storm signals so you stop spending to reach the houses that can't buy a roof.

Honest limits, because a tight trade compares notes: roof age comes back as a range, not a date, and storm exposure is modeled as odds, not proof — you still inspect to confirm. It doesn't measure the roof or identify shingle brand; that's a measurement tool's job. What it does is answer the one question that governs your acquisition cost: which houses, out of this whole street, are actually due? For a first-year shop where every wasted hour hurts, pointing your limited outreach at the right doors is often the difference between a canvasser who pays for himself and one who doesn't.

Q2 targets: job-site canvassing systematized, Google driving inbound, first canvasser hired and producing, 4–5 jobs/month, a documented "which doors" targeting process.

Quarter 3 (Months 7–9) — Hire and Ramp Your First Closer

By now you should have a pipeline that doesn't depend entirely on you, a clear winning lead source or two, and enough margin banked to make a real hire. Quarter three is about adding a salesperson who closes, so the business can grow past your personal capacity.

Hire the Right First Rep

A few hard-won rules for a new shop's first sales hire:

• Hire for hustle and coachability, not a fat roofing resume. A hungry, organized rep who follows your process beats a "10-year roofing sales vet" who wants to do it their own way and resists your CRM.
• Pay mostly on commission, with a livable ramp. A common residential structure is a percentage of gross profit per job (often in the 8–12% range depending on whether they self-generate the lead) plus a small base or draw for the first 60–90 days so they don't starve while ramping. Pay more for self-generated jobs than for company-provided leads — you want reps who hunt.
• Give them a documented process, not a hope. This is why you instrumented your funnel in month two. You can hand a new rep your opener, your inspection checklist, your estimate template, your follow-up cadence, and your kitchen-table structure. A rep dropped into a documented system ramps in weeks; a rep told to "go sell roofs" flails for months.

Protect Your Margin as You Add Reps

More reps means more leads needed and more chances to discount. Two guardrails:

• Set a price floor and a discount-approval rule. A green rep desperate to close will give away your margin. Require owner approval for anything below your floor.
• Feed reps the right doors. A rep who spends half their day driving to dead houses produces half as much. The targeting discipline from Q2 — ranked lists of due roofs, enriched CRM — matters even more once you're paying someone by the hour to be in front of homeowners.

Build a Weekly Sales Cadence

With more than one person selling, you need a rhythm. A simple weekly cadence keeps the plan alive:

• Monday number review (30 min): last week's leads, inspections, estimates, closes by person and by source vs. target.
• Daily activity expectation: a clear, posted number for doors, calls, inspections, and estimates per rep per day.
• Pipeline review: every outstanding estimate, its next action, and its date. No estimate sits untouched.
• One coaching ride-along per rep per week: you in the truck, watching the inspection and the close, fixing one thing.

Q3 targets: first commissioned rep hired and ramping, weekly cadence running, margin guardrails in place, 6–7 jobs/month, two reliable lead sources feeding the pipeline.

Quarter 4 (Months 10–12) — Systematize and Build the Off-Season Moat

The final quarter is about durability: turning a year of scrappy wins into a system that survives slow months, your own days off, and the inevitable churn of a rep or a lead source. This is also where you build pipeline for the next year so you don't start month 13 from zero.

Mine the Asset You've Been Building All Year: Your Own List

By month ten your CRM holds something valuable: every person who ever asked for an estimate and didn't buy, plus every past customer. That list is money already sitting in your book — no ad spend required to reach it.

• Work your lost estimates. A homeowner who got a quote eight months ago and chose a competitor (or chose to wait) is a warm lead now. "Hi, it's [name] — we looked at your roof back in the fall. Wanted to check in before another season of weather. Want me to come re-check it, no charge?" A meaningful share of "no for now" becomes "yes" on the second season.
• Re-engage past customers for the rest of the home. They trust you. They have neighbors, rental properties, gutters, and friends with bad roofs.
• Layer in roof-age and storm signals. Enriching that old list so you can see which of your past leads' roofs have aged into the buying window — or taken a storm since you last talked — turns a flat list into a ranked call list. The roofs that have crossed into "due" are the calls to make first.

Build Off-Season Pipeline Now

Roofing is seasonal almost everywhere. The shops that survive their second winter built pipeline in the fall. Concretely: keep canvassing and estimating through the slow months even when installs pause, so your spring calendar is loading while competitors are dormant. A signed-but-scheduled-for-spring backlog is the best insurance against a cash-flow gap.

A Note on Storm Work — Stay on the Right Side of the Line

Many new roofers get pulled toward storm and insurance-related work because the jobs are bigger and the homeowner is motivated. There's real opportunity there, but there's also a legal line that has sunk roofers, and you need to know exactly where it is before you build any of it into your plan.

