Quentan Tobolka & Jules Dekovics - PODCAST TRANSCRIPTION

Editor's Note: The following is the transcript of a live interview with Quentan Tobolka from PMR Roofing and Jules Dekovics from Exceptional Metals. You can read the interview below or listen to the podcast.

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Hello everyone. My name is Megan Ellsworth here at rooferscoffeeshop.com and we are here for a Stories from the Roof podcast. Super excited to be chatting with Quentan and Jules. Hello gentlemen. How are you?

Quentan Tobolka: Hello, Megan.

Jules Dekovics: Good afternoon.

Megan Ellsworth: Let's dive right in and Quentan, let's start with you. Can you just give us a little bit of background on yourself, your company?

Quentan Tobolka: So my name's Quentan Tobolka. I am the president of PMR Roofing. We are a roofing contractor out of Texas. We are based in Dallas DFW area. We mainly service all over the state. So we're not really specifically located in just the DFW Metroplex as this project will kind of explain that. That was in Del Rio. I've been in the roofing business since 2008. We specialize specifically in re-roofs. The more complex, the more dynamic, the more challenges, to me that's the more fun project.

Megan Ellsworth: Very cool. Love that. Who doesn't love a challenge, honestly? So Jules, why don't you give us a little background on yourself?

Jules Dekovics: Sure. My name's Jules Dekovics. I am the national sales manager for EXCEPTIONAL Metals. I've been in the construction and roofing business for 30 plus years in different facets. Everything from contractor to distribution to manufacturing. So I kind of have seen every side of the business and they all have their pluses, minuses to them. As it comes to the roofing side and the metal side, my position with the company is growth of product line, is national awareness and more exposure for EXCEPTIONAL Metals in a growth mode. So hopefully everybody's going to be seeing a lot more of us as things go. And I'm just happy to be here with you all to talk about this project here and one other thing to note about us is we do have national coverage. We're in five locations. So it's what we do.

Megan Ellsworth: That's great. Well thank you both for sharing. So we're here to talk about a project that you worked on together, the Val Verde Courthouse project. Do you want to just give us a little bit of a 3000 above view of this project?

Quentan Tobolka: Yeah. So Del Rio in 2020, is actually as the world was shutting down in March, there was a very, very significant hailstorm. I remember getting the call that if we wanted to provide emergency response in Del Rio and having to think through like, "Okay. I've got to drive from Dallas to Del Rio," and this is like two weeks after the whole world has shut down. And I said, "Do you go to gas station? Do you stop at a hotel?" Because it's about a nine-hour drive from DFW to Dallas.

Megan Ellsworth: Oh.

Quentan Tobolka: And so that's where I live, that's where I'm based out of. And usually when we get a big disaster like this, I like to go down and assess the total loss. And so they had hail up to baseballs, holes through buildings, immediate response, all of this in March of 2020. And so Val Verde Courthouse was actually one of the projects we did towards the end of this package. We ended up doing something like eight million dollars worth of work just for the city of Del Rio, Val Verde County, which is located in Del Rio, and also the Del Rio Housing Authority. And this courthouse, with the historical permits, was probably the last one that we did because a historical permit can take somewhere between nine months to 12 months to actually obtain. You have to keep the historical look and the appearance. There's an architect assigned from the state of Texas that has to review everything.

He'll do site visits to make sure that the colors match the existing colors. They'll review photos from 80, 50 years ago to make sure that we're matching the look. And so when we come in on one of these responses on that, our goal is to try to give them a better roof than they had before in one way or the other, but to not change the appearance. And so in this particular roof, obviously trying to give them a metal roof with a weather tightness warranty while still maintaining that historical look. So that was kind of the challenge. That coupled with the border security checkpoints you have to go through to get to Del Rio. There is no roofing manufacturer that has any sort of substantial distribution in Del Rio or distribution.

McCoy's is your best place to buy anything that is roofing related and they basically sell screws for our panel roofs. That's about it. There's not a lot in Del Rio. So thankfully it is like four hours outside of San Antonio. So San Antonio is the main market that you kind of have to work from, but it definitely had its challenges when you throw in an architect and pictures that are 100 years old of a building while trying to figure out a way to do it, improve the system that they had before.

