The Finance Hire Roofing Companies Often Make Too Late

Written by: Andrew Henke

Why the right Controller becomes increasingly valuable as a roofing business grows

Roofing owners usually know when they need another salesperson.

They know when production is overwhelmed, when estimating needs help, or when a growing market needs another operational leader.

Finance leadership can be harder to recognize.

A company can continue growing for years with essentially the same accounting structure it had when the business was much smaller. The owner knows the numbers. The leadership team knows each other. A lot gets accomplished through experience, relationships and people simply knowing how things have always been done.

Then the business becomes more complicated.

More people. More locations. More departments. More systems. More distance between the people making decisions and the people doing the work.

At some point, the question changes from “Who is handling our accounting?” to “Who is helping us make sense of the business we’re becoming?”

That distinction came through clearly in a recent conversation I had with Roger Glaude , Controller at Jolly Roofing & Contracting. Roger brings an interesting perspective to the role, with a background in public accounting focused on construction before ultimately moving inside the industry. Today, he works alongside operational leadership across a commercial roofing organization with teams in multiple markets.

Our conversation reinforced something I think growing roofing companies should be thinking about:

A great Controller isn’t simply responsible for reporting what happened. The best ones help the organization understand what is happening, stay aligned as one company and prepare for what comes next.

The first challenge isn’t necessarily accounting. It’s complexity.

As companies grow, processes that once worked because everyone knew everyone become harder to sustain.

Roger described the point where a business begins needing more structure and “guardrails” to support continued growth. The challenge is not that the old way was wrong. In many cases, those relationships, processes and ways of working helped build a successful company in the first place.

The challenge is recognizing when the business has become too large or too complex to continue operating exactly the same way.

That’s an important distinction.

Structure shouldn’t be viewed as corporate bureaucracy invading an entrepreneurial roofing company.

Done correctly, structure should support the culture, not replace it.

A growing contractor eventually needs processes that don’t depend on one person remembering how something should be handled. Information needs to travel consistently between departments. Multiple locations need to feel like parts of the same organization.

At the same time, companies have to be careful not to structure away the relationships, accountability and entrepreneurial mindset that helped them grow.

The goal isn’t to make a roofing company more corporate.

It’s to make growth repeatable while protecting the culture that got the company there.

Growth creates the need to operate as “one company.”

One theme that continued to come through in my conversation with Roger was the importance of creating a common culture and language across the organization.

As a roofing company adds locations, departments and leadership layers, it becomes easier for individual teams to begin operating in their own worlds.

The field has its perspective.

Operations has another.

Finance sees something different.

Leadership may be looking several years ahead.

The challenge is getting everyone to understand that they are part of one company moving in the same direction.

That doesn’t mean every department thinks the same way or every location operates identically.

It means people understand the broader direction of the organization, communicate through a common language and recognize how their part of the business connects to everyone else’s.

A strong Controller can play an important role in creating that alignment.

A great Controller needs to understand the business behind the numbers.

One of my favorite parts of the conversation with Roger was our discussion about finance and operations.

These two groups can look at the same business from very different angles.

Roger talked about the importance of getting out from behind the finance function, building relationships with operational leaders and learning to speak the language of operations.

That may be one of the better descriptions of what a strong finance leader needs to do inside construction.

The point isn’t that a Controller needs to become a roofer.

It’s that financial information only becomes valuable when the people responsible for running the business understand what it is telling them.

That requires the Controller to understand operations well enough to create a common language between the office and the field.

Roger described how conversations with field and operational leadership have helped both groups develop a better understanding of what the other is seeing. Operations gives finance context from the actual work being performed, while finance provides another perspective on what the information is telling the business.

That’s business partnership, not just accounting.

The Controller should be part of the leadership culture.

That partnership also requires the Controller to understand where leadership is trying to take the company.

Finance cannot operate as its own silo.

A strong Controller needs to understand the direction of the organization, buy into that direction and help reinforce it throughout the business.

That doesn’t mean simply agreeing with every leadership decision.

In fact, part of the value of a strong finance leader is being willing to challenge assumptions when the numbers or circumstances suggest leadership should look at something differently.

But those conversations happen within the context of understanding the company’s larger goals.

The Controller becomes another leader helping connect strategy with execution.

As the organization gets larger, that role becomes increasingly important because fewer people naturally have visibility across the entire business.

Growth exposes inconsistency quickly.

