How to Scale a Roofing Company Past $10 Million: Josh Steinberger's Multi-Office Model
- The trap: Josh Steinberger says the $10 to $12 million mark is a break point, and at $8 million the overhead can leave the owner with almost nothing unless he goes out and sells jobs himself.
- The fix: Upgrade the seats as you grow. The people who got you to $12 million are often not the people who get you to $20 million, and higher-skill managers solve bigger problems so the owner has fewer of them.
- The model: Instead of pushing one office to $15 million, NextGen Restoration runs local offices built around $8 million each, with one corporate location handling everything that does not have to happen at the customer's house.
Most roofing owners have a number in their head. Get to $10 million, and life changes. On the Roofing CEO Podcast, host Mike Abramowitz sat down with Josh Steinberger of NextGen Restoration, who spent more than a decade running a single office in that range and then rebuilt his company around a completely different idea of growth.
At the time of the episode, Mike introduced NextGen as operating in four markets, expanding into two more by Q1, with a team of over 50 and revenue of "approximately just under $50 million a year." Josh's target is 12 offices and $100 million a year. What makes his story useful for any home service owner is not the size of the number. It is how plainly he explains why the middle of the growth curve is the most dangerous place to stay, and what he changed to get through it.
From Door-to-Door Cable Sales to Running a Roofing Company
Josh started out selling door-to-door cable and internet for AT&T through a company called Cydcor. A phone call from his stepdad, who had a drywall company, pulled him into roofing. Insurance companies in Cleveland were paying for full roof replacements on wind damage, and his stepdad needed someone who could go get the deals.
Josh flew back to Cleveland for a weekend and knocked doors. "I sold three deals in my my first afternoon with absolutely zero information," he said. The math made the decision for him: an average contract back then was "like six, seven thousand dollars," the two split things 50/50, and an AT&T sale paid "a whopping 115 bucks." They started the roofing company in 2008.
Trial by fire: learning every seat in the business
Josh built the sales side. Then his stepdad and mom moved to South Carolina to build a house, planning to run production from a distance. That trip turned into him "never coming back to Cleveland," and Josh suddenly owned every department. He described "dragging trailers at 5:00 AM," running the dump site, and wrestling with QuickBooks desktop.
The lesson he took from that stretch is one every owner can use. He learned each role well enough to hire into it. "We're going to put a person in this role. We're going to put a person in that role. I'm going to train them in what I'm doing in those roles," he said. It was not painless. "I learned a lot of lessons. I lost a lot of money," Josh admitted, "just through trial and error."
If you are still the person every department runs through, our guide to stopping being the bottleneck lays out a 30-day plan for handing seats off.
Why Roofing Companies Get Stuck at $10 Million
From 2008 until roughly 2019 or 2020, NextGen was a single location. Josh said the company did $8 million in its first year and then moved between 10 and 15 million "as the wave rode for the next decade."
He is candid that hiring was not a priority during those years. "Hiring was always a second thought. It was an afterthought," he said. And for a lot of smaller roofers, the office he was running looks like the finish line.
Josh Steinberger: 10, 12, 13, 15 million dollars, which for a lot of roofing guys is like that that's like their chupacabra.
Josh Steinberger: The cheese is always moving.
The $8 million trap: staffed like a business, paid like a job
This is the core of the episode. Josh explained that at $10 to $12 million, "you go from like brute force with a couple systems and you have to completely revamp your your company to really run and operate at that at that space."
The problem is the staff that keeps the company running. Josh said that staff "is really comfortable at 8 million dollars, but at 8 million dollars you don't you don't earn any you don't make any money." Once billing, accounts receivable, accounts payable and operations are paid, there is little left for the owner. In his words: "If I don't go sell jobs myself as the owner, I literally have no income."
He framed the whole growth curve in three stages:
- At two or three million dollars, "you own a job, but you have all the liability of a business owner."
- At 10 million dollars, "you own a business that operates a lot like a job."
- The real goal is a company where the profit is there and the owner is no longer stuck doing a lot of the roles and responsibilities every day.
He did point to one benefit of reaching the $8 to $10 million range. You gain "a level of redundancy where if you got hit by a car or went into a coma, most of the company potentially would still form to operate to a certain degree without you there." At two or three million, the same accident means "tomorrow you're getting sued by all of your customers."
Upgrade the Seat, Not Just the Headcount
Josh's answer to the profit squeeze is uncomfortable but direct. Growth often means replacing people, not just adding them.
Josh Steinberger: A lot of times we have to fire the people that got us to 12 million dollars. They're not 15 to 20 million dollar people. They're 10 to 12 million dollar people.
In his example, that means moving from "60, 70, 80,000 dollar a year staff people" to "90 to 120,000 dollar a year staff people at the same quantity." The overhead goes up, so sales have to go up with it. But the quality of the problem solving changes. "They solve 120,000 dollars worth of problems, which means I now have actually less problems," Josh said.
The pattern repeats at the next level. To go from 20 million to 30 or 40, Josh said, "I now have to fire the 120,000 dollar people and go get 150,000 dollar people." Those are the people who "solve problems that legitimately can operate a business."
As the team matures, the owner's job changes too. Josh described becoming "a relationship manager," keeping production, sales and accounts receivable connected and putting out the friction that naturally comes up between departments.
