Roofing Road Trips with Heidi Welcomes Tremco’s Mardee Billingsley

By Karen L. Edwards, RCS Editor.

The two discuss Mardee’s article and eBook called ‘Making it Rain in the 2020 Labor Drought.’

Heidi has known and worked with Mardee for several years through National Women in Roofing, Tremco Roofing and Building Maintenance and Weatherproofing Technologies, Inc. She was excited to visit with her to learn more about the inspiration behind the article and eBook.

Mardee has been in the roofing industry for more than 25 years and currently holds the position of Executive Vice President of Tremco Roofing and Building Maintenance. She explains to Heidi that the most difficult part about being in the industry has always been about labor. “It used to be, for me, it was for us just a lack of skilled labor, that we'd hire people to have a body, but they didn't necessarily have the skills that we wanted. And now, it's just a lack of people in general.”

Her company’s entire recruiting development is now centered around principles of taking care of their people plus accelerated training and education programs for workers. “We needed to significantly increase the skills of our laborers that we had and offer young people, in particular, some kind of vision for accomplishment, advancement, and helping us change the way roofing, in particular, is done,” explains Mardee. “We wanted to exploit options for robots, drones, leak detection systems, and we don't believe that our foundations or principles should only be ours.” Wanting to share these principles with the rest of the industry was the impetus behind the article and eBook.

Mardee shares that it took the company a few years of building out their platform of education and training but now they are seeing the payoff. “Since June in particular for recruiting, we have doubled the amount of hires than we have had over the past few years. That is groundbreaking for us,” said Mardee. The company also committed to developing a federally recognized apprenticeship program that provides participant with the training and hours needed to earn their journeyman card.

Listen to the podcast to learn just how they developed their strong recruiting program and the benefits it has delivered.

Read the transcript.