CJ Covell is the Chief Information Officer at Everlast Roofing, a family owned American manufacturer specializing in metal building components used in residential, commercial, industrial, and agricultural construction. Since its founding in 1996, Everlast Roofing has expanded across multiple states, producing metal roofing and siding that power everything from pole barns to modern residential builds. CJ grew up inside the company, often learning technology alongside its evolution, and eventually developed a leadership style that blends hands on understanding with strategic direction. Today, he oversees technology, systems, process improvement, and digital transformation across a fast growing manufacturing footprint.
Here’s a glimpse of what you’ll learn:
- How Everlast Roofing scaled from a small family business to a multi state manufacturer
- Why CJ believes technology should serve as a force multiplier for human ability
- How AI is transforming warehouse operations, logistics, and ERP workflows
- Why understanding the user experience is the foundation of great system design
- How Everlast used ChatGPT and Cursor to build a production ready warehouse system in weeks
- Why communication tools like Zoom and good audio equipment are essential for trust and connection
- How strong vendor relationships affect long term technology outcomes
- Why future leaders must continually experiment with AI to avoid falling behind
In this episode…
CJ Covell shares the origin story of Everlast Roofing and explains how a family business adopted technology from the earliest stages of the internet. Many longtime employees received their first email address through Everlast, which created a unique challenge as the company transitioned from simple office servers to modern systems requiring structured access control and disciplined IT strategy. CJ reflects on growing up inside the organization, helping solve computer issues as a child, and watching technology become a business critical function.
A major theme of this episode is the acceleration of AI and its ability to amplify human capability. CJ describes Everlast’s challenge of managing a massive coil warehouse with thousands of steel coils and new employees lacking historical knowledge. Instead of hiring outside consultants or purchasing a costly logistics system, CJ and his team used ChatGPT to generate system specifications, ask context building questions, and outline a custom warehouse solution. Within three weeks, his team built a working application using Cursor that now allows any employee with a phone to find coils, scan barcodes, update information, and perform tasks with confidence. What would have taken six months to a year with traditional consulting was completed internally with greater accuracy and far lower cost.
CJ also discusses the importance of deep user empathy. He spent days performing warehouse tasks himself to understand friction points and workflow issues. By capturing every moment of friction and turning it into actionable design requirements, the team created a solution that improves decision making and eliminates guesswork. CJ emphasizes that most people do not make mistakes intentionally; they simply lack the right information at the right time. Technology becomes transformative when it removes barriers rather than creating new ones.
The conversation shifts toward communication and the role technology plays in building connection. CJ explains why tools like Zoom outperform other platforms and how simple investments in lighting, microphones, and camera placement create human centered virtual interactions. He even uses a teleprompter setup so his eyes align directly with the viewer, creating natural eye contact and improving trust. CJ points out that companies often resist small investments in communication technology despite spending thousands on travel for a single meeting. He argues that communication quality is the modern equivalent of showing up well dressed and prepared for an in person conversation.
CJ closes with a reflection on the future of AI and security. He notes that threat actors now use AI to mimic writing styles, create sophisticated phishing attacks, and exploit email weakness. As businesses rely heavily on email, AI driven threats force organizations to adopt AI powered defenses. Beyond security, CJ believes the rapid acceleration of AI means leaders must continually experiment, learn, and adapt. Falling behind even briefly could create a widening gap that becomes impossible to close.
Resources mentioned in this episode:
Matthew Connor on LinkedIn
CyberLynx Website
CJ Covell on LinkedIn
Everlast Roofing Website
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Transcript:
Cyber Business Podcast – CJ Covell, CIO at Everlast Roofing
Matthew: Matthew Connor here, host of the Cyber Business Podcast. Today we're joined by CJ Covell, CIO at Everlast Roofing. CJ, welcome to the show.
CJ: Hi, great to be here. Thank you.
Matthew: Great to have you. Before we get too far in, a quick word from our sponsors.
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And now back to our show. CJ, for those who aren't familiar, can you tell us about Everlast Roofing and your role there as CIO?
CJ: Sure. Everlast Roofing is a metal building component manufacturer — a family business. Dad started it in 1996 in Central PA, and since then we've expanded with factories in southern Maine, northwestern Ohio, northern Indiana, and most recently just north of Cincinnati and west of Dayton in Eaton. Basically, if you look at the outside skin of a building and it has metal roofing or metal siding, that's something we're likely able to make. You've probably heard of pole barns — that's the most common — but increasingly you're seeing metal on residential homes, banks, industrial and commercial buildings. It's a pretty exciting thing to be in manufacturing in the US, which isn't something you see as much of anymore. I always smile when I hear people say we need to bring manufacturing jobs back — I just think, hey, we've got them. Come on in.
