In roofing, they say “It rains every night,” which means that no matter how much gets done on a reroof project, at the end of the day the entire roof must be completely watertight before the crew can leave. Shane VonWald knows a thing or two about reroofing, he’s been doing it for more than 27 years. Starting out as a second set of hands in his stepfather’s residential roofing business, he quickly rose through the construction laborer ranks from journeyman to foreman to superintendent before moving into project management and estimating for a large contractor. Today, VonWald leads the commercial roofing division at Signature Roofing, a specialty contractor serving the Boise, Idaho area since 2002. The firm’s roots, like VonWald’s, are in residential roofing. Determined to break into growing local markets in public works and large private projects, Signature Roofing brought VonWald into a new commercial division in 2013.
“Commercial roofs can be quite a bit more complicated than residential projects,” said VonWald. He estimates Signature Roofing does approximately 20 commercial roofs a year, ranging from public schools and municipal buildings to retail centers and office complexes. Signature Roofing’s residential division, on the other hand, does some 300 homes a year. “In residential, it’s a different house every day. You can be on the same commercial job for years and it has to be completely resealed every night.”