Picture this: your school board is about to spend two million dollars on a new roof. Three contractors have submitted bids. The board members, people elected by their community who are not roofing experts, get about fifteen minutes to understand what each one is proposing before they vote.
Would you make a two-million-dollar decision in fifteen minutes?
That question is at the heart of why Coryell Roofing built something the commercial roofing industry has never seen before.
The fifteen-minute problem
Across the country, public school districts and municipalities are making major roofing decisions with very little time and very little information. The specifications between competing bids are often miles apart. One contractor leads with the lowest price. Another leads with the longest warranty. The board is left trying to compare options they were never trained to evaluate.
The stakes are high, because the decision lasts a long time.
A fifteen-minute decision affects that district for the next twenty to thirty years. Shouldn’t we help people understand what it is they need and what it is they’re purchasing?
Chris Coryell, CEO, Coryell Roofing
That conviction led to a concept the Coryell team had been developing for two years: a place where decision-makers could come and actually learn before they decide.
What is an Experience Center?
On June 24, Coryell Roofing opens its first Experience Center in Franklin, Tennessee. It is not a showroom. It is a hands-on education facility built so that superintendents, facility managers, board members, architects, and engineers can touch, feel, and see exactly what goes into a roof system and why the right system matters.
Visitors walk through the history of Coryell Roofing and its partnership with Duro-Last, then move through interactive stations covering loss prevention, materials, installation standards, and warranty protection. Along the way, they learn what FM standards represent and why building beyond code is so important in severe weather regions.
The goal is simple: give people the knowledge to make an informed decision, every time.
Educators like to be educated. We feel a duty and a responsibility to help promote higher standards and the right roof system. The only way to do that is to get people into an environment where they can experience it.
Chris Coryell, CEO, Coryell Roofing
When a building gets the wrong roof system, the cost does not stop at the roof. It shows up later as repeated loss, and that loss drives up insurance premiums, deductibles, and exclusions. For a public school district, that can mean an impossible choice.
Our school districts are literally having to decide between paying insurance premiums and paying people.
Chris Coryell, CEO, Coryell Roofing
Coryell’s mission is to help reverse that. Put the right roof system on the building the first time, prevent the loss, and the premiums and deductibles come back into line. That means more of a district’s budget can go where it belongs: to educators and students.
It comes back to the company’s purpose, protecting people, property, and policy.
The Experience Center was equipped in close partnership with Duro-Last, and reflects years of collaboration with FM on raising standards across the industry. Together, these partnerships let Coryell bring the kind of education that used to require a trip to a manufacturing plant right to a regional location, close to the people who need it.
The Franklin Experience Center is the first of more to come. If you manage a school, a hospital, a municipality, or any commercial facility, you are invited to come see why Coryell does what it does.
Learn more at CoryellRoofing.com, and watch for Coryell’s conversation with Roofing Contractor magazine, coming soon.
