[Music] on behalf of the natural stone institute and stoneworld magazine thank you for joining us for today's session selling natural stone building your company's sales structure we have a great program planned for you without further ado i would like to introduce gk nakan gk nakan Has over 48 years experience in the natural stone industry he and his partners own stone interiors north america a large fabrication company with three locations in the southeast gk's accomplishments include the 2004 pinnacle award for special special use of stone 2005 stone world magazine fabricator of the year gk also served
as the 2011 President of the natural stone institute board of directors and received the migliore lifetime achievement award gk often provides independent council consulting services to fabrication facilities and travels the country providing educational seminars at various industry related events such as stone expo coverings k-biz and the stone industry Education series please welcome gk nakan welcome everybody and thanks for participating in our uh education series today uh as you will find out uh education is a passion for me and of course all of our panelists today i'd like to first have each of our panelists uh
introduce themselves and kind of give a little bit of brief history of your uh Experience in the natural stone industry and darcy wilson tasha we'll start with you thank you gk my name is dasha whitworth i have been in the natural stone industry since 2001. uh before that i worked for a construction management firm i worked for an electrical contractor and a landscape contractor so most of my career i've been In the built industry i was blessed enough to be offered a job in 2001 by uh darryl diago's of the gallegos corporation and that is
where my passion for natural stone began and continues so i am now currently with the natural stone institute i've been here about three years and i'm just great and lucky and thrilled to be here hey Thanks station right good morning everybody i'm brett rugo uh president owner of rugos stone we're a natural stone contractor and fabricator located just outside of washington dc and we work throughout the mid-atlantic area we focus on commercial buildings high-end residences and we do quite a bit of artistic work in the liturgical catholic church Community um my firm is about 25
years old i've been working in the stone industry since 1981 i believe i was born in very vermont to immigrants from italy who were stone carvers and so at the earliest ages i've been exposed to natural stone work all of my life and it's been a passion to do that i was the president of the natural stone institute formerly known as the mia In 2010 and i served on the board for seven years so i'm here today to give some inside perspective on on the commercial sector thank you thanks brad appreciate it well the uh
aaron if you want to go next slide uh today we're going to handle basically or actually address three major areas that we're concerned uh that we want to put some education together with Uh one is the defining the commercial sales customer uh and how we uh attract them and work with them the second will be uh connecting with the design community and then the third again will be securing contracts what what are some of the important aspects of uh of the contract that we make sure we protect ourselves in so with that said we'll go
into msi Uh msi is the host of our uh of our events msi is north america's largest independent source of counter top flooring wall tile and hardscaping surfaces for over 40 years msi has sourced the globe for the highest quality hard surfaces on trend designs and has grown to over 1.5 billion dollars in annual revenues our product lines include the broadest selection of quartz and natural Stone countertops luxury vinyl tile porcelain and natural stone tile decorative mosaics pebbles stacked stone and pavers with over 2 000 employees and over 30 showroom and distribution centers in the
united states and canada we actively service every channel including fabricators retailers builders contractors kitchen and bath dealers mass merchants architects Designers and hospitality our distribution infrastructure includes importing over 50 000 containers per year and a company-owned delivery fleet of over 200 trucks msi can deliver anywhere in the continental united states within 48 hours our information technology systems report real-time inventory so our trade partners know exactly What's in stock and how quickly they can receive it our business is agile and designed for growth we adapt to the needs of our customers from our latest venture a
domestic manufacturing plant for quartz countertops to being on the leading edge of augmented reality to improve the consumer shopping experience we've become the preferred supplier Because we are creative innovative and curious savvy professional and smart flexible open-minded and adaptable cooperative collaborative and responsive this mindset allows us to deliver the greatest assortment affordable products accessible inventory and attentive service at the center of global operations is our 26-acre headquarters in orange california The facility is a testament to our core commitments in addition to stocking tens of millions of square feet of inventory we employ over 200 corporate
employees in key functional areas including sourcing logistics operations marketing accounting and information technology our operations team employs the latest technology and equipment to provide Best-in-class distribution to our customers our sample board processing department produces custom solutions for thousands of our customer showrooms each year experts across our organization are committed to providing our customers an elevated experience from customer service to trend and design msi provides inspiration customer service professionals in our showroom guide you through the industry's top Trending residential and commercial services our slab yards capture the beauty of quartz granite marble and other countertop services
online and in our showrooms we use product stories and technology to show our customers what's possible the more immersive the better msi's marketing merchandising and design teams are committed to providing an elevated and Curated shopping experience a full array of tools are available for our customers website room scene photography displays brochures training modules and trend and design collateral [Music] we are future focused identifying and investing in categories that will transform the marketplace msi making dream surfaces attainable okay um we have our first uh Poll question uh posted now and uh aaron is going to give
a couple of minutes to um to uh answer the question it shouldn't take too long it's just has your business participated in commercial contracts in the past as we have a varied audience in uh in our event today um some of us being uh commercial contractors some of being residential contractors or countertop Fabricators that are looking to get into commercial it's important we know what uh what where we're going it'll help bretton and every one of us um assist in some good questions uh how did that poll come out aaron there it is so great
um so we've had 89 uh participate in commercial uh uh venues uh or contracts which is a lot surprising to me uh for our presentation uh what i'd like to do is uh go ahead And uh and get into the commercial customers and uh you know when we look at commercial contracts there are a couple of uh differences in the type of commercial we do those of us who do like myself do a lot of currently are doing mainly uh countertop commercial and not necessarily exterior skins or or other large commercial projects And there's uh
like brett who does just about all commercial projects uh including architectural uh brett why don't you take a couple of minutes now and give us kind of a um you know what a competitive bid in the different types of contracts you uh you go through okay so you know the word commercial needs a little definition Commercial to me means anything that's really not residential commercial includes institutional buildings museums landscapes large parks um it includes class a office building sometimes class b office buildings generally in urban settings and commercial would include the exterior cladding of a
building the landscaping element around the perimeter and of course decorative Marble lobbies and oftentimes core bathrooms i think commercial is also applied to folks in the counter industry because there's so much high-rise residential work going on we don't really participate in that we've done a few it's not really our our niche um and that's also commercial work because the it's vertically challenged because of the logistics of moving the material So what types of contracts do we see most of the contracts that we see are hard bid they're based upon a set of contract documents and
specifications that design that define all the requirements you need to perform to to complete the work hard bid means that a set of documents have been prepared you prepare a proposal for the scope you desire to do You tender a price generally to a construction manager or a general contractor it gets evaluated and hopefully you get a chance to negotiate the other types of contracts which are obviously preferred are contracts that are negotiated negotiated contracts generally start with a lot of pre-construction services oftentimes unpaid consulting periods where you do sampling Design systems perhaps engineering input
