In his 40 years at Standard Roofing, Pete Taylor has seen a lot of changes, including the family company’s shift from strictly roofing to including other specialties.
“We’ve expanded the business quite a bit over the years,” says Taylor, whose grandfather, Henry Watson Taylor, started Standard Roofing in Montgomery 80 years ago.
Recent rebranding as Standard Commercial Roofing & Envelope Solutions has better defined what the company is today.
That shift began around 1996, when Pete Taylor assumed company leadership from his father, Watson Robbins Taylor. The younger Taylor shifted away from strictly new construction work and emphasized reroofing and related tasks, including scaffolding, asbestos abatement, waterproofing, masonry repair and other related areas of the building envelope.
“We’ve had several stages in the company,” says Taylor, now chairman and CEO of Standard. “We started in the ’40s, and in the ’50s began to delve into military work, which carried it into the ’60s with work in places like Michoud space center in New Orleans, Johnson Space Center in Houston and the Vehicle Assembly Building at Cape Canaveral.”
The ’80s saw Standard moving into industrial work for companies like Philip Morris, Charmin Paper and Miller Beer. “They were all building plants in the South, and we followed that,” Taylor says.
In 1984, after graduating from the University of Alabama, Taylor came to work for the company and soon started leading the shift from new construction to roof replacement and, later, asbestos abatement and other areas.
“We work on the building envelope, which consists of the exterior walls, the windows, the doors, the room, mechanical systems — the entire thing that would wrap a building up to protect its occupants from moisture infiltration that would lead to mold and mildew and things like that,” Taylor says.
Today, Standard has offices in Montgomery and Birmingham, with a client footprint that includes Alabama, Mississippi, Georgia, Northwest Florida and the Nashville area. Clients are largely institutional, including colleges such as the University of Alabama, Auburn University, Troy University, Samford University and the University of South Alabama, as well as school systems in Huntsville, Blount County, Montgomery County, Jefferson County and Shelby County.
As important as that client base is to Taylor, his employees are just as important. That includes Kristine Mantel, the company’s first female president; a number of professional managers who run each division of Standard Roofing; and others, including the subcontractors who do the daily work on the projects.
“We treat our subcontractors just like the people who are on payroll,” Taylor says, adding that the company has provided scholarships, money to take care of funeral expenses and other things.
“If they’ve been doing a good job, they deserve the help the company can give them,” he says. “If they’re working to make sure the company is profitable and successful, then we’re going to make sure that their families are fed and that they are taken care of whatever the issue might be.”
As Standard enters its 80th year, Taylor, whose son, Pete Jr., is now working at the company, is looking further down the road.
“When I turn 83, the company will be 100, and we will be working to reach that milestone, but in a profitable way — not just volume for volume’s sake,” he says. “We’ve made big changes over time, and they were great changes, and there will be other things. We may pick up more disciplines that customers request from us. … The first thing is servicing the customers and making sure our employees are well taken care of. If you don’t have dedicated employees and you don’t have committed, dedicated customers, then you haven’t got much.”
Quality and commitment are key, Taylor adds.
“We have a little catchphrase here, ‘We’ll never let you down,’” he says. “To me that’s the kind of thing we should be committed to. We should never let a customer down.”
Alec Harvey is executive editor of Business Alabama. He is based in Birmingham.
This article appears in the January 2025 issue of Business Alabama.
