A single roof can be a $30,000 job. That makes a missed request from a new customer one of the most expensive mistakes a roofing company can make, and with "hundreds of small tasks going on" in every job, as Ben Beckett puts it, there's no shortage of chances to make it.
Ben is the founder and owner of Alpine Roofing, and for about as long as the company has been around, his answer to that problem has been Zapier.
Built on Zaps from the start
Ben came to roofing from banking, and he's always been the tech-forward one in the room. When he started Alpine in 2022, a handful of people were juggling a huge amount of work in a crowded, competitive trade, so he went looking for anything that would give them an edge. He found it almost by accident.
"I stumbled upon Zapier, and once I started to use it and learned about what it could do, for me, it was a complete game changer."
He started by connecting Asana, where Alpine manages its projects, to Jobber, its CRM. From there, if a task could be automated so someone on his team didn't have to spend time on it, Ben automated it.
The Zap he's proudest of came out of those early days. It takes a roof measurement report and carries it all the way through to a finished estimate in Jobber. There was no ready-made step to build that quote, so Ben, a self-taught ex-banker with no coding background, figured out the Jobber API himself. "I had to learn how to do all that," he said, "and I got it figured out."
Somewhere along the way, the Zap history became his teacher. When something broke, he heard about it right away, and he could see exactly where it went wrong.
"It literally shows you that exact Zap run. There's always weird stuff going on, where something comes through and it just gets missed. I was able to get an email right away from Zapier saying, 'Hey, this is an error.' I'd go in and go through the steps, and that also taught me a ton."
Alpine grew up around those Zaps. Today, the company has about 40 employees and offices in Spokane and Richland, Washington, serving customers across Washington, Idaho and Oregon. It puts on about 300 residential roofs a year, plus a good share of commercial work. Ben sums up what Zapier does for the office like this:
"Zapier's been huge for us. We're running about 12,500 automated steps a month through it, all work that somebody in the office used to do by hand, like copying leads over, updating job cards, filing estimates and sending notices. If each one takes a minute or two, that's anywhere from 50 to 100 hours a week, so it's basically doing the work of one or two full-time office people we never had to hire."
One row for every customer
One of the first things Ben built was a way to view the status of every customer and prospect, along with their projects, in one place.
Before, the details of a job were spread across different apps, inboxes, and people's memories. This means that answering a simple question like 'where are we with this customer?' meant digging.
So Ben built out a way to track every step of the customer journey, all in one place. Now the whole office works from the same picture.
Anyone can see where a job stands, what's already happened, and what comes next, without chasing down a coworker. It keeps customers and actions within a project from falling through the cracks. It also became the foundation for everything Ben has automated since.
The challenge was that once the customer journey was centralized in a single surface, maintaining it in real time required connecting every one of those moments across every app. That meant a lot of new Zaps, and Ben wanted them running sooner rather than later. So he started looking for a faster way to build.
The next chapter: Next-Gen Zaps
That search led him to the early access program for Next-Gen Zaps, and he emailed Zapier support right away to get in. Once he was in, he opened Claude and pointed it at the apps he'd spent years connecting:
"Hey, I have all these apps. You have this connection now. Let's start going through and getting everything converted."
They worked through it one workflow at a time. Claude built each Zap, Ben tested it, and then he checked that the data landed on the sheet the way it should. It was the same habit his Zap runs had taught him, only much faster. He started with the timeline workflows because they mattered most, and he's still working through the rest.
Thinking back to the estimate Zap that took him all that learning, Ben put it simply:
"Now that would have taken me two minutes with Next-Gen Zaps. The speed at which I can now build is incredible."
Going through everything also surfaced a couple of problems he didn't know he had. Calls from the answering service weren't reaching anyone. And brand-new leads never made it onto the sheet, because the old booking Zap could only update rows that already existed. Both are fixed now.
Why he keeps building on Zapier
Ben knows he could have had an AI tool write all of this as custom code. He just doesn't want to give up what he's had since his very first Zap.
"I know Zapier. I don't want to build in some code somewhere that tries to do that. I want to be able to see it, verify it, and make sure nothing's slipping through. I would pay a ton of money for that. That's worth every penny to me."
All 14 of his Next-Gen Zaps are agent-managed, so Zapier keeps watch over each one, flags problems and suggests fixes. It's the same error email Ben has counted on for years, only now it's working around the clock.
The app he's building on top of it all
Ben is now building Alpine's own operations app on top of these connections. The idea is simple: one place where the team can get the answers they need and get their work done, without jumping between programs or waiting on someone else. A lot of the behind-the-scenes work that used to fill the office's day now takes care of itself. That frees the team to spend their time where it matters most, with customers and on roofs. It also gives Ben a clearer, more up-to-date view of the business than he's ever had. That alone saves about 15 hours a week, or roughly $30,000 a year at bookkeeper rates. Just as important, it builds Alpine's way of doing things into the tools themselves, so both offices run the same playbook no matter who's working that day.
"The goal is that nobody here should be doing work a computer can do. My team should be spending their time with customers and on roofs, not on data entry."
What it adds up to
Across all of Alpine's automations, the conversion rate from first inquiry to signed job is up at least 15%. Zaps now flag customers nobody has called back and requests that should have been handled.
Before Alpine automated its lead handling, a new lead might sit for a few hours, sometimes until the next day, depending on who saw it first. Now that lead gets a text back within a couple of minutes, day or night. The follow-up Zaps catch 10 to 15 leads a month that would have slipped through the cracks, like a missed call nobody returned or a request that sat in Jobber.
Close even a few of those at up to $30,000 a roof, and it's easy to see why Ben puts the value of the sales side alone in the hundreds of thousands of dollars.
If you've been building Zaps for years
You're already where Ben was when he started. You have apps connected, workflows you trust and the habit of checking your runs when something looks off. The easiest first step is the one he took: pick the workflow you check most often, rebuild it as a Next-Gen Zap and compare the runs side by side.
Learn more about Next-Gen Zaps.
Ben Beckett is the founder and owner of Alpine Roofing, a residential and commercial roofing company with offices in Spokane and Richland, Washington.
