One of the parts of my concrete coatings business is consulting. It’s the worst part of my business. Yes, I know. Everyone wants in on the consulting business. Hey, you’re dealing with someone else’s problems and your getting paid for it. And, if no one has a problem, no one is going to pay you anyway. I know this is all true. However, what I like to do is coat concrete and build cabinets. I don’t like solving other people’s problems or being in the middle of it when there are two sides warring.
Here is the typical scenario. A concrete coatings applicator goes to a job and coats the concrete. They don’t do it right. Or, they do it right but the customer doesn’t understand the product they were supposed to get. Now, the customer is unhappy and the applicator is unhappy. What do they do?
Well, they call me. After all I’m an expert. I’ve personally coated hundreds of thousands of square feet of concrete and I’ve consulted on, sold coatings into or had my franchisees coat millions of square feet of floors. I know this stuff; I’ve seen it and I know the answers.
Now, it is my job to go out, look at the work and determine what went wrong. I then have to get in between the customer and the applicator and make a determination about who is in the right and who is in the wrong. I also have to present a solution. In the end one party is going to be unhappy and other party is not going to be completely satisfied.
Here is an example. I went to a military base. An applicator had applied a coating to a locker-room floor. The military inspector said the job wasn’t good enough. The applicator said it was. The contractor who the applicator had subbed for was trying to get paid. I walked in, the inspector and the contractor just about got into a fist fight and the applicator had done a fine job. It wasn’t about the floor at all. How am I going to solve that?
That’s why it’s the worst part of my concrete coatings business. But it lets me see what can go wrong and why. You learn a lot from pain and through this process I have learned a lot and can bring that knowledge to our customers. Take a look at our chip floors at https://integritygaragefloors.com/garage-floors/ if you would like to see what we put down on most garage floors.