Ian Wallick’s career in roofing started a decade ago, but his roots in the field travel back at least two generations. Though he acknowledges the good fortune of growing up personally and professionally among one of the strongest roofing organizations in the country – RC 2018 Commercial Roofing Contractor of the Year Best Roofing – Wallick’s commitment to roofing is real. And very personal.
He began as a laborer tearing off and installing roofs in the field for about a year-and-a-half, before moving into a supervisory role managing crews on small repairs. From there, he began showing great value to larger projects as a senior construction manager, running all field operations on the production side. When his older brother, Zack, decided to leave the business and start his own roofing company in 2019, Ian stepped up. Despite the shake-up to the company’s vital sales operations and succession plan, he felt he was ready to assume a bigger role in organization – whatever that meant.
He assured his father, Company President Gregg Wallick, that the family legacy they’d built, including as perennial members of RC’s Top 100 List of roofing contractors, would not falter.
“I said that I wasn’t going to let that happen,” he recounted while discussing the situation on stage with Zack, and their father at the 2021 Best of Success conference.
The company hasn’t really missed a beat, as Ian took up Zack’s sales pipeline of sales for two years before returning to the production side of the business.
RC: You’ve worn a lot of hats recently. Tell us about your current role with the company and what you’re looking forward to?
IW: Today I have moved back into the production side of the company as the senior vice president overseeing all operations and logistics. I have made great progress in my career and look forward to learning more about how to run the business with hopes of eventually becoming the president of the company.
RC: Tell us why Best Roofing is successful?
IW: The company is successful due to great leadership and vision. We also have a service department like no one else and we focus a lot of our efforts into marketing and performing excellent work.
We’re always available and the biggest differentiator to our competitors is the level of customer service we provide to our clients. Each one of these items have contributed to our success, there is not one reason of why we grow other than consistency with our product delivery and customer service.
RC: What are the big challenges in your particular market and how is the company addressing them?
IW: One of the biggest challenges in our market is how regulated our area is with each municipality. So permits are always a big challenge and working with many different engineers on every job. It a lot of paperwork.
RC: How has your company changed in the past few years and what technology is helping?
IW: We’ve changed in many different aspects as we learned how to be a larger company within our facility and our company structure with who does what task. One of the biggest things that we implemented is a professional project management system. We use a few different CRMs, sales software, fleet tracking software and more. So, yes! We use technology to improve how we do things.
RC: Tell us about what’s next?
IW: I want to take it to the next level. Gregg has given me a great foundation here and I would like to grow it to be more dominant in the market.