Megan Ellsworth: Wow. That is really interesting, especially because, as you said, it's a historical landmark.

Quentan Tobolka: Yep.

Megan Ellsworth: So that's wild. Was that the first one you've ever worked on?

Quentan Tobolka: No. In Texas there's I think 50-

Megan Ellsworth: They're everywhere.

Quentan Tobolka: There's tons of counties. And so we are in this program where we do a lot of county work.

Megan Ellsworth: Okay.

Quentan Tobolka: And it's kind of a disaster response, a big storm comes through. And so I think we were going to get one of the calendars for our wall at the shop, but I think we've done about 15 of the courthouses now, but they're all different. It can be stamped metal shingles, it can be low slope roofs, how one had a shingle roof and is still historical building, I don't know, but there's one that has a shingle roof. They all vary. It just depends on when they were built and sometimes with the historical process, it's kind of comical 'cause it changes depending on who the architect you get. Some architects will allow certain things, some won't. So you'll see some modern upgrades that you know this building was built in 1905 and there's no way they had asphalt shingles in 1905.

But this particular building really had kept a lot of its historic look. Some of this metal that was on this building was hand bent, basically 10 foot sheets of metal were making these panels. There was no continuous panels. And so one of the things we did with EXCEPTIONAL was to get a weather tightness warranty was to be able to change this to continuous length panels to meet their detail standards and their engineering department, which they're incredible to work for. There's actually a guy named Nick Prezzato. He was kind of the main guy at EXCEPTIONAL that helped us with a lot of the cut sheets and the designing as we were working through this project. But yeah. So we've worked on several courthouses, but the historical process is quite challenging.

There was a project we did in Far West Texas two years ago where we used one product and then we go to Far East Texas and we try to use the exact same product and that architect says, "No way." And so working, you just don't know. And that was a stamp Victorian shingle. They ended up going to some old artists from Germany that made it originally. It was like, "This is so ridiculous." There is a manufacturer that makes this shingle now that looks the exact same, but they wouldn't allow it like they did in this other courthouse on the other side of the state, but that's just what you have to deal with when it comes to dealing with the architects at the Texas Historical Committee.

Megan Ellsworth: Wow.

Quentan Tobolka: It could be a challenge.

Megan Ellsworth: Geez.

Quentan Tobolka: Yep.

Megan Ellsworth: Yeah. Seriously. So Jules, when Quentan came to you all with this job, how did you approach the job?

Jules Dekovics: Well, the first thing when I saw the photos of it, I was like, "Oh, we got to figure this out because this is going to be a really cool job to get our name on and to be able to show off," and trust me, we've shown this project off and we're going to continue because they did a tremendous job installing it based on the challenges that Quentan just talked about 'cause we see these types of things all around the country all the time. A lot of it was just trying to figure out what was going to be the easiest panel to work with for them on site because these types of projects, you cannot really do in a factory, ship it to a job, and expect it to fit the way it's supposed to.

Megan Ellsworth: Yeah.

Jules Dekovics: And being historical work, things aren't always as square as you'd probably like them to be. Not that they are always nowadays as well, but even back then and when you take things apart, you don't know what you're going to find under it and things of that nature. So being able to work with these guys and figure out what was going to work the best and getting that together was a real big piece of this. And as Quentan had mentioned, Nick had a lot to do with that and our office for the estimation side and our estimating team, I'd put them up against anybody for their knowledge and what they do and how we work with the contractors. We always put the contractors first and that's the way we do business and that's the way we'll always do business. Having the opportunity and the trust of PMR was a big part of the drive to make sure we got the right product in their hands to work with to make that job look as gorgeous as it came out.

Megan Ellsworth: That's great. So I know that Del Rio is right on the Texas Mexico border and I know that a lot of roofers are describing labor challenges. What did you all do for labor on this job?

