The Latino roofing community is growing with each passing year in both influence and business ownership, and roofing distributors play an important part in making that happen.

In this video chat, RSP speaks with Alan Lopez, CARE Operations Manager at GAF, about the CARE bilingual training program and how it has expanded to include business education in addition to installation for Hispanic roofing professionals.

“The idea was to be able to provide to the Hispanic business owners, or those that wanted to become more than installers – there’s a lot of subcontractors that aren’t considered business owners as well – but they wanted more for the opportunity to develop their business,” he said. “The tools that we offer not only are installation … but now we take anything that we train in English and we bring it into the Spanish language.”

Lopez dives into some of the cultural aspects distributors should keep in mind when working with Latino roofers (pro tip: say “yes” to any quinceanera invites!). He also explains that roofing distributors can help bolster the Latino roofing community by booking GAF’s bilingual training, saying it’s not only a morally good decision to support the community, but a smart business move as well.

“Hispanics are the largest population within the roofing industry, you still have a lot of Hispanics that are coming to your store, that are coming to your door, that might be buying material for somebody else, that might be buying material for them. They don't understand how this works. Some of them do, some of them don't. And so if, if distribution does not embrace them, then they're, in the business sense of it, they're leaving money on the table,” he said.