Michigan roofing marketing for a state where wind tears off more roofs than hail

In Michigan a roofer is licensed by the state, not by the city. The license is a residential maintenance and alteration license, and it lists the crafts you passed for. Homeowners can look you up, so the name in your ads should match the name on that card.

The state's license law for maintenance and alteration contractors spells out the crafts. Roofing is one. Siding and gutters is another, and insulation is a third. The license prints only the crafts you qualified for. A roofer may still take on other work when it is incidental to the roof.

That matters for your service pages. A "roofs, siding and gutters" landing page reads as three trades. If your card says roofing only, keep the gutter work as part of a roof job, or add the craft before you sell it alone. The state's list of crafts shows how each one is named.

Three more rules shape the offer:

• The $600 line. Jobs under $600 in total are exempt, but splitting a bigger job into small contracts to dodge the license does not count, under the exemption section. A small leak repair ad is fine. Cutting a reroof into pieces is not.
• A place of business here. Every licensee must keep one in the state, by the same section that lists the crafts. Your profile and site should show where yours is.
• Unlicensed work. Someone working without the license cannot sue to collect or put a lien on the home, under the collection and lien rule.

A first offense can also bring a fine of $5,000 to $25,000 under the state's unlicensed practice penalties. That is why we put the license number in the footer, on estimates and beside the ad's call button. Homeowners in a storm week are told to ask for it. Not legal advice; confirm with counsel.

Where the storms land changes where your money goes. Michigan's wind reports cluster in the Detroit suburbs, while hail reports scatter.

In our count of the SPC report files and the four years before, Oakland County led Michigan with 109 wind reports. Wayne had 85 and Macomb 64. Those three counties made up about one in six wind reports statewide. The Michigan page explains why the three also rank as separate markets in search.

West Michigan sees fewer reports. Kent County, home to Grand Rapids, logged 38 wind reports and 7 hail reports. Ingham, around Lansing, had 22 wind reports. Genesee, around Flint, had 32 wind reports and 12 hail reports. A Grand Rapids roofer still gets storm weeks. They are rarer, so retail replacement and repair pages carry more of the year there.

The surprise is hail in the Upper Peninsula. Marquette County logged 48 hail reports, the most of any Michigan county in the SPC files. Washtenaw, around Ann Arbor, was next with 22. A UP roofer has a real hail page to write, and a downstate roofer should not copy one in.

If you pay people to knock doors or bring you jobs after a storm, Michigan wants each of them licensed to your company. Plan the canvass around that before the first storm.

The state's salesperson license page says anyone who solicits or secures business for pay needs the license. That includes commissioned sellers. It also includes another contractor who sends you a customer for a referral fee. A salesperson may hold a license with one contractor only. So a freelance crew working for three roofers in the same week does not fit.

Each salesperson passes an exam, and your company applies for them. You display the wall license. The salesperson carries the pocket card. Put the card in the canvass script, since homeowners are told to ask for credentials.

Sales signed at the kitchen table also come with a cooling-off period. A buyer can cancel a home sale over $25 until midnight of the third business day, under Michigan's home sale cancel law. Print it on the door-knock agreement. Do not let a rep promise a start date that skips the window.

You are up against many small shops, not a few big ones. Reviews, photos and a visible license are how a homeowner tells them apart.

The Census Bureau's County Business Patterns for 2023 count 509 roofing contractor locations in Michigan with paid employees. They employed 5,059 people. 303 of those locations had fewer than five employees. Owner-only roofers with no payroll are not in the count, so the real field is larger.

In a field that small and that crowded, the map pack goes to the profile with recent reviews and real job photos. We ask for a review on the day the dumpster leaves. We tag each photo with the town, so a Troy job shows on the Troy page and a Livonia job on the Livonia page.