Jesus Garcia’s gutter crews are his three sons and a nephew
Jesus Garcia gave up roofing in Denver and moved his family business to Oklahoma, where two crews form gutter on site and try to finish every house in a day.
Oklahoma City, OK
When Cathy H. needed help with her gutters, Jesus Garcia came out on a Sunday. She wrote in a Google review that he installed and repaired her gutters that Sunday to help her out, and that the crew cleaned up the whole site afterward. Weekends are ordinary for the Garcia family. They work Saturdays and Sundays, and some weeks all seven days. “We know how to do this,” Garcia says. “We have a lot of experience.”
Gutter and Filter LLC is five men, all family. “I got three sons and a nephew working for me right now,” Garcia says. Counting himself, “we are five guys total.” They work as two crews out of Oklahoma City, installing gutter and micro-mesh gutter guards, and doing repairs and cleaning.
Garcia owns the company, and he means for it to stay with his sons. He has no plans to sell. “After I retire, my sons, they going to keep working on the business,” he says. He wants to keep it in the family.
Garcia started the company in Denver in 2010. In those years it did roof replacement as well as gutters. In 2019 he moved the business to Oklahoma City and dropped roofing. “I used to do roofing long time ago,” he says. “But now I got too old.” In Oklahoma, he says, “I just decided to keep doing gutters.”
The company forms its gutter on site. One photo it has posted shows a fresh length coming out of a machine at the back of a work vehicle. Garcia owns three of those machines: two combination machines and a third that makes only five-inch gutter. Most of the gutter the crews put up now is six-inch, he says. The third machine is room to grow. “I have three machines,” he says. “I always can get another crew and put it to work.”
He will not guess at how much more the family could take on. “I can handle a lot,” he says. Then he qualifies it. “Not all the jobs are the same. Some of them have more details than other ones, and some of them go pretty quick.”
The rule on the job is to start and finish each house the same day. “Most of the jobs are done in one day,” Garcia says. “It doesn’t matter how big is it, most of them, we got to get them done for the day. We have to keep up.” On a full day the two crews finish four jobs between them. Customers notice how they leave a site. A car dealership in Oklahoma City called the crew polite and professional and the work clean.
The crews drive as far as two and a half hours from Oklahoma City. The company lists Edmond, Norman, Moore, Choctaw and Harrah among the places it serves. Most of the work is residential, though the crews can handle commercial jobs. Given the choice, Garcia says, “I like doing residential.”
For most of its life the company has worked for other companies. “I’ve been in business as a subcontractor for 15 years,” Garcia says. Today most of the family’s work is installing gutters and gutter covers for a national gutter-guard company, which sells the jobs through its own salesmen. “They keep us busy,” he says. The homeowner signs with the big name. Garcia’s family is the one on the ladders. “We are the ones who do the job,” he says. He takes some jobs under his own name on the side.
He keeps his rules for the business short. In a description of the company he wrote, he listed what it had learned over the years: get to the job site on time, never miss an appointment, do it right the first time and honor the guarantee. Those, he wrote, are the critical points for any business.
Most days now, Garcia stays home while the crews go out. “Most of the times, I don’t work,” he says. “My sons are the ones who work.”