Another interesting point Roger raised was what happens when a roofing organization expands into multiple locations.

Different leaders naturally develop different ways of doing things.

That isn’t necessarily a problem at first.

But as an organization gets larger, having dramatically different processes from one market to another eventually creates friction.

Roger discussed Jolly’s work toward greater consistency and communication across its locations, including bringing leadership together to discuss where the organization has been and where it is going.

I think there is a bigger lesson in that for growing contractors.

Scale magnifies inconsistency.

At one location, an informal process may work perfectly well.

Across five locations, it can become five different processes.

The stronger finance leaders I am getting to know don’t simply identify those differences. They help leadership determine where consistency matters, where operating teams still need flexibility and how to keep different locations connected to the larger organization.

Again, it comes back to operating as one company.

That’s a much more strategic responsibility than closing the books every month.

Technology matters, but only when it improves the business.

Roger also talked about helping move Jolly away from some of the paper-intensive processes that have traditionally existed throughout construction and toward greater use of automation and technology.

What I liked about his perspective was that it wasn’t technology for technology’s sake.

His view was that the companies getting ahead are the ones actually using technology and AI in ways that benefit the organization, rather than adopting tools simply to say they have them.

That’s probably a healthy filter for any roofing executive evaluating technology.

Don’t ask:

“What new software should we buy?”

Ask:

“Where are our people still spending time doing something manually that doesn’t need to be manual?”

A strong Controller should be part of that conversation.

Because the Controller often touches so many different areas of the organization, finance can have a unique view into where information gets stuck, where processes break down and where technology could create consistency or efficiency.

The role has become much bigger than accounting.

That’s probably one of my biggest takeaways from these conversations.

The modern Controller can touch operations, technology, process improvement, leadership communication, strategic planning and organizational structure.

That means the role deserves more credit than it may have received historically.

In a growing roofing company, the Controller can become one of the people helping keep leadership, operations and finance on the same page.

The numbers are still critically important.

But the value of the position increasingly comes from what the Controller helps the organization do with those numbers.

So what actually separates a great Controller?

I asked Roger this directly.

What separates someone who is technically strong in accounting from someone who can become an exceptional Controller inside a construction company?

He came back to communication.

Technical competency obviously matters. But Roger believes a finance leader also has to be able to take that knowledge and communicate it to operational people in a way that makes sense to them.

He made another point that stood out to me as a recruiter.

Technical skills can often be developed.

Communication ability, personality and the ability to build relationships can be much harder to teach.

That changes the interview.

When I’m evaluating Controller talent for a roofing company, I obviously want to understand their accounting background.

But I’m becoming just as interested in questions like:

Can this person sit across from a COO and challenge an assumption?

Can they earn credibility with a branch leader?

Can they explain something complicated without hiding behind accounting terminology?

Are they curious enough to understand how the company actually operates?

Can they walk into an operations meeting and contribute to the business conversation?

Do they understand the direction leadership is taking the company and know how finance can help support it?

Can they help different parts of the organization operate as one company?

Because if the answer to those questions is no, the company may have hired a very good accountant.

It may not have hired the Controller it needs for its next stage of growth.

When should an owner consider adding stronger finance leadership?

I don’t think there is one revenue number that answers that question.

Complexity is probably the better indicator.

If the organization is adding locations, leadership layers or service lines, if processes vary significantly between teams, if ownership is becoming the central point through which too many decisions must flow, or if the accounting department is primarily reporting history rather than helping leadership understand the business, it may be time to evaluate whether the finance function has kept pace with the company.

And for the roofing companies that already have a Controller, there is a different question worth asking:

Are we giving that person a seat close enough to the business to actually use their abilities?

The Controller role is changing.

As roofing companies become larger and more sophisticated, the best finance leaders won’t just know the numbers.

They’ll understand what is happening behind them.

They’ll know the people responsible for producing them.

They’ll understand the culture leadership is trying to build.

And they’ll help create the structure, communication and consistency required for a growing organization to continue operating as one company.

That is also why I have been spending more time talking directly with Controllers and CFOs across the roofing industry.

Our clients are increasingly asking BRIX to recruit these positions.

I can read a Controller job description.

That’s the easy part.

What I want to understand is what makes someone exceptional in that seat inside a roofing company.

Conversations with leaders like Roger are helping answer that question.

And increasingly, I think the answer is clear:

The best roofing finance leaders aren’t sitting on the sidelines keeping score. They’re helping the company play a better game.