“He’s a huge part of the business. He’s young and he’s ambitious, and he said he’s going to buy it from us.”
Natasha Redic is talking about Brian, who works at KBR Roofing Services in Las Vegas and is the son of Miguel, one of the company’s partners. Redic and her husband are building the company with a sale in mind. Brian has already said he will be the one to buy it. Asked where KBR is headed, Redic says the owners are “kind of split” between those two pictures of the future, and she leaves it there.
It is an early question for a company this young. KBR started when Redic and her husband, a general contractor, decided to go into business with a longtime friend who was a roofer. “Our business ideas and morals lined up,” she says, “so we teamed up and started KBR Roofing.”
Miguel, a business partner, leads the field. Redic calls him “well known in the industry,” and she says he is well respected in the roofing community. The work splits about evenly between commercial and residential roofs, and the owners have no favorite. “We like to be versatile,” she says.
Whoever ends up owning KBR would inherit a sales staff built out of the trade. Everyone who goes out to look at a roof has worked on one. “They’ve all been roofers, so they know the assemblies and the systems, so they could speak knowledgeably,” Redic says. The inspection usually happens the day a call comes in or the next, and the point of it is narrow. “We really hone in on what the problem is, and we don’t want to oversell you on anything.”
Redic traces the way the company runs to where its people started. “Everybody involved comes from modest beginnings, and so we really appreciate and value where we’re at today,” she says.
She wants that felt at every level of the job site, and she says it is set by example rather than by rule. “From the smallest labor, the labor worker that might be picking up nails off the ground, to the top estimator, everybody feels appreciated and valued.”
The team meets every Friday. Redic gathers what she has learned during the week and brings it to that meeting to share with everyone.
The crews cover a lot of Nevada. They do a good amount of work in Pahrump and Mesquite, an hour to an hour and a half from Las Vegas. “We will travel within the state of Nevada,” Redic says. The farthest they have gone is Austin, Nevada, at least a couple hundred miles away, where KBR roofed a youth center. She calls that job “kind of a one-off.”