Even at the top, there’s room to improve. That’s the mentality that Feazel COO Katie Ruberto brings to her job daily, and has helped propel what started out as a good Midwestern retail residential roofing company to a great model of successful scaling across multiple states.
Her brother, former RC Young Gun Leo Ruberto, purchased the company in 2013, when it reported $4 million revenue, had one location in Columbus, Ohio, and operated under one brand. In the last 10 years, they’ve scaled up operations to cover four roofing brands across 11 offices in six states that are projected to collectively earn roughly $200 million this year.
Coming off of RC’s 2021 Residential Roofing Contractor of the Year award, there was a lot for the Feazel Roofing team to be proud of and celebrate, but there were gaps, Ruberto noted. So she spent a lot of time interviewing her own employees, reviewing operational processes and evaluating tools like software and communications systems over the next year. Ruberto laid out the key findings and broke down the steps that Feazel’s team took to improve during an informative presentation at RC’s Best of Success conference in Scottsdale, Ariz. Even she acknowledged she was surprised by what she found, and had a dilemma at the start.
“How do you tell these people that they have work to do, that you have gaps?” she asked from the BOS stage. “Although you’ve achieve this level of success how are you going to keep it moving? It requires you to do something different, which is hard to accept.”
Ruberto presented other roofing contractors some actionable tips that they can apply to their businesses, regardless of market or target goals. She boiled it down to three specific areas that, once identified, allowed the key decision makers at Feazel to think critically about the future and how to drive growth.
“Any true operator believes they can always maximize your people, your process, and your technology,” she said.