What made you want to do the work you do? Please share the full story.
I grew up watching families in Florida get taken advantage of after storms. Contractors would roll in after a hurricane, collect deposits, and disappear. Insurers would lowball claims on people who had no idea what their policy actually covered. That bothered me enough to get licensed, learn the insurance side as hard as the construction side, and start GreenTek Roofing & Solar in 2017.
Nine years in, that mission still drives every decision we make. We earned our GAF Master Elite certification, which only 2% of roofing companies in the entire country hold. Florida storms do not forgive shortcuts, and neither do I.
Tell us 3 surprisingly easy and 3 surprisingly difficult things about your business.
3 Surprisingly Easy Things
1. Spotting storm damage that insurers miss. After nine years on Florida rooftops, my eye for damage is automatic.
2. Earning trust after the first job. When you do the job right and walk a homeowner through their claim honestly, referrals follow without asking.
3. Explaining why quality matters. Florida homeowners who have been through one bad contractor are already ready to listen. The storm did the selling for me.
3 Surprisingly Difficult Things
1. Fighting the post-hurricane fraud wave. Unlicensed contractors flood our neighborhoods after every major storm, pressure homeowners into signing over their insurance rights, and vanish before the roof fails.
2. Navigating Florida’s insurance crisis. Carriers are pulling out, policies are getting dropped, and claims are getting disputed at rates I have never seen in my career.
3. Staying patient when the system moves slow. Insurance claims, permits and material lead times all take time, and I am wired to move fast. I have learned to use the wait to prepare the next step.
What are the 3 things you like best about your work and why?
The first is being the person a family calls after the worst day of their year. Florida storms leave damage that is not just structural, it is emotional. Getting to show up, fix it and watch someone’s shoulders drop because help finally arrived, that feeling does not get old after nine years. The second is building something that actually stands for something. GreenTek is not a franchise or a private equity rollup. We built this from the ground up in Tampa Bay and earning the GAF Master Elite certification, top 2% nationally, came from the work, not a marketing campaign.
The third is teaching homeowners how the system actually works. Most Florida homeowners never read their insurance policy until they are standing in a damaged house wondering why their claim got denied. Walking someone through wind mitigation standards, explaining what their coverage actually means, showing them the red flags before they sign anything, that education changes their financial life in a real way. It is also the part of this job I am most proud of.
What are your greatest 3 skills and how have they helped you succeed?
1. Reading storm damage like a language. Most people see a roof after a hurricane and see a mess. I see a sequence of events, where the wind entered, which fasteners failed first, and what the adjuster is likely to miss.
2. Translating insurance language into plain English. I learned that language the hard way by sitting across from adjusters and attorneys fighting for clients with legitimate claims. That skill has saved our clients real money and kept them from signing documents they did not understand.
3. Building systems that hold under pressure. A Category 3 makes landfall and within 48 hours we are fielding hundreds of calls, coordinating crews and processing insurance paperwork simultaneously. The only reason that works is because we built the operational infrastructure before the storm hit.
Those three skills did not come from a classroom. They came from nine years of showing up in Tampa Bay after storms that other contractors fled. Florida teaches you fast or it breaks you. I chose to learn.
Tell us about a time where you saw a surprising outcome that you did not expect.
Early in GreenTek’s history I bid a large commercial roofing job in Tampa Bay. We were not the cheapest option and I knew that going in. I submitted our number anyway because it reflected the actual cost of doing the job correctly. I fully expected to lose it to a lower bid. We got the contract.
The property manager told me afterward that two other contractors had licensing issues and the third could not explain their material specs when she pushed back. She said we were the only ones who answered every question without hesitating. That reshaped how I think about competition in this industry. Price is not the primary decision driver for serious clients. Confidence is. Transparency is. I stopped discounting after that job and we have held our pricing standards ever since.
What is the biggest challenge you face each day and how do you handle it?
The biggest daily challenge is information asymmetry. Florida homeowners are making enormous financial decisions with incomplete information, and there are people in this industry who prefer it that way. Unlicensed contractors, aggressive public adjusters and carriers with denial playbooks all operate more effectively when the homeowner does not know what questions to ask. I handle it by treating education as a core business function, not a marketing tactic. Before we ever talk about a contract I walk every client through what their roof condition means, what their policy likely covers and what the claims process will look like from start to finish.
The harder version shows up after major storms. Contractors flood in from out of state, social media fills with bad advice and homeowners get pressured into signing documents they do not understand within 48 hours of a disaster. Staying visible and credible in that environment requires showing up the same way every single time. Nine years of doing that has shifted something real. Homeowners call us before the storm now, not just after.
What do you value most and why?
Accountability. Not as a concept, but as a daily operating standard. In a state where contractor fraud spikes after every major storm and homeowners are routinely left holding the bill for work that was never finished or inspected, accountability is the thing that separates real contractors from opportunists. I built GreenTek around that standard from day one and every hire, every subcontractor relationship and every client interaction gets measured against it. When a crew makes a mistake on a job, the standard is never to hide it or minimize it. We find it, we own it and we fix it before the client ever has to ask.
