Don Katzenberger, owner of S&K Roofing, Siding & Windows, in Eldersburg, Md., takes pride in his company’s ability to quickly respond to customer inquiries. With eight field sales representatives and a total staff of 35, the company has implemented a series of timing benchmarks: all calls get returned in 24 hours, jobsite visits must happen within 48 hours, and a full proposal must be sent within 72 hours of the customer’s first inquiry. But when a distinguished sounding U.S. Sen. John Glenn recently called, asking for a visit the same day, Katzenberger was able to bend the rules a bit.

“There is a pretty good chance that he had called some of our competitors before he got to us,” says Katzenberger. “So we dropped everything to meet with him. He called us at 10 a.m. and I was sitting in his living room by 1 p.m. By 3 p.m. I had a signed order for a new roof.”

Though the senator’s time constraints are not typical, the reason for his call is becoming much more typical. Glenn’s next door neighbor had recently replaced their roof with a synthetic slate material that has found strong appeal among high-end customers throughout S&K’s, Washington, D.C. service area. Many of the company’s calls for high-end roofing jobs are coming from people who notice new roofs, particularly the synthetic slates and cedar shakes.

“One of the things that really helped us to get into higher-end markets is synthetic roofing,” says Katzenberger, whose company completed 2,500 jobs in 2005 on $15 million in revenue. “We worked hand-in-hand with the sales representatives from our suppliers to get both synthetic slate and synthetic cedar approved in number of high-end communities. Once that happened, we found that a lot of homeowners would pay for its increase durability, that looks the same or better.”

In an extreme example, a suburban Maryland woman replaced a real slate roof with a synthetic one. The reason: her real slate roof had begun to leach iron-ore colors causing massive discoloration in spots. And compared to a new synthetic roof next door, the aesthetics were way off. The new roof cost her $80,000 says Katzenberger. The woman, he says, told him she was able to justify the cost by deferring a new-car purchase for a year — not something that an average homeowner could do.