“We do food production facilities, we do restaurants, hardware stores, we do grocery stores, hospitals, data centers, military projects,” Parker Lancaster says.
None of those floors are alike, and Lancaster does not pretend they should be. His Las Cruces company, Speedway Flooring, lays coatings and polished concrete, and he starts each job from the room rather than from a product. “We typically build systems specific for the customer to fit their needs,” he says.
The trade is a narrow one by choice. “We don’t do all flooring,” he says. “We specialize in coatings and polished concrete, resinous flooring systems.”
The company lays out its sequence on its own pages. Someone comes out to measure, checks the condition of the concrete and how much traffic the floor takes, then proposes a system. Old coatings come off, the slab is ground and cracks are filled before anything new goes down. The finish is coated, polished or stained, then sealed. Grinding concrete throws off fine silica dust, so the grinders run hooked to vacuum systems that pull it in before it can settle on walls and windows. “We’re certified with a lot of manufacturers,” Lancaster says.
Homeowners fill out the rest of the schedule, mostly with garages, driveways and patios. “We have crews that do both,” he says.
The company started small. It got going around the time COVID hit, doing little residential installs, and Lancaster says the business kept growing from there.
His father handles sales, and customers know him as Randy. One homeowner recalled Randy coming out to look at the project and sending a quote promptly, then a crew of three working full days for three days on an epoxy floor, with Parker stopping by on the last day to check the result.
Lancaster traces the way the company deals with customers back to his father. “My father had his own business for 35 years and did really well,” he says. Growing up around it gave him a simple test. “If you put yourself in the customer’s shoes, that’s a big thing,” he says. If weather holds up a job or a truck breaks down, a foreman calls the customer, or Lancaster or his father does.
The company pays its employees bonuses and looks after them, Lancaster says, and that runs both ways: the crews look after the company in return. The pace on a job site tends to sort people out on its own. Typically, he says, “if anyone comes in that isn’t willing to work hard, they don’t last, just because everyone else is working hard.”
On paper, Speedway’s territory is southern New Mexico and El Paso, from Silver City to Cloudcroft and down to Santa Teresa. Lancaster says the crews go well past it. “We go all over the place,” he says.
“We’ve been all the way to Alaska.”