Before he ever worked in the trade, Seth paid someone to put in his floors. What stays with him is how the man spent the visit. “The entire time he was just taking measurements,” Seth says. “He left and sent me a quote, which was fine and all.”
The quote was not what bothered him. “For that person there’s no real relationship, in my opinion,” he says. “It’s more of a transaction.”
Seth now runs Signature Flooring Solutions in Amelia, Ohio, with his business partner, Alex, and he sets up its first meetings as the opposite of that one. “We’re not there to get the job,” he says. The visit is for working out what the customer hopes to accomplish and explaining what the work will involve. The relationship comes first, he says, and the payment second.
Customers often name Alex as the partner who came out to give the estimate. One woman had spent weeks looking for a contractor she could rely on before he showed up to quote her flooring. The project was done within a week, she wrote afterward.
The company is young. It has been official only a short time, Seth says, after a couple of years of remodeling work. He calls the operation small: two crews, with Seth and Alex managing the jobs themselves. “I’m not an outsider or someone that’s just sitting in the office all day,” he says. Anyone who joins the crews has to earn the spot. “The people that work for us have to prove themselves,” he says.
Tile and flooring are the specialty, which mostly means bathroom remodels and luxury vinyl plank for homes and businesses on Cincinnati’s east side. Seth describes the company as commercial-focused, though much of its work has been residential. Of all of it, tile is what he enjoys. He calls it “more of an art versus actually working.”
Seth thinks about trust from the customer’s side of the door, probably because he has stood there. “Everyone already expects the worst,” he says, “so if you can take that out of it, and when you’re done someone says, ‘wow, I’m really happy,’ that goes a long way.”
His definition of reliability is plain. “If we’re doing a job, we’re going to be there when we say that we’re going to be there,” he says. The goal, as he puts it, is to under-promise and over-deliver.
He doesn’t exempt himself from the suspicion he is working against. “Everyone already has their guard up,” he says. “That’s a given. Nobody trusts a contractor, nor do I.”