Can Jeff Cleavenger do Everything?

By Colin Sheehan, RCS Reporter. 

There is no stopping for Freedom Coatings owner and inventor. 

Many roofing contractors have made their way up in roofing doing a variety of work. Jeff Cleavenger exemplifies the term ‘Jack of All Trades.’ He started his career in heat-resistant coatings in Las Vegas, Nevada in 2007 for the Clark County School District working alongside a Senior Mechanical Engineer to provide test results for the benefits of a heat-reflective coating. 

Throughout his career Jeff has been searching for a superior silicone roof coating for ponded areas over acrylics and to repair metal roofs in the Midwest. 

Jeff is the owner of Freedom Coatings LLC and contracts large projects across the U.S. In early 2015, he was introduced to GE Enduris Silicone roof coating. He landed a contract for 217,000 square feet with a Butler standing seam metal roof in Columbus, Ohio. 

Developing and implementing his mechanical inventions allowed him to streamline his operation down to four employees and two seam sprayers while covering 80,000 square feet of seams per day. 

That complemented an additional 80,000 square feet of field application per day to finish the project using the same mechanical application techniques. 

The gallons per square achieved by incorporating these machines have narrowed the margin of error while reducing the actual consumption of product through enhanced efficiencies. 

Jeff was immediately attracted to GE Silicones’ high solid material coatings due to their durability and long-lasting lifecycle. 

GE Enduris in particular, works on all roof substrates and has a long lifecycle that lasts years. GE Enduris can also be re-coated over itself due to some of the properties within its alkoxy formula, either right away or years later, something many other silicones cannot do. 

“This was the first time I had used the GE Liquid Flashing on all lap seams at the rate of 120 mils minimum per roof panel overlap. I never went back to my other products after I started using GE with Butler Metal Roofs,” said Jeff. 

Jeff started repairing O’Reilly Auto Parts’ Butler Metal Roofs with GE Silicones Enduris roof coating. “Now, several years after that initial project, I have five certifications from the company and have even performed some training for GE Silicones.” 

On a recent project, Jeff did the coatings for the Rocky Mountain Harley Davidson Dealership in Littleton, Colorado. This was the first project where GE Silicones tinted the coating color to match the hunter-green metal roof already installed throughout the Harley Davidson Dealership. In this project, Jeff used one of his inventions to re-coat a metal roof. 

Jeff invented a push along cart to spray a four-inch-wide seam at 120 mils thickness on a 130,000-square-foot roof and seal all of the thermoplastic polyolefin (TPO) single-ply roofing membrane seams in record time. 

Freedom Coatings LLC sealed about 130,000 feet of TPO in 18 hours, or a day and a half, with just Jeff and one helper. This is remarkable because a task like the one he is describing would typically take four days to complete with a roller and a bucket and would require more people working behind the scenes. His machines effectively cut labor time in half – which, as all contractors know, is no small feat in the world of roofing. These machines have also helped Jeff and his business gain momentum and continues to save everyone time and money wherever it is used. 

Jeff has frequently provided his insights as an unpaid consultant for Graco Spray Equipment of Rogers, Minnesota and he helped with the development of the best practices video for silicone roofing applications using Graco Products. 

He is constantly working on improving the application procedures for GE Silicones on all projects he encounters. 

For Jeff Cleavenger, ‘every day is a workday’ and it does not matter when or where or how. 

The LAST WORD! 

“I would highly recommend using GE Enduris Silicone on all viable projects where consistency and performance are paramount as I have never had a call back when using this product” 

See more contractor success stories and reviews in the RCS Newsroom. 

GE is a registered trademark of General Electric Company and is used under license by Momentive Performance Materials Inc