Are You Charging What Our Industry Deserves?

My employees would tell you I should stick to sales­—they only let me touch equipment if it’s unplugged!I started in the wood flooring business in the mid-’90s as a salesperson at a wood flooring distributor. Business in our industry was good back then, and for awhile it only got better. When the industry was booming I bought the contracting business of one of my customers who was retiring. Things in the industry have changed a lot since I started, but one thing seems to have not changed: the prices. Many contractors are charging the same prices as they were two decades ago. I think this hurts them, their workers, and our industry as a whole. If all of us looked at our jobs as selling ourselves instead of just installing, sanding and finishing wood flooring, we could invest more money in our businesses, take care of our employees better, and earn more respect for our trade.

I was taught sales basics from my youngest days: My father owned a Volkswagen dealership in our town. When I was in grade school, I played coronet in the band, and I was horrible, but every year they would have a fundraising drive selling magazine subscriptions, and I would sell pages and pages of them. Even then my dad taught me to communicate to my “customers” what I was really selling—helping the school band—and to always ask for the order!

Fast forward to my sales days working at the distributor, and I remember having a conversation with a contractor customer who owned his business. He argued with me about whether he was a salesperson or not. He was adamant that he was a hardwood flooring installer, not a salesperson—like that was a bad thing—but I told him that you still have to sell something. When you’re selling something, if you can explain and build value with the customer, you can charge more for it.

I was surprised that many of my customers would bid their labor and then sell their material at cost. One example still sticks out in my mind. We had a showroom where our contractor customers were able to have their customers visit and pick out their flooring, and in this case I told the homeowners the floor they wanted would be $3 a square foot—$1 a square foot more than the contractor’s cost. I then referred them to one of our good installer customers. When I told the contractor about the job, he said, “Well, $3 is awful expensive for that.” I said, “No, that’s what you’re going to sell it for. You can make an extra $1,000 on this job.” He said, “I don’t know if I can do that.” But as a businessperson, you should be doing that on every job!

As a wood flooring contractor, you’ve got to figure out what you do best and sell that. There’s only one cheapest guy in town. Don’t worry about that guy, worry about what you do. When you’re in front of the homeowner, talk about what you’re going to do for them. If you’re going to give them a special wrap around the fireplace, talk about it. If you have a favorite finish, learn what’s great about it, be able to explain why you like it, and sell it (but also be prepared to talk about the finishes other companies bidding on the job might sell). I talk about my crew, because they’ve got so much experience—two are certified and the rest are working on certification—so that is what I sell. Decide how you can market yourself and then do that, because in most cases the bidding process isn’t really about dollars and cents.

If selling yourself doesn’t come naturally to you, it can be uncomfortable at first. But learning to do it is like an investment in your business. When you sell yourself and your company to the customer, you can make a better living and pay your crews more. Sometimes you’ll hear about that electrician or plumber making a lot of money, and it should be like that with wood flooring, too. All the work that electrician or plumber does is behind those walls. He could make figure-eights behind the walls, but nobody will know it. Our work is on display and people are most critical of it, but somehow we seem to think of ourselves as a lesser trade. When people call me a subcontractor, I say, “No, I’m a specialty contractor.”

When I say that our trade should make more money, it’s not that I’m greedy or anything like that, but I have guys with small kids, and I want them to be able to send those kids to college or trade school. I want them to be able to buy a house and afford the same products they’re installing every day. I want them to be able to save for retirement.

When I bought my business, the previous owner and I started discussing the purchase two years before the actual sale. For the first year and a half, he didn’t say much about money, but he was always talking about how he took care of his guys—how they had medical insurance, paid vacation and paid sick time. He emphasized how good his employees were. His point to me was clear: He cared greatly about them, and he wanted this to continue. Even though the industry has gone through a very difficult time, I have managed to do that. This has kept our core group of technicians together.

A friend of mine recently started a wood floor contracting business and attending the National Wood Flooring Association training. Now he can use that to help sell himself: “I’ve been trained by some of the best in the industry.” If he charges enough for his jobs, he can afford to do things like join the NWFA, get NWFACP certified and join the local homebuilder’s association. Those can all bring him credibility and help him along the way. 

If we want people to see this as a good field to be in, and we want to attract great workers, not just people who can’t find anything else, we need to charge appropriately for our work and take care of our employees, who do a tough physical job every day. If we’re stuck at prices that are the same as they were in 1995, we’re going backwards. I want people to look at people in our industry and say, “Wow, he does wood flooring; he really does well."