The $30M Roofing Company That Gives Like a Nonprofit: Community Marketing Lessons From Tanner Tennyson
Before Tanner Tennyson built a thirty million dollar roofing company on community marketing and a giving budget most businesses would call reckless, he lost nearly everything in a month and a half. He had rebuilt a bankrupted sports physical therapy company’s product line, signed Amazon and Rogue Fitness, and trained his own assistant, and then, inside forty-five days, he was let go without cause, picked up a DUI, and was asked to vacate the townhome he rented from the owner. Unemployed, homeless, and unable to drive, he did the most Tanner Tennyson thing possible: four days later he was crabbing in Alaska.
On a recent episode of Everyday Excellence with host Todd Baldwin of Everyday Media Group, the owner of Integrity Roofing and Construction in Poulsbo, Washington, joined midway by his head of marketing, Katie, told the whole story: three years of commercial fishing with finance books airdropped to the boat by seaplane, a wife-to-be who pointed out he knew a lot about roofing, and a company that grew from a twenty-two thousand dollar bank account to thirty million dollars in its tenth year, in a town of about fifteen thousand people.
The thread holding it together is the lesson he took from being burned: “When I start a business, I want to be the furthest from ever burning anyone. Ever.”
The Roofer Who Was Afraid of Heights
Tennyson’s relationship with roofs started badly. As a teenager, he fell off one, not while roofing, broke his skull, and spent time in a coma. The fear of heights that followed offended him more than the injury, so when a church friend offered weekend roofing work, he took it specifically because it was at height. The exposure therapy became a trade: union roofing for the third largest roofing company in the world funded his college years alongside commercial fishing, and a stint guiding blind athletes through triathlons and marathons connected him to a nonprofit founder who also owned a Colorado roofing company, which pulled him into insurance roofing sales.
That tour of the industry left him with the observation that eventually became Integrity’s founding premise: the excellent products he installed on union commercial jobs rarely reached homeowners. “Why are homeowners not getting these products? This doesn’t make sense.” When he finally started his own company in 2015, the competitive advantage was built in: partner with the manufacturers of modified asphalt systems and bring commercial-grade products to residential roofs.
The $42,000 Sign
The leap itself was anything but casual. Tennyson had twenty-two thousand dollars in the bank, a 715-square-foot house, no family money, and no backup. So he put out what he admits was a ridiculous test: if the company was meant to happen, he would find a silver, black-leather Chevy quad cab short bed LTZ for under forty-five thousand dollars. The biggest dealership in North America laughed, then called two weeks later having found the exact truck for forty-two thousand. When he flew out to buy it, the dealership manager who came to meet the buyer of the best deal on the lot turned out to be his old restaurant manager from his teenage years. He went all in the next day. Five years later, COVID demand took the company from roughly nine million to fifteen, and it has doubled since.
A For-Profit That Behaves Like a Nonprofit
Tennyson frames the company’s defining idea as rights versus responsibilities, a theme he draws from the New Testament: what you can do versus what you should do. “It’s my right to take the profit, buy a boat, whatever. But it’s my responsibility to give.” Faith-based or not, he argues, the universe is engineered so that givers get back, and in his experience, disproportionately.
The test came three years in, when a local high school rebuilding its campus needed a donor for a new ADA-accessible stadium. The gift, over half a million dollars in materials, labor, and cash across two stadium projects, sparked real debate on his leadership team and real doubt in his own head: this might be financially irresponsible. He did it anyway, partly because a formerly disabled athlete from what he calls a severely broken family could absolutely get behind keeping local families dry at their kids’ games.
A decade in, Integrity has given more than a million dollars, and Tennyson’s favorite proof of the return came in a grocery store. Wearing the company logo, he was stopped by a stranger: “Hey, that’s a good company.” He asked if they had ever hired Integrity. They had not. “What that person was saying is the intent of that organization is honorable.” That is brand equity no ad budget buys, and it shows up in the ledger: community and referral business driven by the giving represents thirty percent of revenue.
“Call it marketing, because I would rather not give that money to Google. I know it doesn’t have a metric you can track, but loving people is pretty good for business.” – Tanner Tennyson, on what he told the private equity due diligence team
Pay Really Well First, Profit Becomes the Byproduct
Three years of fishing gave Tennyson time to read every business model book the seaplanes could deliver, and he noticed they all optimized the same way: maximize profit, minimize labor costs, find customers. He flipped it. Priority one: find great people and pay them really, really well, because like a reliable car, well-kept people show up and outproduce. Priority two: give customers something with real, actual value. Do both, he says, and net profit arrives as the natural byproduct.
