New Roofing Business, Slow, No Jobs: What to Actually Do This Week

You incorporated, pulled the license, paid for the GL and workers' comp, wrapped the truck, and printed yard signs. The schedule is empty. The phone rang twice last week and both were people who wanted a free repair on a leak that turned out to be a clogged gutter. Three months of overhead are going out and almost nothing is coming in. If you're sitting in the truck reading this between the two estimates you have all week, you are in the most common, most survivable, and most fixable spot a new roofing company can be in.

The hard truth up front: a slow start is almost never a quality problem and almost never a pricing problem. It's a visibility and motion problem. Nobody knows you exist, you have no proof, and you're waiting for work to find you instead of going to find it. The roofers who break out of the dead-phone stage in their first year don't do it with a clever ad. They do it with a boring, repeatable daily routine that puts them in front of homeowners who have a roof problem right now and homeowners who will have one soon. Everything below is that routine, broken into what to do today, this week, and over the next ninety days.

This is written for the owner-operator or the two-truck shop that is doing residential reroofs, repairs, and storm restoration. If you're commercial, the targeting and bidding mechanics differ, but the discipline is the same.

First, diagnose why the phone is dead

Before you spend a dollar, figure out which of these you actually have. Most new roofers have three or four of them at once.

• No awareness. Nobody in your market knows your company name. There is no signal in the neighborhoods you want to work.
• No proof. A homeowner about to spend twelve to thirty thousand dollars on a roof wants to see that you've done it before, near them, and that the last people weren't furious. You have no reviews, no photos, no referrals.
• No targeting. You're "available" but you're not pointed at any specific houses. You wait for inbound. Inbound for a brand-new company is close to zero.
• No follow-up. You bid a few jobs, the homeowner said "let me think about it," and you never called back. The industry loses a stunning share of sold work to silence after the estimate.
• No speed. Someone did call, and you got back to them the next afternoon. They'd already signed with the company that answered the phone live.

Write down which of these is true for you. The fixes are different. A company with great reviews and no targeting needs a list and a route. A company with targeting and no proof needs to manufacture proof fast. Be honest, because the next ninety days depend on attacking the right one.

The math you need on the wall

You cannot manage a slow start by feeling. Put real numbers on it. Here is a worked example for a one-salesperson shop that needs to net $8,000/month to survive.

Assume your average reroof nets you $2,500 in owner's pay after all costs (this is conservative; many residential reroofs net more, but plan low). To net $8,000 you need roughly 3.2 sold jobs a month. Now work backward through a realistic funnel for a new company with weak proof:

That last number is the one that saves you. You don't need a marketing genius. You need roughly 12 real contact attempts a day, every working day, and a way to convert a quarter of inspections. A door knocker doing 60-80 doors a day to get 12 conversations clears this with room to spare. The reason your phone is dead is almost always that this top number — attempts — is near zero. The rest of this fixes that and tightens the conversion at each step so the top number can be smaller.

What to do today (before you read the rest)

Three things, in the next two hours, no budget required.

1. Claim and finish your Google Business Profile. This is the single highest-leverage free asset for a local roofer. Verify the business, set the category to "Roofing contractor," add your service area, add hours, add ten photos of work (more on getting photos below), and write a real description. Most new roofers half-finish this and wonder why they don't show in the map pack.
2. Text every past customer, every subcontractor relationship, and every personal contact who owns a home. Not a blast — individual texts. "Hey [name], I started my own roofing company. If you or anyone you know needs a roof looked at, a repair, or storm damage checked, I'd be grateful for the call. No pressure." You will get one or two jobs out of fifty texts. Those one or two jobs become your first proof.
3. Block tomorrow morning, 9 a.m. to noon, for door knocking in a target neighborhood (we'll pick it correctly below). Put it in the calendar like a job. The number-one reason new roofers don't knock is that it never gets scheduled.

Do those now. The strategy below makes them work harder.

Pick the right streets, not random streets

Door knocking and mailing both fail when they're random. A new roofer with limited time cannot afford to canvass houses that don't need a roof. The whole game is concentrating your limited hours on the homes most likely to be due.

