Extreme Weather Propels Roofing Innovation - PODCAST TRANSCRIPT

Editor's note: The following is the transcript of a live interview with Greg Hudson from Georgia-Pacific Building Products. You can read the interview below or listen to the podcast.

Intro: Welcome to Roofing Road Trips, the podcast that takes you on a thrilling journey across the world of roofing. From fascinating interviews with roofing experts to on the road adventures, we'll uncover the stories, innovations and challenges that shape the rooftops over our heads. So fasten your seat belts and join us as we embark on this exciting roofing road trip.

Hello and welcome to another Roofing Road Trips from RoofersCoffeeShop. My name is Heidi Ellsworth and I have such a fun announcement for this podcast today. My friend Greg Hudson with Georgia-Pacific is going to be joining me on an ongoing series of What's Happening, what's happening in the industry, what's happening with the weather, what's happening out there. And so I am really excited to bring this to Roofing Road Trips. Greg, welcome to the show.

Greg Hudson: Well, thank you so much for having me, Heidi. It's a pleasure always to be on your podcast.

Heidi J. Ellsworth: It's so much fun. And you and I have these conversations all the time at different meetings, and so I'm thinking, okay, this is going to be really fun. We're going to talk about different things that are really affecting the industry and that we talk about all the time. And what's the number one topic? Weather.

Greg Hudson: Go figure that Roofers would be talking about weather.

Heidi J. Ellsworth: Yeah. Every single time, and I mean every call I'm like, "How's the weather there?" Because I'm so ready for summer. But really what I was hoping you and I could talk about today is to really talk about the extreme weather. And what that's done in the last decades to really push the roofing industry to develop solutions to really protect the houses. And I don't think there's anyone out there who has done more to protect our commercial buildings, buildings overall period, than Georgia-Pacific. So I say, let's get you introduced. If you can do an introduction, talk about yourself and then we're going to just go right into this topic.

Greg Hudson: Well, thank you. Yeah, I'm Greg Hudson. I am the director of Commercial Den Sales at Georgia-Pacific. And in the roofing space, we're known for our dens deck roof boards or cover boards as they're commonly referred to. I've been with GP for 18 years. I've been in construction industry since 1997, but in mid 2000s I got my first taste of roofing and it's just such a wonderful industry. I've just wanted to do more, every year I try to do more in the industry.

Heidi J. Ellsworth: It really is. It's when you think about how much roofings just basically protects everything, and I think people kind of forget about that.

Greg Hudson: You are 100% right. A lot of times it is once it's installed, it's not thought about unless it leaks and that's unfortunate.

Heidi J. Ellsworth: It really is. So let's talk just a little bit about your career with Georgia-Pacific and what you've seen with the innovations specifically around really protecting you against extreme weather. But give everybody out there a little background of what you've seen change over the last couple of decades.

Greg Hudson: It's changed a lot. It is definitely changed a lot. And the things that we look at it from a manufacturer's perspective are not just what are the needs of today, but also anticipating what the needs of tomorrow are going to be. Whether we're designing and building differently or things like extreme weather and the increased severity and the increased impact of these severe storms on our commercial buildings. So it's really getting ahead and just thinking about, okay, we need to plan for this now. We need to be reactive in some cases, but we should be proactive in other instances.

Heidi J. Ellsworth: I love that, the proactive, because I think sometimes having myself been worked for large manufacturers and so often we get stuck in the day-to-day of just reacting to what's happening. But being proactive and really looking towards the future, whether that's the increasing extreme weather or environmental concerns or whatever. I don't know, Greg, if that's always been the easiest thing for the roofing industry to do, but the ones who have done it are seeing great success.

Greg Hudson: You're spot on with that. It's difficult because there is so much work that goes into the day to day, which is somewhat reactive. And you have to really kind of build out culturally within your company to say what's on the periphery, what's on the horizon and what's going to impact us? And fortunately, I work for a company that we have a culture that really demands that you're not only looking at today, but you're looking down the road as well. And specifically when you think about there are regulations around these weather impacts, there are insurance things that we're going to talk about with these weather impacts. But it's also, you got to think about workforce, you got to think about a lot of different things and it's not a singular answer. So getting the right people in the room to talk about and think about these things, engaging subject matter experts like a lot of our roofing contractors and roofing industry folks, it really helps you develop that long-term point of view work.

Heidi J. Ellsworth: Yeah. Now Georgia-Pacific has done some phenomenal work around your cover boards with severe hail, and I know also wind and everything. Talk a little bit about... When I think about, Greg, when I look back 20 years or 30 years, however long I've been here, early on no one was talking about severe hail. They were talking about, oh yeah, we had a hailstorm, but it wasn't like this severe hail and to really address that has made a huge difference. Kind of talk about that.