on how a system is going to perform on the wall and what that system includes it's not all you know our industry on exterior cladding is really not just stone it's all the support systems the insulation what we call the air water vapor barrier the entire envelope of the building negotiated contracts are few and far between unfortunately But they are still preferred because you get into the job early and you get a chance to get your expertise your input your strengths built into the requirements to do that you need an active client clients are usually
developers or architects who want your expertise and want you to contribute to the buildability of the project architects in many cases have become a Little bit generalist they're still very very good designers but they're not always system people and not always the most mechanical people when it comes to all the little assemblies that are required to properly attach the stone to the building depending on the performance requirements so those are kind of the two contracts that we see repetitively is the hard bid which is most of the marketplace And then if your company is engaged
in pre-construction services you can often facilitate the ability to negotiate at least an enhanced position for a hard bid or potentially negotiate a final price based upon all your hard work which could be 18 months two years even longer to build up a body of knowledge or the architect in the engineer record on just how to do It and where to procure it all right brett how do you build some of these relationships when you talk about the the relationship of uh up front how do you go about building that relationship with the contractors uh
and or the architect community well first and foremost uh you've got to have tangible experience and you've got to be a good communicator if you don't have experience uh Generally deep experience in the field that you're proposing to discuss or negotiate on and consult on you won't your the attention span of the end user won't last very long so optimally anybody that you have out doing business development has got to have a couple of decades or at least 10 years in the place and fully understand not only all the variety of materials but their weaknesses
pros and cons accessibility Panel sizes uses recommended uses non-uses so really it's competency from the front end and then it's you have to go out and communicate that that service exists and that you're willing to participate and help people get up to speed on what is available and how it can be attached this takes a lot of time you need brand recognition to get attention from those that are they're in Need of that information so i think the short answer is you've got to have a few years quite a few years in the business you've
got to have had an exposure to a lot of different types of systems a lot of different types of stone and based upon their feedback you will find out as to whether or not your competency is being appreciated valued and as that as your reputation grows Uh for your consulting ability uh so will your opportunities oftentimes architects between studios know one another they share leads oftentimes they're competitors that don't want to share their resources for consulting so you just got to get out there and find out who's current who's in your marketplace who's who's dominant
um and introduce yourself at the lowest level and then work your way up Hopefully to the principal level and as you get older and as time goes on the people you work with that were 20 will someday be 50 and they'll be in senior positions and we and they'll be willing to to listen to you because you have a track record so it's sort of a long road um but if you if you're steady with it you keep chipping away um i have found that you'll get a lot of advocates Of course you have to
be very careful because most of this consulting is gratis they don't seem to have a lot of disposable funds yet for stone consulting at the earliest phases so it's really part of our own internal promotional efforts and costs to market and maintain our brand reputation fred i've noticed in the industry today that many commercial projects and what You and i consider commercial projects are actually designed projects where engineers design anchoring systems and so forth there are a lot of companies out there that commercial smaller commercial builders are going to tile companies and or fabricators and
so forth because they've had relationships with them and trying to get them uh to build uh Buildings you and i have had a couple of relationships with our companies lately where we've come across a a another company trying to to um to do some exterior skins and we just it's not our niche in as a fabricator of countertops and showers we do a lot of different work um what do you recommend how do you recommend Uh we contact uh professionals in that niche to to work with us instead of working trying to do it on
your own without the experience well as soon as you start to go vertically on a building the liabilities and the experience and the amount of engineering that's required is a drastic change in the conditions of your your business risk for that particular project So in spirit experience knowledge of all the most basic uh wind load dead load uh building code requirements are really prerequisite to getting involved with a lot of those things as soon as you put a piece of stone vertically you're creating the potential for a life safety issue and so the installation of
that stone has to be secure with the best possible advice and Adherence to the contract documents so if there is a younger firm or even a firm with a lot of experience but they've never done exterior cladding i would say they look for a mentor or a consultant or a structural engineer to work with to get guidance on a lot of the or all of the connections and the type of stone that's used and the thickness to ensure that what you're venturing out to do Is going to be in complete client compliance and not pose
a long-term risk for you not just under warranty because one can still be sued later on after a warranty if something fell down because it wasn't constructed correctly and you didn't know some of the basics or even more advanced details that can cause trouble to the facade so i guess my word is to my advice to anyone Interested in going from a fabricator business model into a contractor built model they should clearly understand it's a different set of business requirements it's a different set of risk and it is a different set set of competencies um
it's not good enough to just cut a piece of stone accurately it has to be put up In a permanent sense and that isn't always just about the stone anchor but what we're attaching the stone anchor to so my advice would be cautious certainly you want to grow your business and you want to get into it i would participate in a lot of the the nsi stone manuals and other webinars that are offered on technical issues so that you continue to build Your body of knowledge you know i learned something every single day and i'll
never stop doing that for as long as i live because this industry is so diverse and there's so many different little issues that can come up and that's why i say if you're if you really want to enter into contracting versus just being a fabricator it would be You'd be well advised to have a mentor with a number of decades in that industry to understand the business model risk the liabilities and then the technical requirements that are that are really required to make sure that you don't end up in uh in a bad situation due
to any kind of a failure and one of the other things we were talking about is is When we're dealing in these contracts a lot of times it's confusing as to as to who's the customer and who's the client and uh you and i don't know that that uh the customer and why don't you elaborate on the payment as burst of the appreciation of that yeah yeah i've always used the little catch phrase that a a customer is somebody who pays you and A client is somebody uh who cares about what you're doing that's particularly
accurate in the commercial construction world the general contractors and construction managers are there to perform a building under a certain design in a certain time span and certainly they want to do a good job but they're less intimate and attached emotionally let's say to the natural stone and It's the static qualities and the reasons that it were it was picked for so when we do our pre-construction consulting and networking we have always viewed the the general contractor if we end up working for them as the as the customer and the client is the architect developer
museum owner church whoever it is and it's important that we always maintain relationships with them To avert any kind of misunderstanding and a problem and i've often found that really good relationships with clients helps with your relationship with customers yeah we we have that same issue we find that that once we find out who's paying us that's a good and that's a good factor but what we want to know is who's going to approve our work and That's the person who is quality that really appreciates what we're doing the other thing i'd like to maybe
if we can address is the accreditation for level uh a and b i can't think of anybody better since you were on the accreditation board for commercial contractors to kind of explain what that is and why it's important to our industry not necessarily the other side but the whole industry as a whole yeah just It's it seems like a long time ago but i recall meeting with you every single quarter and a select group of others in different airport hotel conference rooms uh over the course of a couple of years and we developed the accreditation
