Why You Should Diversify Your Roofing Portfolio

By Cayden Wemple. 

With over four decades of roofing experience, Ron Lloyd gives some insight on why it’s important to diversify your roofing portfolio. 

Ron Lloyd of Kokua Roofing has learned a thing or two in his nearly 46 years of roofing, and they’ve been invaluable in giving him a long, fruitful career in roofing. After starting as a roofer in Utah that primarily did tile roofing, he pivoted many times to make some interesting career moves. He told host Heidi J. Ellsworth all about those moves on a new episode of Stories from the Roof.  

“We started [our] company in Utah and one of our biggest accounts was the Mormon church,” Ron told Heidi. “I put roofs on churches all over the Western U.S. and then it expanded throughout the Midwest and even some in the deep South, and Hawaii came available if we wanted to come all the way over here to work on some jobs, and we said, ‘Sure, why not? Let's try it. Hawaii in the winter. You bet.’" 

When Ron moved to Hawaii to start his operation out there, he needed to shift from tile and asphalt roofing to metal roofing. “When I moved to Hawaii, there's a ton of metal roofs in Hawaii, so you either learned how to do metal or you didn't get a market share because there's a lot of metal over here,” Ron explained. 

When asked about the best thing he did for his company, Ron said, “Probably expanding outside of just doing tile roofs only.” He continued, “I was on the roof for 17 years and I did nothing but tile. There was a time when we just felt like we could walk into any market and just say, ‘Okay, we're going to take some of this. This is going to be some of our work now,’ and we've toned that mentality down, but we were pretty aggressive younger.” That tenacious mentality has certainly paid off for Ron. 

Learn more about Kokua Roofing in their RoofersCoffeeShop® Directory or visit kokuaroofing.com. 

Listen to the full podcast to learn more about the career of Ron Lloyd.