How Best Choice Roofing tripled estimating output with Hire Bloom — and AI

$478K

Saved annually by partnering with Hire Bloom

80%+

Insurance contingencies that now get an estimate — up from less than 25%

3x+

Estimating throughput with Hire Bloom team members working alongside AI

Highlights

Best Choice Roofing — the 4th-largest residential roofing company in the US — writes 600–700 insurance contingencies a year. A 7-person estimating team could attach estimates to fewer than 25% of them.
Custom AI alone couldn't close the gap, so CEO Bryce Barnett added 12–15 Hire Bloom team members to the estimating team alongside new estimating software — a partnership that has since grown to 22 team members.
Today, more than 80% of contingencies have an estimate tied to them — over 3x the previous throughput.
With 22 Hire Bloom team members, Best Choice Roofing saves an estimated $478,000 a year.

Scale without losing the local touch

74 locations. 25 states. Roughly 100,000 customers a year. Best Choice Roofing is the fourth-largest residential roofing company in the country — and since private equity acquired the brand in August 2024, it has added 20 new locations in 18 months.

That kind of growth comes with pressure. CEO Bryce Barnett's job is to find economies of scale for investors without losing what makes the brand work: local teams who live in their markets, and a high-touch experience for every homeowner.

With 100,000 customers a year, Bryce knew technology had to carry part of the load. The question was where automation should end and people should begin.

"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."

Bryce Barnett

CEO, Best Choice Roofing

The bottleneck: 700 contingencies, not enough estimators

Best Choice Roofing does a lot of insurance work — helping homeowners set up claims and providing insurance companies with estimates for roof repairs. Each job starts with a contingency: an agreement that says, in Bryce's words, "let us go work with you and work with your insurance company. If we can make something work, then we'll bring you along."

The team writes 600–700 contingencies a year. Seven internal estimators couldn't keep up. Fewer than 25% of contingencies had an estimate tied to them — the team was picking and choosing which homeowners to help.

They tried an AI agent first. It helped, but it couldn't carry the volume: "We couldn't deploy enough AI because there wasn't enough custom AI to be able to go build this yet," Bryce said. And the traditional fix — local estimators at $75,000 a year — would work, but Bryce had done this before. At Vivint Solar, he moved 14 departments and 220 roles offshore in less than 12 weeks. He knew there was another way.

More humans, not fewer

Best Choice Roofing brought on 12–15 Hire Bloom team members for the estimating team and paired them with software that helps them write estimates faster, cleaner, and more accurately. The AI stayed. The people came on alongside it.

"We were able to bring on another twelve to fifteen people from Hire Bloom, and the efficiencies we were able to gain... has made us so much more efficient, where over eighty percent of our contingencies now actually have an estimate tied to it, where before it was less than twenty-five percent," Bryce said.

From under 25% to over 80%. Same workflow, more than 3x the throughput. And no more picking and choosing which homeowners get help with their claim.

The partnership didn't stop at estimating, either. Best Choice Roofing now has 22 Hire Bloom team members across the business. Based on Hire Bloom's average client savings of $21,734 per team member, that's an estimated $478,000 a year — before counting the value of all the estimates that used to go unwritten.

Bryce doesn't oversell it: "We're still not perfect yet, but we're getting a lot closer to where I expect us to be."

"Okay, I was wrong."

Bryce got his own push into international hiring back in 2019, from a mentor who told him to stop deliberating and go figure it out. When it came time to build out the estimating team, he gave his estimating manager, Matt Loxley, the same push. Matt was 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 recalled. Months in, Matt tells Bryce he can't believe how much the team wants to learn, grow, and take on more of the estimating team's responsibilities. "It's a breath of fresh air to interview someone who actually wants a job!" Matt says.

For Bryce, the team members themselves settled the question. "They've become team members. They speak excellent English. They're college-educated in the United States. It allows us to basically just have a team member that's remote — and it's no different, because the entire team is remote right now."