programs for the then marvel institute now nsi and the reason for those accreditations were that we were tired of seeing A lack of professionalism a lack of competency in our various sub-sectors of the natural stone industry we wanted the association to advocate and endorse competency and express that back to the design community and the customer community to say these are the best folks for the following reasons and they have passed our accreditation program accreditation is basically a Gold seal or it's a standard it says you are genuinely competent to perform a particular type of work
within the jurisdiction of that type of accreditation so you could be a natural stone fabricator and you could be the best fabricator of desks slab showers staircases vanities kitchens all these sorts of Things that are low to the ground don't pose huge amounts of liability or aesthetic and require precision fabrication but you don't necessarily have the same skill sets that a commercial a contractor does to work in downtown los angeles or portland or new york city or washington dc or chicago with a whole different host of of issues to contend with versus a Single family
or even a multi-family residence so you know uh accreditation is is basically a report card on the company as it stands it it discusses you know it evaluates your infrastructure not only in the office factory and your construction field sites it evaluates your safety program uh in the shop in the field it evaluates your financial stability Your ability to be bondable your credit ratings to a point although we're not a credit rating agency and then it evaluates the body of work that you've done within various types of sectors under the three different types of accreditation
to confirm whether or not you genuinely have the experience to have that standard and to be marketed by the nsi as somebody competent so if you're able to get through all Those things and it is a bit of work and it's a bit of of time to prepare you have then set yourself apart from competition and you should deserve all the accolades and promotion abilities from the nsi to be deemed a superior resource for that particular type of work brett the other thing that i was kind of kind of thinking about is we we have
um two different Trades uh basically when we talk about commercial work and we you mentioned earlier about you know basically the countertop commercial work which you know the fabricators fall into real well and actually perform better in many cases than in the commercial applications than the true exterior commercial contractor when i owned Or was part of uh intrepid we did exterior countertops were kind of the the aggravating part of our work because we do we did much more complexity with exterior skins and interior lobbies and so forth um one of the things that that we
look at today is is uh when i look at a commercial contract sometimes there's part of the trades that our people don't Understand or don't know our craftsmen don't know like doing a column and so forth kind of explain maybe the difference between a a uh craftsman or masonry uh installer to a counter tap installer yeah you know a countertop installer is certainly a skilled guy and he's got a limited amount of rigging ability um he respects the weight and the span Of the of the counter he understands the coordination with the plumbing fixtures the
electrical fixtures the cabinetry um the material handling issue to get it up into place and to do all that without damaging the piece and to get it fully integrated you know every countertop is almost like its own little job and there are people that specialize in That work and they're very very good at it because that is their focus and they've learned how to really control cost and be efficient in that area generally the folks that do that type of work are not really journeyman masons journeyman mason is somebody who's traditionally come up through the
trial trades he understands mortars he understands stone he can work with Rough stone and create hand cut stone he can work with dimension stone and region read the drawings and perform basic trigonometry and geometry to perform layout and installations generally the rigging knowledge of a commercial a contractor mason is far more advanced because we work on all types of scaffolding systems from swings to mass climbers to pipe scaffold it's just a completely different Environment with quite a bit different skill sets that are not acquired overnight they're acquired over a long time with a lot of
training on today all of our foreman and many of our lead masons on the jobs all have osha 30 they all have rigging experience and they're certified they all have scaffold building certified competent person training They have flag and crane signaling training they have specialized training for mass climbers swing scaffolds um they have welding certifications for mild steel to mild steel stainless to mild stainless to stainless they have experience in waterproofing elements joint sealant applications insulation in applications so there's a whole host of a lot more training A lot more diversity in the product types
and it's just a much wider market sector of products that all have to come together so they are to me kind of two distinct skill sets there is some overlap and it's not to say somebody can't grow from being a superb countertop installer into a commercial mason and certainly could do that um i don't think it would be overnight And in the same respect not necessarily everybody was a certified welder who works for me is going to do as nice a job as somebody from stone interiors who puts in countertops every single day so i'm
not saying that one is better than the other i'm just saying they are very different skill sets in two different environments yeah that's the same way we look at it's two different trades Really um when you look at it and how they're put together okay right thanks a lot for this section we're going to move on now aaron i think we're going to go to our uh video on our sponsors so [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] Okay very good well we're back and we're uh ready to get into the design community uh so we have a
couple of questions uh or at least our poll question uh which is uh how have you cultivated relationships with the design community in the past um please start us out because i think daysha and brad and i will go in a different uh direction here based on your Responses here uh so please uh fill us in on that uh poll uh as we go forward uh i really appreciate uh being with us today she's had a lot of experience in the in the uh design community uh in trying to get uh representatives and to represent
the natural stone uh institute and also the natural stone in the design community So let's see how the poll came out and we can go on to the next thing here provide lunch and learns 29 speak at design conferences that's six percent uh provide individual consultant 35 and we've never cultivated a relationship with designers uh one of the things we want to do is work with these designers and as we get into the first questions they show of the design community um it's One of the most important things in our in our businesses is when
we're dealing with designers knowing uh you know who we're dealing with what we're dealing with and who's the customer in a lot of cases too because uh they are professionals and and they they definitely want to be recognized as as professionals uh kind of tell us a Little bit of the techniques that you have in uh setting up customers and expectations with designers absolutely um i think first and foremost it's about building that relationship earning their trust and we we need to go into it as knowledgeable as we absolutely can be educate yourself until i
leave this industry and probably Until i pass away i'm going to educate myself and as much as i can i learn every day something new and i think it's just really important to build that knowledge base in order to be effective in communicating with them you have to listen um they need you need to help them tell you what their vision is so that you can solve for that vision um and sometimes that's that's can be Difficult um it takes really good communication skills so you have your knowledge base you listen and then you solve
their problem um or their vision i wouldn't call it a problem and um so that's what look at setting up that biz building that relationship um it all revolves around those three things um if you come to a particular project that They've already specified everything it's really important to be cognizant of the fact that they do have a they have an emotional attachment just like their client to their design and so it's about having that conversation and solving for it for perhaps they've picked something that's not great for that application well listen and see what
it is that they're Trying to achieve is it a durability factor is it as aesthetic is it is it um is this a home that is spent two weeks out of a year in or if this is something that just lived in every day by really um great big family it's really important to understand all of those things and you just have to ask those questions um because it's your job to solve their Their vision with honesty and integrity and the more you know the better you can be effective at that right thanks um the
