Summit Roofing & Exteriors
Denver roofing crew cut drive time 38 percent and added 2 jobs per day per crew
Summit Roofing & Exteriors was losing most of a workday to Denver traffic and bad routing across 3 crews. After turning on Kaldr Tech's route optimization and mobile dispatch, Sarah Brennan added 2 jobs per crew per day and grew revenue 37 percent in 8 months without hiring a single new roofer.
-38%
Drive time reduction
First 90 days
+2
Jobs added per crew per day
By month 4
+37%
Revenue growth
First 8 months
$94,000
Additional monthly revenue
Month 8 vs month 1
Three crews, one dispatch whiteboard, too much I-25
Sarah Brennan ran Summit Roofing out of a shop in Englewood with her brother Mark, and for five years their dispatch system was a 4-foot dry erase board and a clipboard that rode with Mark in his F-250. The three crews — each with a foreman, three roofers, and a laborer — would show up at the shop at 6:15 a.m., get their paper work orders from Mark, and roll out. The problem was that Mark built the routes based on how he felt that morning and which foreman called dibs on the easy Cherry Creek jobs. On a bad Tuesday in May 2024, Sarah tracked the crews and realized the Aurora crew was driving past the Lakewood crew's first job twice during the day, and the Littleton crew spent 2 hours and 47 minutes in a truck without turning a wrench. That week she calculated the real cost: the three crews averaged 3 hours and 12 minutes of drive time per day each, which at a loaded labor cost of $52 an hour per man meant roughly $2,000 a day in windshield time. Over a month that was $44,000 of paid-for-nothing labor. Each crew was completing 3 to 4 jobs a day when Sarah's own spreadsheet showed they should be doing 5 to 6. She tried a dispatch platform that charged $95 per user per month and had a route feature, but it couldn't handle the hills and weather closures on the west side, and the mobile app crashed every time her foreman Diego opened it in the Foothills. Sarah was ready to hire a fourth crew just to keep up with demand, but the math didn't work — she needed the existing crews firing at full capacity first.
"My foremen used to spend more time in their trucks than on roofs. Kaldr stacked the routes so tight that my Aurora crew did a full extra job before lunch on day one. That's how you know it works."
— Sarah Brennan, Co-Founder, Summit Roofing & Exteriors
Route optimization and a real mobile app
Sarah found Kaldr Tech through a Denver contractor Facebook group in June 2024. What got her attention was a video from a siding company in Golden showing how the route optimization stacked jobs by geography, skill required, and material pickup needs. She signed up on a Thursday and ran Kaldr in shadow mode for one week before going live — she let the system build routes, then compared them to Mark's whiteboard. On the first day of comparison, Kaldr proposed routes that saved 68 minutes across the three crews. On day three it saved 94 minutes. On day five Sarah fired the whiteboard and went live. The implementation took 11 days total, most of which was getting the three foremen comfortable with the mobile app. Diego, her oldest foreman and biggest skeptic, took about four days to stop calling Mark on the radio and start checking the app. By week two, Summit was running fully mobile: foremen saw their next job, customer notes, photo history from the sales rep, material list, and turn-by-turn directions without ever opening a paper folder. Sarah turned on job photo capture for every crew so the office could quality-check work without driving out to sites. She layered in customer SMS notifications so homeowners got a text at 7:30 a.m. with their 2-hour arrival window, which cut no-shows by 60 percent. The invoicing moved to Kaldr in week three, and payments now hit within days of tear-off completion because the foreman can send the final invoice from the driveway before he pulls away.
Features that mattered most
Same crews, 37 percent more revenue
By the end of month 3, Summit Roofing's average drive time per crew dropped from 3 hours 12 minutes a day to 1 hour 58 minutes a day — a 38 percent reduction. That freed up the equivalent of 1.2 labor hours per roofer per day, which translated into 2 additional jobs per crew per day by month 4. In raw numbers, the three crews went from averaging 10 to 11 completed jobs per day to averaging 16 to 18. Most of the added jobs were small repair tickets in the $400 to $900 range that Sarah had been turning down for months because she thought they didn't fit the schedule. The new routing made them profitable fill-ins between tear-offs. Monthly revenue climbed from $254,000 in June 2024 to $348,000 by February 2025, a 37 percent gain of roughly $94,000 a month in added top line. Sarah did not hire a single additional roofer to pull this off — the same 14 people just stopped sitting in traffic. The money went three places: Mark got a real office instead of working off a clipboard in the truck, Sarah bought two new trucks to replace the oldest ones in the fleet, and the crews got a profit-share bonus in December that averaged $2,100 per man. Customer reviews climbed too, because the SMS arrival notifications and faster job completion meant homeowners stopped waiting around all morning. Summit went from a 4.3 star average on Google to a 4.8 in eight months, with 186 new reviews in that window.
Advice to another contractor
Before you hire another crew, look at how much time your existing crews spend driving. I bet it's double what you think. Kaldr showed me my guys were basically working 5 hour days inside 8 hour shifts. Fix that first and you might find out you don't need the fourth crew — you just need the first three to stop wasting fuel.
— Sarah Brennan
Want a story like this of your own?
Kaldr Tech is free field service software. $0/month, 3.5% + 30¢ per transaction. Start free in under 30 minutes.