There are two signals that a residential roof is likely to need replacement:

1. Age. Asphalt shingle roofs in most of the U.S. are replaced somewhere in the 15-to-25-year window depending on shingle grade, ventilation, and climate. A neighborhood built in a tight band of years will "age out" together. A subdivision built in 2003-2005 is, right now, squarely in the replacement zone.
2. Storm exposure. Hail and high wind dramatically shorten a roof's remaining life and create a defensible reason for the homeowner to act now. A roof that took 1.5-inch hail last spring is a different conversation than one that's merely old.

The targeting mistake that keeps new roofers broke is treating every house the same. The fix is to rank streets before you walk them.

A free, manual way to find aged-out neighborhoods

You can do a rough version of this with public data and an afternoon.

• Pull up your county assessor's parcel data (most counties publish "year built" online and many let you export). Find subdivisions where the bulk of homes were built 18-24 years ago. Those are your priority polygons.
• Cross-reference with recent storm history. The NOAA Storm Events Database and the NWS Storm Prediction Center's storm reports archive let you look up hail and wind events by date and county. A neighborhood that's aged out and sat under a recent hail core is your A-list.
• Drive it. Aged roofs show granule loss (you'll see bald, shiny patches and dark streaks), curling or cupping tabs, patched valleys, and a lot of moss on the north slopes. A street with several visibly tired roofs is a street where the rest are close behind.

This works, but it's slow, and the storm cross-referencing by hand is genuinely tedious. It's the part most owner-operators skip, which is exactly why it's an edge if you do it.

Where RoofPredict fits

The manual process above is what software is for. RoofPredict exists to do the ranking step at scale: it estimates a roof-age range for individual addresses from aerial imagery and models storm physics per roof — so instead of "this subdivision is old," you get a house-by-house list of which roofs are most likely due, ranked by age plus the storms that specific roof has taken. It also enriches a list you already own — your CRM, a mailing list, a canvassing route — with those roof-age and storm signals, so your reps walk the doors most likely to convert first.

Two honest limits, because anyone who tells you otherwise is selling: the age output is a range, not a birth certificate for the roof — aerial imagery can't read the install date off a permit, so treat "likely 18-22 years" as a prioritization signal, not a fact you state to a homeowner. And the storm model gives you odds, not proof — it tells you which roofs probably took a beating so you know where to knock and what to inspect; it does not prove damage. The inspection on the roof proves damage. Used that way — to point a limited day at the highest-probability doors — it turns the 234-contacts math above into far fewer wasted steps. Used as a crutch to skip the inspection or to make claims to homeowners, it'll get you in trouble. More on that in the storm section.

Whether you use software or the county-data method, the principle is non-negotiable: rank, then walk. Random canvassing is how new roofers burn out in six weeks.

Door knocking that doesn't make you want to quit

Door knocking is the fastest free path to your first jobs, full stop. It's also where most new owners flinch. Here's how to do it like a professional instead of a nervous salesperson.

The mindset reframe

You are not begging. You are a local contractor offering a free, no-obligation roof check to a homeowner whose roof, based on the age of the neighborhood or a recent storm, is statistically likely to need attention. That's a genuine service. Roofs fail slowly and then suddenly; a homeowner who catches it before the deck rots saves real money. Walk like someone doing them a favor, because you are.

A door script that works

Keep it short. The goal of the door is not to sell a roof. It's to earn a look at the roof.

"Hi, I'm [name] with [company] — we're the local roofing crew working [street/neighborhood] this week. I'm not here to sell you anything. A lot of the roofs in here are getting to the age where they start to go, and we're doing free roof checks while we're in the area. Takes me about fifteen minutes, I'll take a few photos, and I'll show you exactly what shape yours is in — even if the answer is 'you're fine for five more years.' Want me to take a quick look while I'm here?"

Why it works:

• "Local" and "this week" create proximity and a reason it's happening now.
• "I'm not here to sell you anything" disarms the reflex. You mean it — the inspection is the product right now.
• "Even if the answer is you're fine" signals honesty and lowers the threat. Counterintuitively, telling people they might not need a roof makes them trust you enough to let you up.
• The ask is for a look, not a sale. Small yes first.

After a storm, swap the age line for: "We've been checking roofs in this area after [the storm date] — a lot of homes took hail/wind and the damage isn't always visible from the ground. I can take a look and show you photos of what's actually up there." Note the framing: you're checking and documenting, not promising anyone a new roof or an approved claim.