other aspect that we look at is um you know a lot of times we do the lunch and learns and the different types of educational venues i know in our company uh we do a good bit of the um the uh lunch and learns for the asid And the uh nkba and all the different functions of designers just to get recognition to those designers of different products and of course our company uh you're not supposed to be too uh promotional but uh everybody has a promotion when you're the presenter i know the the natural stone
institute has uh certified speakers uh so if uh if a fabricator can Can you guys explain if a fabricator doesn't necessarily or a commercial contract doesn't necessarily have a person on staff how they can go through our process with the natural stone institute to have these events absolutely um that is the first chance to get in in the door to meet to become that um that go-to person for natural stone Um it's super important for us to educate educate educate ourselves and our clients and design communities um yes we do have a ceu program we
have um complete presentations that are certified for asid aia aka asla and there are one there's one or two that are also usgbc accredited um and that allows you to give them a learning credit Um toward their um their ongoing i'm losing my word they're they're ongoing accreditation right they there were a number of learning units for that and so that's a really really great way to introduce yourself and your company to these to these design community members if you don't already have those connections right yeah we really even if you have and I know
we try to do an event every couple of um at least twice a year we try to do an event for our our uh clients and uh we do either lunch and learn or dinner or wine uh i really like some of the um the uh advantages the natural stone institute has in in especially the women in stone where we do wine and stone that's a real nice event to get Designers in to to really appreciate your company i know a lot of the uh the distributors have used that but fabricators should use that too
and uh and if they check the nsi out i think they'll find that there's a lot of ways to connect to these designers and and uh be a benefit to them like you're saying um tell us a little bit about the the relationships Between uh designers uh the the two different basic types one is the one who wants to run the project and and act as a contractor as compared to the true designer who works with the client and you to make a successful project absolutely we have to be really really cognizant of where they
are and how they like to do business and we have to adapt to that um we hope That it's a collaborative effort and um the way you do that the way we get to that position is to actually build the relationship in advance um and maybe this is the first time you've worked with this designer but if you can earn their trust and you can build that relationship then you're gonna make them look like a rock star and you're going to make them have the experience that they'll come Back to you each time for that
same um that same product of natural stone also it's important to recognize that um if you haven't if you haven't had the opportunity to set expectations in advance it can allow it does allow for a little bit of difficulty at the end if we don't have agreement on um an installation Or a product application or in the stone application um so it's really important to work and communicate all the way through the process listen and solve all the way through um and hopefully if you've done your job at the end of the day if there
is a challenge you work together to solve it right you know we have uh designers uh pose a little bit of a problem from time to time with Fabricators and or other construction people just like architects do because a lot of times the specifications and the designs that they perform are not always exactly what should be done or not clearly interpreted to the fabricator and therefore a customer will have a dis will have a disapproval of something and the designer sometimes will be your Best asset and sometimes they'll be your worst nightmare uh you have
any recommendations on when it becomes a worst nightmare we love the best asset you know but it's when they have become the worst nightmare of how they should or would support us as fabricators and contractors absolutely i think um it's really important to think about how You set those uh expectations all the way through um and if you see a red flag if you see that that's not a great option or application of that particular stone that in that space um say something give them a solution find something that looks like that or that has
that same feel but is going to be more effective In that application solve for them become their teammate and then you can often avoid those problems if it comes down to um i i have had situations where i did not recommend a particular stone for a particular application and we chose to walk away if they could you know we just did not we wouldn't warranty it We told them it was not a good idea and we walked away um and i think you need to be able to do that i think you need to maintain
your integrity and honesty and it's more about doing the right thing than it is doing everything in the industry that we can get involved third-party stone consultants that go really far south um we can engage their Their knowledge and expertise that's the good part about the metro zone is to we have a lot of people in our association that can help and are always willing to help too one of the things we've got to do one of the things i've been looking at today in the design community is colors colors is a big aspect in
our design community today and a lot of those colors sometimes give us Difficulty number one in finding uh sources and number two in proper applications uh we use in our company now a lot of marble on our countertops and and and quartzite is becoming real popular too what do you how do you feel the design communities looking at those products today i think there's still some myths out there okay i think that It's our job to explain to them how that material is going to evolve and live within that space um she came here to
say before that uh you know i'm not the same i was 20 years ago well i'm not the same i was 20 years ago neither are my countertops but that's the beauty of it it's it's about patina it's about growing into your Your space it's about evolving um so i think it's just really important for us to set the expectations and let them know exactly what what it's going to do how it will perform and what things they can do should something occur the nice thing about natural stone is it's restorable it's refinishable we can
anything Almost short of somebody taking a sledgehammer to it we have the ability to restore purposes and those finishes and fix chips or fix a crack um unlike a lot of other materials that are out in the market today and i think it's really important for us to remind the designers that yes it will age but it will age beautifully just like we all do Yep that that's one of the big things that we've been able to successfully look at with designers because for for years they've always loved the marble look uh but they didn't
like the utilitarian purpose of the marble well with sealer is that in in hone in the materials that's become better but what really has uh kind of attacked the Residential on our uh light commercial market with uh home interior retail is the quartzite because it has the utilitarian um usefulness of it it doesn't uh etch and stain as as uh as marvel does and it but at the same time there are many uh quartzites that just really look like marble and give that wonderful beautiful blend have you experienced that out and feel too Awesome absolutely
absolutely there are many many stunningly beautiful marble-like quartzites in fact my kitchen has a quartzite that is marble-esque and i mean it's so beautiful and it is utilitarian what's really important for people to understand though is that um that we need to ensure that material is truly a court site Yeah there are some out in the market unfortunately that are listed as a quartzite quartzite and they're just dolimetic marbles so they will etch and then there's nothing worse than a client feeling like they were taken advantage of or they didn't get what they were sold
and so it's really important for us in the stone industry to be very very Clear and to make absolutely sure that what we're selling to people is what it is a waimaku bus is a lot different than super white right i mean it's just to make those distinctions um and i and i think it's important for us to manage that all the way through we can almost always find a natural stone that will fit their budget and their aesthetic values that they're looking for And the color that they want if they're willing to open their
mind and and to look a little bit further than just right what's right in front of me so i think that's to be honest and forthright thank you daisha i appreciate that um thanks for this uh session too we're going to move on now to the sponsor of bnb industries and intermac And i want to thank okay we're back uh we're back to poll three now and uh and this one uh it says uh does your company currently have a structure in place to review commercial contracts and this side of the section we're going to
start talking uh specifically about contracts how you walk away stay what are in them and some maybe Some big pitfalls that all of our companies need to to address when we start doing uh commercial jobs uh you know as my career in the industry i was originally a commercial contractor and uh and you know we had an attorney on staff we had a lot of things that we reviewed our contracts and uh made sure that we weren't setting ourselves up for failure The day we signed the contract so we'll talk a little bit about that
