A year after Tide & Timber Flooring finishes a floor, the company schedules a return visit. Nobody has to call with a problem first. The visit is part of the deal.
Doc Archibald, the operations manager, calls it a one-year wellness check, in which someone from the company goes back out to the job site. The crew looks at whether what it installed is still working the way it should and whether any problems have surfaced since. Most companies, he says, install a floor and consider the job done.
The checkup is one of what Archibald says are 10 guarantees the company groups under the name the Tide & Timber Promise. The first one he mentions is the Color Sure Guarantee. If a customer doesn’t like the color of a floor once it is installed, he says, the company replaces it free of charge. The goal, as he describes it, is a happy customer, not merely a finished project.
The company works to keep that guarantee from being needed. Archibald describes a curated selection process meant to steer customers toward floors they will like, and he concedes that a replacement still happens occasionally. As the company lays it out, the choosing happens at the customer’s house. Staff bring full-size samples so the customer can see them in the room’s own light, next to the cabinets and furniture, then measure and check leveling and moisture before writing a line-item quote.
Archibald thinks most people need that kind of help because they buy floors so rarely. By his estimate, a homeowner does it maybe once every seven to 10 years, and people who don’t own a home don’t do it at all. So the company explains the job before it starts, he says, walking customers through what it plans to do and what could go wrong or right along the way.
The local face of the business is Todd, an installer who has been in the trade since 2008. Archibald says Todd did all the hard surfaces: tile, vinyl, laminate and wood. Hard surfaces remain the company’s specialty. About 90 percent of the work is residential, which is also the work the company prefers, though it takes commercial jobs too.
When Todd was ready to run his own company, Flooring HQ backed him. Archibald explains that HQ invests in installers and becomes a 50/50 partner in each local business, taking on the operating side. Plenty of installers know flooring, he says, but need help with the business end. Archibald works for HQ. Todd handles the installs.
The company works out of Wilmington, Jacksonville and Hampstead, and it lists nearby coastal towns such as Leland, Wrightsville Beach, Surf City and Swansboro among the places it travels. Its installation standard, which it calls PerfectFit, treats acclimation, subfloor prep, layout and finishing as part of every job, and the company backs each installation with a lifetime workmanship warranty.
The quote is meant to be final. Under what the company calls its Price Lock Guarantee, Archibald says, subfloor work is built into the number up front rather than added once the old floor comes up. He says the arrangement matters to the crews, too. It keeps them from being stressed, in his telling, because they know what the company wants and the expectations are clear.
One homeowner, in a testimonial the company posts, singled out how clean the crew left the house and the fact that someone checked in after the install.
Archibald sees the return visit as a check on the work itself. A crew can’t cut corners, he says, when it knows it will be back in a year to fix whatever it got wrong the first time.