By The Coffee Shops®.

Contractors are responding to rising costs and delayed projects by strengthening relationships and emphasizing maintenance.

Roofing contractors are navigating a market where projects are taking longer to move forward, and customers are thinking carefully about major investments.

During a Read Listen Watch® webinar, industry professionals Wendy Marvin, CEO and founder of Matrix Roofing and Home Solutions, Dean Jagusch, owner and CEO of Wagner Roofing Company and Fred Castonguay, co-founder of Reworked.ai, discussed how contractors can respond without losing sight of the relationships at the center of their businesses.

For Wendy, the shift is visible in customer demand. She shared, “Calls are down and things and I think because we've always focused on building relationships and trust and earning business in the community by helping, I think that that has really helped our company.”

Dean has similarly seen customers hesitate before committing to larger projects. “What we're seeing is a lot more of a delay in terms of commitment to a large capital expenditure,” he said. That hesitation is pushing contractors to think beyond an all-or-nothing approach. Wendy said her company is considering partial roofing work, coatings and other options when customers cannot immediately move forward with a full replacement. Education remains an important part of those conversations, particularly when delaying maintenance can create additional problems.

Dean sees an opportunity for contractors to become a continuing resource rather than someone customers call only when replacement becomes unavoidable. “Being the knowledge base for, for these customers,” he said.

The mindset of being a resource for homeowners leads to trust developing before the homeowner is in a position to make a difficult decision. According to Fred, “We're getting to that customer before the insurance company has reached out to them. Before the water comes through the ceiling. We're helping roofers identify and have a conversation.

That long-term approach also creates a bridge to service and maintenance. Instead of focusing solely on the immediate sale, contractors can help customers understand their roofs, address problems as circumstances allow and maintain the relationship through future needs.

As conditions change, the panel's message was clear: relationships, education and adaptability remain valuable foundations for roofing businesses.

Listen to the recording or Watch the webinar to learn more about navigating a changing roofing market.

By Jesse Sanchez. 

Roofing contractors can improve canvassing efficiency by prioritizing qualified homes, warming prospects with direct mail and tracking results by address. 

Door-to-door canvassing remains a powerful roofing sales strategy, but Reworked.ai argues that its effectiveness depends less on the pitch at the door and more on selecting the right doors before representatives head into the field. A canvasser can typically reach 60 to 80 homes in a day, making each stop part of a limited daily budget. Reworked.ai’s approach is to rank properties based on roof condition and homeowner fit, using Eagleview aerial imagery and more than 50 owner signals. Each ranked address costs $1.79. 

The goal is to help contractors focus their canvassing efforts on homes more likely to need roofing work rather than spending time identifying unsuitable prospects at the door. Records include  the homeowner’s name, address as well as roof size, giving representatives more specific information before starting a conversation. 

Reworked.ai also recommends pairing canvassing with direct mail. A two-touch sequence can include a letter followed by an aerial postcard featuring the homeowner’s roof. Representatives can then follow up within the week. Mail Alerts notify a representative when a recipient scans a mailer’s QR code, allowing the team to prioritize that address while interest is active. 

The system can also be used around active jobsites through HALO, where contractors can market to nearby properties once the project has been completed, giving targeted homeowners an example of the contractors work. For storm-related canvassing, Storm Opportunities can map affected addresses as soon as 90 minutes after an event and rank them based on factors including roof age and pre-storm condition. 

By scoring, mailing, knocking and measuring results, roofing companies can evaluate conversations, inspections and contracts per 100 knocks while focusing their teams on qualified opportunities. 

Learn more about building ranked roofing canvassing lists and coordinating direct mail, field outreach and storm response!

By The Coffee Shops®. 

Helping contractors market around existing projects and emerging storm activity. 

After helping contractors identify homeowners who may need roofing services, Reworked.ai is focused on another challenge: turning those insights into meaningful customer outreach. 

