SUNIK ROOFING an Industry Pioneer
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by Rennay Craats
ick Sims takes roofing seriously and has dedicated decades to improving the industry that he’s helped to shape. Since cutting his teeth as a young roofer in 1973 during the Texas building boom, he has become something of a pioneer.
“I didn’t know what I was doing at first but I learned. In a couple short years, I went from having seven guys on a roof doing a house a week to two crews of us doing three or four a week,” says Nick Sims, president of Sunik Roofing. He picked up tricks that made his crews more efficient and profitable, and he was one of the first to introduce staple guns and later nail guns. He developed a new system for quickly shingling a roof that involved the steady passing of shingles that were lined up and nailed down as the next shingle was en route. This cut down the time it took to shingle a house and established Sims and his crew as the pinnacle in the industry. When Sims and his family moved back to Canada in 1986, he wasn’t sure how he was going to make his living. He soon heard the call of roofing and he answered it in 1987. He established Sunik Roofing (a combination of his and wife Sue’s names) in 1989, first as a proprietorship and then as a limited company. He was one of the first to introduce the Calgary marketplace to power crews, which allowed him to complete three houses a day Sunik Roofing • 30
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