Case study
Roofing
Client/Project
How to launch a roofing division that runs from day one: the Green Attic story
Challenge
Green Attic is an established insulation contractor with a 4.8-star reputation — and a second business sitting in its own job files: attic after attic that also needed roof work. Before the new roofing division took its first job, Trampetti built the complete operating foundation — roles, staffing, SOPs, referral lead handoff, crew quality grading, and division-level reporting. The division launched with the operation already running, so the first customer never met a company figuring it out.
Solution
Built BEFORE launch — the division opened with its operating system already running
Green Attic wasn't short on opportunity. Its insulation crews surfaced roofing work on job after job. The risk was sequencing: the work would arrive before the operation existed to run it — and every early mistake would land on a reputation built over years.
The objective was set accordingly: launch the roofing division with its operations complete on day one — every role defined, every workflow documented, every lead owned, and the division measurable as its own business — rather than retrofitting process after the first bad month.
Strong field work, no back office. The company could put crews on roofs. It had no roofing estimating discipline, no scheduling and install workflow, no QC standard — none of it borrowable from the insulation side.
Referrals had nowhere to go. Insulation jobs surfaced roofing work constantly, but no pipeline existed to receive a referral, no owner for it, no follow-up rule.
The reputation was exposed. A 4.8-star rating built on insulation work would absorb every mistake a brand-new trade made while learning.
Leadership couldn't see the division. Without its own KPIs and its own books, roofing's performance would blend into insulation's results.
The work behind the launch
This was operations consulting, not a software setup. Trampetti designed how the division would run — who owns each stage, how work moves, where quality is checked, how performance is measured — then configured tools to serve that design.
Defined who owns every stage of a roofing job. Roles and responsibilities for the new division — crew leads, estimators, and install coordinators, with clear accountability from first call to final inspection. Then the staff to run it was hired, office and field, against those role definitions.
Instrumented the referral engine. Insulation referrals now route automatically into the roofing pipeline with an owner and a follow-up rule attached — no lead dies in the gap between divisions. The cheapest roofing lead the company will ever get is one already in its insulation files; the handoff treats it that way.
Standardized the process from first call to final inspection. Roofing-specific SOPs cover estimating, scheduling, install, and QC — so every job runs the same documented process regardless of who runs it. (Managed in Roofr, configured as the division's project-management tool after the workflow was designed.)
Measured quality instead of assuming it. A crew quality grading system tracks performance job by job and surfaces coaching needs before they become customer issues — the mechanism that lets a brand-new division scale without spending the reputation it inherited.
Built a pipeline beyond referrals. A paid lead channel was set up with a fixed monthly test budget targeted at roofing leads, so the division's growth doesn't depend on referral volume alone — and a standardized one-week crew shadowing program means every new hire learns the operating process before working independently. (Lead channel: Thumbtack.)
Gave the division its own numbers from day one. KPI tracking for revenue and man-hours, dashboards with visibility across every stage of the process, and a dedicated accounting structure — so leadership measures roofing as its own business, not a blur inside insulation's results.
All of it was in place before the first roofing job went out the door — the division opened with its operating system already running, instead of retrofitting process onto chaos after the first bad month.
- Day 1
- Full operating framework live at launch — roles, staffing, SOPs, pipeline, and reporting before the first job went out
- 0
- Referral leads lost in the insulation-to-roofing handoff — every lead owned, every follow-up ruled
- 4.8
- Reputation protected as the new division scaled — crew quality graded job by job, coaching before customer impact
- 6
- Systems built before the first job — roles, lead handoff, SOPs, quality grading, KPI reporting, division accounting
How to grow by adding a trade — without breaking what you built
Most advice on how to grow a roofing company starts with leads: more marketing, more sales, more volume. Green Attic's launch worked because it inverted that order. Three lessons for owners in the $5M–$50M range:
1. Build the operation before the demand hits it. Most division launches bolt process onto chaos after the first bad month. If the roles, workflows, and quality controls exist before the first customer does, there is no first bad month to recover from.
2. Your existing customers are the cheapest growth channel — if the handoff is instrumented. The referral sitting in your current job files costs nothing to acquire and everything to lose. "No leads lost" is not a value statement; it's an ownership rule and a follow-up rule, built into the pipeline.
3. A new division needs its own numbers from day one. If the new trade's revenue, hours, and margin blend into the existing business, you can't tell whether you built a division or bought an expensive hobby. Separate KPIs and separate books make the growth decision readable.
Results