Slippery Rock Gazette

Tom  McNall

Floor Restoration Consultant

When I was in high school, I used to spend my summers working for a flat roofing company. Among my assigned tasks the first few summers was to ensure that the workers on the roof had the necessary supplies to do the job.

I would constantly load the gravel elevator with insulation and tar paper all morning, and in the afternoon, I had to ensure that they had a steady supply of gravel to finish off the day’s work. To do so, I would have to continually fill this large hopper with gravel and ensure it was loaded to the top so that if I had any other errands to complete, the production on the roof would not grind to a halt. 

Now that little trip down Memory Lane has served me to this day in the stone restoration business. How so? Well, for starters, the foremen were always tough and driven men, well-tanned by the sun, squinty-eyed and short tempered.  

So, if I didn’t get the supplies up on time, the men couldn’t work and I would get yelled at in such a demeaning fashion that you would think I just killed his firstborn – and drank all his beer as further insult to injury.  

I would be reminded how my non-attention to detail kept 10 men standing around because they couldn’t work if I never got them their supplies.  I was further tuned in to the fact that it cost the company $200/hr for these men to stand around.  Plus a lot of references about my father and mother, but we don’t need to get into that here.

What is important, however, is that it taught me a valuable lesson on planning ahead and stocking up for the future. And in the stone restoration business, that is vital. Especially when it comes to sales!

Sales are the life blood of the stone restoration business. Most of the people I know in this trade rely heavily on word-of-mouth advertising. And if you are any good, that is a given. However, that will not keep your gravel hopper filled constantly.  

You can get a big $75,000 commercial restoration job that distracts you, makes you feel that you are secure for awhile but if you do not prepare for the next job after you are done, your crew will be standing around if the hopper empties, and you really don’t want skilled craftsmen standing around.  

Workers are called that for a reason, because they like to work. Not because they are psychotic and enjoy blisters, but because they like to earn.  Earning their money makes them feel better.  They like to know they will have money to pay their bills.

As an owner of the business, you may be able to afford a week off after a big tough job, but the workers need steady income. Otherwise they mutiny! They can either quit and go work for your competition (taking trade secrets with them – and perhaps clients as well), take a steady factory job (losing you the time investment that it took you to train them) or they can lose faith in you, talk amongst themselves and you lose the spark that kept them motivated when they were working and making money.  

And finding skilled restoration people is not an easy task. You can’t just pick up a few day laborers down at the local big box lumber yard and expect them to polish marble, let alone restore granite or travertine. Yes, even more than losing money on a lost week of work, you run the risk of losing your well-trained staff (your investment) as well.

So, whether you are in charge of sales personally, or you have a staff of people responsible for generating more sales, you need to keep them and yourself motivated to keep selling whether you are living in a good economy or bad.  

You cannot just fill the hopper and then go read the paper in your office, thinking everything is running smoothly. Sometimes the hopper looks full from the top, but down at the bottom, it’s all jammed up. You need to make sure that sales are coming in and that your staff is busy working on producing more. What have you got to lose?  

If your hopper is running smoothly and always full, then build a second hopper, and a third and so on and so forth. You can always take an extra hopper out of service if you need to, but having one that is always running dry means that your workers will be looking for work elsewhere. And if that happens, soon you will be too.

And so until next month, my friends, may your hopper always be full and keep your stick on the ice.

Tom McNall is founder and owner of Great Northern Stone, an Ontario-based stone cleaning and restoration company servicing Ontario and Chicago, IL. Tom also offers corporate and private consultations as well as speaking at conventions. He can be reached at tom@greatnorthernstone.com.