The culture that results is, by its own team’s description, intense. An anonymous poll came back: a great place to work, however, intense. Team members call each other out regardless of title, because, in Tennyson’s framing, there is a big difference between groups trying to be right and groups trying to get it right. “High performing culture runs on good ideas, not hierarchy or seniority or tenure. That’s all meaningless.” Hiring runs on the Patrick Lencioni poster on the office wall: humble, hungry, people smart. The company runs on EOS, with Tennyson in the visionary seat, trying, in his words, not to physically be there.
What Is Working Now: Giving That Scales, and 5,000 New Followers
A year ago, Integrity partnered with private equity, opened another office, and confronted the challenge Tennyson calls protecting the company’s genetics. His answer was to make the giving structural rather than sentimental: an affiliate program where nonprofit partners like the local humane society and food bank refer work, and customers who care about a cause get a donation made in their name plus a rebate on the project. The giving now scales mechanically with revenue, which is exactly the language an investor understands. The due diligence teams did not know what to do with the philosophy; the program turned it into a system they could underwrite.
Katie, who heads marketing and touches sales, operations, and production through the company’s technology stack, runs the rest of the engine. Paid digital through Google and Meta stays deliberately small with agency partners. The current surge is organic: a strategy shift toward posting more, recombining existing content, and testing hooks added more than five thousand followers across platforms in two to three weeks, built on educational content, company culture videos, and stories showing what the nonprofit partnerships actually look like in practice. Facebook recently started paying the company for its content, a milestone that made the team laugh: we can get paid for this now?
The honest gap is the newest channel. Asked about leads from ChatGPT and the LLMs, Katie’s answer was the one most businesses should admit out loud: it is a new field, they are testing, and right now there is nothing they can track.
The Lesson: The Machines Reward What the Community Already Knows
Here is the irony in Integrity’s position: the company has spent a decade building exactly the signals AI search rewards, authority, trust, reviews, and a community that vouches for it unprompted in grocery stores, and the untracked LLM channel is where that equity now needs to show up. As Todd Baldwin explained on the episode, homeowners are typing long, detailed questions into AI platforms rather than searching roofer near me, and the businesses that get recommended are the credible, accredited ones whose websites answer those questions, with authority signals and FAQs structured answer-first. His matching warning: run from anyone who claims to have AI figured out, because nobody does.
Turning real-world trust into machine-readable trust is precisely the work the team at Everyday Media Group does for home service companies: answer-first content and FAQs, the schema and authority signals LLMs lean on, review systems, and the tracking that would let a company like Integrity finally see which leads arrive from AI platforms instead of guessing. Thirty percent of Integrity’s business already comes from humans telling humans. The next layer is making sure the machines repeating those recommendations have everything they need to say the same thing.
Key Takeaways From Tanner Tennyson
- Make giving structural, not sentimental. The nonprofit affiliate program ties donations and customer rebates to revenue, so the giving scales with growth and survives private equity due diligence.
- Flip the business model books. Pay great people really well first, deliver real value second, and let net profit arrive as the byproduct. An intense, ego-free culture is the compounding interest.
- Trust compounds slowly, then all at once. The stadium gift looked financially irresponsible in year three. A decade later, strangers call Integrity “a good company” without ever hiring it, and community referrals drive 30% of a $30M business.
About Tanner Tennyson
Tanner Tennyson is the owner of Integrity Roofing and Construction, a roofing, siding, and construction company based in Poulsbo, Washington, serving the Kitsap Peninsula, Seattle, and Portland areas. A former union roofer, commercial fisherman, and endurance guide for blind athletes, he founded the company in 2015 and has led it to $30 million in revenue and over $1 million in community giving, partnering with private equity in its ninth year. Reach the team at https://integrityrc.com/.
Ready to Make Your Reputation Visible to the Machines?
Everyday Media Group helps home service and trade businesses turn real-world trust into digital visibility: answer-first websites for AI search, SEO, review systems, and lead tracking that shows exactly where every job came from. Hosted by Todd Baldwin, the Everyday Excellence podcast features real conversations with the owners behind growing home service companies. Schedule a free consultation at connect with Todd Baldwin on LinkedIn.