Matthew: I love that. And 1996 was an interesting time to start a manufacturing business — the Internet was just becoming real. How has that shaped the company's relationship with technology?
CJ: A lot of our employees have been with us 10, 15, 20, even 25 years, which is incredible. Their first email address was their Everlast email address. It's been fascinating to watch technology mature in parallel with the company — because at some point you're not just running your own Exchange Server in a closet anymore. You have a few hundred employees and you're managing roles, access levels, permissions, and it extends to things like physical access control. The joke has always been that my first job at the company was at age eight as the IT guy. We couldn't afford an actual IT person at that stage, so I was hanging around dad's office on school breaks and summers. We were all Mac at the time, so the sales guys would ask things like how do I restart the computer, how do I ZAP the PRAM, how do I set up email on this new machine. One time dad came home with four PowerBook G4s — this must have been around 2005 because we were opening the Indiana facility. The boxes back then were massive. He put them on the kitchen table and said, these four are going in Indiana. And at that point it clicked for me: oh wait, this is actually a real job. People get paid for this. I just thought it was cool to play with this stuff. That fed the passion for technology and how you can use it to amplify your own efforts and the efforts of others.
Matthew: That's a great story. Let's dive into the technology side — because today with AI, "rapid evolution" doesn't even feel adequate anymore. It's hyper-rapid. What are your favorite use cases, your favorite new toys?
CJ: One of my favorite quotes — it might have been Alan Kay via Steve Jobs — is that computers are bicycles for the mind. The idea is that with relatively little extra effort, you can take what an individual can do and magnify it dramatically. Let me give you a specific example that ties directly into AI.
We recently opened a new coil warehouse — larger than anything we've had before, more SKUs, more physical space. We also had a whole crop of new employees who didn't have years of institutional knowledge building into an intuition about where things are. So how do you make sure everybody can find everything?
I decided to start by doing the job myself — got on the forklift, staged loads, tried to find coil among 4,000 coils where everything kind of looks the same. These are massive steel coils, 40,000 pounds each, maybe two miles of steel in a single roll. We were running on a system that wasn't designed for the task.
So one Sunday afternoon I sat down with ChatGPT and said: you are an expert ERP and logistics warehouse programmer specializing in building custom SQL front ends. I need to accomplish X, Y, and Z. Help me write a spec that non-programmers can easily understand. And at the end I added: to give you better context about my business, start with 25 questions that will help frame what I might be forgetting to tell you in this initial prompt. That back-and-forth took about two to three hours. I took the output to my team — John Roof and Jesse Bell — and said, here's what I came up with. What do you think? About three weeks later, we had something in production that people were actually using. Anyone with a cell phone and an entry ID can now be out on the floor and get their jobs done efficiently.
And it went even further than I expected. I had originally envisioned mounting iPads on every forklift and sourcing a barcode scanner and figuring out how to tap forklift power to charge everything. One of my team members just said: everybody has a phone, why don't we just use the phone camera as the barcode reader? There's a library I know that handles it. That was a solution I never would have arrived at on my own. Now nobody needed to change their physical ability or their experience level — we used technology as a force multiplier to put the right information in front of people at the right time so they could make the right decision. Most problems don't happen because people want to make the wrong decision. They happen because people don't have the right information and are doing the best they can.
Matthew: That is wild. That would have been a six-month minimum engagement — more likely over a year — with an outside vendor, probably not even landing exactly where you needed to be, and spending a fortune in the process. You did it in three weeks for essentially no incremental cost.
CJ: And the team did it. I had the idea and did a lot of the fact-finding, but I can't take credit for their execution. And here's the other powerful piece: because they built it, iteration is fast. We can get to version 1.0 quickly and then improve it just as quickly, because the people who laid the plumbing know how it all works. There's also something to be said for the design-by-committee effect you can fall into with outside consultants — by the time they've interviewed 30 or 40 people and gone back to the design room, what you were trying to achieve can get diluted. That didn't happen here.
Matthew: And you never have to restart the relationship because your consultant got promoted or reassigned. That's one of the things that genuinely frustrates me with outside vendors — you invest heavily in bringing someone up to speed on your business, and then 18 months in they're gone and you're back at square one.
CJ: Exactly. When you take that individual away, I don't restart the relationship — I just put the engagement into maintenance mode because I don't have the bandwidth to rebuild that context from scratch. The relationship gets diminished not because of bad intentions but because the institutional knowledge walks out the door with that person.
Matthew: And for anyone not actively experimenting with these tools right now — that's a mistake. The access we have today, at the price point we have today, is a window. At some point the barrier to entry gets higher. The direct interaction with these models that we have now will get obfuscated behind layers of abstraction. You'll be working with the plumbing inside the walls rather than getting to play with the pipes yourself. The gap between people who have built real fluency with these tools and those who haven't is going to widen significantly.
