Today we’d like to introduce you to Nicolas Gonzalez.
Hi Nicolas, can you start by introducing yourself? We’d love to learn more about how you got to where you are today?
I kind of fell into it, right after one of the hurricanes back in 2019. I was working for a friend at the time for $15 dollars an hour, and a roofing company came to me with an offer to be a sales rep. I remember thinking, what did I have to lose? The job was 100% commission, and that scared me because I’d never worked straight commission before. But I decided to bet on myself for once, and I took it.
That was also back when door knocking wasn’t the saturated market it is today. I still knock on doors, by the way. I know some people can’t stand that or me when they see me, but it works, and plus I got a baby to pay for.
While I was there, I loved being outside, meeting homeowners, selling roofs, and seeing that what I put in, I got back. It built my confidence, and honestly, the money didn’t hurt either. But the best part was getting homeowners a new roof through insurance. After a disaster, I saw a lot of people who were struggling, and being able to get them a full roof, often for just the cost of their deductible and way less than a retail job, was the most rewarding part of the work.
Where it got complicated was the company itself. It wasn’t that I was unhappy, exactly. It’s that I wanted to take care of my homeowners in a way that company didn’t allow, because they were profits over everything. I get that now, as an owner myself, but also you can profit well without being greedy and I wanted to give people a genuinely better experience from start to finish, not just on the sales side, but through production and installation too. That’s what pushed me to start my own company, ERS Roof Repair, in 2020.
It’s been a ride since then. Plenty of great years, some rough ones, and a lot of ups and downs. There are days I wish I’d just stayed a sales rep and skipped half the headaches ownership brings. But going through it has made me a better person, a better father, and a better fiancé. Through all of it, we’ve held onto a couple of principles: quality over profits, and treating our customers like friends, not just names on a contract.
Here we are in 2026, still going strong. We’re a smaller, family-run company. I work alongside my brother, which wasn’t easy to figure out at first, but we’ve made it work, and it keeps us focused on quality over quantity, giving every homeowner the best product and service we can, and has built a great connection with him through us having to figure a lot out.
Alright, so let’s dig a little deeper into the story – has it been an easy path overall and if not, what were the challenges you’ve had to overcome?
Absolutely not. It has not been a smooth road. Like I mentioned, there are days I think I should have just stayed a sales rep. In construction in general, you run into a lot of people who make big promises and don’t follow through. There’s no shortage of sketchy operators, there always seems to be an issue on a job site that’s out of your control, and it’s just genuinely hard to find good help, whether that’s crews or sales reps. These days it feels like everybody knows a roofer, or knows a friend of a roofer, or is a roofer. I swear I see a new roofing company truck on the road almost every day.
I’ve hired bad sales reps. I had one guy show up to a roof job in sandals, and it was clear he’d never roofed a day in his life. You could see it in the work. I’ve had to tear off roofs and start completely over because of jobs like that, but I stand behind my work, and I always will.
The last year in particular has been the toughest yet, for my business and for me personally. It feels like everyone is racing to the bottom on price. It’s not that the work is getting cheaper to do, it’s that homeowners are choosing whoever quotes the lowest number, and that makes it hard to compete when you’re carrying workers’ comp and general liability and trying to pay your crews a real wage.
So no, it hasn’t been smooth. A smooth road would have been staying a sales rep. You go home, you turn it off, you relax. As an owner, I’m always thinking, always working through something. But the one good thing about this not being my best year is that it’s forced me to reset. It’s reminded me that money isn’t the end goal, even though yes, we need it to run the company and to pay myself. The journey of learning about myself through all of this has been eye opening. When times are hard, I try to remember I have a lot to be grateful for, everything I’ve built and accomplished. I still have my faith, my beautiful family, and a business that’s still going.
Thanks for sharing that. So, maybe next you can tell us a bit more about your business?
When we started, we thought about doing all things construction and restoration, but early on we decided to focus on one thing and do it well, roofing. Shingle, Metal, Tile, TPO, Modified, flat roofs, commercial, and residential, we handle it all. Within that, storm damage is really where we have a lot of experience and knowledge on. A lot of what we do is helping homeowners get a full roof replacement through insurance for the cost of their deductible instead of paying retail after a storm, and that means knowing when filing a claim actually makes sense versus when a repair is the right call, based on things like the age of the roof and whether it’s realistically repairable. We’re not out here signing up every homeowner who calls, as much as we would like too. Sending someone into that process without a real shot at approval just wastes their time, and that’s not who we want to be.
We really feel that what sets up apart is how we treat homeowners like friends and family, not transactions. My brother and I run this together, and we’re not chasing the bottom line, we’re building something we’re proud of, something I can eventually hand down to my son (If he would even want to roof). That’s honestly what I’m proudest of too, not a ranking or a reputation, just the fact that I’ve stayed standing and profitable for six years in one of the toughest industries there is, doing it the way we actually wanted to do it. Every decision comes back to putting on a quality product and doing right by the people we serve. So if there’s one thing I’d want someone reading this to walk away with, it’s pretty simple, if you’ve got a roof problem ERS Roof repair can handle it.
What makes you happy?
What makes me happy, first is my faith. I’m a Christian, a man of God, and I try to put that into practice every day, even though I’m far from perfect at it, you can ask my fiancée about that. Then there’s my family, my fiancée and my one year old son. There’s nothing like walking through the door and hearing those flat feet come running, screaming “dada” the second he sees me.
Running my own business plays into that. Some days mean long hours, there’s no way around that, but it also gives me the ability to take off go to the zoo or aquarium (his favorites) when it matters and actually be there for my fiancee and son when I need to be. That trade-off is worth it every time.
Work itself is part of my happiness too, in a way I didn’t fully expect going in. Getting to build this with my brother, knowing that what I put in is genuinely what I get back out, and challenging myself every single day, that’s become its own kind of happiness. I’m still finding out what I’m actually capable of. One of the bigger shifts for me has been learning to stop fixating on the end goal and just enjoy the journey, even when things are hard. That perspective alone has changed how I experience all of it and allowed me to find a lot of happiness.
Contact Info:
- Website: https://ERScontractor.com
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/essentialrestorationsolutions/
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/EssentialRestorationSolutions
- Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@ERSRoofRepair
- Yelp: https://www.yelp.com/biz/essential-restorations-solutions-lutz?osq=Essential+Restorations+Solutions
