MANSFIELD — It wasn’t the first time Alumni Roofing won an award when the company received the Small Business of the Year award for the 15-employees-and-over category on Nov. 18.
The company won the same award in 2008, back when the Richland Area Chamber of Commerce categorized the businesses. That year they won in the industrial category, nearly 10 years after the company was founded.
In April, the commercial roofing company won an award from the National Roofing Contractors Association for their work on the Avita Health System tower in Ontario.
The Lexington-based company was founded in 1998 by Tim and Toby Banks, a husband-and-wife team. Banks worked in other industrial roofing companies before starting Alumni Roofing. Leadership changed when the Banks moved to Haiti to become missionaries and Bill and Karen Hope took over in 2004.
Another changing of the guard will take place Jan. 1 when the Hopes plan to sell the company to husband-and-wife team Todd and Kristine Lindeman. Todd has worked with the company since 2004.
Despite change, the homegrown company doubled its revenue growth from 2013 to 2016, $3.5 million to $7.2 million. In sales, Hope said the company experienced a 400-percent increase over the last 10 years.
“We really make a conscious effort to spend our money here locally. We do what we can to find local suppliers and our employees based in all but one in Richland County,” Bill said, adding other employees hail from Ashland and Knox counties.
Hope said the company’s success is due to its clientele base, which extends across communities in Ohio and other surrounding states. According to the company’s application form for the Richland Area Chamber of Commerce Small Business of the Year Award, the company spent $3.6 million in Richland, Knox and Crawford counties in 2016.
That figure was up 42 percent from 2015.
“We want to make sure we’re feeding this local economy,” Bill said.
Much of Alumni’s business is in Columbus. Their most notable work was done earlier in 2016 on the Franklin County Courthouse in Ohio’s state capital city.
“We had to rent this 300-foot high crane, shut down Mound Street, right in downtown Columbus,” Bill said.
His wife Karen said it took seven semi trucks to lug the equipment needed for the crane.
Alumni Roofing’s business model is not expected to change once the Lindemans take ownership at the beginning of the year. One area they are looking to explore, however, is the use of drone technology when making inspections on potential roofs.
“For example, if you go to downtown Mansfield and you look at St. Pete’s — some of those big, tall, kind of tower roofs — very difficult to do an inspection on them. You have to rent a lift and there’s thousands of dollars just to go up and look at it,” Bill said.
He thinks using drones will become more popular in the near future for inspections. The company currently owns one drone and a thermal imaging camera for inspections.
Also in technology, Alumni Roofing bought a quarter-of-a-million dollar computer numerical control machine to help the company “break” metal components necessary for roof repairs and new roof installations.
Lindeman said the company recently paid off the expense, but the machinery paid for itself within a couple months.
“It just makes things easier for when we have days it’s raining. The guys can come here and get ahead on the next project,” Lindeman said.
The CNC machine cuts the time it takes to manually bend metal for new roof projects ten-fold. It allows the company to move on quicker to bid on new projects.
“The vision is going to remain the same, we’ve had a good run for 12 years,” Lindeman said. “I just want to keep that going.”