During their conversation on Roofing Road Trips®, Fred Castonguay and Shyam Prabhakar of Reworked.ai discussed their newest feature, Halo, a marketing tool designed to leverage active roofing projects within a neighborhood. Rather than casting a wide net, Halo starts with a contractor's existing job site and builds an outreach strategy around nearby homes that meet specific qualification criteria. 

Fred described the approach as using a current project as an anchor point for identifying additional opportunities. "We use that job site address as an anchor point, and we do concentric circles around that neighborhood until we find 50 more bad roofs and great homeowners." The goal is to help contractors connect with nearby homeowners while a roofing project is already visible in the neighborhood. The system then launches a direct-mail campaign timed around project activity. 

The company's focus on precision also extends to market expansion and storm response. Shyam discussed a Zip Analyzer tool that evaluates approximately 150 data points to help contractors determine where opportunities may exist before entering a new region. 

The conversation also highlighted Reworked AI's storm-opportunity capabilities. Contractors can receive alerts when storms occur and identify homes that may have been affected. Rather than encouraging broad canvassing, the platform seeks to identify specific homes within an impacted area so contractors can communicate more directly with homeowners. 

Throughout the discussion, both Fred and Shyam emphasized that customer feedback continues to drive product development. According to Shyam, “For every one feature that we build, there were 30 other features that our customers said, 'Hey, this would be a good idea.’ So, that feedback loop and that distilling and identifying what adds value to the customers is as much art as science.” 

As roofing companies look for more efficient ways to grow, data-driven tools that combine targeting, automation and customer insight may offer an alternative to traditional prospecting methods. 

Listen to the full podcast or Watch the recording to learn more about targeted roofing outreach and storm opportunity identification. 

By The Coffee Shops™. 

Using technology to identify customers before they begin searching for solutions. 

Technology continues to reshape how roofing contractors market their services, but one of the biggest challenges remains the same: finding the right homeowner at the right time. On a recent episode of Roofing Road Trips®, host Karen Edwards spoke with Fred Castonguay and Shyam Prabhakar of Reworked.ai about how their platform helps contractors get ahead of demand instead of bidding on it. 

The company’s approach focuses on identifying demand rather than waiting for homeowners to show purchasing intent. While many contractors rely on pay-per-click advertising or purchased lead lists, both of which target homeowners who are already shopping, Reworked.ai, a marketing intelligence platform built for roofers, analyzes roof conditions and homeowner characteristics to surface qualified opportunities before homeowners begin researching a replacement. “Intent is a small fraction of the total marketplace out there, but if someone has a roof that is failing… we’re allowing roofers to find them, reach out to them and convert them into customers,” Fred noted. 

The company developed this model in collaboration with Eagleview, using aerial roof imagery along with other data, such as weather events, to identify homes that may have repair or replacement needs. The platform evaluates more than roof condition alone — financial capacity and homeowner responsibility are also factored in. The result is a more focused approach to customer acquisition: less time chasing broad audiences, more time working qualified opportunities. 

That strategy has produced a fast-growing set of tools for acting on those opportunities. HALO builds targeted outreach around active roofing projects, putting a contractor’s brand in front of the neighbors while the crew is still on the roof. Direct Mail Sequences handle the physical outreach automatically, “There’s an easy button right where we automatically send those mailers out, so the marketing aspect is also handled… We have APIs which we can integrate with the CRM set the roofers are using today,” said Shyam. 

The newest additions extend that reach from the mailbox to every screen in the house. Home Ads, which the company describes as the digital twin of direct mail, serve a contractor’s ads on the exact households they’ve chosen to mail, on streaming TV, phones, laptops and tablets, using a deterministic household-level match rather than cookies or lookalike audiences. Ads go live within 24 hours and are timed so the brand lands before the letter does, turning a cold pitch into a warm follow-up. 

