Meet Jeremy Bleeker: Answer Me This! Winner

By Karen L. Edwards, RCS Editor.

Each week someone wins a prize for answering a question, next week’s winner could be you!

At RoofersCoffeeShop®, we love giving away prizes and then learning about the people who win! Jeremy Bleeker, owner of 1 Roof LLC, was a recent winner of the Answer Me This! question of the week. Answer Me This! is sponsored by The Gibraltar Building Accessories Division as part of their ‘Construction Solutions’ campaign designed to supply feedback from contractors to help them continue to innovate.

We all know that roofing is a small world and we are like one big family, right? So, I guess it’s no surprise that Jeremy Bleeker turned out to be someone I know from the time I worked at EagleView. What I didn’t know about Jeremey was his long, rich history in construction and roofing. It’s always interesting to hear how someone got into roofing and everyone’s story is unique.

Jeremy’s story started at the age of 14 when he lived in Iowa and began working construction jobs in the summer to make money. “I never really looked back after that,” explains Jeremy. “I liked it a lot and it stayed in me.”

But Jeremy didn’t stay in construction after high school. His mother’s side of the family were all teachers, while his father’s side were business owners and entrepreneurs. A high school athlete, Jeremy was determined to play football in college, while earning his teaching degree so he could mentor youth as both a teacher and a football coach.

He attended college but continued working construction jobs throughout the summers while he was in school. After graduating, Jeremy landed a teaching job in a larger, progressive high school in Iowa which was very different from the smaller, rural high school environment that he was familiar with.

“Three years into teaching, I had met my wife and we had a child,” said Jeremy. “I was making more money roofing in the summer or on a weekend than I was making made during the week in teaching.”

It was then that Jeremy made the decision to leave teaching and pursue what was his true passion, a career in the trades. He worked in construction and gravitated toward roofing which he liked saying, “I really liked it because it was a quick turnaround, the jobs didn’t take long and I was hiring a lot of my former high school students,” explained Jeremy. He eventually grew his company to 66 full time employees and 17 crews, providing services across multiple states from Louisiana to North Dakota.

But as Jeremy said, “Sometimes you wake up one day and just don’t have a passion for it anymore. I found myself behind the desk all the time when I really wanted to be out in the field.” He knew it was time for a fresh start. He moved to Florida and worked in the corporate world for a few years before he felt that entrepreneurial spirit calling him. That was in 2017 and Jeremy started 1 Roof LLC to get back to his passion of roofing craftmanship. He surrounds himself with the right people to allow him to not be tied to the desk.

I asked Jeremy about RoofersCoffeeShop and he fondly remember the old days of the Roofers Exchange newspaper. “I loved the print version; it was my secret weapon for recruiting crews. RCS helped us recruit crews in different territories. It was a go-to thing for us in the early years,” said Jeremy.

Lastly, I asked Jeremy if he was familiar with Gibraltar Building Accessories and their Construction Solutions campaign who sponsor the Answer Me This! weekly question. He didn’t think so but as we talked we discovered that he does use SEMCO vents and accessories in his company.

Want to try to be next week’s Answer Me This! winner? Find the link to our latest question in our Forum here.