Born to be a Roofer: Lori Swanson’s Roofing Journey

By Cayden Wemple 

Lori Swanson’s introduction to roofing started at just four years old and she has not looked back. 

Lori Swanson, the owner and founder of Guardian Roofing, is a roofer through and through. Her father was a roofer and when she was just four years old, she was already tagging along with her father to job sites to do estimates. By the time she was 12 she was working on the roof.  

Lori jokes that being on roofs was her alternative to daycare. She explained on a recent episode of Stories From the Roof, “Once I was old enough, I was working around his shop and then essentially on the roof. He tells the story that I was too busy to be left at home alone. So, his solution for daycare at that time was to put me on the crew with the roof and that's what I did. How times have changed, that would never happen, I'm sure, in these times.” 

Although Lori did not realize it at the time, she was learning some very valuable lessons during her adolescence. “So when I was working in the roofing industry, I don't think I really even realized the work ethic or what I was learning at the time, I just knew that I wasn't out at the beach with my friends,” Lori recalls. “However, I learned so much just about the industry as a whole and just the type of people, there's some of the hardest working people you'll ever find in this industry.” 

Once Lori got older, she began learning about the purchasing side of the industry. “I continued to work on the roof every summer through junior high, high school and in college, and my dad had his office manager transitioned,” Lori explained. “So I came inside the office and then started learning more about purchasing and scheduling and job costing and some of the other aspects of the industry, aside from just working in the field and learning different applications.” 

You can listen to the rest of Lori’s fascinating roofing journey here.