The mechanics of a knocking day

• Knock 9 a.m.-noon and 4 p.m.-7 p.m. Mid-morning catches retirees, work-from-home, and stay-at-home parents; early evening catches everyone else. Skip dinner hour right at 6.
• Door hangers on no-answers. Roughly 60-70% won't answer. Leave a clean door hanger with your photo, a QR code to your reviews, and one line: "Stopped by to offer a free roof check — call/text [number]." The hanger plus the in-person attempt together beat either alone.
• Log every door. A simple notebook or a free canvassing app. Mark: not home, not interested, inspection booked, inspection done. You're building a route you'll re-walk.
• Re-walk no-answers twice. The third touch on a street is where booked inspections jump. New roofers walk a street once and conclude knocking "doesn't work."
• Target 60-80 doors a day. That's a realistic morning-plus-evening number that yields the ~12 conversations the funnel needs.

Handling the four objections you'll hear all day

• "I already have a roofer." — "Totally fair. The free check is just a second set of eyes — if yours is solid, I'll tell you and you'll know your roofer's taking care of you. Two minutes?"
• "My roof's fine." — "Could absolutely be. Most of the failures I find are the ones the homeowner couldn't see from the ground — flashing, valleys, the back slope. If it's fine, that's the report I'll give you."
• "How much does it cost?" — "The check is free. If you need work, I'll give you a written estimate and you decide — no obligation, no pressure."
• "I'm busy / not interested." — "No problem at all. I'll leave a card — if a leak ever shows up, call me before it gets expensive." Then leave. Pushing kills your reputation on the street.

What a fifteen-minute inspection should actually cover

The word "inspection" scares new roofers into either skipping the rigor or overpromising. Here's a tight checklist that earns trust and produces the documentation you'll need either way:

• Ground walk-around first. Photograph all four elevations from the yard. Note the roof pitch, number of layers visible at the eave, satellite dishes, solar, and any obvious sag in the ridgeline.
• Gutters and downspouts. A handful of granules in a gutter is normal; a gutter half-full of granules is a roof shedding its protective layer. Photograph it.
• On the roof (only with proper fall protection — this is a leading cause of serious construction injuries, so use a harness and rope or don't go up). Check field shingles for granule loss, blistering, curling, and cupping. Check the south and west slopes first; they age fastest from sun.
• Hail signatures, if relevant. Soft, dark, round bruises where granules are knocked off and the mat is exposed; look on the slopes facing the storm's approach, and check soft metals (vents, gutters, AC fins, the mailbox) for dents — soft metals don't lie about hail.
• Wind signatures. Creased shingles, lifted or missing tabs, exposed nails, debris scarring.
• The vulnerable details. Step and counter flashing at walls and chimneys, pipe-boot rubber (cracks here are the most common leak you'll find), valley condition, ridge and field venting, and the decking feel underfoot (spongy = wet/rotted deck).
• Attic, when accessible. Daylight through the deck, water stains on rafters, wet or compressed insulation, and bathroom fans dumping into the attic instead of out the roof.

Produce a one-page written summary with three to five photos and a plain-language verdict: good for X years, watch these items, or replacement recommended with an estimate attached. That document is your product whether or not they buy today.

Manufacture proof in your first 30 days

Proof is the bottleneck for a new company. Solve it deliberately.

Reviews are the asset

Google reviews drive both the map pack ranking and the homeowner's gut decision. Your first ten are the hardest and the most valuable. Get them like this:

• After every job — even a $400 repair — ask for the review in person, on the spot, then send a direct link by text within the hour while you're fresh in their mind. "Would you do me a huge favor and leave a quick review? It's the whole ballgame for a new company." People who like you will do it if you make it one tap.
• Ask your first-30-day texts-and-friends jobs for reviews and photos and and permission to put a yard sign up.
• Never buy or fake reviews. Beyond being against Google's policy and FTC guidance on endorsements, fake reviews read fake and your real customers can tell. The slow, real path compounds; the fake path collapses.