CJ: It really will. And it's so much easier to keep up than it is to catch up. Whether it's a marathon or a technology evolution, the cost of falling behind and trying to close the gap later — especially at this pace — is enormous. You need to be spending at least a little time every week seeing what's new, what's possible. The backlog of "things I need to get current on" can become overwhelming very quickly.
Matthew: Let's talk about security, because I think that's the other fascinating application of AI. I don't know if you've come across Darktrace, but it's one of my new favorites. The concept is simple: use AI for email security in exactly the way you'd want it to work. It learns how you write, who you communicate with, what's normal — and then flags or removes things that don't fit. Unlike rule-based filtering, which is a constant game of whack-a-mole, AI adapts. And because attackers are now using AI to make their attacks more convincing, you have to fight fire with fire. The end user — who isn't a security professional — is the weak link. Where do you see AI and security going?
CJ: The first thing I think about when you say AI and security is: the bad guys are using it too. I had a situation four or five years ago with a vendor of ours. A frontline customer service employee — let's call him Joey — fell for a phishing attack and gave up his credentials. Joey had no elevated privileges, no access to anything critical. But it was an email account. So now the attacker could just sit and watch and learn — how does the CEO write their emails, how do customers communicate, what language do we use with specific contacts? This was human-driven at the time, about five or six years ago. They used that knowledge to register a domain that looked almost identical to our vendor's and sent an email saying they had updated ACH information. Two or three weeks went by before anyone noticed the payments were going to the wrong place.
Now you don't need a clever human to execute that attack. The hallmarks of a phishing email — poorly formatted text, off grammar, images that aren't quite right — those are essentially a solved problem if you have an AI tool in the hands of a threat actor. So you need to be able to combat an AI-powered threat with an equally capable tool on your side. The cat-and-mouse game has just escalated to a completely different level.
Matthew: And the stakes are highest for the people least equipped to recognize it — senior citizens, who are losing billions of dollars a year to fraud. The end user will never out-think an AI-powered attacker. The technology has to do that work for them.
CJ: I'll add something to the email conversation: I actually think this accelerates the death of email as the dominant communication channel. Email is everywhere and it's the default, but it's extremely difficult to manage without elaborate rules and sorting. I get a tremendous amount of email and I don't live in front of a computer. If something is urgent, people who know me know not to email me — they'll text me or message me through Teams. I find I do more business over text now than I ever expected, with people I never would have imagined were comfortable texting years ago.
And that actually circles back to something broader about communication — the push toward more human, face-to-face interaction. Video calls, done well, can get you very close to the quality of in-person communication. But there's a gap between what most people do on video and what's actually possible. The Zoom fatigue that people complain about isn't really video meeting fatigue — it's poor communication etiquette fatigue. When you go to a physical meeting, you iron your clothes, you shine your shoes, you invest real time and money in how you show up. But most people jump on a video call with a five-year-old laptop camera, built-in audio, poor lighting, and wonder why it feels exhausting and unproductive.
The investment required to show up well on video is genuinely small. A decent microphone — something like a Shure MV6 for $150 or $200 — makes a dramatic difference. Audio intelligibility matters more than video quality. People will turn off a video if the audio is bad far sooner than if the picture is less than perfect. Add a couple of lights, and even a mediocre webcam looks great. And there's a subconscious dimension to this: people pick up on eye contact, facial expressions, energy, gestures — all the non-verbal communication that evolution has trained us to read. When your setup degrades those signals, the interaction becomes tiring and the connection feels hollow.
I actually invested in a teleprompter — not to read off of, but to position a screen directly in front of my camera lens so that when I'm looking at you, you see me looking directly at you instead of slightly off to the side. That small thing changes how a conversation feels at a subconscious level. The goal is always to get the technology out of the way so that what's left is just two people having a real conversation.
Matthew: And that's the key insight — technology in service of the human, not the other way around. Starting from the user experience and working backward. It applies to the warehouse app, to Zoom calls, to AI-powered email security. When the technology is right, it disappears and all that's left is the outcome.
CJ: Exactly. Steve Jobs called them "mere mortals" — the people who can do things in their domain that I could never do in a million years. My job is to use what I'm good at to make them better. That's the whole game.
Matthew: CJ, this has been an absolute pleasure. Before we go — where can everyone find out more about you and about Everlast Roofing?
CJ: Check out our website at everlastroofing.com. We also just opened a new steel service center in southwestern Ohio called Progressive Processing. And if the communication conversation resonated with you, check out officehours.global — it's a daily YouTube show that I'm on, usually on Fridays, with media and production professionals. It's a nonprofit I'm involved with that has taught me a tremendous amount about best practices for video communication and building what I call your virtual persona. Highly recommend it.
Matthew: Love it. CJ, until next time!
CJ: Awesome. Thanks, Matt.