The GAF Master Elite certification we hold is partly a reflection of that value in practice. Only 2% of roofing companies in the country earn that designation because the requirements are not just technical. They include customer satisfaction standards, proper licensing verification and ongoing training commitments. Florida homeowners deserve contractors who stand behind their work when the next storm rolls in. That is not a marketing line for us. It is the reason GreenTek exists.
How do you celebrate your victories?
Honestly, my first instinct after a big win is not to celebrate. It is to figure out what made it work so we can repeat it. But I have learned over nine years that skipping the moment entirely is a mistake. For the team, celebration looks like recognition that is specific and immediate. I want the crew foreman to know exactly what decision kept us on schedule after a material delay. I want the office staff member who caught the insurance discrepancy to know her attention to detail saved a client thousands of dollars. Specific recognition builds the behavior you want to see repeated.
For me personally, victories get celebrated quietly. A good meal with my family, a day completely off the phone, maybe a fishing trip if the timing works out. The wins I celebrate most are not always the biggest contracts. Sometimes the victory is a homeowner calling six months later to say their insurance premium dropped because of their new wind mitigation report. Those outcomes are the whole point of what we built. They deserve to be felt, not just logged.
What is your favorite book and why?
“The E-Myth Revisited” by Michael Gerber is the book I recommend most and return to most often. The central argument cuts deep. Most small business owners are not actually running a business. They are doing a job they created for themselves while the business runs them. When I started GreenTek in 2017 I was a roofing contractor who happened to have a company name. I was on every roof, in every client conversation, handling every insurance dispute personally. Gerber’s framework pushed me to think about GreenTek as a system first and a collection of skilled people second.
That shift changed everything about how we operate. Scaling a roofing company in Florida is not about adding more crews. It is about building processes that hold the same quality standard whether I am on the job site or not. In a storm recovery business operating in one of the most active hurricane corridors in the country, consistency under chaos is the entire game. If you are building something in a high-pressure industry and you have not read it, read it now.
What advice would you give to your younger self and why?
Get licensed faster and stop waiting until you feel ready. There is a version of me in my mid-twenties who knew enough to start but kept finding reasons to wait. The market needed more time. The economy was uncertain. I needed one more year of experience. None of those reasons were real. They were just fear wearing a practical disguise. I would also tell myself to learn the insurance side of this business as early as possible. The contractor who understands both the roof and the policy is a completely different resource to a Florida homeowner than the one who only knows the construction side. That knowledge gap took years to close and I wish I had started on day one.
The last thing I would tell my younger self is that the reputation you build in the first three years sets the ceiling for everything that follows. Florida is a big state but the roofing and insurance community is smaller than it looks. The adjusters, the property managers, the real estate attorneys and the general contractors all talk to each other. Show up honest and competent from the very first job and that reputation compounds faster than any marketing budget ever could.
Are you willing to be a mentor? If yes, what is the best way to reach you?
Yes, absolutely. Mentorship in this industry is something I feel a real responsibility toward. Florida’s roofing and construction market has a genuine shortage of contractors who understand both the technical side and the business side well enough to teach either one. The contractors I am most interested in mentoring are the ones who are already licensed and working but feel like they are running on instinct rather than systems. That was me in the early years of GreenTek. Getting from that stage to a real operational structure is where most small roofing companies stall out and it is exactly where outside perspective makes the biggest difference.
I am also open to mentoring homeowners and property managers who want to understand how to protect themselves in Florida’s current insurance environment. Knowing how to read a wind mitigation report, spotting the red flags that signal post-hurricane fraud before you sign anything, that knowledge is genuinely hard to find from a source that does not have a financial interest in the answer. The best way to reach me is through GreenTek Roofing and Solar directly. I do not promise to have time for every request but I do promise to respond to every serious one.
Just for fun, what is your favorite food?
Cuban food, and if you have spent any time in Tampa Bay that answer probably makes complete sense. Tampa has one of the oldest Cuban communities in the country and the food here is not a trend or a fusion concept. It is a genuine culinary tradition that has been part of this city’s identity for well over a century. The Cuban sandwich is the obvious answer and I will not pretend otherwise. But the version that matters is the one from a counter run by the same family for decades, pressed the right way, with the right ratio of roasted pork to ham to pickles. Tampa and Miami have an ongoing debate about whose Cuban sandwich is definitive and I am firmly on the Tampa side. We use Genoa salami in ours and it makes all the difference.
Beyond the sandwich, ropa vieja is the dish I keep coming back to. Slow-cooked shredded beef in a tomato and pepper base served over white rice and black beans. It is the kind of food that takes most of the day to make correctly and rewards the patience entirely. Food in Tampa Bay is also how I decompress after the kind of weeks this business produces. Storm season in Florida runs hard from June through November and a good meal with family is exactly the reset I need.