He Was Homeless and Living in a Car. Then He Built a Roofing Company That Sold for More Than $50 Million

Before Roofing, Schober Was Trying to Survive

Schober has spoken openly about the years before ProWest. He grew up with more stability than his later circumstances might suggest, but drugs and alcohol entered his life early. By his teenage years, his priorities had changed dramatically. He ran away from home at 15, went through rehabilitation, and spent years moving around the country. Eventually, he found himself homeless. His home was a Volkswagen bus. In recent interviews, Schober has described living that way for close to a year, using public facilities to shower and doing whatever he could to get by. The strange contradiction, according to Schober, was that even during that period he still read books about business and success.

Part of him apparently continued believing his life could look different. Getting there took years. Schober has said his sobriety date is May 31, 1997. The addiction did not disappear because a business opportunity suddenly appeared. He first had to rebuild his life. Roofing came later. And when it did, Schober did not enter the industry with trucks, employees, capital, or decades of technical roofing experience. He entered it as a salesman.

His First Day Selling Roofs Changed Everything

Schober has told the story of his first real roofing sales experience several times. He was 37 years old and looking for a fresh start when he was offered a job selling roofs after a major hailstorm in Kansas. At that point, he was not running his own roofing company. He had joined an existing roofing operation as a salesperson and traveled to the storm market to knock doors and find customers. He packed a suitcase and temporarily left his wife and two young children behind while he tried to see if the opportunity could work.

When he arrived in Kansas, he had almost nothing he needed to do the job. No vehicle, no ladder, no business cards, and not even a local phone number. Schober called the company's general manager and asked what he was supposed to do. The answer was simple: start walking. So he did.

At the first house, Schober knocked on the door and offered to inspect the homeowner's roof. The homeowner agreed, but Schober then realized he did not even have a ladder, so he asked the homeowner if he could borrow his. The homeowner brought one out, Schober climbed onto the roof, and his career selling roofs began.

By the end of that first night, Schober says he had signed eight contracts. Five eventually became roof replacement projects, producing approximately $8,000 for him. For someone who had spent years struggling to find direction, the lesson was immediate. Schober had discovered something he could do extremely well: walk up to a stranger, start a conversation, build trust, and turn that conversation into a roofing customer.

From Roofing Salesman to Business Owner

But Schober was still selling roofs for somebody else. The Kansas experience taught him the sales side of the roofing business. He learned how storm restoration worked, how to approach homeowners, how to inspect roofs, and most importantly, how to consistently create business by knocking on doors. Once he knew he could sell roofs, the opportunity became much bigger than earning commissions for another company.

Schober has described the next step simply: after learning how to sell roofs, he and his partners started their own company. That company became ProWest Roofing. ProWest's public company history dates the business to 2002. Schober would eventually become known as one of its cofounders and help turn what began as a roofing operation in Arizona into a much larger residential roofing business.

But Schober did not want to build a company where every sale depended on him personally knocking on another door. Almost immediately, the question changed. It was no longer, "How many roofs can I sell?" It became, "Can I teach somebody else to sell roofs the way I do?"

The First Growth Engine Was Not Google

Today, contractors spend enormous amounts of money trying to get homeowners to find them through Google Ads, Local Services Ads, SEO, Facebook, and lead generation companies. ProWest's early growth engine was much more direct: walk into a storm-damaged neighborhood, knock on the door, start a conversation, inspect the roof, and sell the job.

A major hailstorm could damage thousands of roofs across the same geographic area. Instead of waiting for every homeowner to search for a roofing contractor, Schober and his salespeople could go directly to the homes that potentially needed the work. Schober already knew that approach worked because he had done it himself in Kansas. Now the challenge was making it work through other people.

The Business Grew When Schober Stopped Making It About Himself

Once ProWest was underway, Schober began bringing friends into the business and teaching them what he had learned about roofing sales. That was the real beginning of scale. One successful salesperson could produce a lot of roofing work, but six people who knew how to follow the same process could produce far more than Schober ever could by himself.

Schober has said that this was also when his approach to business began changing. Instead of concentrating everything around his own success, he focused on helping the people around him become successful. He has described treating the salespeople as though he worked for them rather than the other way around. That philosophy mattered because Schober's personal ability to sell roofs was valuable, but it was not scalable until somebody else could reproduce it.

He had gone from selling roofs for another company to helping build a company that could teach other people how to sell them. And that created the next problem. Selling more roofs was one thing. Actually delivering all of those jobs was another.

Sales Alone Still Could Not Build the Company

Schober eventually learned another lesson that is particularly relevant to contractors. Being able to sell a lot of work does not automatically mean you have built a strong business. In one interview, he summarized the idea simply: the back end of the company matters just as much as the front end. That means the sale is only the beginning. Someone has to inspect the job correctly. Materials have to be ordered. Crews need to be scheduled.

The roof has to be installed. Insurance documentation may need to be handled. Customers need updates. Problems need to be fixed. Payments need to be collected. Reviews and referrals need to follow. A contractor with excellent marketing and weak operations can actually create problems faster. Every new lead becomes another opportunity to disappoint someone. ProWest had to build systems capable of supporting the sales operation Schober and his team were creating.

That is where a roofing sales organization begins turning into an actual roofing company.

ProWest Became Bigger Than One Salesman

Public business records place ProWest's beginnings in Arizona in the early 2000s. The company ultimately developed into a residential and commercial roofing operation serving multiple markets. Schober remained an important part of its growth, but the company became much larger than one person's ability to knock doors. Recruiting became important. Training became important. Leadership became important. Customer experience became important.