Here's the safe frame, and it's worth teaching your reps explicitly:

What you (the roofer) CAN do:

• Inspect the roof and document damage thoroughly — dated photos of every slope, every hail strike, every wind-lifted shingle, with the address visible.
• Write an accurate, itemized repair estimate aligned to standard estimating practice for the work you would do.
• Hand that documentation and estimate to the homeowner so they have the facts.
• State plain facts about your own scope to the carrier if asked.

What you must NEVER do (this is unlicensed public adjusting in most states, and it has gotten roofers fined and shut down):

• Negotiate, adjust, or "handle" the homeowner's claim for a fee.
• Interpret their policy or tell them what's covered.
• Promise a specific payout, approval, or that "the insurance will pay for the whole roof."
• Say anything about their deductible being waived, absorbed, or covered — that's fraud in many states.
• Advertise a "free roof."
• Represent the homeowner against their insurer.

The clean version of the storm play is simple: you find the roofs a storm likely damaged, you document them properly, you write an honest estimate, and you hand the homeowner the facts. The homeowner files the claim. The insurer decides coverage. You never touch the claim itself. Build your storm scripts and your reps' talk tracks around that line and you capture the opportunity without betting your license on it. Per-roof storm modeling helps you find which homes likely took damage worth inspecting in the first place — the targeting side — but the documentation and estimate are where your value to the homeowner actually lives.

Lock In the Systems That Make Year Two Easier

Use the last quarter to write down what worked so year two doesn't depend on your memory:

• A sales playbook: openers, inspection checklist, photo standard, estimate template, follow-up cadence, kitchen-table structure, objection responses.
• A hiring and onboarding doc so your next rep ramps in two weeks, not two months.
• A weekly dashboard: leads, inspections, estimates, closes, close rate, and cost per job by source.
• An off-season plan with a spring-scheduled backlog.

Q4 targets: CRM mined for re-engagement, off-season backlog building, sales playbook documented, storm/claims process legally clean, 6–8 jobs/month run-rate, and a written system you can scale in year two.

The Numbers That Run a First-Year Sales Plan

Pull it together. Here's a compact set of metrics to review weekly. If you only track five things, track these:

The owners who make it past year one aren't the ones with the best logo. They're the ones who look at these five numbers every Monday and fix the worst one.

A Worked Example: One Week in Month 8

To make it concrete, here's what a single week in a healthy month-eight pipeline might look like for a shop with the owner plus one rep and one canvasser:

• Canvasser knocks 250 ranked "due" doors → books 9 inspections.
• Google profile + referrals → 6 inbound inquiries → 4 inspections booked.
• Owner + rep complete 13 inspections, deliver 12 estimates within 48 hours.
• Follow-up cadence closes 5 jobs this week (some from this week's estimates, some from prior weeks' follow-ups).
• 5 jobs × $11,000 = $55,000 booked; at 35% margin, ~$19,250 gross profit before overhead.

Notice the leverage point: the canvasser knocking ranked doors books 9 inspections from 250 knocks. A canvasser knocking random doors might book 3 from the same 250 and quit by Friday. Same effort, very different business. That's the whole argument for targeting in one example.

What to Skip in Year One

Just as important as the plan is the anti-plan — the expensive distractions that feel like progress and aren't:

• Don't buy shared leads from aggregators yet. They resell the same homeowner to four competitors, the margins are thin, and you can't control quality. Prove your owned channels first.
• Don't run big paid advertising before your close rate is solid. Driving leads into a leaky funnel just wastes money faster. Fix conversion first, then scale traffic.
• Don't hire a closer before you have a documented process. A rep with no system is an expensive way to learn what you should have written down.
• Don't buy a second crew before the first is fully booked. Capacity ahead of demand is how new shops bleed cash.
• Don't chase every job type. Pick a lane — residential re-roofs in a defined service area — and get great at it before you add commercial, repairs, and metal.
• Don't compete on price. It attracts the customers and margins that kill new companies.

Common First-Year Mistakes (and the Fix)

Putting It Together

A first-year roofing company doesn't win on craftsmanship alone — that's table stakes. It wins by building a small, measured sales engine and feeding it the right doors. Spend the first quarter getting your pricing and process right and selling from your network. Spend the second building repeatable, owned lead sources and making your first hire someone who fills your calendar. Spend the third adding a closer who plugs into a documented system. Spend the fourth turning a year of hustle into a system, mining your own list, and loading next spring's calendar.

Through all of it, the single highest-leverage discipline is this: don't spend your finite hours, payroll, gas, and door hangers on roofs that aren't due. Roof age is hard to see from the curb, and public records lie to you about it. Knowing which houses on a street are actually aging out — and which ones a storm likely wore out — before anyone climbs a ladder is what turns a grinding first year into a profitable one. RoofPredict exists to answer exactly that question: it estimates roof age as a range per address from aerial imagery, models storm exposure house by house, and hands you a ranked list of the doors worth knocking — so your canvasser, your rep, and you spend the year in front of the homeowners who actually need a roof. It won't measure the roof for you or hand you a finished claim, and it shouldn't pretend to. What it does is make your own streets and your own customer list into work you own and control — which, in a first year where every wasted hour hurts, is the whole point. If you want to see what your service area looks like ranked by which roofs are due, book a demo and we'll walk a real street with you.