Quentan Tobolka: You find out real quick, different labor relationships, subcontractors that they're like, "Yeah. I'm not going to Del Rio." You find out real quick who's employing guys that can make it through. And so that added to the variable of the challenge. So the guys that we use are actually some of our in-house guys that usually work at our shop. And so to be able to take them out of the shop constantly, which they're like the artists when it comes to fabricating the metal, and to put them on a project like this that's going to take six weeks to do and it's just a slow project was not ideal, but we needed an artist. It seems that every year goes by, there's less getting into the trade to learn it as an artist, but rather wants to learn it as mass-produced, put down lots of work.

And so this was not work that could be done by any particular individual. It had to be done by someone who was truly an artist. And so Gerardo on our team, he made this his baby and we basically created a sheet metal shop on the courtyard lawn and-

Megan Ellsworth: Oh wow.

Quentan Tobolka: Every piece of metal, all the trim as Jules was talking about, nothing was really square. And then we had the challenge of the radius that basically we were given, the panels were the right length, but then we had to get them straight curved correctly and then also the battens. That was another challenge, which we actually had a challenge bending those battens, right? I don't know if you knew this Jules, but we ended up having to take those all the way to Dallas because we found someone with a machine that would actually be able to do it better than our machine on site.

The panels were one thing to bend, but those battens were even more challenging to get bent. And so there was some ingenuity that we came up with where we made sample radius pieces for different parts of this dome and then had to transport them to Dallas to have them formed in a warehouse and then get them back to Del Rio without letting them get damaged in any way. That was kind of a fun process to seeing how the guys came up with ways to do that. It was definitely not just your standard, "Oh, it's 14 degrees. Bend it to 14 degrees. You're good." There was variation all throughout it.

Megan Ellsworth: Of course there was.

Jules Dekovics: Well that just shows the talent's-

Megan Ellsworth: Never going to be easy.

Quentan Tobolka: Yeah. At one point, Gerardo had figured out a way with a ratchet strap and a piece of wood 'cause you couldn't use an actual radius figure. You almost had to form it to an actual piece of material. And then you had to get that material to stay in that form and then that's what we were using to capture the correct radius because it wasn't perfect all the way around. So what you look at looks perfect, but there's little small changes would create even more deflections in the panel and the oil candy. So it was really trying to get that right so that it didn't have a bunch of deflections in oil canning, but the ratchet strap with the two by fours were some of the ingenuity that came up with that actually worked out really well with that batten challenge that we had.

Jules Dekovics: Well, it just shows you, with that type of work, you have to be very flexible. You have to have the right people on site that can come up with that type of ingenuity and it is one of the things that I love about metal because, to Quentan's point there, this isn't just show it up and slap it on. This takes talent. Having those folks in your employment is a big deal and a very tough piece of what's going on in the metal industry these days.

Megan Ellsworth: So true. And like you said earlier, Quentan, it truly is an art form and to have those artists on site, that was very smart. Do either of you have any tips or advice for other contractors listening to this that are about to take on a historical job?

Quentan Tobolka: Well, the historical job is be patient. The architect is, at least from my viewpoint in the state of Texas, it's dealing with personalities and you just sometimes have to kind of yield with the architect, "Okay. That's what you want, it has a cost." I think this one in particular, the architect was really on. He did a great job working with us and really wanted to get this weather tightness warranty and understood it and where there's other times where I told you the story about the stamp Victorian shingles that we had to have made by a multi-generational German stamping facility where we couldn't have just used a manufactured one.

In my mind, they still look the same and it would've looked way better if they went with the manufactured ones, but instead we had to use this other one, but that is what the architect wanted and he's ultimately trying to keep the historical thing is I don't really have as much say. As long as it's not going to leak and you're going to get the weather tightness or whatever workmanship warranty, as being flexible with the architects that might be behind some of it.

Jules Dekovics: I would agree with that. Going around the country, you hear that a lot. What Quentan's talking about just in the state of Texas, the difference from east to west, north to south, it's the same thing all around the country and the word that I like that he used is flexibility. You have to be flexible when you're doing this type of work. You have to be clear in your communication. And sometimes people just want what they want and you do the best you can to get them that and you show them options and those kinds of things and most folks will work with you in a good way to get the job done and to make it look good because we all want that when we get into these types of projects.

Megan Ellsworth: Exactly. Well said. So what makes you smile when you think of your job?

