At a glance
| Industry | Roofing / Exterior Contracting |
|---|---|
| Location | Minneapolis, MN (Twin Cities Metro) |
| Founded | 1932 — 90+ years in business |
| Business type | Residential & Storm Restoration |
| Workforce | Employee crews + subcontract crews |
| Trades | Roofing, Siding, Windows, Gutters, Carpentry |
Executive summary
Garlock-French is a 90-year-old residential roofing and exterior contracting company in Minneapolis, operating across multiple trades — roofing, siding, windows, gutters, and carpentry — often running employee and subcontract crews simultaneously on the same project. That operational complexity is exactly what made their technology journey so difficult.
After years of evaluating options, they tried an industry-specific roofing software that couldn’t deliver the trade-level job costing their business required. When they finally committed to Salesforce, their first implementation partner struggled to understand the business, leaving behind rework, added cost, and a lost year of progress.
SMBHD came in, asked the right questions from the first call, and rebuilt the implementation on a foundation that matched how Garlock-French actually operates. Two phases in, adoption is strong, and the team is accelerating toward sales bidding capabilities that will extend Salesforce across even more of the business.
Key outcomes
The business problem
Garlock-French runs a more complex operation than most roofing contractors. On a single job, they may have employee crews handling one trade and independent subcontractors handling another — roofing, gutters, siding, carpentry, and windows all in motion at the same time, sometimes across projects that span three to four months. That operational complexity created a straightforward but critical requirement: the ability to job cost each individual trade on a project, not just the project as a whole.
Their existing systems couldn’t do it. Internal databases built decades ago had no web access. Multiple disconnected software tools created redundant data across the organization. And none of it gave leadership the trade-level visibility they needed to understand where margins were being made or lost.
The search for a better solution became a years-long evaluation — and two expensive wrong turns before finding the right path.
The challenge
- Legacy internal systems with no web access, disconnected from how the business actually operated
- Multiple software platforms creating redundant data and no single source of truth
- Need for trade-level job costing that no off-the-shelf roofing software could deliver
- Industry-specific software promised faster go-live but couldn’t customize to Garlock-French’s model
- The first implementation partner understood the platform but not the business — project management implementation went sideways
- Rework required when SMBHD came in, adding cost and delay to an already extended timeline
- Seasonal business model (Minneapolis) compresses the implementation window into winter months
The solution
SMBHD rebuilt the Garlock-French Salesforce implementation on a foundation designed around how the company actually operates — multiple trades, mixed workforce models, and trade-level financial visibility across every project.
- Trade-level job costing: custom objects built to track revenue, cost, and margin by individual trade on a single project — the core capability the industry-specific software couldn’t deliver
- Multi-workforce scheduling: configuration that accounts for both employee crews and independent subcontractors operating simultaneously on the same job
- Field Service implementation: enabling mobile, field-accessible workflows for crews in the field without office dependency
- Project management structure: rebuilt from the ground up to match Garlock-French’s actual project lifecycle, from initial estimate through multi-month job completion
- Sales bidding capability: in development as the next phase, extending Salesforce into pre-project sales and estimation workflows
- Phased rollout: structured to align with the company’s seasonal calendar and internal capacity to absorb change
The results
Garlock-French is earlier in their Salesforce journey than a more tenured implementation, but the trajectory has shifted meaningfully since SMBHD came in. The clearest indicator is adoption: Bryan Karel expected resistance to change and got the opposite.
Phase 2 rolled out in the last month, which is when efficiency gains are expected to begin materializing in a measurable way. The sales and operations teams are actively engaged with the system and pressing for more — a meaningful contrast to the stalled momentum of the prior implementation.
Looking ahead, Bryan Karel’s definition of success is clear: fewer systems, better customer communication, faster response times, and the kind of operational autonomy that lets field teams and office staff move without bottlenecks. The infrastructure to get there is now in place.
“Finding the right partner makes a huge difference in the feel of the whole software.”
How we worked
- Industry language first, tech second: from the first call, SMBHD asked questions in Garlock-French’s language — subcontract vs. employee crews, multi-trade job structure, trade-level cost tracking. The questions made sense, the flow made sense, and the path forward was clear in a way it hadn’t been before.
- Untangling the prior work: SMBHD inherited an implementation with foundational issues and decisions that weren’t documented or well understood. Rather than building on a broken foundation, the team went back to understand what had been built, why, and what needed to be redone before moving forward.
- Built for operational complexity: the core of the implementation was designing a Salesforce environment that could job cost by individual trade on a single project — the exact requirement the industry-specific software said was unusual. Custom objects and field structures were built to match Garlock-French’s actual workflow, not a simplified version of it.
- Responsive delivery: changes requested in a conversation were often implemented during that same conversation. That responsiveness — the ability to act quickly and come back with complete, thoughtful answers — rebuilt confidence in the project.
- Phased roadmap aligned to the business: given Garlock-French’s seasonal operating model and a smaller internal team, SMBHD structured the implementation in phases — building a solid core first, then layering on complexity as the team’s capacity and confidence grew.
State of the industry
Bryan Karel offered candid context on where the roofing industry stands right now — context that shapes how technology decisions are being made across the sector.
Private equity consolidation and reversal: PE-backed roll-ups have been significant in roofing over the last several years. Some of those firms are now beginning to fail, with contractors stepping back in to repurchase companies — creating a volatile consolidation and deconsolidation dynamic that will play out over the next 12–18 months.
Residential market softness: across the country, residential roofing is down. Economic uncertainty is causing homeowners to delay decisions, compressing demand across the industry.
Material cost pressure: oil-based inputs — a significant portion of roofing materials — have driven prices up, tightening margins further.
Rising customer expectations: the “Amazon mentality” has reached home services. Customers expect faster response, faster scheduling, and faster communication than the industry has historically delivered.
Technology generational shift: a wave of younger, tech-savvy entrepreneurs and business owners are entering the roofing industry, accelerating adoption of modern platforms. Technology is increasingly seen as a labor efficiency tool, not just an administrative one.
