Green River Roofing & Construction, Inc., a full-service roofing firm based in the Kansas City, Mo. metro area, checks off all the boxes you’d expect of a roofing contractor offering residential and commercial service on its website.

Except it’s all pretty much a front — not in a nefarious or dodgy way — because everything on the site is accurate. The firm does offer all the services advertised, including residential reroofing, repair, and new construction. It also offers commercial roof system installation and repairs, gutters, siding and other accouterments typical of established contracting outfits; it has even garnered excellent reviews on consumer sites such as Yelp and Angi.

“Awesome work, they took a really bad situation, MY ROOF, and turned it into an awesome situation,” writes David Batcheller. “Saved me over $70,000 on my commercial building roof by taking on the insurance company.” 

The ruse, such as it is, stems from the fact the firm fields only roughly 5-to-10% of its business from the service areas it lists, according to principal Dennis Bresette, 55, who founded Green River in 2004 after a successful career with Ford Motor Company.

Simply stated, the company’s bread and butter — and main course, side dishes, condiments and the like — is residential roofing on military bases for service members and contractors throughout the country, which makes up roughly 90% of its annual income.

Bresette’s partner and nephew, Jason Seura, 43, teamed up with his uncle in the roofing business in 2010. The company incorporated itself in 2011, and Green River is like a touring rock band of roofing professionals: crews move from state to state wherever the next project takes them.

Acknowledging the unique nature of their business, Bresette explained it took approximately a year to become qualified as a preferred roofing contractor for the large construction companies hired by the Department of Defense to build and maintain the living quarters for the service men and women on its bases.

“The only issue we have is it is kind of a niche market, and it's a really good niche market, so I don't want to explain to the whole country how to go get into that,” Bresette said lightheartedly when asked how one finds themselves in such an exclusive position.

Getting DOD work, and as it turns out, it’s not a simple task. On top of needing the required licensure for each state a firm operates in, there are the industry certifications both the military and its large national builders require from groups like the National Roofing Contractors Association. Some bases may require contractors to have specific certifications related to military construction. Some bases may require a security clearance. Plus, there is a rigorous deep-dive into a company’s financials and insurance history; hint: so-called "storm chasers" need not apply. 

There is also liaisoning and gaining certifications with governmental groups like the Small Business Administration, which includes the 8(a) Business Development Program or HUBZone certification. The hoops are plentiful, but the reward is a steady work stream once a firm completes the process.

That consistent work allows Green River to maintain a rotating staff of 100-150 full-time W2 employees, depending on where the next job is and the scope of work.

Seura explained that there are two types of work the private sector performs for the military in construction: privatized and non-privatized. Green River specializes in the privatized side, so some requirements aren’t as stringent, but a year of vetting requires ensuring each ‘I’ is dotted and ‘T’ is crossed. 

“Most of what we do is the privatized side: we don't work directly with the military; we'll work with the large contractors they have,” Seura said. “So, there's not quite the vetting process, but there's quite a bit of one, and you just got to kind of get lucky and get that first [job] and show what you can do.”

The 'big one' didn't get away from Bresette. He, his nephew and business partner Jason Seura, along with their Beacon and TAMKO contacts, explored the rugged outdoors during a recent trip to Alaska.
Photo courtesy of Miki Reiner

I’ve Seen That Roof Before

For Green River, steady work means volume. Regarding new construction jobs, DOD contractors and their subcontractor partners — roofers, drywallers, HVAC and other specialty trades that help construct a house — will have an entire community to work their way through, sometimes 300-400 homes. After that, there is the maintenance.

“Almost 20 years into it, we've reroofed quite a few of those houses two or three times, just with storms and different [weather-related events],” Bresette explained. “They'll have their phases where they'll build houses, and we'll do construction; they'll build houses for five years and then 15 years later, they'll build some more, but in between, they'll be [reroofs].”

Seura’s background is in industrial engineering, so he handles the more technical aspects of the business, while Bresette handles logistics and operations. Each is a road warrior who travels back and forth between where their crews work at any given time and their home base in Lee’s Summit, Mo.

