Thirty years, one town, two generations

Jim Mayer started this in 1996. He had served his time, he had a van, a ladder rack and a set of lead dressers, and he had had enough of working for a firm that quoted one price and invoiced another. The first year was gutters and slipped tiles round Boldmere and Wylde Green — the jobs nobody else wanted because they were too small to be worth the drive. Thirty years later we still take those calls, and that is not sentiment. It is the whole business model.

Here is the thing that took Jim about five years to work out and that we have never departed from since. If you tell somebody their roof is fine when it is fine, they remember. They ring you in nine years when it is not fine. They give your number to their sister. They mention you at the school gate. Whereas if you sell a re-roof to a house that needed six hundred quid of hip re-bedding, you get one good invoice and you never hear from that street again. We turn down re-roof enquiries most months. It is the most profitable thing we do.

Danny Mayer came in properly in 2009 after his apprenticeship, and he runs the jobs now while Jim still surveys and still argues about mortar mixes. There are five of us in total. We do not use subcontractors, we do not use labour-only gangs, and we do not have a salesman — if someone comes to look at your roof it is one of the two of them, and they will be the ones on it. That caps how much work we can take, which is why we are usually booking six to eight weeks out. We decided a long time ago we would rather be a small firm that does its own work than a bigger one that manages other people badly.

We are NFRC members, which we joined in 2004 and which means somebody independent inspects what we do. We are CompetentRoofer registered, so we self-certify the Building Regulations side and you get the certificate rather than a shrug. Every re-roof carries ten years of written workmanship guarantee. None of that is remarkable — it is just the paperwork you should expect from anyone you let on your roof, and it is worth checking that whoever else you are talking to has it too.