Photo discipline

From job one, photograph everything: before, during (tear-off, decking, underlayment, flashing), and after. A clean photo set does three jobs — it's your portfolio, it's your documentation if a dispute or insurance question comes up, and it's the content for your Google profile and social. Shoot in good light, get the address-identifiable shots plus tight detail shots. Build a simple folder per job.

Yard signs and wrapped truck = rolling proof

A yard sign on a completed job in a target neighborhood is one of the highest-ROI things in roofing. Leave it up two weeks. Park your wrapped truck in front of the job all day. Neighbors watching a crew work their street is social proof you can't buy. Knock the eight houses on either side of an active job while you're working it — "we're doing the Hendersons' roof this week, want me to check yours while the crew's here?" Adjacency selling off a live job is the easiest inspection you'll book all week.

Take the small jobs on purpose

New owners often turn their nose up at the $300 pipe-boot replacement and the $600 repair, holding out for full reroofs. That's backwards in month one. A repair gets you on the roof, builds a relationship, generates a review and photos, and frequently converts — half the repairs you do on a 20-year-old roof end up as a reroof within a year or two when the homeowner already trusts you. Treat repairs as paid prospecting. Do them well, document them, and they become both cash and pipeline. The only repairs to decline are the ones you can't do safely or the ones where a homeowner is clearly trying to nurse a roof that needs replacement and won't hear it — be honest, write it up, and move on.

Social media: low effort, real return

You don't need to become a content creator. You need a steady, low-effort drip that makes you look real and busy. Post one job per week to a local Facebook page and your Google Profile: a clean before/after, the neighborhood (not the exact address), one honest sentence about what you found and fixed. Join your town's community Facebook groups and answer roofing questions plainly without pitching — the recommendation requests ("anyone know a good roofer?") in those groups are warm leads, and being the helpful contractor who already showed up in the group's feed wins them. Twenty minutes a week, compounding.

The referral engine (your cheapest lead forever)

Referrals will become your best channel, but they don't happen by accident for a new company. Engineer them.

• Ask explicitly, twice. Once at the sale ("if I take great care of you, would you be open to introducing me to a neighbor or two?") and once at completion ("who do you know that's mentioned their roof?"). The specific ask — neighbor, family, coworker — pulls names that "let me know if you hear of anyone" never will.
• Make it easy to pass along. Hand over five business cards or a simple referral card at the end of the job. "If you give these to anyone who needs a roof and they hire us, I'll take care of you."
• Referral incentives — within the rules. A thank-you for a referred retail job that closes (a gift card, a check, a discount on future work) is standard and fine. Be careful when insurance is involved: paying a homeowner a kickback tied to an insurance claim, or anything that functions as rebating the deductible, can cross legal lines in many states. Keep referral rewards on cash/retail work clean and simple.
• The neighbor letter. After a completed job, mail or hand-deliver a short note to the surrounding 15-20 homes: "We just replaced the roof at [address] on your street. If you've wondered about yours, we're offering free roof checks to the neighbors this week." Proximity plus proof.

Go where the buying intent already is

Doors and referrals are outbound. You also want to capture the homeowners who are actively looking right now.

Google Business Profile + the map pack

Reviewed above, but to rank in the local map results you need: a complete, verified profile; a steady drip of new reviews; photos added regularly; your service-area set correctly; and consistent name/address/phone everywhere you appear online. This is the free engine that pays you for years. Spend an hour a week on it.

Lead-services: use them, don't depend on them

The pay-per-lead marketplaces (the home-services lead aggregators) will sell you leads on day one. Useful as a stopgap, but understand the trade: those leads are sold to several contractors at once, so you're in a speed-and-price race, close rates are low, and margins get thin. Treat bought leads as a bridge while your owned channels (reviews, referrals, doors) ramp — not as the foundation. A business built only on bought leads has no equity; the day you stop paying, the phone stops.

A small, sharp local ad budget

If you have a few hundred dollars a month, the highest-intent spend for a roofer is search ads on terms like "roof repair near me" and "roof replacement [town]" tightly geo-targeted to your service area, pointed at a simple page with reviews and a phone number that you answer live. Don't run broad brand awareness ads as a new company — you can't outspend anyone. Buy the people already typing the words "I need a roofer."