Greg Hudson: Yeah. Can I go back a little bit further?

Heidi J. Ellsworth: Yeah.

Greg Hudson: And so if we go back to 1987 when Densdeck Roof Boards came about, initially it was actually fire. It was the ULP assemblies and fire could be manmade, but it also could come from an actual disaster as well. So you wanted that gypsum cover board because of its non-combustible nature. But then as it started getting used in a cover board application above the ISO, below the membrane, started to see these additional benefits, increased wind uplift, increased puncture resistance from both foot traffic and hail. And you're absolutely right again, on the hail you had regions of the country that experienced it fairly regularly. But you had other regions say, we get a hailstorm every five years or it'd be a big event when it happened and then it'd be a few years before another one would hit it. So it was never really top of mind.
And with that impact of those hailstorms you started seeing, there's some things that they look at on what performance criteria am I looking for to keep the roof on the roof, as I always say. And also keep it performing as designed. And so that's where FM Global really came in from an insurance perspective, but also design guidance. Plenty of knowledge, plenty of testing at the system manufacturer level when they're manufacturing the membranes, the ISO and the other products. But the FM design guidance for the industry, because they're tested assemblies, it's really been the benchmark to look at. And the NRCA as well with their technical committee and looking at these things. But so specifically when you start talking about the insurance, you're talking about losses, you're talking about monetary losses that go along with it. We all really hope and pray that nobody's ever injured in any of these events. So you plan for that. But the next piece is the actual structure and the monetary loss associated with it. And that's where the design guidance comes in.

And you've seen us talk about moderate hail. You've seen us talk about severe hail and you've seen us talk about the recently added very severe hail standard. And a lot of that came from the design guidance at Factory Mutual.

Heidi J. Ellsworth: And I think it's also interesting as you're talking about this, I am thinking about, okay, when I first started in the industry, I have to say modified bitumen, buildup roofing, multiple layers was the standard. And I mean that's what it was doing. But then within that time, the single-ply came in, TPO and PVC. And as you and I have talked about before, it really kind of brought the importance of that cover board up even higher because of that single ply and how you're creating that protection.

Greg Hudson: The interesting thing is that as you transition from whether it was built up roofs as you were talking about or multiply roofs or modified roofs, there were place for cover boards in those but there were certain robustness built into them. And as criteria changed in other areas, the single ply growth continued to happen, whether it's reflectivity, whether it's ease of installation, skilled labor, lots of different things that these single-plys help meet. And they do have a resilient nature to them. But it did add the fact that... Spit that out, stop. Start again. The other thing that came along was the increased amount of insulation. The investment in your insulation on your roof when you think about energy costs and then energy codes, you had more insulation. So protecting that investment was so much more important. So they somewhat coincided with each other. But as a single-plys did grow, a rigid cover board like Densdeck Roof Boards, it just had a natural fit and it followed that growth curve to add that resiliency, add that increased wind uplift and impact resistance and fire resistance as well.

Heidi J. Ellsworth: That makes so much sense. I should have said insulation too because you're right, that all these-

Greg Hudson: [inaudible 00:10:46] insulation.

Heidi J. Ellsworth: I know we need it. I know. And all of these trends are really in response to your point. It's not just the extreme weather, it's also sustainability and the environmental impacts out there. And so I just love that conversation because I think about it and I think, yeah, so much has changed in such a short time.

Greg Hudson: And they're all connected. That's the thing about it, is they're all connected. Sustainable practices while can have a cost upfront, but over the long-term cycle they will actually with the cost of energy being as high as it is, they will bring your energy cost down. So you want that roof system performing optimally throughout its entire life cycle. And then the expectation for the lifecycle of a roof system is anywhere from 15 to 20 years or even longer depending on what type of system you put down. And we go back to what we led with, the owners are a lot of times thinking about the operation of their facility, what is going on inside? Is a school and a classroom keeping the kids safe and dry? Is it a critical manufacturing operation? Is it some sort of revenue generating? And a lot of contractors do a lot of educating with owners on all the impacts and how they're connected. And really think of your building as an asset and invest in your roof as an asset, rather than just something that's stopping the shade and stopping the rain.

Heidi J. Ellsworth: Yeah, I was always like growing up on a ranch, we were always about the ROI per acre. And I always thought in roofing that's no different. There's acres and acres of roofing up there and what is your ROI on that? Not just protection, but also energy.

