“I’ve been roofing since I was 13 years old,” Josh Ritchey says. “I hated it.”
The job was tearing off roofs and toting shingles, and it paid 50 cents an hour. Ritchey is a third-generation roofer who took over from family, but staying in the trade was never the plan. “I never thought I’d end up in roofing,” he says. “I just kind of ended up here.”
Here is Titan Roofing & Construction, which Ritchey owns with Jeremi Henderson and which the company calls family owned and operated. It has offices in Little Rock, Fort Smith and Hot Springs. Ritchey says his partner works the Fort Smith side, on the Oklahoma border.
The boy who carried shingles for pocket change now carries the risk on every roof. Titan’s warranty runs 10 years, transfers to the next owner of the house and covers materials and labor, provided leaks are reported within 48 hours. The company’s site lays out those terms. Ritchey puts it more plainly. “If there’s anything wrong with the labor, it’s on me,” he says.
The company publishes what a replacement involves. On a shingle roof, the crew tears down to the plywood and inspects it, lays 15-pound felt and drip edge metal, installs the new shingles, reseals and paints the pipes and vents, then cleans the ground around the house. A tile job starts with stacking the old tiles for reuse. The crew checks the deck, lays 30-pound felt with new wood battens where needed, adds weather blocking at the hips and ridges, and replaces any broken tile.
What turns up under an old roof is where Ritchey says honesty gets tested. Rot is his example. Titan sends customers links with photos, and he says the company is “very upfront, very open about what everything is going to cost.” He credits the crews, too. “I know my crew leader very well. He’s been with us for years,” Ritchey says. His family all but adopted the man, he says, and “with those relationships I get better quality.”
His other point is that most homeowners have never done this. “Your average homeowner doesn’t know what to expect,” he says. Sometimes it is their first roof ever, because roofs last a long time. So each time a job’s status changes in Titan’s tracking software, the customer gets an email, from moving up the list to the day the shingles are delivered. A lot of the work goes through insurance, and Ritchey knows the limits of what he controls. “I can’t make the insurance company jump faster than they want to,” he says, “but I can educate the homeowner and let them know this is what the next step is.”
The contact sometimes runs past the job. After a ceiling repair and paint job, one family who had mentioned they were about to become grandparents got a call from the workers, who wanted to know whether it was a boy or a girl. Big companies don’t make that kind of call, the customer noted afterward.
Ritchey says growing office by office across the state, at its own pace, keeps the company close to the people it works for. “We can be there to serve our local community and not chasing a storm,” he says.
The partners eventually want a fourth office, in Jonesboro. Ritchey says that depends on people more than anything else. “As long as I have people I can trust to do that,” he says, “then I can expand.”