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What Best Choice Roofing's CEO Gets Right About AI in Home Services

Best Choice Roofing touches about 100,000 customers a year. It's the fourth-largest residential roofing company in the country — 74 locations in 25 states. So when CEO Bryce Barnett joined us for a live AMA, we expected to talk about technology.

We didn't expect his sharpest takes on AI in home services to be about people.

For half an hour, Bryce took questions on AI, hiring internationally, and life under private equity. The full recording is worth your time (watch it here). Here are the moments we keep thinking about.

The question he asks before deploying any AI

Bryce gives his team one filter for every AI tool they evaluate: will it replace somebody's job, or will it make people more efficient?

After a year spent overhauling Best Choice Roofing's tech stack, his answer is firm: "It doesn't have to be or. It's always and."

That's not a slogan. It's a budget decision.

"I've been spending the last year focusing on the tech stack," he told us. "That's allowed me to identify where we want to invest more — and scale back less in our tech and focus more on people-to-people interactions."

Why pull back on tech spend at a company that size? Because homeowners are telling him to. (We found the same pattern across the 10,938 customer reviews in our AI in Home Services report). In Bryce's words: "More and more people are realizing that AI is everywhere, and then they're also saying, 'I don't want that.' I actually want to deal with people. Being able to find that balance for homeowners and for my employees allows me to be more efficient in how we're deploying those tools."

The clearest example came from his estimating team. Best Choice Roofing writes 600–700 insurance contingencies a year — agreements to pursue a roof claim with the homeowner's insurer — and seven estimators could attach estimates to fewer than 25% of them. They tried an AI agent. It wasn't enough: "We couldn't deploy enough AI because there wasn't enough custom AI to be able to go build this yet."

So they did the "and": kept the AI, added 12–15 people, and introduced software to help them write estimates faster. Today, more than 80% of contingencies get an estimate.

(Full disclosure: those 12–15 people came from Hire Bloom—you can read the case study here. We're big believers in this story, and we know we're biased. The numbers, though, are his — not ours.)

On hiring internationally: "You just gotta go do it"

Bryce got his own push into global hiring in 2019, from a mentor who told him to stop deliberating and start testing. He's been pushing that forward ever since — most recently to his own estimating manager, who was openly nervous about interviewing candidates overseas.

It didn't last. "After his second interview, he came upstairs, came into my office, and he was like, 'Okay, I was wrong. These guys are incredible. I can't wait to be able to work with them.'"

Bryce's advice for operators on the fence: start small. Phones, email, back-office work — roles that are repeatable, trainable, and already remote. It doesn't take a big investment to test, and if it doesn't work, you reset and try again.

The talent side matters to him, too. The people he's hired this way are "folks who actually wanna work, who wanna engage... they wanna contribute to the overall business" — and for them, he said, the work is "a lifeline," one that betters their lives and their families' lives.

He also named a benefit we rarely hear said out loud: handing your standard operating procedures (SOPs) to a partner pressure-tests your whole business. "If you can go and build a team off of my SOPs and it's working, then I know that I've written my SOPs the right way."

On private equity: "They are buying you for one reason"

The most candid stretch of the AMA had nothing to do with AI. Private equity bought Best Choice Roofing in August 2024 at 55 locations; 18 months late,r it has 74. Bryce knows the model from the inside, and he didn't sugarcoat it.

"They are buying you for one reason and one reason only, and that's to sell you and make a profit off of you and move on to the next deal."

That's not a complaint — it's a planning instruction. His counsel for founders weighing an offer: you can find dollars in a lot of places, but cultural alignment is the thing you can't retrofit. Ask your prospective partner how they handle the rough quarters, not just the good ones. "You should also talk about what happens when things aren't going to go well — before they don't go well."

Watch the whole conversation

The full AMA covers Bryce's take on call centers, recruiting automation, balancing scale with local teams, and what a 25-year career taught him about trying things before they're comfortable.

And if a bottleneck like that estimating team sounds familiar, we're happy to talk through what the "and" could look like for you.

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