Two alert systems round out the picture. Storm Alerts notify contractors the moment hail or wind hits a neighborhood they cover, event size, homes affected and can trigger ads inside the affected homes automatically. Mail Alerts put a unique QR code on every mailer and text the contractor the second a homeowner scans it, with the homeowner’s name, address and contact details, shrinking response time from days to seconds, so the call happens while the mailer is still in the homeowner’s hand. 

As contractors look for ways to improve marketing efficiency, technologies that emphasize precision over volume may become an increasingly important part of business growth strategies. 

Listen to or Watch the entire podcast to learn more about finding roofing demand before homeowners start shopping. 

By The Coffee Shops™. 

Industry leaders share how contractors can adapt to economic pressures while building stronger customer relationships. 

During the National Roofing Contractors Association (NRCA) mid-year meetings in Chicago, industry leaders gathered for a Read Listen Watch® (RLW) webinar to discuss a topic many contractors are facing in 2026: economic uncertainty and its effect on roofing businesses. 

Moderator Heidi J. Ellsworth was joined by Wendy Marvin of Matrix Roofing and Home, Dean Curtis of Wagner Roofing Company and Fred Castonguay of Reworked.ai for a conversation about labor challenges, rising material costs, changing customer behavior and the increasing role of technology. 

While conditions vary by region, the panel agreed that many contractors are working harder to achieve the same results. Wendy pointed out that labor availability, pricing pressures and slowdowns in new construction have affected the market. Customers are taking longer to commit to major investments, making service and maintenance work increasingly important. 

As homeowners and building owners delay projects, the panel emphasized the value of education and long-term relationships. “Because we’ve always focused on building relationships and trust and earning business in the community by helping, I think that has really helped our company,” Wendy shared. Rather than focusing solely on roof replacements, contractors are exploring repair options, maintenance programs and phased approaches that help customers manage costs while protecting their properties. 

Technology was another key theme. Contractors today face a growing number of software and artificial intelligence offerings, which can feel overwhelming. Still, Fred encouraged contractors to stay engaged and informed rather than ignore emerging tools. Instead, he urged contractors to evaluate if a technology product fits their needs. “You could have the best product in the world, and it does so much and it’s priced perfectly. It just doesn’t match up with what I’m doing right now,” he said. 

The discussion repeatedly returned to relationships as the industry’s greatest strength. Whether helping homeowners understand maintenance requirements, navigating insurance concerns or evaluating technology investments, trust remains critical. Dean emphasized the lasting value of people-focused business practices, saying, “It is about the people and about how we adapt as people and bring on these technologies and continue to be able to service our customers no matter what is going on.” 

The panel closed with a reminder that despite economic headwinds, the core need for roofing services remains unchanged. As Fred put it, “The roofs are still aging.” 

Listen to or Watch the webinar to learn more about navigating economic uncertainty and technology adoption in the roofing industry. 

By Reworked.ai. 

What makes Reworked.ai’s approach to customer acquisition different. 

When it comes to finding new customers, roofing contractors have a seemingly endless number of companies and strategies to choose from — and most of them are selling the same thing: Names on a list. To learn what makes Reworked.ai’s platform stand out in a crowded industry, we interviewed Fred Castonguay, one of the company’s co-founders. 

Reworked.ai is a marketing intelligence platform for roofers that finds the homes that need a roof now — and turns them into qualified opportunities before the homeowner ever starts shopping. The thinking behind it starts from a simple observation: Nearly every home in America will need a roof eventually. The hard part is finding the small fraction that need one this year.  

Fred shared what inspired the company, saying, “Our entire goal is to use advanced computer tools such as computer vision and machine learning to allow contractors to take control and have efficiency in their customer acquisition process.” 

But what really separates the platform from the crowd is its focus on demand rather than intent. Fred explained:  

We are not a lead provider. A lead provider is harvesting intent, whether it’s through a form or a banner or using pixels to see who’s on a website. What we do is go to the source and look at the demand signals. So in the case of roofing, that’s the roof. 