Speed-to-lead is the whole game

Whoever calls back first usually wins. Set the standard at answer live or call back within five minutes. Get a number that rings your cell. If you genuinely can't answer (you're on a roof), a cheap answering service or a simple "text us" auto-reply that promises a callback time beats voicemail. The lead you return tomorrow is already someone else's job.

Storm work: the legal lines that keep new roofers out of trouble

Storm restoration is where new roofers find volume fast — and where the legally naive ones get hurt. The work itself is legitimate and valuable. The way you talk about it is what gets companies fined, sued, or shut down. Learn the lines now, before you knock a single storm door.

What you, the contractor, absolutely may do:

• Inspect the roof and document conditions thoroughly with photos and measurements.
• Identify and record storm-related damage (hail bruising, wind-lifted or creased shingles, granule loss, damaged vents and flashing).
• Write an accurate, line-item repair estimate for your scope of work — ideally aligned to the standard estimating platform adjusters use (Xactimate-aligned), so it speaks the same language as the claim.
• Hand that documentation and estimate to the homeowner.
• State facts about your scope to the carrier when the homeowner has authorized you to discuss the repair you'd perform.
• Meet the adjuster on the roof and show them what you documented.

What you may NOT do (this is unlicensed public adjusting in most states, and it's a fast way to lose your license):

• Negotiate, adjust, or "handle" the claim for the homeowner for a fee.
• Interpret the policy or tell the homeowner what is or isn't covered.
• Promise a specific payout, an approval, or that "the insurance will pay for everything."
• Promise the deductible is waived, absorbed, eaten, or gone. Rebating or eating the deductible is illegal in many states and is insurance fraud framing — do not say it, do not imply it, do not put it on a flyer.
• Advertise a "free roof."
• Represent the homeowner against their insurer.

The safe, durable frame: you document thoroughly, you write an accurate estimate, you hand it to the homeowner. The homeowner files the claim. The insurer decides coverage. Your job is the photos, the measurements, the scope, and the repair. Everything on the coverage/payout/negotiation side belongs to the homeowner and the carrier. Teach your reps this list out loud — most do-not-say violations come from a green canvasser improvising at the door.

Done correctly, storm work is a documentation-and-estimating business, and that's a business you can build a reputation on. The contractors who blow up are the ones who turned it into a claims-promising business.

Finding storm-hit roofs without chasing every cloud

Not every storm produces claimable damage, and chasing storms blind wastes fuel and credibility. Use the public hail/wind data (SPC storm reports, NOAA Storm Events) to know where significant hail or wind actually hit, then concentrate inspections there. This is exactly the per-roof storm modeling described earlier — knowing which specific roofs sat under a damaging core tells you where to knock and what to look for. It tells you the odds, not the verdict. The roof inspection delivers the verdict.

Working the insurance/storm estimate the right way

When a roof has legitimate storm damage and the homeowner decides to file, your value is in the documentation and the estimate — and doing those two things well is a skill that separates real restoration contractors from storm chasers. Here's the workflow that stays on the right side of the line.

1. Document before anyone files. Date-stamped photos of every damage point, a hail/wind narrative tied to the actual storm date from the public storm reports, slope diagrams, and soft-metal damage shots. This is the evidence the homeowner's claim rests on.
2. Measure accurately. Get real measurements — by hand or aerial measurement report — so your square count, waste, and accessories are right. A sloppy estimate that misses a slope or undercounts squares costs you and the homeowner.
3. Write a line-item estimate in the carrier's language. Aligning your estimate to the standard platform adjusters use (Xactimate-aligned line items) means your scope and theirs can be compared apples-to-apples. Include everything your repair legitimately requires: tear-off, decking replacement where rotted, ice-and-water per code, drip edge, flashing, vents, and proper disposal.
4. Hand it to the homeowner. They submit the claim. You do not file it for them, you do not tell them what's covered, and you do not promise an outcome.
5. Meet the adjuster on the roof. Walk them through what you documented and show your scope. You're presenting facts about the repair you'd perform, not arguing coverage. If the adjuster's scope misses something you documented, you can point to your photos and measurements — that's supplementing the documentation, which is fair and factual, not negotiating the claim.
6. Know the deductible stays with the homeowner. They owe it; you collect it; you never eat it, waive it, or build a fake "storm discount" to erase it. Putting the deductible on the contract and collecting it is what keeps you legal.

