How to Create a Roofing Business Plan

If you want to take your roofing company to new heights, a well-crafted business plan is the ladder that will help you reach them.

It’s late afternoon, and you’ve got a phone crammed with unanswered messages that you haven’t had a chance to open yet cause you’re stuck in the sweltering heat, directing a shingling crew.

After all these years of hard work getting your roofing business off the ground, why are you still being pulled back on the jobsite? You’re so ready to free yourself from the daily grind, you can taste it. Like the cold drink that’s waiting for you if this day ever ends…

You’ve heard about elite roofers who’ve found a way to run their companies with calm and control. Are they urban legends? We can definitively tell you they exist. We know a bunch.

What’s their secret?

A clear, effective business plan.

What is a roofing business plan?

A roofing business plan sets out your vision for the future of your company over the next 5 to 10 years and covers the financial, operational, sales, and marketing strategies you’ll use to achieve your goals.

Why does my roofing company need a business plan?

The benefits of a business plan are immeasurable, and include things like:

• Helping to clarify the long-term vision for the company, not just for yourself, but for your team as well.
• Providing you a roadmap you can refer to when faced with unexpected decisions or “shiny” opportunities that threaten to knock your business off-course from your goals.
• Stating intentions in a document has an uncanny way of bringing dreams into reality – if you’re serious about getting off the tools, this is the first step to making it happen.

Remarkably, most roofers don’t have written business plans. They’re getting by and taking what’s thrown at them day by day. If that’s been your approach thus far, ask yourself: how’s it working out?

If you’re still waffling about whether you need a business plan, your answer to that question should be all the motivation you need to get started.

What should I include in my roofing business plan?

1. Executive Summary - highlights of your business plan
2. Company Overview - key details about your company and culture
3. Market Analysis - industry, competitors and customers
4. Marketing & Sales Strategy - how you’ll land jobs
5. Operations Plan - how you’ll execute those jobs
6. Financials & Revenue Forecasting - how much you’ll make from those jobs

☝️These are the main sections typically found in a roofing business plan template, but unless you’re hunting for funding and need to appeal to investors with a more formal structure, your plan is yours to customize however you want.

Ideally, it should still include the above sections, but what you call them is up to you.

Here’s a process to walk you through getting to a finished plan.

How do I write a roofing business plan?

1. Conduct market analysis: Who’s your competition?
2. Work out what matters: What’s your company’s WHY?
3. Figure out your financials: What are your projections?
4. Set your sales strategy: How many jobs do you need to close?
5. Define an operational path: How will you get the work done?
6. Summarize it!

Let’s break down each step, and look at which section of your plan it relates to.

Step 1. Do some market analysis

Get a birds-eye view of the market by researching the following:

• The size of the roofing industry in your area
• Whether it’s slated to grow or decline over the next decade or so
• The most in-demand roofing services, such as solar installations, shingle repairs or gutter maintenance (just as a few examples…)
• The main companies offering those services
• The roofers you admire most
• The kind of customers you’re best positioned to serve. Residential? Commercial?
• Where you can find them

This phase isn’t just about learning more about the market in general, it’s also about identifying where you fit within it. While it’s important to understand who your competitors are and what makes them successful, also keep an eye out for where they’re dropping the ball. That could present an opportunity for you.

Your findings will make up the third section of your business plan: Market Analysis. (But remember… you can call your sections whatever you like!)

Step 2. Work out what matters

g everything you learned in the last section, give some thought to what makes your company unique.

Beyond the typical service differentiators, zero in on the magnitude of what you’re building, and the potential your company could have on the wider world. And don’t downplay it. After all, helping people have a safe and secure roof above their heads is a noble endeavor. It’s also just the beginning.

Give some thought to:

• Which roofing services you’ll focus on
• What your company can do better than anyone else
• The core values behind your brand
• The larger purpose your company serves
• What motivates you more than money

Your answers to the above will form the second section of your plan: Company Overview (aka, your purpose or “why”).

Step 3. Figure out your financials

The most accurate – and admittedly, easiest – way to create your financial projections is to work from your previous financial statements.

Uhhh…

Don’t have any? It’s okay. (Kinda.) It may or may not surprise you to learn most roofers don’t have a formal financial tracking system in place. While it’s certainly not an ideal scenario, if you have to make educated guesses, it’s not the end of the world. At least for now.

Pull together what you can and get a sense of your:

• Annual revenues
• Net profit margin
• Gross profit margin
• Operating expenses
• Budget
• Cashflow

Once you’ve compiled all that, use it to formulate financial projections for the future, particularly for your anticipated profit margins and target revenues. The numbers you come up with will heavily influence your sales and marketing strategies, which is why we recommend doing this step now.

Ultimately, though, your decisions here will be used to complete the last section of your business plan: Financials & Revenue Forecasting.

If you don’t have a proper financial plan in place, now’s the time to fix that! This Budget Quick Tool will get you started.

Step 4. Set your sales strategy

For roofers, a precise sales goal is essential to your plan. You need to know what you’re aiming for in terms of deals closed.

Reverse-engineer your “jobs needed” into “leads required” by doing a series of basic calculations:

• What’s your average job size?
• How many jobs do you need to do to achieve your target profit margin? (You defined this in Step 3 above.)
• How many estimates do you need to do to get that many jobs?
• How many leads do you need to generate that many estimates?

Now for the big finish: How are you going to find those leads? Door-knocking? Social media? Referrals? Vehicle wrapping?

There are a ton of marketing tactics to choose from, and you’ll have to give careful thought to which ones will most effectively connect you with the ideal customers you identified in the first step of this process.

The decisions you make here will form the underlayment for the fourth section of your plan: Sales & Marketing.

Step 5. Define an operational path

Alright, now that you’ve pinpointed where you’re going, it’s time to figure out how to get there.

Outline the following:

• Your BHAG (Big, Hairy, Audacious, Goal)
• Who will you need on your team
• The systems do you need to implement
• How will you keep track of progress
• How you’ll maintain accountability within your team

Don’t fret about every tiny detail, this step is about broad strokes. These answers will help you round out the fifth section: Operations Plan.

If you’d like to take this exercise a bit further, we’ve got a template for an Annual Strategic Plan that will help you break your vision down into executable steps for your team. (Quick tip: don’t tackle everything all at once!)

Step 6. Summarize it!

Congrats – you made it! Well, almost. Technically, there’s one last section you need to do, but you can give your brain a break cause you’ve already done all the heavy thinking.

Basically, now you just need to create a brief write-up with a general description of each of the above sections.

Even though it’s the last part you write, it’ll be the first section of your plan: Executive Summary.

Do’s & Don’ts of creating a roofing business plan

Want a hand with your business plan? Learn more about Breakthrough Academy’s coaching program for elite roofers.