Miles Hall opened High Mileage Flooring in 2020, and the first year went mostly to waiting. “We kind of had to sit around that first year,” he says. Once the pandemic mandates lifted, “everything just turned on.”
Before that he worked for his father, and he lets those years take some of the credit for how he runs things now, along with what he calls “just taking ourselves serious.” His reason for going out on his own fits in one sentence. “I had a product I knew I could put my name on and sell it to somebody,” he says.
That sentence also explains how the company is built. High Mileage is six people, Hall included. He wants the crew to turn out work with the same quality he started the business on, so he talks with the guys about what the work should look like and why they are all there. If the quality drops as he brings people in, he says, he builds “all the team up to the quality that High Mileage stands for.” He has “more appreciation for my guys because they’re helping me build this thing.”
Commercial work is where he is most at home. “That’s kind of actually where I base my roots out of,” he says, and the company is set up to run many different flooring systems. Polished concrete leads the company’s own description of its work. The crew grinds the slab to expose the aggregate, densifies it, polishes it and seals it, and a commercial floor typically takes one to two weeks. The crew also puts down epoxy and quartz broadcast coatings, self-leveling underlayment and moisture barriers, and lays carpet tile and vinyl. Walmart, Target and a hospital appear on the company’s list of past clients, and it says it is certified in RetroPlate systems.
That range turns up in what customers remember. One who needed heat-welded flooring for a laboratory wrote that Hall knew exactly what the job called for and quoted it right away.
Hall is not trying to build a company that grows by hiring strangers. “I don’t necessarily want to commercialize my business,” he says. “I don’t want to work with people that I don’t know. I like to work with the guys that I do know and build a relationship and kind of be in each other’s corner.” A new man or two joins now and then, but the crew stays small and familiar.
He applies the same plainness to customers. When a schedule slips, he lets them know the week got pushed around and the crew is making adjustments. “I do reach out instead of keeping them guessing,” he says. He puts the company’s reliability at an eight or a nine out of 10. “We have our moments.”
The name on the work is meant to outlast him. Given the choice between growing the company to sell or keeping it in the family, Hall picks the second. “Hand it down,” he says.