Do this cleanly across a storm season and you'll build the kind of reputation — with homeowners and with adjusters — that produces referrals for years. The contractors who treated it as a claims-promising hustle are the ones who don't survive the first complaint to the state.

Pricing and cash flow so the first jobs don't sink you

Landing jobs is half the battle. New roofers also fail by underpricing out of desperation and then running out of cash mid-job.

Don't buy work

When the phone's dead, the temptation is to bid rock-bottom to win something. This is a trap. A job priced below your true cost doesn't just lose money on that job — it sets the homeowner's referral expectation low and trains you to chase volume you can't afford to deliver. Know your real numbers:

• Materials (squares × price, plus underlayment, flashing, vents, fasteners, drip edge, ice-and-water, waste at ~10-15%).
• Labor (crew cost per square or per day; if you sub, the sub's bill).
• Overhead allocation (insurance, truck, fuel, dumpster/disposal, permit, advertising, your own pay) spread across the job.
• Profit on top of all of it — not "whatever's left."

If a competitor is 20% under you, the answer is usually that they forgot to pay themselves or aren't carrying real insurance. Don't race them down.

Deposits and draw schedules

Protect cash. A common residential structure: a deposit at signing (enough to cover materials — but check your state, some cap or regulate roofing deposits and require specific contract language), the balance on completion. For larger jobs, a materials-delivery draw and a completion draw. Never float a full job's materials and labor on a new company's thin reserves. Order materials against a signed contract and collected deposit, not on hope.

Contracts and compliance

Use a written contract on every job — scope, materials/color/brand, price, payment schedule, start window, workmanship warranty, and the cancellation/right-to-rescind language your state requires (many require a 3-day rescission notice, and storm/insurance jobs often have additional required disclosures). A clean contract prevents the disputes that eat a new company's time and reputation. If you don't have a roofing-specific contract reviewed for your state, get one before the next signing.

The 90-day ramp plan

Put it together into a routine. Here's a realistic schedule for a solo owner-operator going from dead to booked.

Days 1-7: foundation and first motion

• Finish Google Business Profile fully; set service area and category.
• Text 50+ personal/past contacts (individually).
• Build your first target list: pull assessor data for 2-3 aged-out subdivisions, or rank a list with RoofPredict, or both. Cross-reference recent storm reports.
• Order door hangers, yard signs, and business cards.
• Knock 60-80 doors/day, 4 days this week. Goal: 3-5 inspections booked.

Days 8-30: proof manufacturing

• Keep knocking your ranked routes; re-walk no-answers.
• Close and complete your first jobs (even small repairs count). Photograph everything.
• Ask every customer for a Google review + photos + yard sign + referrals.
• Knock the 8 houses around every active job.
• Goal: first 10 reviews, first 3-5 completed jobs, a portfolio folder.

Days 31-60: compound the channels

• Reviews start lifting your map-pack visibility; keep the drip going.
• Start a small geo-targeted search-ad budget if cash allows; answer every call live.
• Mail neighbor letters around completed jobs.
• Build the referral muscle: ask every customer, hand out cards, reward closed retail referrals.
• Track your funnel weekly (contacts → conversations → inspections → sales). Find your weakest conversion and fix that one thing.

Days 61-90: tighten and forecast

• You should have inbound starting from reviews/referrals. Don't stop knocking — outbound is what keeps the floor from dropping out.
• Re-rank your target lists with fresh storm data after any local hail/wind event.
• Review your numbers: are you hitting the ~3 sold jobs/month survival line? If not, the leak is almost always (a) too few contact attempts, or (b) inspections that aren't closing — drill into whichever it is.
• Start building the systems (CRM, follow-up cadence, a hire for canvassing) that let you stop being the only salesperson.

Track the funnel weekly or you're flying blind

The difference between a new roofer who fixes a slow start in ninety days and one who's still struggling at month nine is almost always measurement. Keep one simple sheet — paper, spreadsheet, or a free CRM — with five columns updated every Friday:

Then read the ratios, not the raw numbers. If contacts are high but conversations are low, your door opener or your timing is off — rewrite the script or change your knocking hours. If conversations are fine but inspections aren't booking, you're talking too much and asking for the sale instead of the look. If inspections happen but nothing sells, the leak is your estimate presentation or follow-up. Each bottleneck has a different fix, and you can only see which one you have by watching the ratios move week over week. New roofers who "feel busy" but stay broke are almost always strong at one stage and quietly terrible at one specific other — the sheet exposes it.

