Agustin Gomez was a mortgage banker until 2009, when the mortgage industry collapsed and he moved into roofing. He tells the story in two parts. The collapse is the first. The second explains why it was roofing.
That part happened in Houston, around a hurricane. “There’s a lot of storm chasers coming in, taking people’s checks and not coming back,” Gomez says. The work that did get done often fell short. “We wanted to make a difference there, and not only that, but the quality of the work wasn’t there with most companies that were doing the work.”
Brazos Valley Roofing Experts, which Gomez founded and owns, is built as an answer to that. A homeowner who has watched a crew take the money and disappear wants proof, and Gomez’s version of proof is documentation. Quality is easy to claim, he says, so he prefers to point out that the company has a process to prove its work. He describes the company as open with customers about what it is doing on a roof and says it hands them a record of the job.
The company’s About page puts the same idea in writing. It promises a documented installation process and says every layer of a roof is installed correctly, from the decking to the final shingle. The record shows up in what customers report, too. One homeowner whose roof had been leaking said the crew came back after rain with a moisture meter to confirm the leak was actually fixed.
The work is mostly residential, about 90 percent by Gomez’s count, with commercial jobs making up the rest. He would like the commercial side to grow. Across both, the company installs three main systems: asphalt shingles, metal and TPO, a single-ply membrane used on low-slope roofs. The business lists a CertainTeed Master Craftsman certification and standing seam metal among its credentials, and its service area runs from College Station and Bryan out to Navasota, Brenham, Huntsville and Conroe.
Gomez says the customers who hire him tend to describe the same thing. They tell him the company understood what they needed and offered a fix for that, rather than trying to sell them an expensive roof. For someone who got into the trade because of people who took homeowners’ checks, it is the comment that seems to matter most.
He later moved to the Brazos Valley to open the branch, and he says he loves the community, which he found welcoming. He is the only owner. He runs a team, and he is plain about where its standards come from.
“It has to do with who I am as a person and what I believe in,” he says. “It’s what I believe in as the owner and the values that we pass it down to our people and the training we provide along those same values.”
He wants those standards to outlast him. The goal is “a generational business,” Gomez says, but one “structured so that if we needed to sell it in 10 years or so we can.”
In the meantime, the standards are kept on paper, the same way the jobs are. “We lead by example, and it’s something that we have written out, and it’s something that we train on, and we talk about it constantly,” he says.