Rob Long has hired people to work on his own house, at times when he had the money for it but not the time. “I end up looking at them going, do you not realize what I do for a living,” he says. “And I end up sending them home.”
Long owns Creative Homeworks Custom Building & Remodeling in Dayton. Most of his work is high-end kitchen and bathroom remodels for homeowners. The test he applies to the crews at his own house is the one he applies on every job. “If I wouldn’t do it to my house, I won’t do it to yours,” he says. It comes down to respect, he says, and to the fact that people spend good money when they have work done on their homes.
Long is the sole owner. “It’s my baby,” he says. He calls himself a working owner. “I’m not a salesman,” he says. “I’m not the owner of the company that sits in an office. I’m in the field every day, so I keep it personal.” He runs the business out of his shop, with no brick-and-mortar building and no wrapped trucks.
The company has no employees. Long works with a group of skilled tradesmen who have been at it a long time. He pays them as independent contractors, and each runs a business of his own. When a job needs a permit or a lot of electrical work, he calls electricians, plumbers or HVAC people he has trusted for years. He describes them as “a core group of small subcontractors, not companies but individuals.” What he will not do is pile on outside crews to finish sooner. “I don’t bring in subcontractors to get the job done faster or make more money,” he says. “So I take my time, and people like that.”
One homeowner who had a master bathroom redone described how that care looked in practice. The crew covered the bedroom furniture in plastic, put up a plastic barrier from floor to ceiling between the hallway and the bathroom to contain the demolition dust, and covered the carpet and stairs. The owners were at work during the day while the crew had the house to themselves.
The work Long likes best is the high-end custom kitchen. The company’s name is the point, he says. He likes walking into someone’s house and coming up with creative solutions to make it better, “not just run-of-the-mill pull and replace.”
He came to the trade sideways. Long was a Recon Marine, the Corps’ counterpart to the Navy SEALs and Army Special Forces, as he puts it. He deployed with SEAL teams and went through special forces schools. He credits that service, along with the way he was raised, for his reliability.
After the Marines he went to college and came away disillusioned. He moved back to Dayton, and in 1985 he started as a helper on a construction site building custom homes. He framed houses on one builder’s crew, moved to that builder’s finish crew, then learned remodeling at a remodeling company before going out on his own. “So I learned as I went,” he says.
The choice of trade was practical. “I figured as long as we’re on this planet we need food, clothing and shelter,” he says, “so shelter is a good thing to know how to do.”
Long has a partner who has worked with him for many years and is 10 years younger. “When I’m done, he can take it over,” Long says.
Until then, he has no interest in making the company bigger. Getting bigger, he says, would cost the personal quality customers come to him for. Skilled help is hard to find. The job itself has gotten tougher, too: carpentry is harder than it was 20 or 25 years ago, he says, because of the quality of the materials available now.
He has a plainer reason as well. “Now I just get off work and I want to go home and take a nap,” he says.