Josh Swisher is the owner of Northface Construction, a roofing company located in Elk River.
From the time he was in kindergarten, until he was a freshman in high school, Swisher lived in Andover on five acres of land.
That is until his family opted to sell their property to a developer.
They then moved to the small town of Nowthen, and Swisher later graduated from St. Francis High School in 2009.
Throughout his youth, Swisher was experimental, his personality not yet fortified.
In middle school, he liked skateboarding.
“I wore spike belts and had dyed hair,” he says, and then when the family migrated to Nowthen, he ditched the skateboard in favor of a more powerful vehicle.
“I also found out what rednecks were all about,” he says with a laugh. “In keeping with the cliches, I then bought a truck.”
But Swisher never became insulated in his small town, his brain too curious to let apathy ensue.
After high school, Swisher went to community college and spent a year in North Dakota before coming back to Minnesota and enrolling at the best academic institution in the state, St. Cloud State University (no authorial bias here).
Swisher ultimately earned a degree in business, but even before he walked across the podium to grab his diploma, he was already a businessman, having been a roofer since he was fifteen, and then founding Northface Construction while he was still attending classes at SCSU.
“I got the LLC in 2010, but Northface Construction wasn’t really a company at that point,” Swisher claims.
“Honestly, I got the LLC so that I could show proven income, then get a loan in order to buy a truck and impress chicks.”
In fact, Swisher says he didn’t take being a roofing contractor seriously until 2015, when he graduated.
“The year before I graduated, I had made enough money from roofing that it became clear that if I simply doubled or tripled down on those efforts, I could make a nice life for me and my family,” Swisher explains.
From 2015-2017, Swisher grinded, wearing every hat in his roofing company until he could afford to hire an employee to alleviate some of his daily responsibilities.
In the years since, Northface Construction has become a legitimate player in the Twin Cities roofing market, to the point that Swisher has employed 31 other individuals to help him turn his once modest LLC into a full-fledged roofing machine.
As we sit in his office, I ask Swisher what this all means to him.
After all, he once was just a kid from Nowthen, installing shingles to earn some spending money.
“That’s a great question, Quentin,” he says, then pausing for several seconds to reflect on a journey that has not only added some commas into his bank account, but more importantly, allowed him to develop into the man, husband, and father he once dreamed of becoming.
“Northface Construction is, in many ways, the byproduct of my pursuit of excellence.”
Adds the cerebral and well-read Swisher:
“One of the core values at my roofing company is to constantly be learning. I’m a curious person, and I want to discover new things about other people, the roofing industry, my 32 employees, and our clients. That’s really the basis of everything we do because when we’re genuinely trying to understand and help people solve their home exterior problems, that’s when we find success.”
In that sense, the roofing business is a conduit for learning, but in an industry that is widely known for attracting unscrupulous characters, self-development often gets discarded in favor of the expedient acquisition of capital.
For Swisher, his modus operandi isn’t centered around revenue figures or net worth.
Instead, he wants to cultivate a culture and solidify a reputation that homeowners feel confident hiring for their next roof replacement.
Still, getting to that end goal, if there even is an endpoint, will be arduous.
“If you ask me what this company is going to look like in a few years,” Swisher begins, which is ironic because I was going to pose that same question to him, albeit later in the conversation, “but if you asked me that question I wouldn’t know the answer because everything is constantly evolving and changing.”
“That’s both simultaneously exciting and scary, but if we remain focused on leading with intentionality and a desire to help people, I’m confident Northface will continue to thrive.”
Like most entrepreneurs, Swisher doesn’t have the future neatly packaged into a comfortable itinerary.
He only knows where he thinks he wants to go, and he is willing to endure some agony in hopes that one day the knots in his stomach will morph into eternal satisfaction for having ascended a cliff few would ever dare scale.
“Be careful what you wish for because I asked God to make me strong, and consequently he’s put a lot of daunting challenges in front of me,” Swisher shares, not a morsel of complaint accompanying those words.
“I’ve always wanted to be the best version of myself. I have yet to find my limits, and that’s because the reality is if you want to truly discover what you’re made out of, you’re going to be tested every damn day.”
Call him crazy, or simply call him a roofer; either way, Swisher is embracing the path ahead.
“I’m excited about a lot of things. I’m excited about the prospect of destigmatizing what it means to be a roofing contractor, because unfortunately, there are a lot of contractors who operate with malintent,” he says.
“That then gives homeowners bad experiences, and a poor perception of this industry, but if I can do my part to reverse that trend and provide so much value to homeowners in the way of information and resources, then I’m doing my job; not just as the owner of a roofing company, but also as a steward of the community.”
Running a roofing juggernaut sounds good on paper, but to some homeowners, shingles are just shingles, and there isn’t anything a roofing contractor can do to alter that perception.
In seeking to combat those preconceived beliefs, Swisher and his team created CFLM, an acronym that means customer for life mindset.
“With that, the goal is to create and facilitate an experience that is so good that homeowners will not want to call anyone else for roofing, siding, windows, or gutters,” Swisher outlines.
“What we do is not rocket science, but what the CFLM looks like in practice is doing everything that we say we’re going to do, and openly communicating at every point of the process so that expectations are properly established.”
Adds the former St. Cloud State Husky:
“Again, I don’t think striving for that is anything revolutionary, but in this industry, doing those simple things goes a very long way toward building and engendering trust with the client.”
So much so that even when things go left during a project, Northface Construction has the systems and the staff in place to orchestrate a seamless remedy.
“When something goes wrong, and inevitably that will happen sometimes because there are things that are out of our control, that’s when we show our true character, and do what we can to not only rectify the situation, but to give the homeowner confidence that we truly are looking out for their best interests.”
As mentioned, Swisher doesn’t have it all figured out, nor does he purport to, but he has established a roofing company that has generated millions of dollars of revenue in 2024 alone, plus amassed a 4.9 rating (out of 575 reviews) on Google.
Which is to say, Northface Construction doesn’t miss the mark, their clients are extremely satisfied, and they are on the precipice of becoming a household name in the Twin Cities in the years ahead.
“And how we are going to do that is by implementing aggressive and effective marketing and branding strategies,” Swisher says, a tactic that if successful, will allow him to capture more market share in a region that has an estimated 150,000 roofs replaced every year.
“That being said, the biggest component to all this is we will not grow to the level I’m envisioning if we’re not providing commensurate value to Minnesota homeowners, so delivering that exceptional customer service will always be at the forefront of our efforts.” QS
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