What a Difference a Day Makes: How Some Garage Floor Contractors are Multiplying their Revenue & Productivity

2018-05-23

When you’re coating a concrete garage floor, one day can make all the difference.

With epoxies, it can take 3, 4 or even 5 days to complete a job, between coat and cure time, depending on the project’s specs.

What using a quick-cure material like polyurea does for contractors is reduce job time to one day of labor. With a polyaspartic polyurea coating, you can prep the floor, coat it with primer, broadcast vinyl chips, finish with a topcoat and return it to service 24 hours later. It’s a long day, but labor costs are lower.

For homeowners, this is a significant difference in time, days more that they must find a place to store all their stuff as the garage floor is finished.

The clear advantage of a one-day installation is the savings in labor and time. Polyurea may appear a little bit more expensive (per gallon) but provides a greater return in labor savings than cost of material—making the cost per square foot, or CPSF, of polyurea lower when compared to other materials. (You can read more about that here.)

Less time means that you can book more projects during the same period of time it would have taken to do a single job using another material, and therefore make your business more effective—and more profitable.

A handful of contractors have taken this practice to a whole other level, according to regional sales manager Brian Raines. (And you can too.)

“With a two-man crew you can do a garage a day if you’re using polyurea,” Brian reported from the field. “A two-man crew with epoxy will be back every several days, so they can’t do as many jobs per week.”

“If you cluster those jobs in the same neighborhood, it’s actually possible to coat 2 garage floors in a day.” Brian went on to explain. He added the caveat, “There are not a whole lot of contractors who do it, but it’s possible.”

The requirements for this ninja scheduling hack: job sites must be close enough together that installers aren’t isn’t losing time traveling between them, and the team must be skilled.

Some contractors have started specifically marketing within neighborhoods, to get neighbors to do a package deal—with the intention of booking the jobs on the same day.

Is this something you’ll try in your business? Need guidance choosing the right materials? We’re here to help: click here to schedule a call with one of our flooring experts so that you can increase your team’s productivity (and profitability!) too.