Hey, I'm John Rogers
here's my story...
Hey, I'm John Rogers
here's my story...
I grew up in Montgomery Alabama during the 70’s. My first career was in the restaurant business and that led me to various parts around the south and up the east coast. I grew up with a love for the outdoors, which has continued into my adulthood. I have always enjoyed hiking, backpacking, camping, mountain biking, climbing, kayaking, the list goes on. I met my future wife in Birmingham, Alabama and after a few false starts (a nod to JB ) we have now been married for over 35 years. We have five daughters, which range in age from 19-34 and live scattered around the US, with one in the UK pursuing her masters.
I started my remodeling company in 1996 and became a licensed residential general contractor in the state of Georgia in 2004. To date, I have completed over 20 million dollars worth of renovation projects and built multiple homes from the ground up in the 1.5 million dollar price range, not including the land. I sold my remodeling company in 2019 for cash. Now I’m living the next chapter of my story.
I have always enjoyed helping people. I have coached each of my kids in various sports and I have had the good fortune to meet with many folks over the years to coach them in business and in their personal lives. I really enjoy watching the light bulbs come on as they begin to grasp the concepts and processes that I enjoy teaching. It is a real pleasure to see someone take positive steps forward, personally and professionally, and that–my friends–is my real purpose in life.
"John has a gift for getting to the heart of a matter and simplifying it. He helped calm down all the noise and distractions going on in my head so I could see what options I had to make the best choice."
Rich M
My first company
Cellular Unlimited 1993
I wish I had some photos but sadly I don't. We rented cell phones and sold pagers. We owned about 40 cell phones and had approximately 400 pager accounts when I sold the company for a few thousand dollars. It was a fun side hustle for my career in the restaurant business. Our mountain top moment was when we rented all 40 phones to FEMA for their disaster response to tropical storm Alberto in 1994. They rented from us because we had cell service and they didn’t. That peak was followed by a valley when it took 6 months to get paid and they were the bulk of our cash flow or lack thereof!
The History of
John Rogers Renovations:
In 1996 I started my remodeling company with less than $500 in the bank, a stay-at-home wife, two kids under the age of 10, a mortgage, two car payments and small amounts of other debt. As my first career, I worked in the restaurant business for two well known chains, as a manager then a general manager. Throughout this first career, I learned a lot about business, managing people and cost controlling while working in that first career. I did not go to college.
In 1995, I started working for a friend who owned a commercial construction company and after a year of working with him I thought I was smart enough to start my own company doing home remodeling. It was great at first–I had a few weeks of work lined up, plus it was new and exciting. I had enough connections that work was coming my way pretty easily, but I was struggling with how to swing a hammer, look at new jobs, write estimates, job costing, how much I should mark things up, insurance, the list went on and on.
I also struggled with the push and pull between the busy (which is great) and the slow (which is not great) cycles. The busy cycle was always met with excitement and eagerness and the slow cycle was always coupled with the “maybe I should just get a job working for someone else” thought. These cycles lasted until 2004, but I am getting ahead of myself.
In 1999, my brother-in-law got me involved with the Home Depot Expo as a contractor, and I thought that I had made it to the big leagues then. What started out as something fantastic, quickly turned into jobs that could never get finished–poor execution on their part and mine–lost profit, and later lost money. After a couple of years of trying to make this work, I finally had to say goodbye to the Expo. Fortunately, I had successfully grown my reputation and word of mouth referrals enough to shake the dust off my feet, look at my maxed out credit line and said the same thing I had said a hundred times before: “We will do better on the next job.” Which is a lot easier said than done.
Finally, in 2004 I decided to get serious and stop the cycle of barely making any money and thinking that I should get a job working for someone else. I had a couple of guys in the field that were doing great and if I was going to take a step forward, I had to get an in-house accountant in place. I hired someone part time to do payables, put receipts into QuickBooks, and it only took her a couple of weeks before she was killing it on her own.
With those couple of guys in the field and one in the office part time, I was able to go to the jobs in the morning, look at new jobs in the early afternoon and be back at the office by two, so I could do estimates–for free. Free estimates were the only part that I hated at this point.
With data entry off my plate, I had just enough time to start evaluating my Profit and Loss statement and it looked terrible. I knew how to read a P and L from my restaurant days, but I didn’t really understand how this P and L related to the jobs I was doing, and, well, it didn’t really match up. This was because of my accountant, he had set up my P and L for doing taxes, not for running a construction company. I set out on a new course to figure out how to properly structure a P and L for my purposes, track job costs, employee time, labor burden, subcontractor cost and materials cost. This did not come together quickly and there was a lot of trial and error. As I started to get all of this under control, I updated my overhead categories to more accurately reflect what my hard earned gross profit was being spent on.
Because of all of this, I was finally able to figure out how much I needed to mark up projects so that I could actually make money, consistently. The year 2008 was our best year ever, and we all know what was happening at that time too. We barely made it through ’09 but 2010 began with the promise of something better, so I made my next move.
The albatross of all of this was the free estimates. I don’t know who let “free estimates” become a thing, but I was not going to play that game any longer. In 2010, I hired my first interior designer, then a design assistant who could help with drawings and other administrative functions. We developed a process so that we could get paid for design and estimating. At the beginning of all of this, design was a loss leader for the company, later we turned it into a profit center.
