A storm gives you about seventy-two hours

They arrived two days after the hail, which is how long it takes. Men with clipboards are knocking on the doors of people who called you on Thursday while you were forty feet up in the next county with no free hands.

You worked those messages that evening. Three had already booked an inspection with somebody else — not because those companies are better roofers, but because those companies answered at four-fifteen while you were tied off.

So you have been roofing this county for nineteen years, and you are now competing on your own street with a crew that will be four states away by October — and losing, on availability, to men who have never met a building inspector here.

This is what makes roofing different from every other trade. Your revenue does not arrive evenly — it arrives in bursts, triggered by weather, and the entire burst is allocated in about seventy-two hours. The storm does not create demand you can serve at your leisure. It creates a queue, and the queue is ordered by who picked up.

And it is not only the homeowners. During a storm week your line carries adjusters trying to schedule, adjusters' schedulers, your own customers with a leak on a roof you put on four years ago, a supplier calling about a delayed load, and a general contractor who needs a dry-in date. Every one of those calls is stacked behind the same voicemail greeting.

The companies that come out of a hail event bigger are not the ones with more crews. Everybody is short on crews that month. They are the ones whose phone was answered while everyone else was on a roof.

Roofing demand is the least evenly distributed of any trade. A market can go eleven weeks quiet and then take a hail core, and the following seventy-two hours will produce more inbound than the previous two months combined — all of it while every roofer in the county is already committed.

Inside a storm week the pattern is predictable. The first evening is leaks and panic. The next two days are inspection requests, which is where the volume and the money are. Then the adjusters start scheduling, which is a completely different kind of call arriving on the same line. Then, about a fortnight later, the supplement conversations begin, and those are the calls that decide whether an approved job is a profitable one.

Outside storm season the rhythm is ordinary and the risk is different: retail replacement calls arrive in ones and twos, they are worth a great deal, and they are the easiest thing in the world to lose while you are on a roof. Nobody is desperate for a new roof on a dry Tuesday, which is exactly why that caller will happily go with whoever rings back first.

What answers today is a mobile in a tool belt, forty feet up, in wind. That is not a discipline problem — a roofer cannot take a call from a ridge, and should not try. The alternative most companies reach for is a voicemail box that fills up on the first afternoon of a storm week, or an answering service that cannot tell an active leak from a routine inspection request and passes both along as "customer called about roof."

Megan answers all of them at once, in your company's name, at four-fifteen on the afternoon the hail stops. Whether that changes what a storm week is worth to you is a question one storm will answer, and the forwarding takes a minute to set up and a minute to remove.