I had been in the residential wood flooring business for about 10 years when the Great Recession hit, and we started doing gym floors just to stay in business. A few years later, we purchased our biggest gym floor competitor, and we’ve never looked back! Today we have three to four crews traveling throughout the Rocky Mountain West doing sports floors, and it’s a business I’m passionate about.
In the following pages I explain some of the things I learned about making the transition from residential work to gym floor jobs. This description will only scratch the surface of the many facets of commercial construction; installing a gymnasium floor in a large commercial project is as different from installing residential wood floors as it is different from doing roofing. The actual work is not that different, but in commercial construction, process is key. The process and administration must be attended to! My goal is not to discourage anyone, just to shed some light on the process. The installation of gymnasium floors (like anything else in life) has abundant opportunities for any ambitious individual willing to serve their customers with high-quality products!
Bidding jobs: residential vs. commercial
In my experience, when dealing with a homeowner, it is very important to build trust. The contractor is, after all, coming into the homeowner’s home and staying for some period of hours and days, often without the homeowner being home. So, it is understandable that the homeowner would want to know references and background information about the contractor. A contractor needs to connect with the homeowner at some level, putting the homeowner at ease about the contractor’s ability to perform the job, and then, finally, show the homeowner a written estimate clearly defining the work to be done and the exact price.
Throughout this process, the homeowner and the contractor develop a relationship of mutual trust. The homeowner is trusting the contractor to come into their home and do a neat, precise, professional job in the time frame that the contractor said they would do it in. The contractor is trusting the homeowner to give them reasonable access to the job site, to have some understanding of small changes and inevitable challenges that may arise, and, finally, to pay the contractor in full when the job is complete.
Your submittal will need to detail every single product you intend to use on the job, from sandpaper to paint.If the contractor has done what they said, and the job has been completed on time and the customer is happy, the customer is usually appreciative and thankful for the job. In my experience, this becomes part of the payment for the job. Customer appreciation, positive reviews, and the referral of friends is a natural part of a job well done (of course, not every customer is a good customer, and some are very hard to please). However, in general, if the contractor is honest and does what they say they will do, most customers will be appreciative of the work performed and will pay promptly.
It will likely be one to two years after you bid the job before you are delivering material to the job site—and you must stick with the price you bid at that time.Now enter into the commercial realm: GCs who build schools, civic centers, college campuses, and other large projects where a gymnasium is to be installed are going to be large, well-established organizations.
In order for a flooring contractor to bid a gym flooring project, it usually requires using some kind of plans service. These are usually subscription-based plans in which you pay a fee to get access to even bid the work. The GCs will sometimes be helpful if you have questions about the bid, but in my experience, usually they are not.
They are trying to get bids together from dozens of subcontractors on a multi-million-dollar project. Answering a question from a subcontractor who cannot determine whether the architect is calling for 1st grade or 2nd-and-better maple is low on their priority list. Sometimes the architect can be helpful, but this is hit or miss, as well.
We are a well-established gymnasium flooring company, and we expect to win only 20–40% of the jobs we bid on. The plans are complicated (as mentioned above, sometimes vague), and it is time-consuming to determine what you are being asked to bid. The bidding process, like everything else we do, takes time and experience to learn. In many instances, after hours of hard work on a project, someone else will be awarded the contract.
Dealing with contracts
Once a bid has been submitted, it may take the GC a couple of weeks to a couple of months to get around to notifying the subcontractor that they are being awarded the project. If you have never worked for a particular GC before, expect to go through some kind of pre-qualification process before being given a contract to do the work.
When your contract arrives, read it carefully. If you disagree with any of the provisions in the contract, the GC may agree to change that provision. More likely they will just offer the contract to another subcontractor (welcome to the world of commercial construction!).
Upon signing the contract, you will be asked to send in a submittal. This is information about all of the supplies to be used in the installation and finish work on the gym floor, such as the type of gymnasium floor system, type and grade of maple, sandpaper, paint, base cove, threshold, and so on. The submittal needs to match the detail called for in the original plans and specifications that were the basis of the bid.
At some point, likely 12–24 months after the project was bid, it will be time to deliver the gymnasium flooring material to the job site. The GC doesn’t care if prices have gone up in the meantime, you will be expected to perform the job at the price you bid.
As a residential contractor, you may work with only one or two people per job. On a gym floor project, you will deal with many people. The GCs, estimator, project manager, job site superintendent, project engineer, architect, interior designer … the list goes on.
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How to get paid
The wood flooring contractor who wants to enter the world of commercial installations will need administrative help to navigate the dozens of logistical details necessary to do this type of work. The most important one is, not surprisingly, getting paid.
