In 1978, Ray Ellis started Rayco Construction and built the commercial roofing company on strong relationships and referrals. After nearly 30 years of running the company, Ellis sold his business in 2006 to Duane Nelson and Paul Janssen, Rayco Construction’s current president and vice president, respectively.
Learning from the Family Business
Nelson started working for his family’s logging company, operating equipment and driving trucks, while most of us were learning to ride a two-wheel bike. Right out of high school, he began his career as a laborer putting on roofs. As his roofing career unfolded, he gained experience driving trucks, running cranes, watching over crews as a foreman, and eventually becoming a salesman. Over the course of his career, he had the pleasure of working for many great roofing companies in the Minneapolis-St. Paul area before partnering with Janssen in 2006 to buy Rayco Construction.
Janssen also started putting on roofs as a teenager. His father owned a roofing company, and Janssen worked with him during the summers. Like Nelson, Janssen started as a roofing laborer and then moved into roles as a foreman, a field supervisor and then sales. Janssen has spent most of his career at Rayco Construction. He recently celebrated 28 years at the company, a place where he started at the bottom and worked his way up to the top.
Leading from Experience
Today, Nelson and Janssen leverage their respective 25+ years of installing, repairing and running crews on flat roofs. With Nelson and Janssen at the helm, Rayco is a company that truly speaks from experience. The two leaders have a deep understanding and vision of what it means to deliver a superior roofing solution – from ordering the right materials and planning the project to completely executing the installation.