The two failure modes and their fixes

• Top-of-funnel starvation (most common). Too few contact attempts. The cause is almost always that knocking never gets scheduled, or the owner is spending the day on quotes and admin instead of generating leads. Fix: block lead-generation hours on the calendar as non-negotiable appointments, and treat "did I make my contact number today" as the one metric that matters most while you're young.
• Mid-funnel leak. Plenty of conversations, few sales. The cause is usually weak proof (no reviews yet — see the proof section), a price presented without value, or no follow-up. Fix: lead every estimate with photos and a written report, present price against what the homeowner avoids by acting now, and run the five-touch follow-up below religiously.

The follow-up system that recovers "lost" jobs

New roofers leave a fortune on the table by quitting after one "let me think about it." Build a dead-simple follow-up cadence and run it on every estimate that doesn't close on the spot:

• Day 1: text a thank-you + the written estimate + 2-3 photos from the inspection.
• Day 3: call. "Wanted to make sure the estimate made sense and answer any questions."
• Day 7: text a relevant proof point — a review, a finished-job photo from their neighborhood.
• Day 14: call with a reason — "materials availability," "crew opening next week," or a seasonal note.
• Day 30 and beyond: quarterly light touch. Roofs that weren't ready in spring are ready after the next storm.

A five-touch cadence will recover a meaningful share of estimates that would otherwise have evaporated. Most of your competitors send zero follow-ups. That gap is free money.

What new roofers get wrong (the short list)

• Waiting for the phone instead of generating motion. Inbound for a new brand is near zero. You must go get the work for the first year.
• Random canvassing. Walking streets with no age or storm ranking burns your energy on roofs that aren't due. Rank first.
• Quitting knocking after one pass. The bookings live in the second and third touch on a street.
• No reviews ask. The single most undervalued thirty seconds at the end of every job.
• Underpricing in a panic. Cheap work doesn't fix a slow start; it digs the hole deeper.
• Improvising storm scripts. Promising payouts, approvals, or "free roofs" is how new companies get fined or shut down. Document, estimate, hand off.
• No follow-up. Treating a "maybe" as a "no" hands the job to whoever called back.
• Depending on bought leads. A fine bridge, a terrible foundation.

Pulling it together

A dead phone at a new roofing company is a motion problem with a known fix. You point your limited hours at the roofs most likely to be due — by age and by storm — instead of at random houses. You knock, you offer a real free inspection, you book the look, you document like a professional, you write an honest estimate, and you ask for the review and the referral every single time. You follow up five times when others quit after one. And you keep the storm conversation strictly on the documentation-and-estimate side, never on payouts or coverage, so the work compounds your reputation instead of risking your license.

The targeting layer — knowing house-by-house which roofs are aging out and which ones a storm just wore down — is the part that turns a grinding 234-doors-a-week slog into a sharp, short route of high-probability addresses. That's the gap RoofPredict is built to close: a roof-age range per address from aerial imagery plus per-roof storm modeling, ranked so your next knocking day hits the doors most likely to convert, and your own list gets enriched with the same signals. It points the truck. The inspection, the honesty, and the follow-up still close the job — that part is, and always will be, you.

Start with the three things in the "today" section. Then put 9 a.m. on tomorrow's calendar and go knock. The schedule fills from there.

FAQ

I just started my roofing company and the phone never rings. What's the fastest way to get a job this week?

Two moves, today. First, send individual (not blast) texts to every past customer, sub, and homeowner you personally know telling them you started a roofing company and asking them to call or refer anyone needing a roof check — fifty texts usually yields one or two jobs. Second, schedule a door-knocking morning in an aged-out neighborhood and offer free, no-obligation roof inspections. Door knocking is the fastest free path to a first job because it puts you in front of homeowners with a roof problem right now instead of waiting for inbound, which is near zero for a brand-new company.

Does door knocking still work for roofing, or is it dead?