How are they able to do this? Reworked.ai has a partnership with EagleView that gives them access to aerial imagery revealing which homes are “showing serious signs of wear and tear, like water pooling, missing shingles, tiles out of place, serious streaking and more.”  

Once those roofs are identified, the platform helps contractors reach the homeowners behind them. Fred described the original outreach engine: “We have a mail integration program that our customers can use to reach out to specific homeowners by name and give them information about the work their roof needs and how their company can help.” That outreach engine now goes well beyond the mailbox. Direct Mail Sequences pair a personalized letter with an aerial postcard of the homeowner’s own roof. Home Ads — the newest addition — put the contractor’s brand on that same household’s TV, phone and laptop, targeting the house itself rather than a lookalike audience, so the letter arrives from a company the homeowner already recognizes. Mail Alerts close the loop on speed: Every mailer carries a unique QR code, and the moment a homeowner scans it, the contractor gets a text with the details — so the follow-up call happens while the piece is still in their hand.  

The same demand-first logic extends to weather. With Storm Alerts, the moment hail or wind hits a neighborhood a contractor covers, they’re notified instantly — and ads can begin serving inside the affected homes within 24 hours, days before the first crews start canvassing.  

By pairing demand signals from the roof itself with outreach that reaches homeowners by name — in the mailbox and on every screen in the house.  Reworked.ai goes beyond harvesting intent and instead finds the demand for roofing contractors. 

By Emma Peterson. 

Live from the NRCA Midyear Meetings, roofing and technology leaders discuss the roofing trends, challenges and opportunities. 

Today’s economic market has been defined by instability, shortages and hesitant buying habits. To learn how to navigate a roofing industry that has been reshaped by these shifting customer behaviors and factors, Heidi J. Ellsworth will host Fred Castonguay, Wendy Marvin and Dean Jagusch for a Read Listen Watch® webinar live from the National Roofing Contractors Association’s midyear meetings (July 15, 2026) all about how they are using relationships, trust and engagement to keep their businesses competitive through the chaos.  

Meet the panel 

Fred is the cofounder of Reworked.ai, an AI-powered software that helps contractors “stop wasting money on poor-quality leads and start targeting opportunities that convert.” He is well-known for his strong leadership skills and solid track record of delivering high value returns.  

As for Wendy, she is the founder and CEO of Matrix Roof and Home in Vancouver, Washington. She founded the company in 2007 with the goal of making a roofing company people could trust and has grown the business into a highly respected home services brand. 

Dean, the final panelist, is the owner and CEO of Wagner Roofing Company in Washington D.C. His team specializes in “institutional, commercial and residential projects with an emphasis on historic restoration” and boasts a legacy of quality work that dates back to 1914. 

What this webinar dives into 

This webinar will be a great resource for contractors trying to position their businesses for long-term resilience and growth. Wendy and Dean offer front-line expertise in the unpredictability of working in the roofing industry today. They will not only highlight the operational and workforce pressures that are hitting contractors the hardest right now but also share insight into rethinking leads in relation to the growing hesitation in homeowners and building owners. And this RLW is about more than just identifying the issues. Fred will share how AI can help contractors like Wendy and Dean cut through the noise and navigate market shifts.  

Overall, if you are a contractor or roofing professional looking for an honest, real-world conversation at how to leverage technology and innovative strategies to generate better leads and grow beyond our current economic uncertainty.  

Want to join the conversation? Register to attend the RLW on July 15, 2026 at 11 a.m. PT (2 p.m. ET)! 

By Reworked.ai.

Reworked.ai's bet: stop racing for leads, start scoring demand. A new generation of property data is making it possible.

Most roofing marketing is a race. The contractor who answers a homeowner's Google search fastest wins the job. Everyone else paid for the same lead and lost. Fred Castonguay, co-founder of Reworked.ai, thinks that race is the wrong race.