Bresette acknowledged that volume is the secret sauce of success in the pair’s line of work. Rather than getting between $15,000 and $50,000 for a new roof, they may get a fraction of that, but multiplied by a factor of 100 and greater, the income is steady and cumulative. 

Since the U.S. government ultimately owns each home, ensuring remittance for new construction or dealing with squirrely insurance carriers for repairs are non-issues. Our conversation occurred ahead of Hurricane Helene, which pulverized parts of the U.S. Southeast, so their plans may have been diverted, but last we spoke, Green River was preparing to deploy its resources to Alabama for its next job.

From left, Jason Seura, Daniel Taylor, field manager at Green River Roofing, and Dennis Bresette, during a recent trip to Alaska.
Photo courtesy of Green River Roofing

Safety: No Lip Service

Having interviewed several contractors for profiles, safety has been a topic that has been stressed more recently. Anecdotally, it’s an open secret that residential roofers tend to blanche more at being tied off and adhering to OSHA regulations than their commercial counterparts.

That is, unless the homeowner is the U.S. government. Bresette and Seura, who each proffered their reasons why safety sometimes gets the short shrift in residential roofing, said for Green River, it’s a non-issue since their ultimate boss sets the standards to which the company must comply.

“Yeah, there's always eyes on you,”  Seura said. “We'll have tele-anglers, those big old forklift things that weigh 30,000 pounds … four or five of them working in one street; 100 guys; … we've got to put fences up around every property; we've got everybody tied off.

“Everybody's got to wear their safety colors or a vest. There's quite a bit of stuff you won't see on residential houses normally,” he added.

The principals agreed that profit is the ultimate culprit in residential roofing's higher incident rate of workplace injury and death. For most companies, time is money, and the faster a reroof is completed, the quicker a crew can be dispatched to the next job.

“It's for money,” Bresette suggested when asked why safety seems more lax in residential roofing. “[T]hey can go faster without it. You know, the mentality most of the installers have is that no matter where they're from, they're all kind of brought up with ‘the faster you go, the more money you make.’” 

I asked if hubris was also a culprit.

“Yep,”  Seura added. “I've done this since I was 12,” he said, mimicking what any shingle slinger might offer. “You know, a lot of roofers are from Southern areas, and you know they did it when they were kids, and they still do it now, and ‘I've never had a rope,’” he adds for good measure.

Of course, the attitudes of field crews and their company owners don’t always align, except when there is no choice. And, when you are on government property, that choice is made for you, which makes keeping their employees safe a somewhat less daunting task.

Preparation Makes Perfect

Keeping their operation tight to ensure overhead remains in line with operating expenses means leaning on suppliers and manufacturers for exacting customer support. Unlike a typical roofing outfit with set territories and well-established relationships, Green River’s constant march for work raises the need for seamless communication between where they get their supplies and those providing the material.

The company website namechecks GAF, which Bresette said he likes to offer the small percentage of local business the company fields; TAMKO is currently the manufacturer of choice in the caravan work the company exists in. 

When you are transient and ordering materials in significant quantities, the relationship between supplier, manufacturer, and contractor becomes more intimate and clutch.

“It's basically just a phone call to the manufacturer and say, ‘We need to set up, you know, a schedule for delivery … getting 40, 50, 60 truck loads of material on some of these jobs,” Bresette explained.

The company has relationships with both ABC Supply and Beacon, and their Beacon sales representative, Miki Reineir, said that the company’s Government Sales Division works with contractors worldwide.

“Green River Roofing is a customer that I consider a Beacon family friend,” she said, and Green River’s principals echoed that sentiment. 

“[Reineir] has been the biggest blessing in the industry that we've ever had,” Bresette said with an earnest grin. 

He added that his relationship with suppliers helps grease the wheels, ensuring local branches know who he is when the company arrives in town and ensuring the supplies the company needs are in stock and ready for delivery when called upon.

“Miki has been an advocate for us since day one, so we are blessed to have her, to have that relationship — actually friendship,” he added.