I am Division President of MetalMaster-RoofMaster, the Upper Midwest commercial roofing and architectural sheet metal division of Wolkow Braker Roofing Corp., based in McHenry, Illinois. It is a 49-year-old company, now employee-owned through a new ESOP, in the middle of a real rebuild. It has a rich history and an incredible amount of capacity, like a caged animal that just needs to be unleashed. That is what I am here to do, and I love this job. I have not been able to say that in a long time.
I ran Great Day Improvements' Upper Midwest region, the three-season sunroom division across Chicago, Madison, Milwaukee, and Minneapolis. I inherited a region with real problems, falsified records, staff resignations, and quality issues, and started rebuilding it from the ground up. A few months in, a Chicago opportunity pulled me to MetalMaster.
I took over a roofing company, renamed it Roofed Right America after a trademark fight, trademarked it, and grew it from about $5 million to $35 million with a team of 180 across the region. When it sold to private equity, we stopped seeing eye to eye. I value my mental health more than a paycheck, so I resigned at the end of October 2025. I lost a dear friend over that disagreement, someone I still miss to this day.
At Metal-Era I learned the technical side of this industry, how edge metals are tested and how building codes get made, and I worked with the Canadian government to help develop codes that lined up with ours. I fell in love with sheet metal here. I also got let go. After ten years running my own company, I was not very manageable yet, and I can own that now.
On January 1, 2002, I started my own company out of my garage with nothing and built it into one of the top five roofing firms in Wisconsin, union sheet metal and union roofing both. When the recession reached commercial roofing in 2009 and 2010, customers paid far slower than our contracts said. I burned through my reserves and my line of credit, and it ended in an involuntary Chapter 7 liquidation in 2011. I did not run from the debt and I did not hide from it. I damn near lost everything, including the value of my name, and I learned more in that failure than I could have any other way.
I ran for Congress in Wisconsin's 5th District in 2016. I served as DNC Representative for Wisconsin from 2017 to 2023 and on the executive board of the Wisconsin Democratic Party, was Board President of Planned Parenthood of Wisconsin C4 from 2021 to 2024, and an Everytown for Gun Safety fellow. I also served as a Biden elector, and stepped back after the death threats that followed.