Greg Hudson: Yeah, and there's lots of ways to achieve it. Now there's been some really good work in this space, and I think as an industry whether it's from a manufacturer, distributor or contractor or the design community, we're not there yet but we're on this journey together. And I think the best minds are coming together to say, okay, how do I need to impact this? What are the costs associated with it? And what type of resiliency do I need from extreme water? What type of energy performance do I need from this roof system and how long is it going to last? And so you see those things and they're improving. And then there's other things on the periphery that are coming down. You think about this wild land urban interface, and we talk about whether it's wildfires or different things that go along with it. But code moves a lot slower than insurance premiums. It would be one way that I could describe it. I'm not an insurance agent, I can't speak to it but code is adopted. It's typically created on three year cycles in the built environment.

And different municipalities adopt different codes and code is not all encompassing. And we also have to remember code is usually the bare minimum. Insurance companies are looking at saying, "I'm insuring this building for loss. What's the cost associated with that and what's the impact on that?"

Heidi J. Ellsworth: Yeah, that's so true. And that moves fast as they start seeing these-

Greg Hudson: As you read the headlines from Florida and California where they're running into these things and it's just tough to get insurance in some areas, or it's at a premium cost associated to it. But you also look at, one of the things that we chatted about a while ago is you see this increase in weather events and Noah tracks weather events. I think they go back further in 1980, but severe weather events have had an increase in the number of events per year but also the dollar impact has increased year since 1980. And they have a really nice chart that shows you this impact and what we used to call these billion dollar severe storms once in 100 years or so. They've been fairly regular for quite a while now, and especially in the past 20 years. It could be attributed to climate change. It could also be attributed to you think about the population migration in the United States, you have more people moving into temperate climates, whether it's moving to the southeast.

But in those temperate climates, there are significant severe storms that impact that. So you have more structures, more people, more things going on. So you have a greater impact to go along with it. And the roof systems being impacted just like your vehicles are impacted or a residential home's impacted. Think of the square footage of an average size commercial building. I've heard industry estimates that the average roof sizes 25,000 square feet. Given some of these monster data centers and these monster buildings that have been built these million footers, I think that number's going to start creeping up. But you think, again, it's a commercial low slope roof system so it's fairly flat. So you have this big target that's sitting out there for whether it's some sort of wind impact or hail impact as we were talking.

Heidi J. Ellsworth: And it's so interesting because when you think about the different parts of the country, everybody has their own things that they deal with. In the West where I'm at, it's the firestorms. And that's partly due to a lot of different reasons. We won't go into all of that, Greg, but the fires are so much more intense and numerous it seems like. And then we just had in the Midwest, this just happened last week with those huge hail balls coming down. And now we're going into hurricane season, and so the East Coast is dealing with the winds. But there's been a lot of straight line winds that have been hitting lately too. What are you hearing from the contractors out there on how they're dealing with that?

Greg Hudson: The contractors, first and foremost, they do unbelievable work. They are out there, they have to be reactive to get things patched up. They have to assess, they have to sell the value of a roof to an owner that might not be as educated on the performance of roof systems. And they consistently have to adjust. And a lot of times people take for granted that they're going out there shortly after a storm and there's a devastating storm in some instances. And there's a lot of safety that goes along with it. They have to plan around that safety. They have to plan around their people's safety that go along with it. But one of the things hear a lot is they're busy. They're definitely busy. And being a heavy re-roof market that commercial low slope roofing is, it's fairly often that they're repairing a damaged roof. It's not always that the roof just fades off into the sunset.

They're repairing a damaged roof and it's damaged from some sort of weather event. And we're also seeing a lot of increases from, like you were talking about with fire and owners are now thinking about whether it's because of the insurance premiums or it's because they're seeing the same things. They're coming with a lot more questions. And we have some really, really good contractors in the country here that are educated that can lay out alternatives and really talk through the pros and cons of a lot of different roof system types depending on what they want to plan for. And at the same time, designers as well, roofing consultants have been so impactful and architects as well in really thinking about an existing roof system or a new roof system. Beyond code, what might impact this roof system and how should we plan for that? How should we design for it? And like I said, those two key partners working together with manufacturing community is really going to help us escalate our resilience and roof systems initiative that we're looking at accomplishing.

Heidi J. Ellsworth: Well, and I love how you say that because we were just together at the IBEC show, International Building Enclosure Consultants and really you saw it all come together there. I thought that was a really great show. And you really saw a lot of contractors were there, a lot of consultants coming together. I think you're right, in fact, it's really interesting, Greg, if I think about how educated a contractor is. Especially all contractors, it doesn't matter what kind of roof systems you put down, but just kind of talking more on the commercial side when you're talking to a building owner, wow, you're talking about protecting the building from extreme weather. You're talking about environmental, you're talking about sustainability, energy, all these things. It's like a whole new level of education for contractors. And if they're not doing it, they're being left behind.