Josh traced this back to one of his very first coaching experiences, with Grant Cardone's 10X roofing company platform. Going through "the 360 and the platform process" gave him a close look at "all of the like job roles, responsibilities and what it takes." If you are mapping those seats in your own company, start with an accountability chart and a plan to build a leadership team so you can step back.
The Multi-Office Model: $8 Million an Office
Here is where Josh's thinking departs from most of the owners Mike has interviewed. Mike noted that many guests just want to get to 15, 20 or 25 million and avoid the headaches of multiple markets. Josh went the other way.
"Instead of having to push one office to 15 million dollars, dude, I can do 8 million dollars in my sleep out of any office in any market anywhere in the country, retail, storm, it doesn't matter," he said.
His math: four markets at about $800,000 a month each put the company at "36 million dollars plus." Then he asked the question that reframes the whole business. "Am I a 36 million dollar company or am I actually four companies that do 8 million dollars a piece?"
Josh Steinberger: I've become Jimmy John's of roofing. We don't sell franchises, but we have a business model that operates much like the franchise.
Josh Steinberger: We'll go take 1% of everybody every other competitor's stuff in any given market and we can do it quietly behind the scenes.
Because $8 million in a major market barely registers, each office does not need to win the whole market or outspend everyone on marketing. And the national scale helps locally. Josh said the notoriety of a $50 or $100 million company "makes it that much easier in every individualized market to sell 8 million dollars a year." With six markets fully online at an $800,000 monthly average, he put the company at "48 to 55 million dollars a year."
Centralize everything that does not touch the customer's house
The model only works because of how the back office is built. Most owners who open new markets, Josh said, try to "create all three prongs, sell, build, collect in each individual market." The result is that "you're now running eight individual businesses separately but collectively."
NextGen does the opposite.
Josh Steinberger: If it doesn't have to go to a customer's house and see them face to face, it happens in one location.
The local team's job in each market is "to go sell and do quality control." Anything that physically goes to the project is hired locally. Everything else runs centrally. "I operate 90% of the business out of one office," Josh said, and that is where the profit comes from. "Instead of having to hire an expensive person and people to run one full office of back office, I can run three offices for the value of one office from one location."
He compared it to how private equity consolidates companies: take out the redundancies, get better pricing as one big client, and focus on what really needs managing. For Josh, that list is short: "I need to manage the cash flow. I need to manage the payables. I need to manage the HR and I got to continue to recruit new people."
For owners who want to see where their own overhead is going before opening a second location, the unit economics of scaling a home service business and the weekly scorecard are good places to start.
"Walmartized": Consistency Is What Makes a Business Investable
Josh does not plan to grow by acquisition. "I tried that game acquisition wise. We ground seed every new market that we're going to go into," he said. His target is "12 offices, 100 million dollars a year in revenue," vertically integrated as one business with no multiple entities. If he gets there, "we start talking about the the word IPO."
The standard he holds the company to is consistency across every market.
Josh Steinberger: That requires you to have, you know, what I call Walmart Walmartized the business. It needs to be that that level of everybody knows where they go, when they go, how they go.
He used the Walmart automotive department as the example. Close your eyes and you can picture where it is in any store. When anyone pokes "into the books" or walks into one of his offices, he wants them to find the same thing in the same place. That kind of repeatability is what lets an owner move toward "a board seat where, you know, I I pop in a little bit, but I'm not really working in the business every day."
Whether the end goal is an IPO, a partner or a sale, the same consistency is what a buyer or investor looks for. If you run a roofing company and want to know what that consistency is worth today, Forge Strategic Equity offers a roofing company valuation.
What Retirement Looks Like for a Nearly $50 Million Roofing Owner
Mike asked Josh how he defines retirement. "I think retirement means that I live my life on my terms," Josh said. Right now he still reports to a team that relies on him. "Majority of things happen without me," he said, but if he took five days off, things would still pile up.
His version of retirement is simple: "my game plan in retirement is I have one meaningful conversation with a stranger a day." He tied the financial side to finding "a way to to yield three million dollars a year in passive income from the interest made from the value of the company," while noting those were "rough numbers." Since 2008 he has written his goals down in seasons, and one of the big ones was to write himself "a 10 million dollar check in cash" by 40. "We're we're pretty close to the 10 million dollar check," he said.
What Home Service Owners Can Take From Josh's Model
You do not need to be a roofer or plan for 12 offices to use these ideas. Based on what Josh shared, here are the questions worth asking about your own company:
- Are you staffed for the revenue you have, or the revenue you need? Josh's warning about the $8 million staff is really about matching overhead to production.
- Who on your team is a "10 to 12 million dollar" person? Growth may require upgrading seats, not just adding them.
- What actually has to happen in the field? If a task does not need to be face to face with the customer, ask whether it can be centralized.
- Could someone walk into any part of your business and find things in the same place? That is the consistency Josh calls "Walmartized."
- Is hiring still an afterthought? For a decade, Josh said, it was for him.
If you want a structured way to see which of these gaps exist in your business, our roadmap on how to scale a home service business breaks growth into stages, and Jeremy Lara's story on how to scale a roofing business shows what the earlier stage looks like.
