HIP Roofing Ltd in Demand with Excellent Customer Service

SISTERS, HOLLY AND LUCY DODD run a successful roofing business in Chester and like most roofing contractors this spring are booked up well into the year.

But being in huge demand isn’t anything new for HIP Roofing, based in Saughall, Cheshire. Since taking over the business from her father, Terry Dodd, six years ago, the business has grown at an exponential rate.

“It’s partly down to creating a strong online presence,” says Holly. “When we took over Dad’s firm, MTD Roofing, we inherited Dad’s excellent reputation for customer service and roofing expertise. But the business needed to keep up with the digital age.

“Now, we have an up-to-date website, we’re on several social media platforms and one of the trusted trader sites, all with outstanding reviews.

Roofing Business

“But it’s also because we get a lot of recommendations and word of mouth referrals. We work hard at always turning up when we say we will. One of my pet hates is contractors who go off jobs for a day or two leaving the customer wondering where they are.

“Lucy’s always available on the phone and we have to tell her to stop answering on Sundays.”

Holly started working with her Dad as a girl. She used to be paid £5 to clean up the yard and office on a Saturday morning. As she got older, she would help her Dad working on the roofs and gradually built up her experience. Although Terry retired in 2015, he’s still there to ask advice from and occasionally helps out with overseeing work, remaining a very fit 78-year-old.

HIP Roofing Team

Apart from the sisters, we have contracted roofers in the team and Holly works with them as a team on the roofs.“We’re like a family, we spend time together outside work, we celebrate birthdays together. I buy the lads breakfast and always make sure there’s two people on a job just in case, we look after each other, we treat people who we would want to be treated if we were having work completed on our home’ 

The company has carried out local schools work, and is a registered Firestone installer but most of the work is domestic slating and tiling.

“I prefer working at peoples’ houses,” explains Holly. “That’s the part of the job I enjoy the most – meeting people, getting a glimpse into their lives. It’s interesting. I love building relationships with my Customers, and sometime friendships have happened too. And I like to see my job from start to finish. We’ve got so many customers where we started with them years ago, going out to do a repair and Eventually they’ll need a new roof and often by then we know them and their roof really well.

Aftersales Care

“We’ll do the maintenance afterwards too. We follow up, aftersales is important and customers appreciate it when they know you’ll come back and sort out any problems.”

Although Holly is a roofer, she says she doesn’t want her daughters Isabelle, 8 and Phoebe 3, to follow her into the family firm as roofers because it’s such hard physical work. However, as HIP Roofing stands for Holly and her daughters’ names, it seems that joining the business might be their destiny. ‘People love that we’re females, they trust us – and being in this industry, it’s a quality that’s hard to find’.