“I’ve built myself a job,” Max Wensinger says. “I haven’t really built a full business yet, as in I can step away from it and it operates without me.”
The job is Under One Roof, the roofing company he owns in Farmers Branch. It has no full-time staff to speak of. A few part-time salespeople work with him, closer to referral partners than employees, and he works with a number of roofing crews. The company describes Wensinger as the person usually up on the roof, and says he handles the inspections himself on houses, townhomes and commercial buildings.
What keeps the company in order is a sequence of checkpoints. Wensinger knows where each salesperson stands and who they are working with. A signed contract means he expects a first check. Then he orders materials, then comes the second check. “There’s kind of checkpoints along the way,” he says, “and if one of them doesn’t happen, then the next thing can’t happen.”
He says he is selective about who he brings on, and nobody who sells with him draws a salary. “You produce, and if you produce, you’ll make good money,” he says. He thinks the alternative backfires: “When you give people salaries and they say they’re going to produce, they don’t produce because they have a salary.” For someone new to the trade, he figures, it takes three to six months of steady effort to reach a point where the work keeps coming. “If you’re not at that point after six months of hard work, then you’re either doing something wrong or you just aren’t going to cut it.”
Wensinger has been in roofing since 2014. He was out of school and not doing much when a high school friend of his girlfriend, now his wife, offered a way in: the friend’s family ran a roofing company and needed salespeople. He signed on, and the company sent him to Pennsylvania almost immediately. There he learned storm restoration along with roofing itself.
He went back to school after that and worked in commercial real estate. Then came the June 2019 microburst in Dallas. He left real estate to start a roofing company with a friend, and when that partner moved out of state a few years later, Wensinger stayed and started his own. Under One Roof dates to January 2021, according to its Better Business Bureau file.
Most of his work is residential re-roofing, the kind he has done longest. He has begun taking commercial re-roofs as well and finds them close to houses in practice: get the scope right, reach an understanding with the customer, replace the roof. New construction is another matter. The work arrives as a set of blueprints and a request for the lowest possible bid. “A lot more money is floated up front, and there’s just too many variables,” he says. He still bids some of it and will probably give it another serious go once his commercial re-roofing is steady. Houses, by comparison, are “pretty straightforward,” he says, “and I can get it done without hurting my brain too much.”
On a replacement, the old roof comes off down to the decking, and any sheet that is soft or won’t hold a nail is replaced before anything new goes down. New shingles are fastened with ring shank nails, which hold better than smooth ones when wind gets under an edge. The company pulls the permit in its own name and schedules the final inspection. Wensinger is GAF certified and installs GAF systems when he can, which lets him offer customers upgraded warranties.
He mostly works in Dallas-Fort Worth and its suburbs, though he says he can legally take work anywhere in Texas and has crews willing to travel. “It just has to be the right job.”
The next step, as he sees it, is to have other people producing and managing production, and later to expand into other markets. He has no interest in selling for a long while. For now, the checkpoints all lead back to him.
“I’m just wearing a lot of hats right now,” he says.