It's me on your roof

I'm Lewis McDonald. I work on my own out of Corowa, and I've deliberately kept it that way. There's no crew, no sales rep, and nobody who turns up to quote your roof and then hands it to somebody you have never met.

That has a cost and I won't pretend otherwise. I can't be in two places at once, and after a bad storm there's a queue. What you get in exchange is that the person who looked at your roof and told you what it needed is the person standing on it, and there's nobody to hide behind if it isn't right.

Most of what gets written about a roofer is the one off job. Somebody rings, the roof gets restored, everyone shakes hands. That's real, and it's a good part of the week, but it isn't actually where most of my work comes from.

I look after a real estate company's rental properties, every roof and every gutter across the portfolio. I also look after a retirement village of 152 self contained units, again all the roofs and all the gutters.

There's more on how we work across a portfolio if you look after properties rather than live in one.

These are houses and units, not factories. What is different is who the customer is and how long the relationship runs. A property manager isn't going to be charmed by a good quote. They keep using you or they don't, and they find out which within a season, because a roof you did badly turns into a tenant ringing them about a ceiling.

That's the reference I would give you if you asked for one. Not a review, which anybody can collect three of, but the fact that organisations who could replace me at any time with one phone call haven't.

What I won't do

I won't tell you a roof needs replacing when it needs repairing. There's more money in the bigger job and that's exactly why you should be careful about who tells you that you need one.

I won't quote a price over the phone without seeing the roof, and I'll not undercut a proper job to win it. The cheap end of this trade is where roofs get one thin coat over unwashed tiles and look wonderful for a year.