Background
"EagleView is saving us a ton of money”, says Doug Cooper, president and co-owner of Glendale, Illinois-based Advocate Construction. Founded in 2012 by Doug and his partner, Nick Wallace, Advocate now employs 110 professionals and serves customers in Illinois, Wisconsin, Michigan, Missouri, Kansas and Colorado. In a business where errors can be costly and contractor injuries can be devastating, Advocate has used EagleView roof reports to minimize those risks and find opportunity to grow. Advocate uses EagleView reports on more than 3,000 jobs a year, improving employee safety, ensuring measurement and ordering accuracy, and saving hundreds of hours of lost time. With that volume, “Every way you look at it, EagleView has allowed us to scale our business”, Doug says.
"Getting off that roof is probably the single most important thing I appreciate about EagleView…I haven’t measured a roof by hand in over eight years."
Challenge
Being up on a roof is dangerous. Falling can lead to serious safety violations and difficult customer issues, let alone severe injuries or even death to the contractor. Working amid this avoidable risk just doesn’t make sense, according to Doug. “When you’re up there and thinking about not falling, you might forget to run a measurement on a valley, and you have to go back. Or you might make an error transitioning a number, and it can throw off your material count.
“Getting off that roof is probably the single most important thing I appreciate about EagleView,” says Doug. “I haven’t measured a roof by hand in over eight years.” Doug goes on to add: “Anybody who has ever had any sort of safety violation or experienced a fall injury on their team – an injury to someone you care about – knows how important it is to keep people off the roof whenever possible.”
Solution
“We rely on EagleView so we don’t have to set foot on a roof,” Doug says, noting that Advocate uses EagleView for “everything,” including both residential and commercial roof and wall projects. “For the risk we avoid and the time we save, it makes sense to order an EagleView report whenever we secure a job,” adds Doug, noting that using the EagleView measurements helps Advocate’s:
- Employee safety
- Customers
- Accuracy
- Cost and material control
Beyond the risk of injury or error, hand measuring a roof job, especially a commercial job, can take a significant amount of time. “I wouldn’t even tackle a 10-building project without EagleView. The amount of time it would take to measure that would be crippling, and that is time you didn’t get to use calling on someone else. It’s hard to scale up your business that way.”
Impact
0
Roof falls or injuries while securing new projects since 2012
3,000
Total jobs in 2019
100%
Jobs involving EagleView reports
EagleView Property Report for Construction
Roof Measurements
Wall Measurements
Gutter Management