Greg Hudson: It's very interesting to see when you sit down and you talk with a successful contracting company, anybody in the company and they go through that education and lay it out, here's our safety protocols, here are how we're looking at all these different things that impact them. But so often if you look at... And I'm just using some industry standards that could fluctuate so do not hold the numbers against me, but always going off in commercial low slope the 80/20 rule, 80% of the roofs are re-roof or recovery and 20% are new construction. Of that 80% of the time, a majority of the time they're not working with an architect or a roofing consultant. They're calling a contractor. And when you're calling a contractor, and they're almost the designer of record, I guess you'd call it, they have to account for all this stuff. So they have educated their estimating staff, their sales staff, they've educated their people on here are all the different buckets that you need or boxes that you need to check when you're talking with that owner. So it's a big lift.

It is. But the ones that are successful are investing in that area, investing in training, investing in being proactive as we talked about.

Heidi J. Ellsworth: Yeah. What have you seen just from a manufacturer to a contractor or consultants, but I think the consultants this is kind of the world they live in every single day working with-

Greg Hudson: 100% yes. You go there to learn from them.

Heidi J. Ellsworth: Yeah, exactly. They're there every day. But I think about what the contractors and as a manufacturer starting way back at the beginning of my career, we were working with architects and consultants and contractors and educating them. But I think about today how that from a manufacturer side has changed also. The degree and the depth of education that you need to do to make sure that everyone has the right tools in their hands to talk to those building owners.

Greg Hudson: And there's different levels of depth in those tools as well. That there are certain things that designers need to know, and actually they care about. There's certain things that contractors deal with every day and they care about. So you need to ensure that you're really speaking the right language, giving them the tools to be successful. And there's certain areas that overlap, that you could use that training for multiple different disciplines. But you have to be nimble and you have to be focused, and you have to understand how are they receiving information as well. When you think about you talked about designers, the AAA accredited courses they're doing that. They have a continuing education requirement, they seek that knowledge to know what's changed out there. And contractors, it's really a different model. You're not going to get that big forum typically where you can bring multiple contractors into a conference room, feed them lunch and talk about Densdeck Roof Boards for an hour. It is much smaller, almost bite size content that you need work and then it's repetition to go with it. And it's also, they're busy people.
They have a focus on education, and there's so many different areas that they have to understand in a roof system. So it's a bit of a challenge, but it's something that we're committed to.

Heidi J. Ellsworth: Well, and I see it all the time with what you all do and what you're getting out there for them. Okay, I know we talked about this a little bit earlier, but I want to just touch on it again. How insurance is really changing our world, has changed roofing in the last... I can remember when I first started out, you didn't even talk about insurance, especially if you lived on the West Coast you didn't even know what insurance was. And now today we have contractors who specialize just in insurance work. We are starting to see contractors who are really trying to understand and specialize it on the commercial side. What are you seeing with specifically commercial roofing and insurance companies? And then also how they're working with us or how we're working with them? And we and us would be the roofing industry.

Greg Hudson: No, that's a good question. So I tie it back to, I'm not going to repeat what I said about what FM again, but FM Global is actually an insurance company. Not every roof has FM Global insurance, but a design guidance that comes through them. So you do have a standard there. But then if you take your standard building insurance company that a building owner may have, they're looking at their risk, their profile that's out thereand they're looking at the size of the claims. I'm going back to the NOAA data, and they broke down the billion dollar severe storm disasters and 70% of the average property losses are attributed to hail, 20% to lightning, 10% to tornadoes. 70% to hail, that's a big number. And you think about that roof system and the cost associated with that roof system with the more insulation, they're replacing that cost in that type of insurance claim process.

So it's significantly changed. The second side of that is they're looking to better understand roof systems. How can I build in that resilience? And it's an area as an industry where we could do a lot better. It's definitely an opportunity for us to work together for those sound designs and really get clear on this is how we mitigate risk. Nothing's going to completely take away the risk, but this is how we mitigate risk. And they could adjust accordingly. But I look at some of these data points that talk about claims. We had a 2.7 billion storm that hit Denver, Colorado in 2017. The $2.2 billion storm... Excuse me, they caused across the south central Minnesota. We had a 1.9 billion storm that hit San Antonio in 20th May of 2020. And as this data updates, we were just talking about the hailstorms last week, we've seen a significant amount of hail this year alone.