It works, and for a new company with no reviews or ad budget it's often the single most reliable channel. The companies who say it's dead usually walked a street once, knocked 20 doors, got no answers, and quit. The bookings come from volume (60-80 doors a day), a tight script that asks only for a free inspection rather than a sale, leaving door hangers on the 60-70% who don't answer, and re-walking the same street two or three times. Target aged-out or storm-hit neighborhoods so you're not wasting steps on roofs that aren't due.

How do I get roofing leads without paying for them?

The owned, free channels are door knocking and canvassing, a fully completed Google Business Profile with a steady stream of real reviews, referrals (asked for explicitly at the sale and at completion), yard signs and a wrapped truck parked on active jobs, and neighbor letters mailed around completed jobs. These build equity that keeps paying you for years, unlike bought leads, which stop the day you stop paying. Use pay-per-lead services only as a short bridge while these owned channels ramp.

How many doors do I need to knock to land a roofing job?

For a new company with weak proof, plan on roughly 1 conversation per 6 contact attempts, an inspection from about 1 in 3 conversations, and a sale from about 1 in 4 inspections. That works out to landing one job per roughly 70-75 contact attempts. At 60-80 doors a day you can realistically book 3-5 inspections per knocking day and close one or two jobs a week as your script and proof improve. Re-walking no-answers and leaving door hangers raises the conversion meaningfully.

What should I say at the door to book a roof inspection?

Keep it short and ask only for a look, not a sale. Something like: 'Hi, I'm with a local roofing crew working this neighborhood this week. I'm not here to sell you anything — a lot of these roofs are getting to the age where they start to go, so we're doing free roof checks while we're here. Takes about fifteen minutes and I'll show you photos of exactly what shape yours is in, even if the answer is you're fine for five more years. Want me to take a quick look?' The honesty and the small ask are what get you on the roof.

How do I find which neighborhoods to target instead of knocking random streets?

Rank streets by two signals before you walk them: roof age and storm exposure. Pull your county assessor's 'year built' data to find subdivisions built 18-24 years ago that are aging out together, then cross-reference recent hail and wind using the NOAA Storm Events Database and the SPC storm reports archive. Drive the streets and look for granule loss, curling tabs, and patched valleys. Software like RoofPredict automates this by estimating a roof-age range per address from aerial imagery and modeling storm impact per roof, so you get a ranked, house-by-house list instead of doing the cross-referencing by hand.

Can I tell a homeowner the insurance will pay for their new roof or cover their deductible?

No. Promising a specific payout or approval, telling a homeowner what their policy covers, or saying the deductible will be waived, absorbed, or 'eaten' crosses into unlicensed public adjusting and, in the case of the deductible, insurance fraud framing that is illegal in many states. What you can do is inspect thoroughly, document damage with photos and measurements, and write an accurate repair estimate that you hand to the homeowner. The homeowner files the claim and the insurer decides coverage. Stay on the documentation-and-estimate side and never advertise a 'free roof.'

How fast do I need to respond to a roofing lead?

As close to instant as you can manage — answer live or call back within five minutes. Whoever responds first usually wins the job, because homeowners with a leak or storm damage are calling multiple companies and signing with the one that shows up first. Route the business line to your cell, and if you genuinely can't answer because you're on a roof, use a 'text us back within X minutes' auto-reply or a cheap answering service. A lead you return the next afternoon is usually already someone else's job.

Should I lower my prices to win jobs when I'm slow?

No. Underpricing out of desperation usually means you forgot to pay yourself or aren't carrying real insurance, and it sets a low referral expectation while training you to chase volume you can't profitably deliver. Know your true numbers — materials with waste, labor, overhead allocation, and profit on top — and hold them. If a competitor is 20% under you, they're almost always cutting something you shouldn't cut. Fix a slow start with better targeting, more contact attempts, and stronger follow-up, not with a lower price.

How do I get my first reviews when I have zero jobs done?

Get them from your very first jobs, including small repairs. Ask in person on the spot at completion, then text a direct review link within the hour while you're fresh in the customer's mind, framing it honestly: it's the whole ballgame for a new company. Also ask your earliest friends-and-referral jobs for photos and permission to put a yard sign up. Never buy or fake reviews — it violates platform policy and FTC endorsement guidance, reads fake to real customers, and collapses, whereas the slow real path compounds into map-pack ranking and trust.