FAQ

How many roofs does a new roofing company need to sell in its first year?

Work backwards from your average job value and your real capacity rather than picking a revenue figure. A disciplined first-year residential shop with one crew and an owner-salesperson typically ramps from 2–3 jobs a month early to 6–8 a month by year-end. At an $11,000 average job value, that's roughly mid-six-figures to about a million in booked revenue across the year, ramping into it. Your number depends on local pricing, roof complexity, and how much you produce versus sell. The key is not assuming month-twelve volume in month two.

What's the cheapest way to get roofing customers in the first year?

Your warm network and finished jobs are nearly free and convert best. Tell everyone who knows you what you do, then turn every completed roof into reviews, referrals, and neighbor knocks (door hangers before, yard sign during, knock the eight nearest homes after). A complete Google Business Profile plus your first 10–20 reviews drives free inbound that compounds. Door knocking costs only time, but only pays off if you knock the right doors — older roofs, not the whole street.

Should a new roofing company buy leads in year one?

Usually not yet. Shared leads from aggregators get resold to several competitors, carry thin margins, and you can't control quality. Prove your owned channels first — referrals, job-site canvassing, Google, and targeted door knocking — and learn your real cost per closed job. If you ever test paid leads, hold them to the same standard as every other source: cost per signed, profitable job measured against your gross margin, not cost per lead.

How do I figure out which doors to knock?

Knock roofs that are old enough to be candidates and skip the ones that aren't. The trouble is roof age is hard to see from the curb, and county and Zillow records show year-built, not roof age — a re-roof done a few years ago is invisible there. A per-roof targeting layer like RoofPredict estimates roof age as a range from aerial imagery and models storm exposure house by house, so you can hand a canvasser a ranked list of due roofs instead of telling them to knock everything. Roof age comes back as a range, not a date, so you still inspect to confirm.

What should my close rate be from inspection to signed contract?

For residential re-roofs, a healthy first-year close rate from completed inspection to signed contract is often around 30–50%. If you're consistently below 30%, the problem is usually pricing, trust-building, or your follow-up cadence — not your lead volume. Buying more leads to fix a low close rate just wastes money faster. Track every stage of the funnel so you can tell whether the leak is at the booking stage, the estimate stage, or the close.

Who should be my first sales hire?

Not a closer — a canvasser or appointment setter who fills your calendar so you can spend your time closing and producing. Pay a modest hourly base plus a meaningful bonus per booked-and-held inspection. The biggest risk with a green canvasser is door fatigue from knocking the wrong houses, so put them on ranked, due-roof doors fast. A canvasser who books appointments and earns bonuses in their first weeks stays; one who knocks dead doors quits. Hire a commissioned closer later, once you have a documented sales process to plug them into.

How do I price roofing jobs so I don't lose money in year one?

Before quoting a stranger, price three sample jobs on paper — a simple ranch, a steep two-story, and a complex cut-up roof — from real material takeoffs and labor plus your burden, then apply your target margin (many residential shops target around 35% gross). Charge for complexity (pitch, stories, penetrations, multiple tear-off layers), don't try to be the cheapest, and always include a per-sheet decking-replacement line so a rotten deck doesn't eat your profit. Know your margin so you also know the most you can spend to acquire a job.

Can a roofer help a homeowner with a storm-damage insurance claim?

Only on the documentation and estimate side. A roofer may inspect the roof, document damage thoroughly with dated photos, write an accurate itemized repair estimate, and hand all of that to the homeowner. The roofer may not, for a fee, negotiate or 'handle' the claim, interpret the policy or coverage, promise a specific payout or approval, say anything about waiving or absorbing the deductible, advertise a 'free roof,' or represent the homeowner against the insurer — that's unlicensed public adjusting in most states and has gotten roofers fined. The homeowner files the claim; the insurer decides coverage.

What metrics should I track weekly in my first year?

Five: inspections booked per week (top-of-funnel health), inspection-to-signed close rate (pricing and trust), average gross margin per job (selling profitably), cost per closed job by source (where to spend), and outstanding estimates and their age (follow-up discipline). Review them every Monday and fix the worst one. Owners who survive year one aren't the ones with the best branding — they're the ones who watch these numbers and correct course weekly instead of quarterly.

How do I keep leads coming in during the slow off-season?

Build the off-season pipeline before the season ends. Keep canvassing and estimating through slow months even when installs pause, so a signed-but-scheduled-for-spring backlog loads while competitors go dormant. Mine your own CRM — lost estimates from earlier in the year and past customers are warm, free leads. Enriching that old list with roof-age and storm signals tells you which past leads have aged into the buying window or taken a storm since you last talked, so you know which calls to make first.