(Team JRR 2008)
I had built everything off of this cash flow. I didn’t have any charge accounts with vendors or suppliers and I set up everything so that we didn’t charge anything. I had really dialed in on my costs, how to estimate a job, and most importantly how to invoice and schedule jobs for good cash flow. I had beaten my credit line down to zero and I hired an estimator. My work life was complete, no more estimating for me and we got paid to write them.
In 2011, I started marketing. Someone told me that if I wanted to get above 1.5 million in sales consistently and ‘sell” at a 40% gross profit, I had to market. They also said that marketing would bridge the gap that would inevitably happen when the economy took another dip. They were right about both of these things.
Gathering momentum
Investing into marketing...
(JRR did the construction for the Property Brothers in ATL 2012)
I started small and as marketing proved itself to me, I spent more and more money on it. I revamped my website and began following SEO best practices. Again, these things proved themselves and I spent more money as they did.
My goal was to do all of this through cash flow and I was generally successful. In 2018, for the first time ever I considered the idea of selling my company. I did a little research and came to the conclusion that it was possible to sell, but I needed one more year at the current profit level to get the sale price to a number that I liked.
John circa 2019
In January of 2019, I reconsidered selling and in March of that year I listed it. We had a couple of tire kickers along the way and on October 1st I had some real interest. We met and reviewed all of the systems and processes that we had developed and documented, considered our web presence and historical profitability, and on October 31st, 2019 I got a check for the full asking price. Now, to manage your expectations, it was not millions of dollars. It was enough to pay off everything and have some left over, but more importantly it got me out of the non-stop grind that I had been in. I took a month off and then went back to work. I am not the kind of person to sit still and I am living the next chapter of the story now.
On a more personal note, I mentioned the two kids by 1996, but my wife and I added three more in 2000, 2002 and 2004. Five kids–five girls–and my company raised these five kids and funded a conservative family lifestyle. We didn’t go snow skiing, but we went to the beach most summers. We enjoyed camping, hiking, kayaking and made the most of what we had. Some years were great and some were pretty lean, my wife was supportive throughout all of this and we have been married for over 35 years.
With my unique personal and work life, I have had the opportunity to meet with many men and women about their businesses and job opportunities. I have coached several small business owners in the areas of personal development and work/life balance. That was the kind of “side job” that I had while running my company, purely because I enjoy helping people succeed personally and professionally. I have been engaged in this full time endeavor since 2022 and I am living chapter three of my story now.
Below are some of the accolades we received and some photos from my John Rogers Renovations days.
John was a guest on a radio show in Atlanta circa 2013
The Team at NARI Awards Show 2016
In 2012 we were fortunate to do an episode with the Property Brothers. What a fun time we had with Jonathan and Drew!
NARI Awards 2011
JR Renovations Houzz Awards:
The NARI COTY Awards are premier honors in the remodeling industry. This annual award recognizes excellence in over 48 different categories and is only given to NARI members by a national panel of leading experts in their respective fields.
- Best of Houzz 2013, Design
- Best of Houzz 2016, Design
- Best of Houzz 2017, Design
- Best of Houzz 2018, Design
- Best of Houzz 2014, Service
- Best of Houzz 2015, Service
- Best of Houzz 2016, Service
- Best of Houzz 2018, Service
National Association of Remodeling Industry (NARI) Contractor of the Year (COTY) Awards
The NARI COTY Awards are premier honors in the remodeling industry. This annual award recognizes excellence in over 48 different categories and is only given to NARI members by a national panel of leading experts in their respective fields.
- Residential Bath over $60,000 (2011)
- Residential Interior under $100,000 (2011)
- Residential Interior $100,000 and over (2011)
- Residential Interior $100,000 and over (2012)
- Residential Kitchen $40,000-$80,000 (2013)
- Residential Kitchen over $150,000 (2015)
- Residential Kitchen over $150,000 Regional Winner (2016)
Five Fifty (550)
The Five Fifty (550) list showcases the achievements of the 550 most successful remodelers in the country. It is estimated that over 500,000 active contractors are considered for the spotlight, but only a little more than 500 are chosen.
- 2013 Award winner
- 2014 Award winner
- 2015 Award winner
- 2016 Award winner
JJR Renovations “Atlanta Business Chronicle Top 25 Residential Remodeling Contractors” Honors:
The Atlanta Business Chronicle, a publication with over 23,000 paid circulations in the Atlanta, GA area, ranks the top contractors in Atlanta every year by revenue. Only the top performers who provide homeowners with a single source for remodeling projects that require a variety of construction trades make the exclusive list.
- 2014 Award winner
- 2015 Award winner
- 2016 Award winner
- 2017 Award winner
- 2018 Award winner
- 2019 Award winner
- 2020 Award winner
Reviews from clients
of John Rogers Renovations, Inc
Reviews from clients
of John Rogers Renovations, Inc
Reviews from clients
of John Rogers Renovations, Inc
" I initially could not visualize the end result and certainly couldn’t come up with a tangible “value calculation”. Needless to say, signing the initial contract equated to a level of trust that I don’t often grant to many people.
The entire process, from drawings to completion, exceeded my expectations. John’s process has clearly been perfected over the course of his career. The end result gets a rating of “Unbelievable”. The first words of every person who has visited our home since project completion have been “WOW!”
Renay B. | Atlanta
John stands out. He is a wonderful communicator and I find that communication and expectation-setting are key to a good working relationship. He provided almost daily updates via email, had a complete schedule online that was continually updated and, most importantly, he called me when the project or question required a conversation. He was also available via text if needed.
Heath W. | Dunwoody
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