when going into the uh residential area in the countertop area uh you know our contracts there are a lot uh simpler in uh because the jobs are usually uh much quicker they're you know the whole length of a job may be three weeks from sales to um to completion uh whereas a commercial contract may be you know Six months to three or four years okay uh let's see how this uh came out on our poll so um a lot of us uh 59 of us don't have a structure and 41 of us do have a
structure that's that's really good uh it would be nice for everybody to have a structure if you're going to do commercial work it would be very good for us to to have a structure one of the things that that you know i Like to talk about is is knowing what's in the contract right would you like to kind of start on uh on the contract side of the commercial contracts sure um we review every single boilerplate contract and the scope specific portion for every project many of these commercial contracts have been developed over years with
extensive amount of hours by very skilled attorneys and They're really about risk aversion and risk containment and pushing all the risk down to the subcontract levels so to sign a commercial contract you have to have a very high level of risk tolerance because many of the items that are not very palatable will not be changed by most general contractors for example payment terms there is a term in the Commercial world called paid when paid there's another term called paid if paid these types of terms guarantee this the construction manager that they don't have to pay
you even though you've completed your work if they're not paid by the owner this is a very tricky slippery slope um it causes a lot of heartache with long delayed payments and it basically means your contractual relationship and ability to get paid is only as good As the relationship between the owner the construction manager if those two have fights and they stop paying each other there is no inherent obligation for you to be paid by the construction manager for the stonework that's something you always want to look at if you can get out of it
all the better i would say try to sometimes if you're new to the industry and you've got really competitive prices You might find that certain construction managers have waived those things because they find your proposal to be very attractive so it's worth trying indemnity and insurance generally insurance levels within the commercial industry are much higher than residential uh or even like commercial it's very unc not uncommon to have five or ten million dollar general liability umbrellas Uh statutory limits for workers comp shouldn't be really any different than the limits that you have commercially they might
off also ask you for professional liability insurance well what is professional liability insurance that is an insurance policy that somebody with a professional accreditation holds such as an architect a structural engineer That sort of thing generally as a contractor fabricator you can't purchase professional liability insurance it has to be purchased by the licensed individual who could be your subcontractor now if you do have in-house structural engineers you might be able to get that policy they're very expensive and the limits on those keep going up every year it's very it's not uncommon to see two and
three million dollar limits now On professional liability so we see those things all the time another one to look for that sticks its head up a lot on commercial work is mold insurance it's not cheap it's not in most standard portfolios of commercial and construction insurance and it poses certain liabilities to you i would try and avoid it again as much as possible we have had a couple of clients that insisted on it we made them Pay for the policy these were contractors coming out of california and they had a whole different set of legal
concerns than people on the east coast warranty periods warranties are very very critical they're not often spelled out on the drawings they're usually embedded in the specifications or what we call the general condition specifications that define everything on the project Not just the stonework it's very common to have a one-year warranty usually the commencement is what we call substantial completion that's basically when the building has been deemed by the inspectors to be occupiable and then they can it's a transfer of the building from construction to an occu an occupied structure that's usually when warranties kick
off warranties are a corporate guarantee That you will go back within a certain specified time period to fix or repair things so you've got to be very careful about them we often see five-year warranties now particularly on very high-end cladding and we get clients asking for 10-year warranties we do not sign 10-year warranties we will tell them straight up from the beginning well what's the price there is no price we're not offering a 10-year Warranty so be very careful about that it's not child's play if you take a contract and sign it and then you
refuse to provide that warranty you will not get paid the rest of your contract now then the contract the construction manager will have to come up with a way to create the warranty that he bought from you to give hit to be compliant with his Contractor and i assure you you won't get paid the full amount that's due to you warranties are very careful you need to study the language very carefully and you need to understand if any of the obligations within warranty can be diverted to manufacturer warranties generally stone suppliers are not going to
give much of a warranty it might be a year and it's only Good for the material but there's a lot of wiggle room for them depending on how you handled it anchored it if you prepped it and cut it after you took possession of it the biggest things that you want to look at in warranty is when you get into joint sealant which is what you often call caulking insulation and waterproofing those are the things that cause most building owners maintenance issues And those are the things that are usually people get called back on so
in the curt wall industry the subject matter of warranty and the pass through to the material suppliers the dow cornings the pecoras the general electrics that produce the actual caulking can often be procured for 20-year warranties on material even in the case where a material supplier wants to offer 20 we're always Very careful to qualify that our warranty is one year we'll give you the pass-through warranty from the material supplier and a lot of times that's fine but as time has gone on the subject matter of extended warranties and very rigid warranties has become much
more prevalent so the question was do we review contracts yes we do we review them all and generally we will Sign most contracts but there are some times where we find their issues that we will not agree to and we will avoid that job i often tell people the last right you have in this commercial construction world is before you sign the contract because once you sign the contract it's an uphill battle with a document that is heavily weighted to the other side of this equation Again this goes back to what we're talking about with
customer relations and clients and having a client on your shoulder to look out for your interest and to help you stay within the guidelines as much as possible by you doing your work is is also a great benefit it's not going to change the language of the ca of the contract um but it's another positive step towards Trying to stay safe within the confines of your contract so contract reviews is very very important the jurisdiction for disputes is important are you going to litigate if you're doing an out of town job and you're from little
rock arkansas and this job is in topeka kansas are you prepared to go to topeka to settle all the claims and charges if you end up in court generally the the place the jurisdiction Is weighted to the person issuing the contract i always tell people that commercial construction is one of the only industries where you sell things and you have to sign somebody else's agreement unlike a manufacturer like stone interiors and others most likely they issue a contract their terms and conditions are defined and somebody else signs it He's the seller he created the contract
one of the big differentiators in commercial work is that we have to sign somebody else's contract 95 of the time those contracts are very well thought out and they are generally immovable and if you are not going to sign and you have problems with the boilerplate and even though your price is great and you're competent most likely they won't break their risk Model and they will kick you out of the decision-making process and find somebody else that will keep their business model their legal risk model contained so it's absolutely important that you review them again
as a quick recap your terms your terms and conditions what are your paid when paid your indemnification and insurance your warranty And then of course your schedule you are always better suited having a defined schedule many contracts are issued today with a very gray language on that that allows the the client or the customer the general contractor to change the schedule at whim and require for you to have multiple mobilizations not just one all to suit their needs and a lot of these changes have been made to Eliminate claims and change orders later on by