A GC will usually accept a pay application only once a month, typically toward the end of the month. The subcontractor can bill for the work that has been done throughout the month. The GC will then bill the owners around the first of the month. Once the owner has paid the GC, they will pay the subcontractors. It is typical to wait 60–90 days after the work has been completed to be paid. We have often completed a gymnasium flooring project before being paid for the materials. This is annoying, but it is the way it is. Plan for it!
Even though you may be dealing with large amounts of materials, you need to be prepared to not be paid for them until, potentially, after the project has been completed.Know your bonding
Bonding is like insurance. There are bid bonds and performance bonds.
A bid bond guarantees compensation to the bond owner if the bidder fails to start a project.
A performance bond, also known as a contract bond, is issued by an insurance company or a bank to guarantee satisfactory completion of a project by a contractor.
Typically, a contractor must show some history of ability to complete a project of the size and scope they are trying to get bonded for. This creates a catch-22 for a contractor new to a certain area of work. If you need a bond to do the work, how can you prove you can do the work if you cannot get the bonding. Like anything else, you need to start small and work your way up. Like insurance, bonding becomes much more expensive (or possibly impossible) to obtain if you ever have a claim. If you are bonded on a job, you better do it right!
Gym floors often require travel
Depending on geographic location, many gym floor contractors do a lot of travel. However, if a person lives in a large metropolitan area with hundreds of gyms in a relatively small area, this may not be an issue. Located where we are in Montana, we travel constantly, so hotel bills, vehicle expenses, fuel and other related travel costs add to our price for gym floor work.
Getting bonded for the first time can be a catch-22, because you must demonstrate a history of being bonded for larger projects.Insurance: lots of it
A gym flooring contractor needs lots of insurance. Workers compensation insurance, liability insurance, vehicle insurance, unemployment insurance, umbrella insurance and, as mentioned above, bonding. When working for a GC, expect lots of requests to your insurance agent for insurance certificates (basically, proof of insurance), requests for subrogation clauses, and so on. Insurance costs money, and these costs need to be built into the cost of the work.
Many gym jobs today involve an interior designer, with specifications for exact paint colors that fit into the overall design vision for that gym.A word on quality
“The only thing a good contractor leaves behind is the quality of work that they do.”
The gym floor community is small. Athletic directors talk, coaches talk, maintenance people talk, principals talk. If a contractor does good work, people will talk. If a contractor does poor quality work, people will talk more! Generally, when you do a good job, no one says anything, and when you do a bad job, they shout it from the rooftops! That is a fact, don’t let it bother you. Commit to doing great work, and if you make a mistake, go back and fix it! Quality work is just a matter of making up your mind to do quality work. Do not focus on profit! Focus on quality, because profit follows quality.
Early in my career I had a mentor named Randy Nash of R&R Hardwood out of Boise, Idaho. Randy said this: “When you make mistakes (and you will make mistakes), and have customers that are not entirely happy with your work, if you have the integrity to go back and fix the problem, you will gain more respect and rapport with that customer than if you had just done the job right in the first place.”
Of course, the goal is always to do the job “right” the first time. However, everyone has problem jobs, and in the beginning of any career, you probably won’t have to wait long for one. The question is: Will you do the right thing? Doing the “right thing” is making the customer happy! This is the basis of quality work.
Part of ‘quality’: Giving the customer what they want
Let me say one more thing about “quality” work. What is quality work? The old saying goes, “Beauty is in the eyes of the beholder.” As a contractor, we work for the customer. In gym work, sometimes it’s easy to lose sight of who the customer is. On a new construction project, the gymnasium flooring contractor is working for the GC. An architect is overseeing the building design, an engineering firm is overseeing structural design and there may also be an owner’s representative. On some projects there are other consultants, like an interior designer. All of these people and their companies may have some input on the gym floor installation and finish. Ultimately the facility owner, which is the school district, college, or municipality, is paying the bills.
In a situation like the one outlined above, it is almost impossible to have any communication with the people who actually own the facility. Even though the gym floor contractor is the “expert” in maple gymnasium flooring, in most cases you will not be asked to provide a recommendation. As an example, the interior designer will choose paint colors for the game lines on the gymnasium court. Maybe what the designer is trying to accomplish is to match a color scheme throughout the building. He or she doesn’t care what color you normally paint auxiliary basketball lines. As an example, if they want Sherwin-Williams SW1084 Dunes Tan, you need to figure out how to give them that color. Giving the customer what they want is part of doing quality work. Following directions from the people the customer hires to give them what they want is part of the job.
