The Roofer's Field Manual
Why your phone rings less than it did two years ago, and what actually fixes it.
A free field manual for roofing owners who are done paying an agency every month and watching the calls slow down. Read it in one sitting. Own the fix instead of renting it. No retainer, no contract, no agency in Atlanta.
You have felt it for a while now
The trucks are still moving. The crew still shows up. The work is still good. But the phone rings less than it did two years ago and nobody can tell you why.
You half-blame the agency you pay every month. You half-blame the economy. You half-blame Google for messing with the algorithm again. Half-blaming three things means you act on none of them, so the summers get quieter and you keep paying for the version of marketing you signed up for a few years back.
Your agency sends a PDF every month with green up-arrows on it. Rankings up. Impressions up. Something up. Meanwhile your actual calls are down and those two facts sit on the same page like they have nothing to do with each other.
That gap is the whole problem. The report measures things that go up while the thing that pays your guys goes down. The agency hasn't lied to you. They have told you the truth about something that stopped mattering.
If this is you
You started in the trades and went out on your own somewhere around year eight. Or you took over from your dad. You have got a yard, a foreman you trust and a husband or wife at home who knows what payroll Friday feels like. You have spent fifteen years building a reputation in two or three zip codes.
The peers you would call to compare notes are quiet about it, because they are doing the same math at their own kitchen tables and landing on the same non-answer. The supply rep at the counter has watched it happen across half his accounts. He is not going to be the one who explains it to you.
If you run storm work out of Texas or Oklahoma, it looks a little different and it is the same shift underneath. The out-of-town crews that used to win on door-knocking now show up online the morning the hail hits, before your trucks are even loaded.
If any of that lands, this book was written for you.
A letter from the author
I watched this happen for a year before I understood what I was looking at.
Roofing companies I worked with were running the same trucks, the same crews and roughly the same marketing they had run for years. The phones were ringing less. The owners knew it. They told themselves it was the economy. I told myself something close to the same thing, because the dashboards I was looking at weren't telling me anything different. Pattern recognition is most of what I have ever been good at and the part of me that should have caught it sooner was looking at the wrong dashboard.
By the time I worked out what was actually happening, two of those companies had lost ground in their own markets that I don't think they will get back. A homeowner who hired a different roofer for a job your trucks used to win is a homeowner you don't get a second swing at for fifteen years. The neighbor across the street watches the new roof go on and does the same math when her own roof starts to fail.
This book is the version of that year I wish I had been able to hand those operators twelve months sooner. The work would have been the same. The losses would not have been.
I am not a roofer. I have never carried a bundle up a ladder and I'm not going to pretend I have. What I know is how homeowners are deciding who to call now and why the money most contractors spend on getting found is landing in the wrong place. You know roofing. I know this. The book is me handing you the part you are missing, in plain language, with nothing held back.
Alastair
What you will know by the last page
Seven chapters. Short on purpose. I cut everything that wasn't earning its place, so you can finish it across a couple of evenings on the couch.
- The Phone You Used to Hear Ringing. Why the calls slowed down without you doing anything different and why your own numbers can prove it faster than any report your agency ever sent.
- The Mechanism Nobody Showed You. Where the calls are actually going now. How homeowners pick a roofer in 2026 and why the way they search changed underneath you while you were paying someone to watch it.
- Why Your Agency Can't Fix This. Not because they are crooks. Because of how they get paid and what their tools were built to measure. The reason is structural and once you see it you can't unsee it.
- A Different Category of Thing. What the actual fix is. Why it isn't more agency, more ads or a new website. And why the contractors whose phones are still ringing already have it installed.
- The System, Three Components. The whole blueprint, laid out. The pages that make you findable, the content rhythm that compounds and the loop that learns what is working in your market. Enough detail that you or somebody you hire could build it.
- What Installation Actually Looks Like. Week by week. What the first two weeks are, what the first ninety days honestly feel like (quiet, for a reason) and when the compounding shows up.
- Monday Morning. A short list of things you can do the morning after you finish reading. Specific. Whether you hire us, hire someone else or hand the book to your nephew who is good with computers.
The part most books like this leave out
The book gives you three honest ways forward and treats all three as real.
Build it yourself.
Take the blueprint in chapters five and six and put it in with your own team or a nephew who is good with computers. You will get the pages and the content engine working at a level that moves your numbers. The book gives you enough to start.
Hire someone else with the blueprint in hand.
Take it to a freelancer or a smaller shop you trust and have them build it. You control the cost. You own what they build.
Have us do it.
If you read the whole thing and decide you would rather we built and ran it, that is what we do. One-time build and you own the system at the end of it. No retainer. The agency model is the thing this book is trying to get you out of, so we are not going to sell you another one.
That is the spine of the whole thing. Own what gets built. Fire the agency if you decide to. Stop renting results that vanish the day you stop paying. The book shows you the entire system so you can choose for yourself, including the option that never sends us a dollar.
What this book won't do
It won't make you a marketer. The skill is still reading what is in front of you and acting on it. If you can read a roof from the truck before you climb the ladder, you have got most of what you need.
It won't replace doing the work. The system makes the phone ring. Your crews still climb the ladders.
It won't sell you something on every page. There are three places in the book where I mention what we do at Strategyc. You can ignore all three, finish the book and walk away with a working plan.
It won't promise you overnight results. The mechanism compounds. It does not spike. The first thirty days look quiet and anyone telling you different is selling you the same shape of problem you are already in.
It won't tell you to fire your agency tomorrow. You might. You might not. The book puts the real numbers in front of you so you can make that call honestly, instead of on a Tuesday in a bad mood after a slow weekend.
“What's the catch”
Fair question. You have been pitched by every agency on earth and your bullshit detector is working. Here is the straight answer.
The book is free because some of the people who read it will want help putting the system in and they will think of us when they do. That is the whole model. We give away the entire blueprint, including how to do it without us, because the people who decide to hire someone want to hire the team that had nothing to hide.
You give an email so we can send you the PDF and a few short follow-ups about what is in it. No card. No salesperson calling your cell. If the follow-ups aren't useful, one click and they stop. That is the deal, start to finish.
Who it is for
You run a roofing company doing somewhere between two and twenty million a year. You have got a real crew, a real reputation and a real suspicion that something has slipped that the monthly report isn't showing you. Retail or storm. San Diego or Mesquite or Tulsa or Greenville. The mechanism is the same everywhere; the book says so plainly and shows you where your market is different.
Who it is not for
Guys looking for a hack, a hostage agency or someone to blame. The book is honest that this compounds over months, not days. If you want a magic Tuesday, this isn't it.
About Alastair
Alastair Macartney spent years building content and visibility systems for home-services businesses, which is where he watched the shift in this book happen in slow motion across his own clients. Before that he served as an officer in the British Army, ran four startups and held a BASE jumping world title. He wrote a book about that part of his life, Perfect Madness, in 2014. He lives on Whidbey Island with his three kids.
He will be the first to tell you he is not a roofer. The book is built on the half he does know, handed to the half you do.
The Roofer's Field Manual
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