Follow The Money (September 2007)

Being a charity case doesn’t help the business owner, the customers (because businesses don’t stay around long enough to help them a second time), the employees or even good old Uncle Sam or Revenue Canada (who always looks forward to their share).
Let me offer a different kind of share, as in what I’ve learned about making money while out on the road in this business. Here are two important lessons:

1. NO RESTORATION MONEY IN COUNTERTOPS
For some reason, every time I teach a course or speak at an event, I get two or three individuals approaching me with their ideas of making a killing in the countertop-repair field, particularly with granite. They base their ambitions on the huge popularity of granite countertops, and the low cost-of-entry of tooling costs compared to floor restoration.
With the building boom that occurred in North America and every tract-home contractor offering granite countertops as an upgrade, you’d think that this is a wise idea – especially if you add the mantra/myth from many quarters of the industry that, “all granite needs to be sealed all the time.”
Let me explain why this train of thought has little hope of reaching its destination.
First, people don’t walk on their countertops. That little secret keeps me looking at the surfaces that make me money, namely floors. Yes, those beautiful coverings where everyone has to walk gets dirt to sand away its surface, along with boxes (and the odd sofa) dragged across them.
Those surfaces eventually need restoration. Granite, meanwhile, wears the least of all stones, especially on a countertop where its worst enemies are chicken bones.
The second reason why a counter-only restoration business is short-lived is that most people living in tract homes don’t want to pay the kind of money that real restoration professionals demand for their training and for their time. When they hear that their $5,000 countertop upgrade is going to cost them $1,500 to repair, they start to play turtle with their wallet.
If you think you’ll stay busy doing little $300 repairs here and there, think again. Do you have any idea of what the marketing is going to cost for you to stay busy with a minimum of 20 of those little repairs every month?
Another reason is that pictures can be deceiving – and sadly enough, so can the Internet. Many people post videos of themselves restoring a granite countertop and make it look easy. Try it in real life and many a fabricator with years of experience will tell you that it is not as easy as it looks.
When they polish the surface of those slabs in the processing yards, they are not tickling the stone with 110V power and human pressure. They are using huge, calibrated, $250,000+ commercial-voltage machines bolted to a concrete floor and utilizing hydraulic pressure. Just try to duplicate that in the field.
Now, I’m not saying that it cannot be done, but unless you are charging real well for your time, you could open a Pandora’s box of trouble for yourself, especially if you are lacking experience.
When it comes to countertops, we usually do it as an add-on when we’re working on the surfaces that truly make our company money: floors. Sure, we do small repairs, but only when we get slow (rarely) and we still get paid for them.

2. CHEAP CUSTOMERS NOT WORTH THE TIME
With the advent of Big-Box stores selling cheap stone, every abode in North America now can have stone, just like them fancy, high fallootin’ homes in Beverly Hills. It’s convenient for anyone and their brother-in-law to tile their crib on the weekend while sharing a case of wobbly pop.
The problem then comes in when mother and the children end up stubbing their toes on the excessive lippage created by the inebriated installation. Now if I had a nickel for every customer that bought their stone at the local Big Box, installed it themselves and then called us up to fix it on Monday, I would at least have a lot of nickels instead of wasting a lot of dollars to go out and look at them.
I know I’m sounding like a pompous, nose in the air, prejudiced jerk. But, when I tell them (over the phone) how much it will cost for us to flatten the floors and make them look the way they should, voices changes octaves and exclaim that we want more than they paid for the tile.
That’s why I don’t waste money to price those jobs in person. We screen all of our customers and charge an estimate fee for going on-site to ensure that our customers actually bought their stone at a respectable dealer and had it professionally installed.
Just letting the customer lure you by telling you they have a big restoration job for you shouldn’t be motivation to waste your time (which is money). This is how fishermen stay fed and fish die – the latter takes the bait. When I look at a job, I want some sort of commitment; asking up front where they purchased the stone and who installed it can reveal if they can afford you.
Herein lies another secret. If they had it installed by a company you know, it’s easy to do an informal credit check. If they tell you who installed it, and you check with the company only to find out it was never paid for, it should tell you right there to get paid upfront (or have a credit card and a rock-solid contract).
I hope this helps everyone make a little doe-rae me, and I look forward to seeing you at StonExpo in Las Vegas. Until then, keep your stick on the ice and I will try to keep my shtick on ice.
Tom McNall is founder and owner of Great Northern Stone Care, a Huron Park, Ontario-based stone-cleaning and -restoration company servicing all of southern Ontario. He’ll present “10 Ways to Diversify Your Business” on Oct. 20 at StonExpo 2007 in Las Vegas. He also serves as the director of training, technical assistance, and operational support for Stone Restoration Services, a division of Stone Shop International. Tom also offers corporate and private consultations, serves as a trainer for the Marble Institute of America, and is also on the organization’s board of directors.