About Josh
From the roof to the boardroom of a company that watches roofers for a living
Josh Cotner didn't set out to build a coaching platform for roofing companies. He set out to run a contracting business, and later, an insurance agency. Commercial Roofing Coach is what came out of everything both of those turned out to teach him.
Where It Started
He started as a contractor, not in a classroom
Before Josh ever built a course or coached a roofing company owner, he worked as a contractor himself. That matters, because the person who eventually built this platform didn't learn the business side of the trades secondhand from a textbook — he learned it the same way most roofing company owners do: by getting thrown into it and figuring it out as he went.
Like most people who end up running a roofing company, Josh got good at the actual work first. Nobody handed him a manual on how to price a job for real profit, how to read a P&L, how to hire and keep good crews, or how to build something that didn't depend entirely on him personally being on every roof. Fieldwork teaches you the craft. It doesn't teach you how to run the company wrapped around the craft. Josh had to learn that part the same way the owners reading this page do — by living it, one job and one mistake at a time.
That gap — between being excellent at the trade and knowing how to run the business — is the exact gap Commercial Roofing Coach exists to close. It isn't theoretical for Josh. It's the thing he had to work through himself before he ever tried to teach anyone else how to do it.
Why Contractors Choice Agency
A front-row seat into how roofing companies actually operate
After his time as a contractor, Josh moved into commercial insurance and eventually founded Contractors Choice Agency, a commercial insurance agency built specifically around contractor trades. Today it serves more than 50 different contractor trades nationwide — electricians, plumbers, HVAC companies, general contractors, remodelers, and roofers, including 78 roofing companies specifically.
Running an insurance agency isn't the same as running a coaching platform, but it put Josh in an unusual position: instead of seeing one roofing company from the inside — his own — he ended up with a close-up view into how dozens of roofing companies actually run their businesses. Insurance conversations for a contractor business aren't small talk. To properly understand and cover a roofing company, you have to understand what it does, how it's staffed, how it handles storm season, how it prices jobs, and how it's growing — or isn't. Multiply that across 78 roofing companies over years of renewals and conversations, and patterns start to show up that are nearly impossible to see from inside just one company.
To be direct about it: Commercial Roofing Coach does not sell insurance, and this page isn't here to point you toward Contractors Choice Agency's coverage. The agency is mentioned here for one reason — it's the vantage point that gave Josh the pattern recognition this entire coaching platform is built on. Nothing on this site links to an insurance quote, a policy, or a product.
What He Learned
What separates roofing companies that scale from ones that stay stuck
Across conversations with dozens of roofing company owners — some running a single crew, some running several, some purely storm-driven, some retail and repair-focused — Josh started noticing the same handful of patterns showing up again and again. Not tied to any one region or storm market. Tied to how the business itself was being run.
The roofing companies that stayed stuck almost always had the same fingerprints: a sales process that only existed in the owner's head and only ran when a storm forced it to, estimates priced by matching the last competitor's bid instead of a real number, production scheduled off a group text instead of a system, and restoration jobs that stalled out for weeks because nobody had a consistent way to document damage or follow up with an adjuster. Marketing, if it existed at all, meant "canvassing after a storm" and nothing else — which meant the business went quiet the moment storm season did.
The roofing companies that scaled tended to make a specific shift, whether or not the owner could name it: they moved from being the crew leader who personally ran every job site, to the operator who built a bidding process and a production system around the work, to the owner who ran a company that didn't depend on them being on every roof or in every adjuster meeting. It wasn't about working harder through more storms. In most cases, the owners who scaled were working differently — they had a real estimating process, a documented claims workflow, a marketing plan that didn't evaporate in the off-season, and at least the beginning of a sales team that wasn't just them.
None of this came from a business textbook written for a generic industry. It came from watching the same decisions play out across real roofing companies, in real storm seasons, over real years — and noticing which decisions tended to lead to a company that could take on a second and third crew, and which ones tended to leave an owner still personally closing every sale and chasing every claim five years later.
Why Commercial Roofing Coach
Teaching the patterns instead of just watching them
At some point, watching the same mistakes and the same breakthroughs happen over and over across roofing companies stopped feeling like something Josh could keep to himself. He'd spent years building a mental map of what actually moves a roofing company from "a stressful storm-chasing job with a truck attached" to a real, scalable business — and there wasn't anywhere for a roofing company owner to go learn that map in language built specifically for the trade, rather than borrowed from an unrelated industry.
Roofing isn't generic contracting, and Josh wanted the platform to reflect that. Most business education is written for people who already think in spreadsheets and org charts. Commercial Roofing Coach was built to be the opposite of that — courses written in plain language, for people who are skilled at roofing first, covering the exact areas he kept seeing trip up otherwise-talented roofing company owners: storm sales and canvassing, estimating and pricing, the claims and adjuster workflow, production and crew management, marketing and lead generation, building a real sales team, financials and cash flow through seasonal swings, scaling past a single crew, and customer experience that turns storm-season jobs into referrals instead of complaints.
The Crew Leader → Operator → Owner framework that runs through every course on this site isn't a borrowed slogan. It's Josh's own description of the shift he watched happen, over and over, inside the roofing companies that scaled — and the shift he almost never saw happen inside the ones that stayed stuck running on storm adrenaline alone.
How Josh Teaches
Practical over theoretical, always
Josh isn't interested in teaching business theory for its own sake. Every course on this site is built around a specific outcome a roofing company owner can actually put to work — a real storm-sales system, an estimating process that protects margin, a documented claims workflow, a production schedule that doesn't require the owner on every roof, a marketing plan that survives the off-season, a hiring process for a sales team, a clear read on cash flow through seasonal swings, and a roadmap for adding a second or third crew without losing quality control. If it doesn't change how you run your roofing company, it doesn't belong in the curriculum.
That same practical streak is why the Roofing Company Accelerator exists alongside the individual courses. Some owners will take a single course and run with it on their own. Others need someone in their corner holding them accountable to actually apply it — and Josh coaches those owners directly, drawing on the same pattern recognition that built the curriculum in the first place, not a generic coaching script written for a different industry.
Still Close to the Work
Still talking to roofing companies, not reminiscing about them
Josh still runs Contractors Choice Agency day-to-day, which means he's still talking with roofing company owners regularly — not looking back on a business he used to be close to years ago. The patterns this platform teaches aren't frozen in time from when he first noticed them. They get tested and updated against real conversations with real roofing company owners, storm season after storm season.
That's a deliberate choice. It would be easy to build a coaching platform once, coast on the original insight, and stop paying attention to how the trade is changing. Josh's view is that the patterns separating roofing companies that scale from roofing companies that stay stuck are worth continuing to watch closely — which is part of why he teaches this material directly, instead of handing it off entirely to someone with no ongoing connection to the trade.
If you're running a roofing company and something on this page sounds like your business — the storm-to-storm sales, the gut-feel bidding, the claims that stall out, the feeling that nothing moves unless you're personally on the roof — that's exactly who Commercial Roofing Coach was built for.
See what the coaching platform is built on
Look through the curriculum, learn about the Roofing Company Accelerator, or just call and talk to Josh directly about where your roofing company is stuck.