people who aren't disgruntled with the way the process went it's always best to have the delivery date of the stone note and the duration date for the installation with an agreed to sequence you also need to be careful about language that requires you to include any and all over time to meet The schedule and again the schedule is often defined as something that can be modified to their liking time so a lot of careful language that you need to review to make sure all these fit within your your business model and the way you estimated
the job it's a very critical thing right brett can we touch real quick on on bonding because one of the the things that that a lot of people don't Understand about bonds is that uh it can it is forever you know so if a building fails 20 years later and the bonding companies called in and found that there was an error uh it that binding if you've been demanded by to that bonding company they can be like me you know an old man sitting on my front porch and they can come knock and take my
company away speak a little bit about the bonding of it Okay so let's start with what is a bond bond is bond is basically an insurance policy that would be held by your client that guarantees from a third party that if xyz stone fail falls down goes bankrupt can't complete the project that that bonding company for the same price will step in apply financial resources seek other talent or take the remnants of this failing company To complete the project for the same fixed price that is what a bond is there are two types of bonds
there are payment bonds and performance bonds payment bonds basically guarantee that i will pay gk for the stone if i don't that bond covers the fact that i took the money on the federal courthouse and i didn't pay it to gk who i owed it to and i went and bought another house for Myself and i failed to pay him that performance bond would cover uh gk getting paid what is it that's the performance piece the the payment i'm sorry that's the payment piece the performance piece is what i spoke about earlier which is the
ability to finish the job for the guaranteed fixed price how do we get bonds bonds are issued by surety companies that are special Insurance companies that have deep actuarial departments that provide great in-depth analytical reviews of a company's performance over many years the assets that they have in place the interview the owners and the principals of the company and you develop what's known as a relationship and they're going to assess whether or not you're a worthy risk So getting a bond is not a guarantee you have to have a relationship in place you're going to
have to have assets there are a lot of different ratios that people use to determine what's an adequate level of assets relative to the bonding program but one of the things we get asked all the time in pre-qualification questionnaires that are very common now from construction managers who want to know Everything about your company is they want to know your single job bonding limit and your gross bonding capacity those are two different things a single job might be the biggest bond we're going to give you is a million and the most at any one time
we're going to give you is three or four or it could be completely bigger but that's that's those are two criteria so you've got to have a relationship which is getting to know somebody you're Going to take extensive interviews they're going to look at all your financial statements they're going to look at your past track record they're going to see if you've been in court if you've had warranty problems what your safety issues are like and all that boils down to an assessment of whether or not you're a good risk because it's their risk for
a pretty Menial fee you know bonds as a cost to the marketplace are anywhere from one and a half to two percent a little higher if you're really brand new and that's on top of your price and that's something you should always carve out in your proposals and add as a fee if somebody's entertaining bonds once you get a bonding relationship you're going to have to maintain that Relationship on a quarterly if not yearly basis with in-person interviews financial statement reviews where they're going to look at the long form of your estimate of your financial
statements and understand your performance and predictability on the bigger riskier jobs whether they were bonded or not bonded because it all builds down to the bonding agent's personal final opinion although the Actuaries have a lot of input on on it from a dollar and cents standpoint you're going to have to have a personal relationship with the bonding agent where they eventually take faith in your ability to perform so that's what bonds are bonds uh generally are for the duration of the warrantable period they are not for lifetime in my experience so if my warranty is
for one year the Bond will probably follow that for one year if it's a five-year project the bond will be covering performance for the warranty portion assuming that we got to that point in that five-year period bonding companies hate 10-year programs they do not want any part of any 10-year obligation so that's another easy excuse for you when somebody's asking you for a 10 year The surety companies will not endorse it and that's pretty well recognized through all the exterior envelope trades the roofers the uh the curtwall contractors and the stone contractors so you know
we have a project now that's a six or seven year project and we had to split it into two phases to tackle the five-year bonded warranties because they would not provide seven to ten year At the end of a completion so you know these are all the finer points of negotiation when you get into commercial work and you run into bonding one last note about bonding unless your company is completely liquid and stands on its own you have a banking relationship maybe you have a line of credit but you do not rely on the bank
for your daily operations and that perhaps you've got two or three Times annual expenses in cash sitting in that company you will probably have to be required to be personally indemnified that means your personal residence your personal assets everything you own is also on the line with the bonding company so it's not just your company it will be you personally so bonds are very serious business and do not take them lightly if You can avoid bonding work do it all the time it just mitigates your own personal and corporate risk as you go forward but
as your company gets more and more established this is another part of doing bigger more complicated work because bigger more complicated clients with demanding designs want guarantees because they have lawyers in their ears who want these guarantees Because that fits into their business model so these are all little pointers about what bonding is and what it isn't there's a lot more to talk about in that but i would just say never take it lightly and also understand it unless you're really cash solid really you're going to end up with personal indemnity and that's very serious
business yeah thank you brett um The the other side as we close up because we we could talk for hours on all of these issues but um and and there are more and and we'll have other events as we go forward with it but one of the things that we always know is know when to walk away i remember a guy telling me to use the old kenny rogers technique You know no one to hold them no one to fold them and no one to walk away there are contracts sometimes the best contract out there
is the one you walk away from so don't be afraid if you're not comfortable to walk away because it may be the the one that really gives you the most trouble we've had i've had that experience personally Uh with my former company and um and sometimes there was one that wish i'd walked away a long time we knew all the signals up front but we just kept going after the wrong project uh okay what we'll do now is go into our video with uh park industries and integra and uh and go from there okay we're
back and this is the um the time that we uh asked for questions From the uh from our participants in our or from our our audience uh we'd like to uh thank you for attending uh mark have we got any additional questions out there at this time yeah um i know we talked about it the other day but can you guys uh get into some more detail about um additional expenses or challenges on commercial projects that might not exist on Retail or residential work oh oh good yeah uh but you want to address that area
too i mean i i i could we could go on for days about additional expenses on that yeah i mean let's start with safety you know in the last 15 years safety has changed not 180 degrees but 360 degrees and osha has really ratcheted up the amount of ppe we need to provide and the date Sensitive expiration date of it what do i mean by that well not hard hats don't last forever either do vests and neither do safety harnesses which can get quite expensive safety harnesses are either full body or around the waist we
only use full body and the lanyards and ropes that go with those for fall protection so a lot of expenses in those things Miscellaneous material consumable expenses on job sites are far greater than a shop environment it's always chaotic you always seem to need something and it's you know there's just always expenses for lots of little things we calculate that as a percent of our labor on every job on you know over two decades of working in various types of jobs and we have a good handle on what that Can be but there's many types