The company needed people who could reproduce the same sales process across different neighborhoods and eventually different markets. That is the same transition almost every growing contractor faces. A roofing company can reach a certain size because the founder is exceptional. It reaches a much larger size only when the company itself becomes exceptional. By 2022, ProWest had become valuable enough to attract institutional capital.

Then Private Equity Came Calling

In March 2022, Spell Capital Mezzanine announced that it had made a debt and equity investment supporting the acquisition of ProWest. The public transaction announcement confirmed the acquisition but did not disclose the purchase price. Later interviews and profiles involving Schober have described the transaction as being worth more than $50 million, with some reporting a figure around $51 million. Because the official deal announcement did not publish the amount, the exact figure should be understood as reported rather than independently disclosed by the transaction parties.

For Schober, the transaction represented an enormous change. A man who had once slept in a Volkswagen had helped build something institutional investors wanted to own. But the acquisition also says something about the roofing industry itself. Residential roofing remains highly fragmented. Thousands of contractors operate in individual cities and regions. A company that can consistently generate customers, train salespeople, produce jobs, maintain a strong reputation, and repeat that system across markets becomes much more valuable than a contractor that simply has a busy season.

Private equity is not buying a roofing company because of the shingles it installs. It is buying the business system behind those jobs: the customer relationships, the sales team, the brand, the workforce, the processes, and the ability to keep generating revenue year after year. By that point, ProWest had become much more than a local roofing contractor.

The Story Did Not End With the Sale

After the transaction, ProWest became part of a broader roofing platform. Today, ONE Solutions includes ProWest Roofing, Interstate Roofing, O'Danny Boy Builders, and 5 Stars Roofing as part of a larger network of roofing businesses. Schober remained connected to the organization, but his role and focus began changing. Then ProWest hit another milestone. In December 2025, FOX 10 Phoenix reported that the company had recorded $70 million in sales, its best year ever.

That number is especially interesting because it came several years after the acquisition. The company had not simply been built and sold. It was still growing. Some later profiles cite figures approaching $189 million or $200 million, but those numbers appear to refer to the broader roofing platform rather than ProWest alone. For ProWest itself, the $70 million 2025 sales figure is the cleaner number supported by independent reporting.

And Schober decided to celebrate that record year in an unusual way. He started giving money away.

From Selling Food Stamps to Giving Away $35,000 in a Week

FOX 10 reported that Schober gave away approximately $35,000 to people around Arizona in a single week after ProWest's record year. He approached strangers in parking lots. He gave money to families. He helped people struggling with rent. He filmed some of the encounters and shared them online. The concept eventually became part of a larger personal brand Schober calls 9 Figure Roofer, centered increasingly around generosity and second chances.

There is something unusually circular about that part of the story. Decades earlier, Schober was living in a Volkswagen and depending on food stamps. Now he was walking up to people who were struggling financially and handing them money. His current platform reports hundreds of thousands of dollars given directly and more than a billion views across social platforms. Schober has also become involved in efforts aimed at people coming out of addiction or incarceration, including programs connected to training people for roofing and sales careers.

The person who once needed a second chance had built a career around giving other people one.

What Contractors Can Learn From ProWest

The emotional part of Schober's story is powerful, but there is also a very practical business lesson underneath it. ProWest did not become valuable because Bob Schober could knock on more doors than everyone else forever. It became valuable because something that worked for Bob could eventually work through other people. Customer acquisition became repeatable. Sales could be taught. People could be recruited. Jobs could be produced.

The company could operate beyond the founder. That is where many contractor businesses get stuck. The owner believes the problem is a shortage of leads, so the company buys more advertising. But the website does not create enough trust. Calls go unanswered. Salespeople do not follow the same process. Estimates sit without follow up. Nobody knows which lead sources are actually creating customers. The company generates more opportunities but does not become meaningfully better at converting them.

ProWest's story shows the opposite. Schober first discovered a way to create opportunities himself. Then he taught other people how to create them. The company eventually built enough infrastructure around those opportunities that it became something investors wanted to acquire. That is a customer acquisition system. The specific methods have changed since Schober started knocking doors. Today, homeowners may begin by searching Google rather than answering a salesperson at the front door.

But the basic path remains similar. The contractor has to become visible. The homeowner has to trust the company. The opportunity has to become a conversation. The conversation has to become an estimate. The estimate has to become a customer. And the customer experience has to become a review or referral that helps create the next opportunity. That is the same principle GiveMeSomeLeads applies to contractor marketing. Google Ads, contractor websites, landing pages, and conversion tracking are not separate marketing products.

They are pieces of the same customer acquisition system. The objective is not simply to produce more clicks. It is to make the path from homeowner demand to paying customer more measurable and more repeatable.

From a Volkswagen to a Roofing Company Worth More Than $50 Million

Bob Schober's story could easily be reduced to a motivational headline. Homeless man becomes successful entrepreneur. But that misses the more interesting part. There were years between those two versions of his life. Sobriety came first. Then a strange opportunity selling roofs after a hailstorm. Then one homeowner who lent him a ladder. Then eight signed contracts. Then learning how to teach other people what he knew. Then building a company capable of delivering the work those salespeople sold.

Then private equity. Then a business producing tens of millions of dollars every year. Schober did not go directly from a Volkswagen to a $50 million transaction. He went from being unable to control his own life to building systems that could help hundreds of other people perform without depending entirely on him. That is the transformation that made ProWest valuable. The roofing industry happened to be the vehicle. And perhaps that is why the final chapter fits the story so well.

Schober once depended on strangers and second chances. Today, after helping build a roofing business that changed his life, he spends much of his time trying to create those second chances for someone else.