From Door Knocking to Doubling Revenue: Roofing Business Growth Lessons From Jeremiah Wallace
When Todd Baldwin asked Jeremiah Wallace what made him get into business, the answer came back without hesitation: “Because I’m insane.” It might be one of the most honest entrepreneurial answers ever given on the Everyday Excellence podcast, and it sets the tone for a conversation packed with hard-earned lessons on roofing business growth.
Two years ago, Wallace made what he calls the craziest decision of his life. His second daughter had just been born. He had no capital, no office, and no customer list. What he did have was a business license, a pair of boots, and a conviction that homeowners in the Greater Seattle area deserved a contractor who would tell them the truth. His first official day as the owner of Wallace Construction was eight hours of knocking on doors.
That day produced his first roof and a small window and door project. Today, Wallace Construction serves homeowners from Lake Washington north to Mount Vernon with roofing, siding, windows, and decks, and the company is on pace to double its revenue in year two. In a recent episode of Everyday Excellence, hosted by Todd Baldwin of Everyday Media Group, Wallace broke down exactly how he got there.
The Real Cost of Starting From Zero in a Saturated Market
The Greater Seattle area has roughly 4,500 roofing contractors. Some of the established players spend ten thousand dollars a month on Google advertising alone. For a brand-new company with no capital, competing in that arena was simply not an option.
“Until you have the capital to play in that realm, you’re kind of grassroots, knocking on doors, referrals.” – Jeremiah Wallace
The math of door-to-door work is brutal. Wallace estimates he heard no roughly ninety percent of the time, and rejection at that volume erodes confidence fast. The hidden cost of a saturated market is not just lost leads. It is the psychological toll on the person doing the selling, and it is the reason so many young contracting companies stall out before their marketing ever gets a chance to work.
There was also a pricing problem. Homeowners collecting multiple bids see wild swings, and contractors get judged on a single number. Wallace shared a story about a siding project in Lake Stevens where his fifty thousand dollar quote for a James Hardie installation came in against competing bids of seventy and eighty thousand. On a nearly identical house next door, his same fifty thousand dollar estimate was suddenly the highest bid against quotes of twenty-five and thirty-five thousand.
“It’s like playing the lottery. I never know if I’m gonna be the lowest or if I’m gonna be the highest.” – Jeremiah Wallace
What He Tried Before It Worked
Learning Sales the Hard Way
Wallace is quick to say he was never a born salesman. He learned the craft standing in front of a martial arts school in Bellevue, waving at strangers and trying to start conversations. “It went horrible for I would say six months,” he admits. Then he got creative. He started holding punching pads out front, inviting passersby to throw a strike, coaching them on technique, and walking them inside to book an appointment.
“It’s not that you were born with this. It’s a skill set that you develop.” – Jeremiah Wallace
Working for the Wrong Companies
Before launching his own firm, Wallace worked in-home sales for other contractors. One employer preached customer service while chasing seventy percent margins, doubling prices overnight and blaming the sales team when volume dropped. The companies he worked for offered homeowners full replacement or nothing, with no option for repairs or maintenance. Those experiences clarified exactly what kind of company he refused to build.
What Is Working Now: From Boots to Digital
Wallace has not knocked on a door in three months. That is not because he got tired of it. It is because his marketing engine finally caught up. His current lead channels look like a textbook progression for a young home service company:
- Google reviews. He is approaching 55 five-star reviews and asks every single customer for one.
- Google Ads. Focused on roofing, where search intent is strongest and competition is fiercest.
- Meta advertising. Facebook and Instagram campaigns drive deck and siding leads, producing a couple of new leads every week.
- Social content. Job site photos, drone shots, and project media that all link back to his Google presence.
Notice the segmentation. Roofing, an urgent and unglamorous purchase, runs on Google where homeowners search when they have a problem. Decks and siding, visual and aspirational projects, run on Meta where imagery sells the dream. Matching the channel to the buying psychology of each service is a level of strategy many contractors never reach.
The System Behind the Sales
Wallace credits his decade as a professional martial arts instructor for the discipline underneath the business. He ran one of the most profitable schools in the Northwest before the pandemic forced a career change, and he rebuilt his construction company on the same foundations: structure, discipline, and systems.