of those expenses that you need you will get things stolen unfortunately you are no longer in a controlled environment you are now in the circus with all the other people who are around you and you have to prepare yourself for that's very frustrating so if you bring new tools and equipment on the job you better lock them up in a secure gang box and make sure you've got fresh keys that not everybody else has a copy of Because that happens um rigging equipment are you know on every single job is always another area where we
have theft and they're expensive items aluminum beans are not throwaway neither is steel those are things good caulking guns care and custody of hand tools grinders drills belt sanders welding equipment welding leads all of these things today if osha Sees a problem you don't have the guard on you've lost the guard you've got a cut in the cord one of the ground prong is gone on a grinder all of these are finable activities and therefore what happens is the tool the cost of tools today is almost unfortunately so cheap it doesn't cost money it doesn't
often save you money to repair them we've been struggling with this issue for years Tools are not also designed to last as long as they did before but because of the osha requirements and safety requirements you're forever turning them over so miscellaneous tool expense and i'm not talking about blades and bits i'm just talking about the actual drills and the grinders and the skill saws and the worm saws all have a tangible expense that you need to account for and learn your own Estimating it doesn't mean in a small group you can't take great care
and custody of your equipment but if you start to grow to 50 60 people on a job site you're going to get 50 or 60 people's ways of doing things no matter how hard you try and enforce your way of doing things which means take care of your tools every day you will have offenders and it does add cost to you Traditionally the industry does not expect the workman to provide all his own tools you are expected to provide that so tools and miscellaneous materials are big expenses they're constantly ongoing and because of today's safety
laws you have to retire tools a lot sooner than you used to and you better police and green tag them every day because those are offenses if you get Caught and the osha fines just keep going up every single year another another thing that we've seen over the years too brad is logistics you know uh whether you're working maybe at an airport in and you gotta you you have to park your car and take a bus in or whatever or even in a in a high-rise commercial application where you're waiting for a buck hoist or
an elevator to To get up and you can spend several hours waiting for your particular uh material to get to a location that's just wasted time that you may not have in a residential type or you would not have in a residential type operation unloading and distribution as is an activity within a commercial estimate properly developed do not assume that you're gonna pull up Everybody's gonna applaud and they're gonna get out of your way so you can go in and efficiently install your material as quick as possible and get out of there unfortunately it's not
always a team environment and there are waiting times for hoys for cranes for those types of things i would also caution you never load the job with the material well in advance of the need it will get Damaged it will get stained it will get broken it will get moved five or six times and not always by you and it'll get damaged and the contractor is going to say to you well why'd you put it on the job i didn't tell them to move it so what they moved it was in the way it's your
fault you have insurance so be very careful about your material and it's a constant monitoring to make sure When is the right time to deliver and to get your access and make extreme efforts to coordinate your time on the elevator and if somebody isn't holding up their end then you know you can make some threats that they owe you time for down time but don't assume it's just drop and go all the time in commercial work is a much more shared event when it comes to the time on the job to Move your material around
right mark do we have any other questions there yeah hey brett um can i use my uh regular residential install crews on jobs that may require you know um prevailing wage or union wage union workers things like that can you get in a little bit about that sure um let's clear up a couple of terms that you just talked about union wages prevailing wages okay the Word prevailing wage is generally describing federally mandated davis-bacon wage rates which is a published rate on federally funded projects at the beginning of a project and it states all the
prevailing wage and benefit packets for every trade for that particular project that then becomes the legal minimum that you must pay on that particular project so if you're A curtain countertop installer and you don't have a union workforce chances are you will be paying people that to go on that job a raise for you to meet the prevailing wage it does not mean mean that you need to put them in a union and we'll get into this in a minute it just means you need to meet the wage minimum And the benefit and there's two
categories within the davis-bacon wage schedule so if you're bidding a federally funded job one of the things you need to understand from the beginning is there a is there a wage scale on this project is there a davis bacon and generally a well-organized project will issue those rates at the beginning of the bid period and that rate Is the minimum that you must pay for the duration of the project under different trades now let's talk about the different trades under prevailing wage if you're just going if i'm going in to do a marble lobby those
trades are already well defined the marble mason is well defined and the finisher is defined i can't wiggle out of that and try and use a carpenter Or use an iron worker who might be a little cheaper than a stone mason to do that work you can make assignments it's very elaborate you got to go into appeals i wouldn't recommend it prevailing wage does not mean you need to join the union it means you need to pay a minimum amount and you will probably also have to have the ability to issue certified payrolls So your
accounting department will have to issue certified payrolls because davis bacon prevailing wage jobs often have audits and with these audits they can request your certified payrolls to ascertain that you paid that wage and benefit package now if you don't offer benefits that's fine you have to roll the benefit piece into the wages to come up with the total package in the Envelope there's a lot more description you get onto that it kind of gets heavy accounting but that's something you need to understand so you got to be able to issue certified payrolls generally certified perils
are going to accompany your monthly requisition as part of the preparation of the requisition meaning your pay application so if you're going to enter a project That has prevailing wage you have to know how to produce certified payrolls and you know you have to be able to meet those limits that might involve a one-time raise for these guys to go on there if you're a non-union contractor now generally what happens is various unions and urban environments follow the federal prevailing wages and they solicit past experiences and their current contracts to the Federal government to sustain
the prevailing wage as close to or higher than the current prevailing union wage so oftentimes prevailing wage and the current union packages are very close or identical at the onset of a project so let's say it's a five-year job for example the davis bacon is issued in the year 2020. most unions will get raises every year every three years whatever it Might be if you're a union contractor on a prevailing wage job and you've signed a union contract you have two obligations one to meet the minimum of the prevailing wage the second one to pay
your current obligation for the union contract which trumps prevailing wage so that means even though the prevailing wage was bid at twenty dollars an hour If your union agreement in year two and three is at twenty two dollars an hour you're paying twenty two dollars an hour and then in year four you're paying 24 an hour not the 20 that your non-union competitor would be legally obligated to do signing up with unions is a whole different webinar we'll have to talk about that with gk but that's a different subject matter uh but that's a little
breakdown and background about the Difference between prevailing wage what that means to you on federal projects now there are times where prevailing wage will also show up on state funded projects it is rare that we see prevailing wage requirements on private uh entities but not unheard of okay so that's a little little break down there yeah thanks uh yeah we have seen prevailing Wages in uh and you do that mainly in like airport for for countertops for airport projects and those type of things where you have to do certified apparel if you're not familiar with
certified payroll please uh when if you're getting on to any type of government job make sure you you understand what you're going to have to do because they will Not pay you if you don't send those certified payrolls in mark any other questions there sir yeah more on the sales side um if i'm doing primarily residential or multi-family you know residential work what uh what do you tell a sales team or or to look for to start finding commercial projects that won't extend my risk or can minimize risk to the company one of the things
