I started roofing in 1996, a few months out of high school, when a newspaper ad offering $9 an hour pulled me off a $6.50 shop job. My first day on a roof lasted sixteen hours. Thirty years later, I'm still climbing them. I came up the long way — years of tear-offs and hauling debris before anyone handed me a nail gun, then over a decade installing roofs for one Michigan company, then repair work, which is where you really learn how roofs fail. Everything I know came off a roof, not out of a classroom. In 2017 I moved my family to Tulsa, and in 2018 I opened Green Country Roofing. I still walk every roof I'm asked about myself. I got turned down for a sales job once for being "too kind" — I kept the trait and built the company on it instead. I write the way I talk, because that's the ...