4 Contractor Tips for the Winter Season

Author: Lee Polevoi | January 8, 2025

The winter season offers contractors a chance to plan ahead and hit the ground running once spring comes around. But what should contractors be focusing on? A few contractor tips can make the difference between business growth and stagnation during a slow season.

The good news is roofing contractors can always find smart, productive things to do during the winter downtime. Many issues and opportunities in a roofing contractor's business can be addressed during the traditionally slow months, but perhaps the most critical elements worth assessing are:

• Your team's skills and capabilities through training
• Contact with current customers and identifying new customers
• Business performance
• Project management tools

Choose one or even all four of these tips to focus on this winter to set yourself up for a productive spring.

1. Strengthen Your Team's Abilities

Keeping a skilled team in place is among the key challenges facing any roofing contractor. It's important not only to support team members in expanding their skill sets, but also to avoid idle time that can lead to a drop-off in motivation and learning.

Instead, slow months represent an opportunity to enhance employee development and retention, with a focus on contractor training. The best starting point might be just after a new employee joins the team. A carefully designed onboarding process helps ensure that each rookie roofer understands how the business operates and expectations regarding their individual job performance, and strengthens relationships with their manager.

With a solid team in place, the next step is leveraging the slow season to boost your team's abilities through training and possible certification by the National Roofing Contractors Association. New technology and methods of roofing repair and replacement keep changing all the time, so it's essential that you and your team keep pace with these changes. Look for ways to help your team expand its capabilities, through individual training sessions, webinars and/or attendance at trade shows.

2. Stay in Touch With Your Customers — and Find New Ones

As winter approaches, there are plenty of ways to maintain contact with current (and prospective) customers. For example, consider reaching out to your valued customers with timely advice on how to best clean their roofs after a snowstorm. Offer other winter roofing tips on your company website, as well as timely emails (and social media posts) that link to your best "how-to" content.

Make sure customers know you're always available to assist with any roofing issues, regardless of the time of year. Then put some time and effort into identifying new customers and reaching out to them through the most appropriate sales and marketing channels.

3. Assess Overall Business Performance

It can be a challenge to evaluate your business during peak seasons when much of your time is spent out in the field. Slow months represent the opportunity to:

• Take a fresh look at your business plan.
• Assess the level of cash flow within the company.
• Measure ROI from the past year's roofing projects.

Just as importantly, review customer feedback you've received in recent months. What does that feedback tell you about customer satisfaction? Should you stick to the established way of conducting business, or is there some more effective method of acquiring and retaining new customers?

4. Explore New Tools

The slow months also represent a time to improve business performance and plot out new strategies for growth. Take some time to evaluate how new tools can help streamline your business. Beacon PRO+, for example, enables you to manage your accounts remotely, including ordering and tracking building materials and paying your bills, all from your phone or laptop. Take advantage of tools that save you money like Beacon's Manufacturer Rebate Tracking which allows you to track rebates with the click of a button.  

It's no surprise that your work in the field might slow down at the end of the fall, but when it comes to keeping busy over the winter, pick a few of these contractor tips to focus on, and set your sights on what you can do to prepare yourself for spring.