“You just need a scissors to put the stuff on, not a tanker or a kettle and mops and all that stuff,” says Rich DeMuro.
He is talking about the roofs that replaced the ones his Clifton company was built on. For years that was hot tar. “We were doing a lot of hot tar, which was the roof of choice back in the day,” he says. Laying it meant owning heavy gear. “I had to buy tankers and equipment and support equipment and support vehicles, and you need a lot of men to do all that.”
Then plastic and rubber membranes arrived, and the kettles stopped making sense. “We wound it down with the advent of plastic and rubber roofs,” DeMuro says. The company changed direction, and the crew got smaller.
DeMuro has worked in the trade since 1977, by the company’s own account. Its specialty is flat roofs on commercial and industrial buildings, with houses alongside, across eight North Jersey counties from Passaic and Bergen out to Sussex and Warren. The materials it lists read like a record of what came after tar: torch-applied welded polyester, EPDM and TPO membranes, and coatings that run from aluminum to silicone.
The company has none of the management layers, salesmen or office staff of the bigger outfits. “We just get a call for a job,” he says. “If it’s residential, I have a couple of guys that do that. If it’s commercial, I’m on the job myself, and we take care of it.” A customer who calls for a quote gets the owner, not a salesman, and the company has said as much since at least 2009.
Silicone has cut the labor further. “Nowadays, we do a lot of silicone coating, so it’s not as labor-intensive as it used to be,” he says.
He has a plain reason for liking the industrial jobs. “When you’re on industrial, you’re on a flat roof, rather than a steep, pitched roof,” he says. “So it’s safer.”
He measures what he knows in square feet. By his own rough estimate, he has about 40 million square feet under his belt. That knowledge, he figures, sells a job more than anything else.
Roofers have come and gone over the decades. “I went through a hundred of them through the years,” he says. “All good guys, but all got their issues.” He does not think anyone takes up the work because it appeals to them. “Nobody gets into the roofing business because they want to. It’s high, hard, hot, and heavy.”
He has no plans to pass the company to his children. He intends to sell it. “This is an extremely rough and brutal business,” he says.
He tells a story from the hot-tar years. A man who had served in Special Forces worked for him then and told DeMuro that PT, the military’s physical training, had been tough, but roofing was PT every day of his life.
“So it’ll make a man out of you,” DeMuro says.