SummitPentagon Premier Roofing Business Plan — The Economics of One Roof

What a single replacement costs and earns: materials, labour, disposal and the gross margin left once the crew comes off the roof.

The Economics of One Roof

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One residential replacement in Year 5
Figure 7. One residential replacement in Year 5.

One residential replacement, Year 5

$

% of price

Contract price

17,411

100.0%

Materials

(6,661)

38.3%

Crew labor

(4,725)

27.1%

Workers’ compensation on that labor

(756)

4.3%

Sales commission

(958)

5.5%

Customer acquisition cost

(1,303)

7.5%

Contribution per job

3,008

17.3%

The single most instructive line is customer acquisition at $1,303, which exceeds workers’ compensation at $756 by seventy per cent. Most roofing contractors budget carefully for insurance and treat marketing as a residual. The arithmetic says the opposite: acquiring the customer costs more than insuring the crew that serves them.

4.1 How the cost lines behave against the benchmarks

Against published benchmarks the plan sits where it should. Materials at 37.8 per cent of Year 5 revenue run above the 22 to 30 per cent band because this plan is replacement-weighted, and replacements carry more material and less labor than repairs or commercial work. Gross margin at 35.4 per cent sits at the upper end of the 25 to 40 per cent range, earned by job costing rather than by pricing high. Overhead at 27.1 per cent sits below the 30 to 45 per cent band by design. Net margin at 5.2 per cent is roughly double the NRCA average of 2.8 per cent and short of the 10 to 15 per cent that well-run shops achieve.

The materials and labor split deserves a note. Crew labor at 26.8 per cent of revenue sits below the 32 to 38 per cent benchmark on a bare-wage basis, but roofing labor is never bare: adding the class code 5551 premium at 16.0 per cent of payroll brings fully-loaded crew cost to 31.1 per cent, which is inside the band. Any comparison of roofing labor cost that excludes workers’ compensation is comparing the wrong number.