"Every contractor wants speed to lead — to get to a prospect first. But what if there was a different way? What if you could find demand before it shows up on a search engine?"

— Fred Castonguay, co-founder · Reworked.ai

That question is the foundation of Reworked.ai, a platform that fuses aerial roof imagery, property records and homeowner data into a single intelligence layer for contractors. The bet is direct: if you can see which homes will need a new roof in the next twelve months — and who lives in them — you don't have to compete for the homeowners who are already shopping.

"The thing I appreciate about a roof is that it wears its emotions on its sleeve. It's not going to lie. If a plane can see it from 6,000 feet, then a roofer at 6 feet is going to see a lot."

— Fred Castonguay

Four products, one engine

Reworked.ai turns that intelligence into four contractor-facing tools:

• Zip Analyzer — Pinpoint the neighborhoods worth your spend, ranked by roof age, ownership rates and homeowner profile.
• Roof Opportunities — Score every home in a chosen area on roof condition + owner fit. The top of the list is who to mail first.
• Mailer Easy Button — Launch a personalized direct mail campaign in minutes, with the homeowner's name, their roof image and your branding. No agency, no design cycle.
• HALO — When a job lands, HALO automatically fires a follow-up mailer to the surrounding neighbors. One job becomes a campaign.

"You can't be targeted if you're spraying and praying," Fred said. "We're talking about a four-to-six-times return at the low end. At the high end, much more."

A concrete example

A New Jersey roofer recently ran a single $987 Reworked.ai mailer to 300 scored homes. Four turned into closed jobs — about $130,000 in revenue. Roughly 130× the ad spend. The job-conversion rate (1.3%) was an order of magnitude above the industry baseline for targeted direct mail, and the team did it without buying a single lead.

It's the kind of math that's hard to ignore: not because direct mail is new, but because the targeting is.

When the weather decides

Reworked.ai's Storm Opportunities product layers historical storm impact zones over the same property-condition data. The result lets contractors focus retail and insurance restoration work on homes that were already aging before the storm hit — not just chasing the storm itself.

"We've looked at the homes that, before the storm, were not in great shape. We've looked at the homeowners. Why would you do it the hard way if the technology is there for you?"

— Fred Castonguay

Why now

Aerial imagery used to cost dollars per property. Owner-occupancy and income data used to live in walled databases. In the last 24 months, both have collapsed in price and improved in resolution — and Reworked.ai is one of a small group of companies betting that the right way to use them is on the front end of the funnel, not the back.

"It's just taking advantage of the data that's out there and democratizing it. Every contractor should have access to this — not just the ones with a six-figure marketing budget."

— Fred Castonguay

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By The Coffee Shops™.  

Lead lists were built for replacement. Rejuvenators need something different. 

Most lead lists in roofing were built for one thing: replacement. The roof is shot, the homeowner is shopping, the contractor closes. Rejuvenation works nothing like that. 

A rejuvenator needs an asphalt shingle roof somewhere in the middle of its life. Old enough to benefit, young enough to still be worth saving. Miss on either side of that window and the appointment is dead before the truck pulls up. 

That's the targeting problem rejuvenation contractors live with every day. It's also the problem Reworked.ai co-founders Fred Castonguay and Shyam Prabhakar dug into on a recent episode of Roofing Road Trips® with Karen Edwards. 

Fred put the trap in one sentence. "You're talking to the right person; you're not talking to the person whose roof is only three years old or whose roof is not salvageable." That's the entire rejuvenation pitfall. The three-year-old roof is too new. The unsalvageable roof needs to come off. Most marketing hits one of those two houses, never the one in between. 

Generic marketing makes it worse. "For the average home services company to try and participate in a pay-per-click market today, it is wasteful," Fred said. "Your message is getting drowned out by the massive spending campaigns of the national accounts." A replacement contractor can absorb that waste. A rejuvenation contractor, working a narrower slice of homes and a homeowner who didn't even know rejuvenation was a thing, cannot. 