This is a fine line. Sometimes what the customer wants doesn’t make sense, or it is not possible or is not a good idea. Sometimes, however, it’s good to just stop and ask yourself: Is this really that big of a deal? If the customer has been using ABC finish, but I like XYZ finish, does it really make that much difference? As a gym floor contractor, you should be comfortable using a variety of products and finishes. In my experience, if a customer really wants a certain product, give them that product! If a customer has a strong preference for one brand of finish over another, as long as it’s approved by MFMA, give the customer what they want. If a customer wants a certain design on their gym floor, but you think it looks silly, you can make gentle suggestions, but in the end, it’s their gym floor. Part of doing quality work is giving the customer what they want. Do not fight with your customers! It will not end well for you!
You need to be prepared to use whatever finish is specified—giving the customer what they want is part of doing a quality job.Pricing structure
The more established your company becomes, and the more known for quality your company becomes, and the more reliable your company becomes, the less pricing will matter to your customers!
It is extremely important to give your customers value. Value goes way beyond the price of your service. Did you show up on time? Did you conduct yourselves as professionals? Did you do what you said you were going to do? Were you reasonable and easy to deal with? Did you notice that none of these questions dealt with how the project looked?
Your projects need to look great, but quality goes well beyond that simple standard. Gymnasium flooring contractors are working (in most instances) for public entities. By definition, these jobs tend to be somewhat political. If you embarrass the people you are working for in a public entity, you endanger their jobs! If you showed up late, completed the job late, had guys smoking in the back of the school (it’s illegal in all 50 states to smoke on school property), then you did poor-quality work, regardless of what the gym floor looked like.
By contrast, if you show up on time, complete the job when you said you would, and charge the customer what you bid, now you are on the way to doing good-quality work. Now if the floor looks great, the customer is satisfied. Don’t look for a big slap on the back; this is what they expected when they hired you!
Word will get around when you do quality work. Price will become secondary in some cases. No one gets every job they bid (or if they do, they aren’t bidding enough work)! Don’t worry a bit about the jobs you don’t get. There is always another job; go bid some more. Meet some new potential customers. It’s a big world out there!
Our company works almost exclusively for K-12 public schools. We do jobs for colleges, rec centers, private schools, churches, and so on. However, nine out of 10 jobs that we do are for K-12 public schools. So, everything we do is catered to the needs of K-12 public schools. We know that technically we need to be the low bidder, but our focus is on providing a level of value and service to our customers such that they still choose us sometimes when we are NOT the low bidder.
We have a pricing structure that works for us. We travel throughout the Rocky Mountain West. Many times, when we dispatch a crew to go to a job, they are traveling four to nine hours just to get there. Our jobs usually entail hotel stays, fuel for the trucks and food for the crew, as well as insurance, snowy mountain passes, and other challenges too numerous to articulate. We need to build in these expenses for every job we bid.
Every contractor is going to have a different pricing structure, because every contractor is going to have a different customer base and situation. A contractor who provides value to their customers is a valuable entity!
Coating a gym floor
First, any finish on a gym floor must be approved by MFMA. This is critical for the safety of the athletes on the court. Coating a gym floor typically calls for a four-coat system; either two coats of sealer and two coats of finish, or, in some cases, three coats of sealer with one coat of finish. When it comes to painting courts and lines, different contractors do it differently; some do one sealer coat and then paint, while others do two sealer coats and then paint. Either way, you need a good heavy scratch that you want that paint to grip into.
We call this contraption (above) the “Zehnder finish barrel” because Rob Zehnder was the one who originally showed us the idea—it’s a trash can with a valve at the bottom that allows the finish to meter out. In our area, here in the high desert, our struggle is extremely low humidity—so much that if you pour a ribbon of finish the length of a gym, the finish can start to dry out on the floor before you spread it. With this, we can put our gallons of waterborne finish in, add the recommended amount of water to extend dry times, add our hardener and mix it all easily. Using this, I can actually coat a gym floor by myself.
An important part of gym finish work is understanding how to use stencils. Here we’re applying stencils prior to painting a center logo.
Equipment for gym work
First, most gym pros have a good working set of riding sanders. While not theoretically necessary (thousands of gyms have been sanded by walking over the years), it is really unlikely that a contractor will be competitive in both labor and quality without them. A new set of riding sanders costs about $40,000. A contractor also must purchase the required amount of cord, dust bags, power hook-ups, phase converter, edgers, buffers, power booster, sandpaper, another trailer to haul said equipment … the list goes on and on. A pro doing gym work also needs a line taping machine and poles and the skill to use them, as well as painting equipment. A well-stocked gymnasium-dedicated sanding-and-finish rig is likely a $100,000 investment. Again, starting small is likely the best route, so maybe the first few gyms get sanded with a residential machine. Maybe a contractor starts by doing some annual maintenance coats and minor game-line painting. However you choose to start, lots of specialized equipment will need to be purchased as your gym floor career starts to take off.
