West Shore Home is one of the largest home remodeling companies in the nation. Earlier this month, the Board of Trustees granted the naming of “West Shore Home Field at Beaver Stadium” for a 15-year contract to honor a $50 million gift.

Partnering with Penn State in the past and being an alumnus himself, West Shore Home’s chief executive officer B.J. Werzyn created the company just six years after graduating. Since then, he’s managed to change the remodeling industry game, expanding into 40 markets across the nation.

We chatted with Werzyn to learn more about how he grew the small, local company into a national brand and his partnerships across the university.

Onward State: What led you to create West Shore Home?

B.J. Werzyn: Growing up, my family had a building products company. They were a window and door manufacturer. I never really had any interest in getting involved in the family business. It was something that was definitely not on my radar. My goal was to go to Penn State to be an engineer, but upon graduating in 1999, I wasn’t necessarily sure what I wanted to do next.

The family business had expanded, and they took on a partner from Europe and opened up operations in Florida. They asked me if I would consider going down there for a gap year between my undergraduate studies and grad school. So, I ended up getting involved with the family business. But it was good because I got to see all aspects of the construction industry. We were doing wholesale distribution with the manufacturing of the windows and doors. I worked a lot with builders and architects on new home builds. After a couple of years of doing that, we ended up selling that business. But I stayed in Florida, and I went to work for a window and door company that was more focused on the residential remodeling aspect of it. I really liked that better. I liked the direct-to-consumer aspect of it, I liked the fact that you could see the impact that you’re having on the end consumer.

It was at that time I decided I wanted to move back to Pennsylvania to be closer to family. So I moved to Mechanicsburg, and completely separate from the family business, I started West Shore Home. I had no business schooling, I had no capital. I just bootstrapped it from day one, and today, we are one of the largest, if not the largest, home remodeling companies in the country.

OS: What does your role as president and chief executive officer of West Shore Home entail?

BW: I lead quite a large organization. Today, we’re in 40 markets in 21 states. We have about 3,500 employees, so as the CEO, I’m mostly involved with more of the strategy, less of the day-to-day execution. I have a really good executive team. I work a lot with our marketing department, and our technology department is where I spend a lot of my time. My role is mostly focused on growth and strategies.

OS: How has the home improvement industry changed since you founded West Shore Home?

BW: Back in 2005, it was very fragmented. I think there are around 500,000 contractors in the United States – anything from a small local mom-and-pop shop to more of a specialized replacement contractor like we are. But what has changed over the past 15 to 20 years is that we started to see some consolidation. Private equity got involved about six or seven years ago and started doing some mergers and acquisitions. I would say that’s probably been the biggest change since I started it. It’s still fragmented, though, because it’s a very, very large industry with $500 or $600 billion a year of annual remodeling activity.

OS: What has your partnership with Penn State Athletics and the university looked like?

BW: We’re specifically partnering with the College of Information, Science, and Technology, starting with an internship program this summer. We develop a lot of our own custom software here at West Shore Home, whether that’s digital applications or AI use cases. So we’re going to partner with the university to start an internship program this summer and hope to expand that this fall into some projects, maybe a capstone project with the university or potentially some AI projects within Nittany AI Alliance, which is their AI club. So, we have a lot of good opportunities to continue to partner with the university academically.

With Penn State Athletics, it’s been mostly with the football program, and we’ve been involved with them for several years now. Since the early days of NIL, we’ve been involved with many different aspects, doing direct deals with players. We did a deal with Nick Singleton as he was an incoming freshman, and we’ve been involved with the football collective Happy Valley United. We’ve also partnered with [the team] a lot on community outreach and community involvement, like having some of the student-athletes and football players partner with us on our annual Toys for Tots drive. They’ve also done things with us on Four Diamonds, which is obviously a collaboration with Penn State University as a whole for childhood cancer. All of that led up to the opportunity to get more involved with the naming rights deal for the field at Beaver Stadium, which is now called West Shore Home Field at Beaver Stadium.

OS: What motivated West Shore Home to pursue the naming rights for Beaver Stadium?

BW: It was a great opportunity for us to be attached to one of the most iconic venues in all of college sports, especially with the stadium renovation project that’s going on. It’s going to be a $700 million renovation project that will turn Beaver Stadium into a year-round venue. So it’s not going to be just used for seven or eight home football games a year. It’ll be used for concerts and other major events. The ability to attach the West Shore Home name and partner with Beaver Stadium was very attractive for us.

Anytime there’s a major concert or football game there, or there could potentially be an outdoor hockey game or any major event that could happen at a stadium complex like that, West Shore Home will be getting brand awareness by being attached to Beaver Stadium.

OS: What excites you most about having West Shore Home so prominently associated with Penn State football?

BW: I’ve gotten to know coach Franklin over the years, and I really see what he’s built with that football team and the culture there, and I really think it aligns with the core values here at West Shore Home. That alignment of culture and that alignment of values between my company and the football program was very exciting for me.

Penn State’s core values are built around having a positive attitude, strong work ethic, competition, and sacrifice, and we believe in those same things, too – extreme ownership, being exceptional teammates. There’s a lot of alignment when it comes to what they’re doing there as a football program and what we do here at West Shore Home.

OS: What are your short-term and long-term goals for the company?

BW: In the near term, we’re going to continue to grow the business and expand our geographical footprint. We’re getting ready to launch some new product lines, which is exciting.

Long-term, it’s more around the technology that we’re building. We have visualization and scanning software that eventually we will be able to turn those applications customer-facing and allow people to self-service through an e-commerce platform, if that’s something that they want to do. Today, we send out the design consultant to their home, gather all the current state data, and do a needs assessment. They can show them what the project’s going to look like – they can give them a quote, get them approved for financing, and make it super easy and convenient for them. But in the future, customers will be able to do that all on their own. So, really, it would be a platform like Amazon for home services.

OS: What do you find most rewarding about your role as CEO?

BW: I think it’s just about the people here. We’ve got a really great team and bring people in, getting them aligned with our mission, giving them the opportunities to maximize their potential, to really become the best versions of themselves and to see what they’re capable of. And as we have some of these really audacious goals that we’ve set out for ourselves, once we go out and accomplish those goals and just see the satisfaction that they get from their employment here at West Shore and see how much they are dedicated to the mission is definitely the most rewarding thing I have as a CEO.

OS: How do you see the company’s role evolving within the home improvement industry?

BW: Technology aspect of it? We tech-enabled the business six or seven years ago, and that allowed us to grow from $100 million in revenue to a billion in revenue. Today, we are applying artificial intelligence to every aspect of the business, so we’re going to continue to be the technology leader within the home improvement industry. And I think we’re really going to revolutionize the industry by becoming the Amazon of home improvement and allowing for a full e-commerce experience for those that want to remodel their homes, and for most people, those are their most valuable possessions. If they’re not their most valuable possessions, they are definitely their most intimate possessions. It’s where they raise their families, it’s where they make their memories. And the customer experience today is not great in the industry as a whole, and we really want to make it as convenient to remodel your bathroom or replace your windows or doors or put new flooring in as it is to order something on Amazon.

OS: As per OS tradition, if you could be any dinosaur, which would you be and why?

BW: The first one that comes to mind would be a Tyrannosaurus Rex. We’ve aggressively grown West Shore Home into a national brand. We started as a small local company here in central Pennsylvania and have now been able to scale it to 40 markets and 20+ states. So I just think aggressively growing the business and being successful in a very large industry would make us the “Tyrannosaurus Rex” of home remodeling.