My name is Phil Gehrig. I was 18 and fresh out of high school when I first climbed scaffolding on a real roof — the re-roof of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, DC, where I worked as an OSHA-certified subcontractor going up and down that building every day.
That job taught me what a roof actually is: a system, installed by people, where the details nobody sees are the ones that decide whether it leaks in year eight. It also taught me that I liked the work. I just didn't want to be the only one who understood what I was looking at.
So I went into the business side of residential home improvement — first marketing, then sales. I learned how the industry really sells roofs and windows: send a representative to the house, sit at the kitchen table for two or three hours, present a price, and then present a much lower "today only" price if the homeowner signs before the rep leaves. I got good at it. I also understood, pretty early, that the whole performance exists because the first number was never real.
In 2013, at 25, I left and started an exterior remodeling company in Northern Virginia. It began small, with one business partner, and about a year in I bought out that partner and kept building. Over the next decade it grew into one of the largest roofing and window companies in the United States, and I'm proud of that company and the people who built it. But growing inside the industry also meant watching it drift further from the homeowner: longer appointments, more pressure, more commission riding on getting a signature before the rep walked out the door.
Remote Roofing is the other direction. We measure your roof from above instead of from your driveway. We publish our prices instead of discovering them at your table. We send you a video you can watch on your own time, and the one conversation we do have is a quick fifteen-minute call. A real person is assigned to your project, walks you through your price and prepares your quote. The technology does the measuring. A real person gives you your price. And when you're ready — on the call or a few weeks later — you sign from your inbox, at the same price.
It's a simpler way to buy a roof. It also happens to be how I'd want to buy one.
— Phil