Baker Family,

We have made it to May! We know all of you have a bit of “cabin fever” being confined to work, home, and grocery stores (if you are able). We do too! However, our collective efforts to be cautious and focused on a safe return to public activity are critical to getting our lives and our economy back to normal are critical. While we see many of our state governments now announcing phased re-openings, we encourage each of you to maintain your lifestyle as you are for another few weeks. We must continue to use good social distancing, hygiene and PPE practices as advised. And, we will continue to operate in the field and in the office as we have been for the last 45 days for a bit longer. The last think we would want now is for any of branches to experience an outbreak – you all have been doing such a good job complying with these practices and continuing to operate for our customers, and we would not want to have a major interruption now after all of your hard work!

Here is what we saw this past week:

Our Update:

  • Shelter in Place orders are being phased out over the next few weeks / months in most of our locations.  That said, this is in no way means like is back to business as usual.  Please continue to operate as you have been by restricting your movements to work – home.  As returning to normal operations is our goal, we, too, will need to phase some of this back in and will be working with managers over the coming weeks to develop plans that make sense for individual locations and departments based on personnel numbers and activities.
  • The Federal government continues to expand financial support offerings to individuals who have been adversely affected by Covid 19 financially.  Our HR staff is up to speed on unemployment benefits (benefits which vary state by state) and retirement account loan provisions. While we are hopeful that none of you are experiencing financial hardship as a result of Covid 19, we acknowledge some of you probably are due to the loss of employment of a spouse or dependent.  We encourage those who have experienced such loss to take advantage of expanded unemployment benefits.
  • We encourage you to remind fellow employees to check the text messages coming from the company as many of these messages continue to send out positive and constructive information related to safety and operations.

Our Customers

  • No change for most job sites which remain open and schedules are being adhered to as planned. We are seeing these sites, especially those through GCs with multiple trades, require further precautions relative to social distancing, PPE and work hours. Please be mindful of your site’s requirements and recommendations through your daily safety huddles. If you require additional PPE to be compliant please let management in your branch / location know.
  • This week, we continued to see an increase in the number of service work orders being created in support of our commercial and residential service operations. That is in large part due to the storms that have come through the Southeast over the last 3 weeks. There are also select signs of businesses beginning to assess facility needs and deferred maintenance. There will be some “return to work” due diligence activities that facility managers, property managers, mutli-family residential managers will have to perform – we will need to be active in that process. This is where your commitment to professionalism from the sales process, to operations, to billing and close out are vital.
  • Our bid / pipeline activity for many of our divisions and departments continues to be active. That said, we have some locations that have been slower than others and many that have witnessed a sharp decline in new construction budgeting and estimating. We also have some of our larger private customers re-scheduling or putting on temporary hold some of their larger projects. We all need to be mindful of this as it affects locations differently. Staying close to our customers in all aspects of what we do is critical right now. They must have confidence in us, and we must be flexible and adaptive to their requests to push forward or back scheduled starts, etc. We must value every opportunity that we have right now.

The result of our economy being shut down for numerous weeks will have an impact on our society and our business. That is for certain. Thus, Expense and cost containment remain critical. Your vigilance and stewardship related to expenses such as non-essential travel, non-job related credit card usage, overtime usage, hiring freeze for salaried positions, wage freeze, and, in some cases, reductions in work hours all help to balance the negative impact of some projects being delayed or cancelled, customers who defer / delay payments, and reductions in our normal revenue volume levels. Thank you and please continue to operate in this manner. As we have stated before, we are examining all options for cost containment and will continue to do so as a good business practice and as a real response to an ever-changing economic environment.

There will be many economic challenges ahead for our country, our communities, and our business. Some of those challenges will not be easy to navigate. However, we remain POSITIVE and tremendously PROUD of this entire team.

We must keep each other healthy, mentally and physically, and we must continue to be there for our customers especially as they begin to return to operations in their facilities or examine what has been neglected and needs to be serviced in their hospitals, homes, apartment complexes, dormitories, churches, etc.

… stay CALM and stay FOCUSED

Board of Directors
Baker Roofing Company

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