So that's going to impact that insurance company's risk profile and their bottom line. So I think they're getting much more engaged and it's really causing the owners to engage much more and circle back to what we talked about earlier, is not just put it in place and not think about it until it leaks. So it really comes with a cost. And insurance companies, you see things like IBHS, which is a bunch of insurance companies got together, they do testing. And they've been very strong with the fortified home on the residential side. And you see them foraying through testing of product systems, that type of stuff into the commercial market. You can follow them on socials or different stuff out there. And it's really just getting the right people to think about what are the risks, how do we mitigate them?

Heidi J. Ellsworth: Yeah. And I think everyone is... Building owners are demanding it of contractors, contractors are demanding it of their manufacturers and the systems and the design community. And so it is one of those things that's not going away. It's going to keep... And from what we can see, who knows, but extreme weather's not going to be going away anytime soon either.

Greg Hudson: I would agree with that point, that I don't think it's going away anytime soon. And the position that contractors are put in, you installed this beautiful roof and then inch and three-quarter hail hits it at x miles an hour. Why isn't it standing up to it? And well, this was the roof that you said you wanted based on the budget that you gave me. So that's how I planned for it. So it does put them to really understand that return on investment, that budgetary to roof performance, thinking about your roof system as a long-term asset and what you want to get out of it. And we're seeing a lot of contractors gravitate to those conversations and really get knowledgeable to be able to have them with those building owners.

Heidi J. Ellsworth: I love it. So your advice, I love this part, your advice for contractors out there who are listening to this and thinking, yeah, I'm kind of doing it, but not all the time and I'm letting them sway me with budget. But then having to deal with all the after effects with the building owners, insurance companies, all of that. What's your advice to commercial roofing contractors out there on how to really ahead of this and really start thinking proactively?

Greg Hudson: I usually seek advice from the contractors, but I will give this one piece of advice. If you're talking to a building owner and they're looking to have that return on investment conversation specifically to put a cover board like Densdeck Roof Boards into their system. And understand the upfront costs versus the long-term payout with reduced operational and maintenance costs. Build in that resiliency, I would say engage our people. We have a sales force all across the country, in Canada and south of the border and even in the international markets as well. Engage our people. They've been trained to have the technical conversations with folks that want to get very technical and understand how our products work and how they can mitigate risk, but they can also have that ROI discussion. And that's something that we've really worked on, honing that message and amplifying that message out there. That there is an upfront cost adder to put a cover board into a roof system, but there is a payback as well.

And there's multiple different paybacks depending on what type of system you end up deciding to put down. And our folks are trained to have those conversations. They can help the roofing contractor, they can supply them with the right collateral to have that conversation. We want to be a resource to the building owners, to the contractors, to the design community. We want to be a resource out there.

Heidi J. Ellsworth: I love it. That is all about building relationships and asking questions.

Greg Hudson: Yes, I agree. One of the things that I was thinking about is the past NRCA President Reid Ribble. He had a really good quote that said, "Roofs have a prominent role to play in protecting families and property as the first line of defense against the elements. As those elements get more severe, it really calls out the need for increased protection."

Heidi J. Ellsworth: The importance of quality installers, quality roofing companies out there, quality manufacturers, the distributors who get it from one place to the other, I think it is all just so important that we continue to be proactive. And I love that quote from Reid because it shows how important this industry is.

Greg Hudson: It does. And all the different people that you just named are really what draws people to this industry. There are quality installers, there are quality manufacturers, there's amazing distributors that get the products from point A to point B and there's great designers. And the more that their presence is amplified, the less than quality installers, less than quality manufacturers. It really closes the door on them with the misinformation to the owner or the budgetary sell versus really understanding what the needs of that owner are.

Heidi J. Ellsworth: I love it. Greg, thank you. How can 30 minutes go so fast?

Greg Hudson: We always have these chats for 30 minutes and they end up turning into an hour.

Heidi J. Ellsworth: Yeah, exactly. And that could be so easy today too. But we're going to save it for the next one. And for everyone listening out there, if you have ideas of some topics you'd like Greg and I to talk about, to go over, please let us know, heidi@rooferscoffeeshop.com. I'll connect you with Greg. We're going to be doing this, and I know some of the things on our list are solar. We're also looking at new innovations, some of the new things that are coming up around energy. So Greg, we're going to have a lot of fun with this.

Greg Hudson: I think it's going to be a good summer.

Heidi J. Ellsworth: Yeah, very good summer. So thank you so much again. I'll see you next time, Greg, when we have our next chat.

Greg Hudson: Okay. Thank you very much, Heidi.

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