Adam Sand explains how roofing companies should train site supervisors through a 2-3 week program: ride-alongs with a field manager, then shadowing a supervisor while handling CompanyCam photos, change orders, and scheduling. Proper onboarding costs less than constant rehiring and builds supervisor retention.
One of the biggest mistakes roofing companies make is underestimating the role of the site supervisor. In this video, I want to break down what great site supervisors actually do and how the best roofing companies recruit and train them the right way.
We talk a lot about the role of the site supervisor. The site supervisor's role is to really manage communication with the customer and to create flawless job sites, the kind of environment where when people drive by, they would hire you. Like, I would go look at a customer's job site, like, hey, let's go look at your job site, and we go Tarps are blown up against the property, you know, subs got music playing, the compressors on the grass, is gasoline pouring on the grass, this kind of stuff. Site supervisor stops all that. Site supervisor is also knocking doors around the area, and they're usually like a young bright face for the company. This is the farm team for your whole company. Then the training for this position is actually going out on ride-alongs with the field manager, if you have one, if you're at that size. That's going to give them a chance to collapse time frames and see multiple jobs throughout the day. And the field manager is probably the better representative of the company to give that training. Now, if you're not doing 4 roofs a day, don't have a field manager, then they're going to have to go out with site supervisor. Usually, if you don't have a field manager yet, you will have a more senior site supervisor who will be a good candidate for field manager when you get there. You're going to put them out with that person. And the training methodology that I always liked was like, take that person who's doing the job, and now the new person, the new hire, they're the phone operator. So they have to get comfortable with the system. So they say, look, you can't make the judgment calls that I'm making, but you can put stuff in the system. So So I want you to watch how I do it, and then I want you to enter in, like, I want you to put the company cam pictures in, I want annotate the things, I want you to type out the change order, I want you to push the buttons in the Arrivi, right? Those kinds of things. You're gonna be the person that runs that for me, 'cause that'll make it so I have to do less work, but then you're gonna learn how I do things. You're gonna learn how I talk to the neighbors to do that door knock. You're gonna learn how we set up the pop-up tent. And that's usually gonna be 2 to 3 weeks, and they should have a really good grasp on it. If you have the field manager, I would say do a little bit of time with the field manager first, So they're not stuck there all day and they can see more jobs in less time by riding along with a field manager. Field manager can set the expectations of the role, and then after about a week of rolling with the field manager, then they can spend a week or 2 weeks out there with another site supervisor. So that way in 3 weeks you have somebody who's not going to churn. This feels long to some people, like they're like, can you put the gloves on? You're ready, you know what I mean? You have to follow proper recruiting, proper hiring, proper interviewing, proper onboarding to the company, stability, security, you know, not just throwing them to the wolves. Like, that's like the general principle falls of people ops. So if you don't skip those steps and you give them a really good, stable, secure onboarding where they don't just get thrown to the wolves right away, there's a higher likelihood that they'll stay and perform. And the most expensive part is hiring and training new people. So I would much rather take 2 weeks to train somebody and go through actually like a good recruiting process, then they'll stay longer.