Quentan Tobolka: I would say the people. The guy Gerardo that did this project, I would not normally have a relationship with a guy like Gerardo, probably. He's not a guy that I would normally encounter on a day-to-day basis, but in roofing, I'm getting to hang out with him and learn his passion and his skillset and that exists all throughout the company and in our industry is it's just the people. For the most part, we can all buy material as a roofing contractor, we can all put down certain stuff, we all have the same access, but it's the people that make us a company. And so having and learning from those guys is such a joy. And then getting to experience some of their culture when it comes to guys on my company that were at my wedding and held my babies when they were born versus going to quinceaneras or going to their weddings and to things that are important in their life stage.

Those types of things are what make just the connections you make in the industry and then that goes to the distribution side and the manufacturing side. Those relationships where you, for 10, 15 years, you've known and you've had a relationship and watched everybody grow and how they've changed in their career, what they've done, you're developing friendships and some of it's pretty simple. We can get that down to a science on some projects. So that can get a little bit mundane. That's why I like these complex stuff 'cause there's not a lot mundane about this type of job, but the bulk work of roofing can get a little mundane, but it's the people that make it so much fun, whether that's distribution, manufacturing, or just all the way down to the labor or the guys in the shop or whatever it may be.

Megan Ellsworth: I love that. Yeah. Jules, what makes you smile when you think about your job?

Jules Dekovics: A lot of it is seeing the finished product. When you walk into a project and don't know what it's going to really look like at the end and you figure your way through it with all the people involved, and to Quentan's point, getting to know the people, how they think, their talents, what makes them tick every day, those types of things and then you get to the end of that job and you stand there side by side and looking at the project and going, "Wow. Look what we did." And to me, that is a huge part of it because it's not an I business when you look at this. It's a we business. Quentan mentioned distribution and the architects we talked about and engineering and historicals. It's a we when we look at a project like this. And when getting to the end of it and seeing what you're able to accomplish, that's what fuels me a lot to get up in the morning.

Megan Ellsworth: Well said. I love that so much. Well, thank you both for chatting with me today. This has been super informative. I just have one last question and that is, how long have you been following Roofers Coffee Shop and what's your favorite thing about RCS?

Quentan Tobolka: Yeah. So I think since 2020, I was telling you that earlier Megan, I got the opportunity to be on in I think it was around 2020, but I was on a podcast then. And since then I have been following in. I think one of the cool things is just hearing the perspectives, the challenges in Ohio versus the challenges just in different parts of the country, how they're different, but sometimes they're really just the same and it's fun to kind of hear how some of those challenges or struggles and how guys are attacking them from a perspective that is just not as common maybe in our market. I've enjoyed hearing the stories. It's kind of more into the people, how people resolve and get through different challenges that their market faces.

Megan Ellsworth: Yeah. I love it. Jules?

Jules Dekovics: I can't even tell you how long it's been. For as long as I can remember at least that I've been looking at things and diving in and get a little more intimate to it, let's say, as things went on, but some of the favorite things about it is those stories of how people get through things, the variations from east to west, north to south, like we talked about earlier, it's the same thing. And to see how people get through and I've been in metal a long time and I just love looking at different projects and frankly looking at it and see what I might've done differently and then listening to how people did it and go, "Ah," and you learn things that way and that's the biggest piece I think with this, listening to these types of podcasts and the reading, you learn a lot from it and I think that's probably my favorite part of the whole thing.

Megan Ellsworth: Yay. Well, we're so glad to have you part of the Roofers Coffee Shop community here and thank you again for chatting with me. That was super interesting about the historical project. I look forward to hearing about any other fun projects you both have coming up. So thank you again.

Jules Dekovics: Sounds good. Well, thank you Megan.

Quentan Tobolka: Thanks for having me.

Jules Dekovics: Yeah.

Megan Ellsworth: Yes. For all of those listening, you can find stories from the roof wherever you listen to podcasts. You can also find it at rooferscoffeeshop.com and we will be seeing you next time. Thanks for listening to the AskARoofer podcast. Feel free to subscribe and leave a review. Go to askaroofer.com to ask a question.