Danger ahead! Understanding risk at every stage

By Dani Sheehan. 

What does risk management look like at your company? Jon Belnap of IB Roof Systems shares key milestones for a successful roofing project. 

In the most recent RoofersCoffeeShop® RLW® Heidi J. Ellsworth sits down with Jon Belnap of IB Roof Systems to discuss risk management in the roofing industry. They discuss how you can help to reduce risk on the roof and understand the pitfalls that can happen when things aren’t done correctly. Jon’s been a registered roof consultant for the last 15 years, but he’s no stranger to the danger associated with being on the roof. Working in the industry for over 30 years now, he’s held nearly every position from journeyman to estimator to project manager as well as spending time in manufacturing as a technical manager. 

When Jon talks about risk management, he says, “It really is the process of identifying, assessing and controlling risks that might be a risk to your company’s capital and earnings. We’re all in business to make a living here, and so anything that could take away from that, we want to try to identify that, assess it and put procedures in place that can help eliminate that so that we can keep more of that hard-earned money that we make.” 

The first step is to identify key players in the process and whether or not they might contribute to the risk. For most roofing projects this includes the owner, a designer, the installer and the product manufacturer. After the key players have been identified, you can begin to assess risk. There are cases where the risk is too high, and the best option is to avoid bidding on the project in the first place. But as Jon explains, “We’re in business to do work, get paid for work. So, avoiding risk is really not a good solution for most of these situations. So, then we look at minimizing the effects of loss. So, for these risks that we’re going to choose to take on, these different projects, we’ve got to shift our focus into minimizing both the frequency of risk and the severity of risk.” 

Do you have a dedicated risk management department or an employee responsible for reviewing your risk? You can’t successfully control the risk if you haven’t been able to properly identify and assess the potential for risk in each of your projects. Jon dives into more specifics when it comes to mitigating risk throughout this episode, but he summarizes, “What the biggest takeaway from this whole thing should be at the end of this is the importance of collaborating and communicating with the other relevant parties. When we all get together and put our heads together, we can work all this stuff out before it becomes a problem. So, educating one another, being willing to listen, that’s what makes these projects a failure or a success.” 

Read the transcript, listen to the full podcast episode or Watch the webinar to learn more about strategies for risk management and what your company should be doing to mitigate risk.