“If we have multiple jobs, I’m not installing every single one, but I’m on every single one every day,” says Arman Aguirre, who owns Legacy Custom Flooring with his wife, Cecelia.
On a tile job, Aguirre is on site himself. If he tells a customer he’ll be there at 8 a.m., he is, and he holds his crew to the same clock.
The arrangement starts before the work does. Aguirre does the bidding and the selling himself, so the person who walks a customer through the options is the person who will later set the tile. “Not only am I an installer, but I also go and do the bid. I do the selling all myself,” he says. He recalls a customer who had gotten bids elsewhere and ended up more comfortable with him. Coming at it from the installer’s side, he says, he could answer more of the questions.
His time in the trade runs longer than his company’s. Aguirre was born and raised in Phoenix, in the Maryvale area, and earned his GED. At 19 he met a friend at a business school he had started attending, and in 1996 that friend took him on as a helper and trained him to install flooring. After about a year and a half he began laying floors himself. Later, another installer taught him how to build showers, and those became part of his work too. Custom showers and backsplashes now sit alongside floors on the company’s list of services.
He first went into business for himself in 2003, with a flooring company he says was very successful. When the 2008 recession slowed the work, he lost it and went back to working for other companies. He was supervising for one of them when COVID hit, and it had to let him go. Ready to run his own company again, he wanted a fresh start, so in 2020 he opened under a new name: Legacy Custom Flooring. “With all the contacts I have, I was able to keep working through COVID,” he says.
When he got into tile, he says, there weren’t many people doing it. “Now you can drive down the street and you see five or six people driving around with tile tools,” he says. The men who taught him had already put in about 30 years by the time he arrived, some of them laying tile back in the 1970s. He thinks their work was better even than what he saw in the 1990s, and he has tried to pass it on. “I learned from old school style installers, and then I teach my guys the way I was taught,” he says. New products bring new methods, he allows, but the standard holds. When he sees something he doesn’t like, it gets fixed.
What he tells the crew is simple. “Not only is their name on it, but they’re representing me as well,” he says.
Most of that crew has been around a while. His brother works alongside him, and Aguirre says a lot of his guys have been with him for a long time. A customer who had just moved to Arizona from the Midwest later posted that the crew arrived on time and cleaned up every day, and singled out the brother’s tile work.
Nearly everything the company installs goes into homes. Aguirre holds a commercial license, but he puts commercial work at two or three percent of the total. Carpet, vinyl and tile are what he says the company does best. “We’re pretty much valley wide,” he says, and jobs have taken the crew as far as Queen Creek and Buckeye.