Jason Shepherd keeps a simple scorecard for J & R Roofing. “It’s probably my number one goal as the owner is just to not have any bad reviews or any upset customers,” he says.
He can’t think of a single customer who would give the company a bad review. He has also worked out what keeping it that way costs. “I don’t want to grow super big,” he says, “because I know the more people I hire the more the possibility for that is to happen.”
So the Layton company is built to stay at a size its owner can keep an eye on. Shepherd wants to grow to a point, he says, but not at the expense of what he thinks the company does best. At its current size, he says, the work is better and so are his relationships with customers.
Keeping the company small means keeping the owner’s job large. Shepherd is choosy about handing off any part of it. “I keep a lot of my responsibilities,” he says. He is just as choosy about who he hires, and he leads by example with the crew he has, a group of roofers he calls awesome. People like that are the hard part. “It’s just hard to find good long-term guys to work with,” he says.
Shepherd is from Colorado and has been roofing since he was about 16. Before he went out on his own, he spent four years at a commercial roofing company where, he says, all they did was commercial roofs. He started J & R Roofing in Utah after he got sick of working for somebody else.
That commercial stretch is part of why he says the company is well rounded. Most of its work is residential, but the crews install metal and shingle roofs, TPO flat roofs and some designer roofing systems. He cares about that range. “I’d like to be known as an actual roofer,” he says. “I don’t just want to be a shingle guy.”
There are a few systems the company doesn’t take on. It doesn’t do gutters at all; Shepherd subcontracts that work to a gutter company.
The crews work out of Layton and cover the towns around it, among them Clearfield, Roy, Kaysville, Farmington and Bountiful, with business hours Monday through Saturday. One homeowner whose words appear among the company’s testimonials hired Shepherd first for a flat section of roof over an addition, then called him back a year later to replace the rest, a job that meant working around solar panels. The crew, that customer noted, left the yard clean.
Shepherd isn’t planning to sell the company or build it into something massive. Once it reaches the size he is aiming for, he wants to spend his time perfecting it, and he hopes to hand it down to one of his kids someday.
He doesn’t picture himself running it from behind a desk. “I’m definitely more of a hands-on type of guy,” he says. “I can’t sit in an office all the time.”