On a recent flight, I had the window seat and was gazing out as we rose up to (and into) the clouds. Right outside the glass were little clouds—the kind that look like they’d fit in the palm of your hand. And then it dawned on me: For being “little,” it was taking 5 to 10 seconds to pass each of them. We weren’t slipping by a cotton ball. We were moving past clouds with depth, distance and massive volume, but my vantage point made them seem much smaller.
A few minutes later, as we continued to climb, the little clouds hung below us, and the view changed. The sun was brighter. The horizon widened. And far below, I could see shadows sliding across the ground—broad, moving shapes that weren’t little at all. Those same clouds were covering entire neighborhoods and, sometimes, towns. They were massive. Sure, the angle from 30,000 feet exaggerates what you see, but the point hit me: The closer you are to something, the more difficult it can be to appreciate its true size or scope.
That’s not just an airplane thought. It’s a job-site thought. It’s an ownership thought. It’s a “Why does this keep happening?” thought. In roofing, especially when you are busy, growing, understaffed and overcommitted, there is a constant temptation to press closer. Get your face right up to the problem. Study it harder. Micromanage. Push through.
Sometimes, that’s exactly what’s needed. Craft matters; details matter; and roofing is a trade that punishes wishful thinking. But there is another kind of mistake that shows up when you remain hyper-close to the work: You start looking at the world through a paper towel roll. You become extremely focused but also limited. You can see something clearly, but you’re missing what that “something” is connected to—what’s causing it, what it affects and what else is moving around it.
It’s easy to obsess over a leak, change order, late delivery, crew that didn’t show, foreman who’s frustrated or a customer who’s impatient. Each problem feels urgent, close and personal. It is! But the “big cloud” you are moving through might be a process problem, a communication gap, a pricing model that doesn’t match your overhead, a training issue, a handoff that’s inconsistent or a culture that’s quietly teaching people to do the wrong thing fast.
Zooming out isn’t an excuse to ignore details. The goal is to connect the close-up work to the bigger picture so your effort moves your company forward instead of wearing your team out.
When you step back far enough, you start seeing the interactions: production affects service; service affects reputation; reputation affects sales; sales affects the kind of work you attract; the kind of work you attract affects staffing; staffing affects safety; and safety affects everything—including whether your best people stick around!
We’ve all heard the phrase “can’t see the forest for the trees.” That’s real, but I think there is another version that hits contractors more often: Sometimes, you are so focused on a single leaf you forget it’s attached to a branch, which is attached to a tree, which is part of a forest. The leaf is still worth caring about, but it makes a lot more sense when you understand what it’s connected to.
It reminds me of something that happened this past summer with my son Tate. He was standing in front of our house, looking at an arborvitae bush from 15 feet away. He was in the process of earning a few bucks from a bet (a powerful motivator) and proving me wrong (an even more powerful motivator!). He was attempting to turn a boring bush into one of those spiral carved, topiary things. He had to cut close, right next to the bush, but from there he couldn’t see whether he was doing it well. He had to back away to make sure the spiral was staying at the proper angle and to keep on course.
Art has been teaching this lesson for a long time. Stand nose-to-canvas in front of “A Sunday on La Grande Jatte,” the pointillist painting in the famous “Ferris Bueller’s Day Off” scene, and you’ll swear it’s just a mess of dots, smears and little blocks of color. But step back, and suddenly there is a summer day on a river.
Nothing changed on the canvas. Your distance did. So what could taking a step back look like in a roofing company?
- Zoom out on purpose. Put a recurring block on your calendar—weekly or biweekly—to review your business like an outsider. What’s working? What’s repeating? What’s getting “explained away” every week?
- Follow the handoffs. Most chronic problems live in the spaces between roles: sales to production, production to service, office to field, field to supplier, foreman to crew. Map those handoffs, and you’ll usually find the problem.
- Look for patterns not stories. One callback is a story. Five callbacks with the same root cause is a system. Systems don’t get fixed with speeches; they get fixed with changes.
- Walk jobs with fresh eyes. Ride along with a service crew. Make surprise visits to job sites without making it seem like an inspection. Ask “What makes this hard?” and listen for answers that start with “We always … .”
- Measure a few things that matter. You don’t need 40 KPIs. Pick a handful that tell the truth: gross margin by job type, labor hours versus estimate, rework/callback rate, safety leading indicators or backlog quality, for example.
Zooming out isn’t an excuse to ignore details. The goal is to connect the close-up work to the bigger picture so your effort moves your company forward instead of wearing your team out.
If you are in a moment where everything feels “right in your face,” consider you may be standing too close. Take a step back. Look at the context, the interaction and the environment. Because sometimes the issue isn’t the tree or even the forest. Sometimes, it’s that you have been staring at a leaf (or a cloud) so long you forgot it was part of something bigger, and that something bigger is exactly where the solution lives.
MCKAY DANIELS
CEO
NRCA