In practice, that means confirmation calls the day before every appointment, weekly touchpoints for customers whose projects are weeks out, daily job site communication with photos and drone footage, and a defined sequence from signed agreement to deposit to critical measure to cleanup and magnetic sweep. In an industry where showing up fifteen minutes late without a phone call is treated as normal, simple reliability has become his competitive edge.
“I can’t ask somebody to do something that I’m unwilling to do myself.” – Jeremiah Wallace
A Culture Built for the Long Haul
The systems serve a bigger purpose than efficiency. Wallace wants a company built on honesty, integrity, and discipline, where employees can find financial success and still make it home for dinner with their families every night. In his view, that balance is a direct output of process. When every job follows a defined sequence, nobody lies awake wondering whether the material order went out or whether a customer got her update. The system remembers so his people do not have to.
It also shapes how he hires. Right now the team is Wallace, a project assistant being groomed into a project management role, and trusted subcontractor crews who get roughly ninety-eight percent of their work from him. That structure lets him scale production without carrying a full payroll before the revenue supports it, a lesson plenty of fast-growing contractors learn the expensive way.
Educate First, Sell Second
Wallace never assumes a homeowner knows what a reroof involves. He described sitting down with a customer in Mount Vernon whose 19-year-old roof was failing around the perimeter and explaining how eave flashing directs water into the gutters instead of wicking back into the plywood. Her reaction: “That’s a thing?” His response captures his whole philosophy: even if she hires someone else, he has fulfilled his mission by giving her the information she needs to make an educated decision. As Todd Baldwin put it during the episode, the first to educate wins.
The Lesson: Grassroots Gets You Started, Digital Keeps You Growing
Wallace’s story reflects a pattern the team at Everyday Media Group sees constantly with home service businesses. Door knocking, referrals, and pure hustle can absolutely launch a company. But hustle has a ceiling, and Wallace named it himself: a million dollars is roughly what one determined owner can produce alone. Past that point, growth depends on systems, people, and a marketing engine that generates leads while the owner runs the business.
His channel strategy proves the point. Reviews build the trust, Google Ads capture roofing demand, and Meta campaigns create demand for decks and siding. Each channel feeds the others, and none of them requires Wallace to stand on a porch. That compounding effect is what separates a marketing engine from a marketing tactic, and it is the difference between a company that grows when the owner pushes and one that grows on its own momentum.
The transition is where many contractors stumble. They know they need Google visibility, reviews, and paid campaigns, but they try to manage it all themselves, the same way Wallace once spent hours wrestling QuickBooks before hiring a bookkeeper. His advice applies to marketing just as much as accounting: pay the specialist, and spend your reclaimed hours on the work only an owner can do. That is precisely the role a digital marketing partner like Everyday Media Group plays for home service companies, handling the SEO, advertising, and online reputation work so contractors can focus on their crews and customers.
Key Takeaways From Jeremiah Wallace
- Sales is a learned skill, not a gift. Six months of awkward conversations outside a Bellevue martial arts school taught Wallace that persistence beats talent. “Fall down seven times, get up eight.”
- Know which customer you are for. Price shoppers planning to sell their home are not his fit. Homeowners planning to stay long term, who care what goes underneath the shingles, are.
- You cannot scale alone. “When I started trusting people and letting them in, that’s when it freed up my bandwidth to really start to progress. If I could have done it earlier, I would have.”
About Jeremiah Wallace
Jeremiah Wallace is the owner of Wallace Construction, an exterior remodeling company serving the Greater Seattle area from Lake Washington to Mount Vernon with roofing, siding, window, and deck services. A former professional martial arts instructor with 19 years around the construction trades, he built the company on honesty, integrity, and discipline. Learn more at wallaceconstruct.com or follow along on Instagram at @WallaceRemodel.
Ready to Grow Your Home Service Business?
Everyday Media Group helps home service and trade businesses build the digital marketing engine that takes over when door knocking has done its job: SEO, Google Ads, review generation, and websites built to convert. Hosted by Todd Baldwin, the Everyday Excellence podcast features real conversations with business owners on what actually drives growth. Schedule a free consultation at or connect with Todd Baldwin on LinkedIn.