Reworked.ai, powered by Eagleview's aircraft-captured aerial imagery, was built around that mismatch. Its scoring engine, Betty, looks at every home in a market and surfaces the midlife asphalt shingle roofs that are real candidates for rejuvenation. Each one comes with verified homeowner contact and demographic data, so contractors can reach those specific houses through mail, email, text or door-knocking. Not the block, the house. 

That last piece matters more than it sounds. Most homeowners aren't shopping for a new roof. They're even less likely to be shopping for a service they've never heard of. The first conversation isn't, "Do you need a roof." It's closer to, "Did you know there's a way to extend the one you have?" A pitch like that takes education and patience. Send it to the wrong house and you burn more than the postage. You burn the relationship. 

Shyam pointed to where the product is going, saying, "It's no longer about just spotting a bad roof and a good homeowner. We now give you the homeowner's direct cell, email and additional capabilities so you can actually turn a great opportunity into a hyper-targeted, instantly actionable campaign." For rejuvenation, that direct line into the homeowner is the difference between a one-shot mailer and a real campaign. 

There's another advantage too: trust. A rejuvenation pitch lands harder when the contractor shows up with an estimated roof size, an honest read on remaining useful life, and a financing range, instead of a cold pitch from the curb. Homeowners who weren't in the market are surprisingly open to a contractor who tells them something they didn't know they needed to hear, as long as it checks out. 

"We're listening to our customers on what capabilities they need," Shyam said. "We're taking all of this and building the best product that we can offer." 

For rejuvenation contractors, the math has always been the same: find the right roof, reach the homeowner, tell them something useful before anyone else does. And the tools to do that, at the address level, finally exist. 

Read the first article in this series or Listen to the podcast to learn more about how Reworked.ai is helping rejuvenation contractors find the homes that fit.

By Emma Peterson. 

Catch up on the biggest industry stories from May 2026. 

This last May, The Coffee Shops™ crew has been working hard to keep up with all the news and developments of the industry, whether it’s new events, evolving technology, shifting regulations or something else! To help readers like you keep up with everything, we like to put together a list of the top articles each month so you can see what the industry has been talking about.  

This month, we saw multiple articles about artificial intelligence (AI) on our top ten list. In eighth spot was “Cutting through the noise around AI,” which highlights Patrick Garcia of SRS Distribution and Fred Castonguay of Reworked.ai’s insights into how business can use AI effectively. The other article, in the fifth spot on our list, explores the common fear of AI taking human jobs with Denver Riggleman, the co-founder and CEO of Hootl. 

This month’s top list also saw articles from Coffee Shops’ President Heidi J. Ellsworth and our friends at Cotney Consulting Group. In her article, Heidi shares how Thomas Roofing delivers both quality craftsmanship and community support. As for the Cotney Consulting Group article, it dives into the difference between business and profitability, emphasizing how successful contractors are the ones who operate with better habits.  

And in the top spot for the month is one of my articles about “how the Farnsworth Group fosters business growth by helping contractors and other professionals better understand the market around them.” 

May 2026 top article list 

10 - Thomas Roofing and Supply builds a legacy through family, quality and community by Heidi J. Ellsworth 

9 - The operational habits that separate profitable contractors from busy ones by Cotney Consulting Group 

8 - Cutting through the noise around AI by Emma Peterson 

7 - Kick off the summer with the SRS XTV Soccer Tour! by Emma Peterson 

6 - Investing in people, not just positions by Emma Peterson 

5 - Is AI coming for our jobs? by Emma Peterson 

4 - When your company grows beyond you by Emma Peterson 

3 - Beyond the roof: Taking care of families in need by Emma Peterson 

2 - Training as the foundation of a stronger roofing industry by Emma Peterson 

1 - Seeing the big picture by Emma Peterson