When talking about tenure in roofing distribution, Erik Zadrozny has quite the claim backing up his bona fides: he joined Beacon as the fourth employee of its corporate operations.

“I knew that I loved construction and I loved marketing. And just by the grace of God, I ended up applying to a newly created marketing position with Beacon, and that was 19 years ago,” he said.

In that time, he played a role in shaping the company, constantly working on its culture and clearing the way for his teammates to succeed, and he had a hand in forming Beacon PRO+, the company’s eCommerce platform.

Blazing a Trail

While attending the Ohio State University (Zadrozny noted the emphasis on "the"), Zadrozny worked with the university’s basketball team, following aspirations of becoming a coach. Unfortunately, a transition with the coaching staff dampened his trajectory, causing him to seek steady employment elsewhere.

He landed a job at Campbell Builders, an insurance restoration company. With a passion for marketing, he often became the go-to guy for the company’s branding efforts, with his superiors letting him loose on its website and advertising.

“At this company, I learned how to do web design, graphic design and how to utilize tools like CRM to engage our customer base,” he said.

That experience came in handy when he sought a new job. He found a posting for Beacon, which was seeking a corporate marketing manager at its Herndon, Va. headquarters.

“When I interviewed, I told them ‘I can do graphic design, I can do web design, I know how to do CRM.’ They're like, ‘Great, that is the direction we want to go,’” he said. “And so when I first started, I was the marketing department, one person, and got pulled into every segment of our business, which was incredibly important to my development and understanding of our business.”

Like his previous role, Zadrozny took the initiative to help Beacon obtain a business intelligence tool to better understand customer behavior and launch Salesforce as the company’s CRM. Recognizing his potential, Zadrozny was included in efforts to bolster Beacon’s reputation and work on greenfield strategies and acquisitions.

During one fateful meeting, a customer told him and Beacon’s CEO at the time that they would buy everything on Amazon if they could, including roofing materials. They weren’t about to let the retail giant take their business, so the team put their heads together.

“I’ve always had that belief that with hard work and with good people around you, you can pretty much figure out anything,” he said.

Zadrozny, Beacon’s director of eCommerce as of 2017, worked with the company’s IT team, helping develop Beacon PRO+, the distributor’s 24/7 eCommerce platform. He recalled going to industry events like Best of Success and asking contractors to order from the platform to help test and recalibrate it.

“It’s based on the needs of real customers who literally told us, ‘I want to work with my material supplier, and I want it to be easy,’” he said. “But it's more than just ordering. It's ‘I want to get alerts of when a delivery is arriving at my job site, like UPS does.’ So we outfitted our fleet with tablets to go do that.”

He said this extended to helping contractors with market intel such as hail maps, so they created Beacon Storm+ to provide real-time storm alerts free of charge. They also fielded requests to pull all purchases together so customers could manage their books, so they developed PRO+ to provide customers with access to five years of purchasing history.

Photo courtesy of Erik Zadrozny

Since launching in 2018, Beacon PRO+ has massively expanded, including integrations with other programs in the roofing space and a mobile app released in 2022. At that time, Zadrozny became the national director of sales before earning his current title of vice president of sales in 2022.

Zadrozny said the company aims to generate 25% of revenue through Beacon PRO+. As proud as he is of Beacon’s progress in this venture, he is quick to downplay his role in it.

“I was in the right spot at the right time to help bring our digital capabilities to life, but truly, there is a team at Beacon that has taken it to a level that I could not have even imagined,” he said. “There’s a bunch of people in our e-commerce, marketing and IT teams that have spent years honing and enhancing our capabilities – it’s truly remarkable.”

With such a dearth of knowledge and experience, I had to ask: over the 19 years of his career, what are some of the most significant changes he’s witnessed? Zadrozny pointed to technology integration in the industry, especially the advent of artificial intelligence.

“At Beacon, we're using AI now inside of our own business in marketing, product management and more,” he said. “For example, we're using AI to help us double-check invoices as part of our customer experience commitment. So we're using technology in a lot of different ways and exploring more every day.”

A Career Jungle Gym

As vice president of sales, Zadrozny’s territory covers Maryland to Florida and states like Kentucky and Louisiana, or as he put it, the “SEC of distribution.” In a way, his aspirations for coaching have come to fruition as he works to support his local teams and educate them on how to bring tools like Beacon PRO+ to customers to enrich their lives. He also works with customers directly to help them obtain their needed resources.

Much like a coach, it’s not about the individual but the team. He recalled the lessons he learned while attending a two-day leadership conference run by Jocko Willink, a retired U.S. Navy SEAL who co-founded Echelon Front, a company teaching leadership training.

“I’m big on decentralized command and making sure that we have the right culture inside our business,” he said.

With that in mind, he said he focuses on three objectives: ensuring Beacon has the right culture, recruiting and retaining top talent, and owning his results.

“I'm just like anybody else — I have goals and metrics that I'm trying to hit, that are based around growing our business. But for me to hit my goals it is truly a team sport all the way down to the roof loader, so I need to be a force multiplier,” he said. “I am passionate about empowering my team to do their jobs and if there's obstacles that are standing in their way, I need to find ways to go remove those barriers for them.”

While it can be argued that Zadrozny’s career seems as if it was on the rails ever since joining the industry, he believes finding a successful career is more about seizing on opportunities when they appear.

“People talk about career paths — I don't think they're really such a thing. I think it's more like a jungle gym … take the opportunities that are presented to you, do them at a high level, treat people the right way, and the next opportunity will make itself available to you,” he said. “That’s my path at Beacon.

“I am eternally grateful that there have been countless people who took the time to invest in me and my career at Beacon, now I have the responsibility to pay it forward and do it for others.”

To that end, he said he has enjoyed Beacon and the relationships he had made throughout his nearly 20-year career. He loves seeing people inside the business grow their careers or watching the people Beacon hires level up in their careers and provide for their families.

“As a sales leader, I genuinely enjoy sharing the Beacon story with contractors — explaining what we do, why we do it, and how our approach is intentionally designed to help them build more,” he said. "There’s nothing quite like seeing their eyes light up when they realize the impact we can have on their business. Serving our customers is at the core of who we are, and we take that responsibility very seriously.”

As much as he likes his Beacon teams, there are two other ‘crews’ he loves, listing them in order of importance: his wife, two children, and the Dave Matthews Band. Regarding the latter, he has seen the band at least 46 times and, like his career, uses tech to make life easier.

“I actually have an app on my phone where I can keep track of their set lists as they play them,” he said with a smile.