Ty Flying Out has a line he gives roofing customers. “Sometimes we make mistakes and can’t get it right the first time,” he says, “but we’ll come back and keep coming back till we get it figured out.” Then comes the part that matters to the customer’s wallet: the return trips cost nothing extra.
Few roofers say that out loud. Flying Out thinks it is the reason people hire him. “Honesty,” he says. “I’ll tell them the truth.”
One homeowner saw what that looks like in 2019. Flying Out came out to look at an aging roof, went straight up the ladder and came back down about 10 minutes later. Then he walked the couple through the photos he had taken, one problem area at a time, and told them how he would fix each one. He recommended patching the trouble spots, which he said would carry the roof another couple of years. The homeowner wrote that he could easily have sold them a new roof instead, and they would never have known.
He has run Flying Out Roofing since 1998. In his telling, roofing found him. He was remodeling houses when a hailstorm came through, and roofing became the work. The company now handles both commercial and residential roofs, and he says commercial work makes up more of it than it used to. On the commercial side, the company lists TPO, PVC and modified bitumen systems, along with metal retrofits laid over existing roofs. On houses, it is mostly shingles and metal. The office is on Boucher Drive in Edmond.
The promise about mistakes comes from his parents. “I was taught from my parents a long time ago, if you tell somebody you’re going to do something, you go out there and do it,” he says. That holds even when the error is his own, down to a quote he figured wrong: “You still go out there and you fix what you said you was going to fix.”
Showing up works the same way. “If I tell you I’m going to be there, I’m there,” he says.
He holds his crews to that standard, and he doesn’t claim they always meet it. “I teach my guys how to do things, and we do things correctly,” he says. “We’re not always perfect. We are human, so we do make mistakes sometimes, too, but we try not to.”
The work reaches well past Edmond. “We do travel outside of Edmond area. We go everywhere,” he says. The company has taken jobs in other states, for clients ranging from government agencies to private businesses. Flying Out is Native American, and the company presents itself as minority-owned, with an all-Native American team.
He was looking after crews long before the Edmond office. In 2001, The Oklahoman quoted him as the owner of Flying Out Construction in Alva, in a story about a deadly heat wave. He said he cautioned his employees to take several short breaks to drink water.
He learned the trade from one man. “The guy that taught me how to do construction, his whole family did it forever,” he says. “I learned from him. And he is retired now for many years.”