When you do a lot of gym work, having rider sanders like these are essential.
Our EMack game line taping machine is an essential piece of equipment.
This our installation trailer; we also have a dedicated sanding trailer and a dedicated finish trailer. I look at them like tool boxes.
This photo from a job we did training for in Argentina shows a basic floating sleeper system: The sleepers are not anchored, and they have resilient pads underneath them for cushioning. Systems like this are still commonly used in the U.S. but typically have a layer of plywood over the sleepers; this makes the floor stronger for situations such as when a lift has to go on the floor to fix a light or a scoreboard.
Know your flooring system
If you’re in the gym flooring business, you need to be familiar with the Maple Flooring Manufacturers Association. The MFMA is the trade organization dedicated to the gymnasium flooring industry and oversees the manufacturers, setting standards for maple grading and quality control. The MFMA is also involved in testing and inspections of gym floors, and all finishes used on a gym floor must be approved by MFMA for the correct coefficient of friction, making them safe for athletes. Nearly all installation bid specifications will require an MFMA mill product, and the MFMA has six mills: Robbins, Connor, Action, WD, Horner and Aacer.
So, if you plan on installing gym floors, the first step will be to build a relationship with a mill and to become a dealer for them. Some mills are interested in having new dealers, some are not. A contractor could certainly be a gym floor contractor that just recoats, sands, seals, paints and finishes gym floors. However, to install gym floors you will need to become a dealer for one of the six mills.
Floor systems are specifically designed to flex to some degree to protect athletes from injury. There are dozens of gym floor systems available and hundreds that have been installed over the decades. It takes time to get a working knowledge of all the systems and their strengths and weaknesses. Some common systems include:
A floor system like this (above) with two layers of plywood or OSB, pads on the bottom and maple on top has been very popular for many years. Recently these systems have become very expensive because of the cost of plywood.
This (above) is an anchored stringer system. The stringers are anchored into the concrete with a bent nail pin. A layer of plywood spans the stringers, with maple on top. These systems are very sturdy and heavy-duty.
This (above) is an example of a panelized system. These subfloor systems come as a premanufactured 2-by-8-foot panel. They install like shingles. These systems install quickly and perform very well.
Gym floor systems, like all products, are constantly evolving. New and better materials are developed and old systems degrade with time. One area that has received a lot of attention is relief for low body extremities: hips, knees, and ankles. New systems have testing requirements, DIN and PUR, that certify these floors perform for the athlete’s safety as well as maintain ball bounce. More recently, testing is being done to try to reduce concussions on maple floors. These are exciting developments and make gym floor replacements a viable discussion topic for facility owners, even if the gym floor is not technically “worn out.” Sports at colleges and professional facilities are a multi-billion-dollar enterprise, so protecting the athletes is obviously a high priority.
Doing court lines and logos
Learning to do gym lines is really its own trade; it’s as different from installing a gym floor as laying bricks. There are lots of numbers to understand when it comes to painting lines. Basketball is the primary function for most sports floors, but in college facilities you may get dedicated volleyball gyms. When it comes to municipalities or schools, there might be multi-user facilities, and they do their best to cater to a wide variety of users, so you could have basketball courts, volleyball, pickleball and more all on one court. It takes experience to visualize where the courts will be and make it most advantageous for all the players, and which sports might be able to share a line instead of having two lines 1 inch apart from each other. Those are subtleties you won’t find written in any book, and some architects will handle it from start to finish while others will rely heavily on the expertise of the subcontractor. Most have very specific ideas of what they want their product to look like.
There’s no school you can go to to learn how to do gym lines; it’s very much its own niche industry. Typically you go work for another contractor to learn the ins and outs of the trade.
We have one crew sand and a different crew that paints and coats the floor. We have trailers set up dedicated to each.
This what we call a stain stencil—instead of our masking going on top of the sealer coat, like we do with paint, it’s directly on top of the raw sanded maple so the logo can be stained. More and more, people are loving the stain instead of just using paint.
The center of this piece of plexiglass is the pivot point for the EMack line taping machine; here four finish nails are being used to anchor it down so it can be used to create a three-point line or, as seen in the next photo, the center circle.
This court shows the newer trend of using stain; in this photo game lines are being painted on top of it.
This gym floor is completely taped out and ready for paint. This is a good time to check with the job site superintendent and/or architect to make sure these lines are exactly where owners want them, as it’s easier to change now than after you paint!
