RCS'er Paul Grizenko

Paul has been in the roofing industry since 1996 and currently owns Permanent Roofing Systems (manufacturer of aluminum shingles and accessories) and PRS Roofing Inc. (retail contractor and distributor of quality roofing products) in Montreal, Quebec. He specialized in residential metal roofing installing aluminum shingles (from PRS and Permalock), steel vertical panels (MacWest and Ideal), granulated steel shingles (Gerard/Allmet). On the manufacturing side, he obtained the shingle-forming machinery from Mustang Aluminum Shingle Co. in BC, Canada in 1996, and has been steadily improving the flashing system and the installation methods and cultivating a dealer base of competent, certified installers.

How long have you been contributing to the Forum?
I think it was around 2005, that I came across Tom Hay in another forum, and followed him to RCS. I was delighted to find a place where it seemed that the majority of participants actually knew their subject matter (roofing), compared to other places where there were many opinions, but an apparent lack of practical experience. I found the discussions and occasional arguments to be entertaining, educational and thought provoking. I've been fortunate to have met a number of posters like Mike Hicks and David Chenoweth, and hope to meet many more in the future.

So, How's business?
Hot and cold. Work seems to come in bunches. This seems to be true both for my dealers and ourselves as installation contractors. People read the news that the economy is contracting, and they pull back. Then a major storm comes through and everyone's panicking about their roof. Where that causes problems is in trying to maintain a steady workforce. Because our work is relatively specialized, there isn't a large pool of available and trained talent to draw upon, and we effectively have to "grow our own" workers. That takes time, and in fairness to good employees, we can't let them go every time work slows down, so... we carry our workers through lean times, and run them full blast when the times turn busy.

Who taught you to roof?
I learned to roof by doing, watching both good and bad roofers (obviously different lessons from each group), and by trying to understand the "why" behind each procedure or practice. One also learns a lot by going to do estimates for people with various roof issues - by trying to understand the cause-and-effect behind each disaster, and seeing in detail how systems fail, one gets a very good idea of what the key elements in a good system are.Another source of excellent information is the feedback from installers that I train in the various systems we sell and install. I usually give the installers a specific scenario to solve and they then come up with their solutions. Sometimes the answer(s) I get are original and brilliant even though they are different from accepted practice. I usually try out these new approaches experimentally in non-critical areas, and if no flaws emerge after some time in the field, then these innovations are added to our bag of tricks.

What was the most valuable lessons you learned about roofing?
Details matter. In solving a problem for a client, you have to really focus on what the actual problem is, and not jump to conclusions. It's so easy to think that client B has the same problem as client A because their symptoms are similar, whereas the actual causes may be very different, requiring different solutions.