What is in your opinion the difference between a professional and a nonprofessional roofer?

This is a great question submitted to me.

Is it appearance, organization and operation, customer service, identity, etc.?

A professional is an expert at what s/he professes to be and is worthy to be paid for it. So a professional roofer is an expert at roofing and worthy of being paid for it. That does not mean s/he is necessarily an expert business person or an expert sales person or an expert anything else.

A professional roofer has a long history of installing roofs that last longer than the guarantees. He listens to his customer's needs and tailors a solution that fits his needs, not some pre-determined set of ideals established by a roofing trade organization.

A Professional Roofer is on Angie's List and has a BBB Sticker

I despise BBB. We have an A+ BBB rating with zero complaints, but it's a scam. There are roofers who have an A+ rating who I know to be crooked as a corkscrew. As soon as I pay $900 each year for our 2 memberships, they start jacking me up about buying ads.

My guess is that they are a lot like Facebook. My friend is banned from Facebook because of unPC posts regularly. I make the exact same posts and never get banned. The difference? I bought $7,000 in Facebook ads last year...

A professional roofer gives a bid and that is the price he does the job for, take it or leave it. A nonprofessional gives a bid and if it is too high for the customer, starts to negotiate a different price.

Well Vickie, you asked what is a professional "Roofer". Of course there will be many replies commenting on many different areas of the roofing "Business", all of which are legitimate and have plenty to do with the overall scope of things.

But a professional "Roofer" doesn't have to own a business. Like some of the others have already stated, he or she is the person who is an expert in the roofing trade, has many years of experience, pride and integrity in their work and will do the right thing even when nobody's looking and no one else but them would ever know the difference! ;)

A professional knows industry materials, standards, and practices well enough to see a full range of options on each project, has a reasonable idea about the time, effort, and expense entailed by each of them, has seen and made enough mistakes to provide informed opinions concerning the consequences of decisions made and actions taken, knows the difference between his responsibilities and other people's, and takes full responsibility for his.

As usual, we redefine the question/word to fit our own view of what we think the answer should be. In a purely technical sense, professional is anyone who charges to roof. When you couple it with unprofessional, as a comparison, it defines it a little more narrowly.

I have found roofers to be as pigheaded as martial artists. Each one convinced that his style is superior to all the others - Kempo superior to Tae KwonDo, BJJ superior to Karate, etc. The question is a great one, the answers are usually tiring and pretty much useless.

Egos in both realms are outsized.

pro·fes·sion·al prəˈfeSH(ə)n(ə)l/ adjective 1. relating to or connected with a profession. "young professional people" synonyms: white-collar, nonmanual "people in professional occupations" 2. (of a person) engaged in a specified activity as one's main paid occupation rather than as a pastime. "a professional boxer" synonyms: paid, salaried "a professional rugby player"

You're right. It's funny though...my mind coupled it with unprofessional rather than nonprofessional so it took me down a different path. I had a gc friend who once defined professional as someone who does more than an amateur but less than he's capable of. That struck me as odd but the more I thought about it the more it rang kind of true. A "professional" doesn't usually gild the lily. Sometimes I do gild lilies just to keep from getting bored with the routine specs or to see just how well I can do, but I have it in me to cut the corners that don't hurt anything with the best of them.

When I was just getting started in West Texas the old line roofers said the ambient temp roofs we were installing were a gimmick, wouldn't last, etc.

Those roofs are 30+ years old now and the owners think they represented a great value. That means more to me than what other roofers think about it, 90% of who haven't been in business half that long.

Being a professional doesn't mean doing only what the industry tells you to do.

Agreed. When I use the term "the industry" I usually mean two things and people sometimes get confused by that. On the one hand, I mean The Industry (manuf., ICBO, testing labs, trade orgs, applicators, all rolled into one "official" sometimes specific and sometimes vague entity) but I also mean Everything-that-people-are-doing-in-the-day to day-business-of-putting-on-roofs. Same difference between saying "in sports..." or saying, The Sports Industry.

I've always been a bit of a team player and a bit of a rebel and don't want to rid myself of either side. One of the things I liked most about Dick Fricklas was that he was right in the dead center of The Industry but never batted an eye when it came to questioning the reality of positions The Industry would take.

Problem with The Industry is that it tries to extract Policy from a matrix of mistakes and gets itself into tight spots with one-size-fits-all proclamations. Everybody gets in line and stops thinking and takes refuge in policy. Drives me nuts quite often. A lot of the best decisions come down to a certain "feel" and policy people are terrified of that. C'est la vie.

I like to keep track of what The Industry is coming up with because it represents a broader data base than what I can generate entirely on my own, but I am always prepared to deviate from Industry Policy when I have certain knowledge from personal hands-on experience that the policy is either biased, wrong, or that I can do better.

People will always move towards establishing policy. But then they change it. Sometimes for good reasons and sometimes just because they think they can and think they can get away with it. Go ahead and use those Oatey jacks with the neoprene collars that UV degrade in ten to fifteen years. It's an industry "standard" now. Not on my watch. Go ahead and put on a "lifetime" tile roof over one layer of 30# felt. Not on my watch. Go ahead and force a piece of metal nosing on a humpy fascia board that has no sheathing end-grain exposed. Mind-numbing dumb. The list is quite long actually.

Probably easier to define the difference between a professional roofer and a hack than a professional roofer from a non-professional roofer.

You would have to think that the non-professional was at one time a professional and something made him go to the other side.

That "something" could be financial where he took the money and ran.

Maybe missed something on a quote and took a shortcut to prevent a loss at the expense of the client.

Skirting regulations and pocketing the money saved.

Bidding work to only establish perceived cash flow to stay financially alive for another month.

A professional is someone who gets paid to do the job.

I try to raise my business to a standard of excellance. I want my company to be the one everyone uses in my area to measure successful roofers by, not just professional.

I'd venture that 90% of the roofing innovations were born of some contractor violating some "rule" about how it is supposed to be done. Roofers are often like ants, they follow each other around in a circle endlessly because that is what those they follow are doing.

As with most other industries, nearly all innovation was created by 1% of those in that industry who refuse to follow ants. The other 99% explain their own lack of creativity by labelling them as corner cutters.

The irony is as thick as peanut butter. For decades the NRCA said to remove all blisters. My dad said no, a blister by its nature is air/water tight on the bottom and top, therefor cannot leak unless you disturb it. My dad held that if it's big and dynamic, cut it out, but if it's small and static, you do more potential harm by removing it. Lo & behold, the NRCA finally came around.

You can be a follower or you can be a leader.

You can't talk about money without talking about value. I can pay you money to do my roof but the value might not be the roof you install. It might not even have anything to do with the quality of the roof you install. The value might simply be in making my roof problem "go away" even if it's only for just long enough to get a loan on a piece of property I'm trying to buy or to refinance. I could provide a real estate broker with a bogus roof inspection and the value is that I make the deal happen, but there's no intrinsic value in the report and getting paid for it does not make me a professional. Pay is a good indicator, but that's all.

A professional is someone who practices a profession. A profession is an occupation, especially one that involves prolonged training and a formal qualification. An occupation is a job or profession. A vocation is a person's employment or main occupation, especially regarded as particularly worthy and requiring great dedication. Occupation, vocation, profession all hovering around together in a little cloud that we try in our way to condense into a useful meaning. An attorney working pro bono for no pay is still a professional. A professional is capable of being unprofessional. A non-professional is capable of being professional. Might require a good bit of luck, but it's possible; I've seen it. Training, even if it's just a little research, dedication, and value. I think if we focus on value we're doing the best we can to be professional.