that that uh i'll take That first fret but one of the things that that really concerns me is you know we brett talked about commercial a multi-family uh condos where you have three or four hundred condos those are commercial jobs and you are dealing with a commercial contractor the henderson backs of the world or whoever the turners because they're building those condos so you're going to Have the same contractual obligations that the that you would if you were doing the exterior skins and masonry uh but the big difference is the preparation of of those things
uh as you start bidding that work make sure you know that you're going to have to do the logistics that we were talking about how to get your tops up to those floor lines yes you're still only doing a countertop And a countertop for countertop contractors is we know how to do that but there's a whole new section that you have to worry about including the contracts including the the logistics including the knowing when to walk away and not uh so be very careful and then if you're using subcontractors you better make sure That your
subcontractors have the ability to perform and to give the same insurance and details that you would have to give to the general contractor brett do you have any additional on that um i think he covered it quite well i mean trying to grow a business will never be without risk but it has to be measurable intelligent risk tolerable risk um When you go on to these these federal type projects even though you're competent there are a set of rules that you have to adhere to you just talked about that you know the certified payrolls the
safety plans you'll now be able to have you will have to write programs called activity hazard analysis ahas these are whole diagramic narratives that describe the Potential for an accident and how you will avoid that it seems like nonsense for common sense but it's required by a lot of these big projects and we spend a ton of time writing this for very complex exterior projects so the whole day of saying hey you're you really know what you're doing i trust you is sort of out the window because of the pressure on safety and the insurance
Companies who want to mitigate uh every bit of potential risk for injuries um i think there's another interesting thing we've talked about which is we haven't touched on today when it talks about growth and expanding yourself from the factory to the job site once you start entering these job sites you have different categories of workers compensation insurance And you have what's known as an emr an emr is a rating based upon your pro based upon your past experience for accidents an emr is also a measuring stick that's used to be to pre-qualify the safety level
and record of a company before it's allowed to enter for example pharmaceutical projects let's say you ended up with a great countertop opportunity and you were the best price and the best Company to do it but your emr was 1.9 and they will only allow people less than one you won't be getting in the door so one of the big wake-up calls when you move from your controlled environment in the factory in single-family homes as to you go to urban job sites is there's a lot more oversight there's a lot more measuring sticks and safety
is a really Big area where you have to probably enlist a safety consultant it's an expense and you're gonna have to build it into what you're doing to educate your staff and your workman and people have to buy into it if you do not have buy-in it'll never work and you won't be able to survive in the commercial side if you don't have that corporate buy-in on the safety So emr is a very big statistical factor for us we just had a really nice nose that we got our amr down to 0.87 which anytime anybody's
below one is a really big accomplishment and it speaks to a really good safety record over the last three years and that's something we're very proud of and the mr also relates to your premium and how much you will pay So the higher your emr the less desirable you are the higher your rates go lower yeah right that's awesome a good a good point the amr is excellent because now when you're shopping and if you have to shop insurance companies that's the first thing they look at is your history of your incidents which is your
emr and i remember one time in at my former company we were at what that 1.89 it Could barely get contracts we brought it down to an 89.89 and we were insured all over the place we could get very competitive insurance rates and in our industry a lot of people don't pay attention to insurance rates because if a if a workman's comp rate is is uh fifteen dollars per per thousand or per hundred and you got an emr of 198 that means it's 30 Per payroll dollar so you really it's a major it's doubling your
cost of your payroll uh insurance dollars so it's a major cost and a major competitive edge for companies like us that keep it real low so that's good there's one other point we really need to talk about on that and that's for companies that you know are a little new to this area and are considering moving into Different market sectors so let's say you live in an area like i do and you you get any one of a dozen states within four hours every one of those regions most likely is going to have different workers
compensation rates that are statutory based upon the experience mod of the industry in that region so the insurance for me in virginia will not be the same as the cost of new york city and as you grow And as you bid work in other areas it is really critical that you get quotes going into any bid from your insurance agent with the type of trades you're going to use whether it's a stone mason finisher carpenter whatever it is so that you are bidding the job with the correct cost generally it's priced per hundred dollars of
payroll um going into the job and you will find that there are certain Jurisdictions in the country with much much higher workers compensation rates even though you have a good emr because the risk in that marketplace has already proven to be very high so no matter who goes in even if you're perfect the rates could be two or three times what you're used to in your more common marketplace the rates will be different because the risk environment is different Working in your shop will be a much lower rate than going on a job site do
not assume that you can carry those same rates so get your insurance agent in the office and talk about your growth idea so that you get a really good understanding of the workings workers comp jurisdiction pricing based upon the region that you're working in or that you would bid so if You're going to go out of town to some new area and it's an urban area chances are it's going to be a lot higher than where you came from if you're from a rural area those are very important things that could be a big wake-up
call too so a lot more a lot more planning has got to be done on the insurance as you even look at your bids right mark anything else we're getting Pretty much to the end now yeah let's go for one more question gk um i think this will be probably mostly for dacia but uh you indicated that designers often specify stone based on visual aesthetics over performance um what techniques or resources are available to help um influence them to pick a more appropriate stone First and foremost it's the salesperson's knowledge and the ability to understand
what they truly truly want um we also have a consumer website use naturalstone.org that is a great resource for um end users and customers and and designers to read about different stone types and to really try to understand more um there is a great article on there About being your own stone sleuth and how to be able to take a sample and figure out what what the true properties are going to be is it going to stay it's a good patch then it's also about just educating them on again stone can be restored it can
live and evolve with with with a home in in in its space um and it should be expected to but i think it's really really important To manage that expectation all the way through the process yeah i know the natural stone institute has a lot of um assistance too with reference to materials and so forth uh but uh you know looking in and getting some research done for a customer is real important uh in trying to develop a pattern of resources uh i think the natural stone institute Has quite a few of them out there
with their catalogs and so forth um okay mark i think that's uh where we are for the day uh dasia and brad thanks a whole lot y'all made my job real easy today i can say that and i hope our attendees have appreciated the knowledge that both of you have uh we'd like to turn it back over to aaron Now and we can do the closing uh thank you gk i want to thank uh gk brett and dasia for a great discussion let's all give them a virtual round of applause uh they did provide a
lot of great information for us moving forward thank you everybody who attended the past two days you will receive an email with a recording of this session So you can review it and also pass along to some of your colleagues this recording for both days will also be added to the stone industry education page which is www.stoneindustryeducation.com and also the natural stone university which can be found at www.ufstone.com coming up we actually have four more virtual stone summits coming up in this year's term you can find out more information about those And sign up for
those at www.stoneindustryeducation.com and once again i want to thank the panel for everything that they provided the past couple of days and please feel free to contact us if we can provide additional information thank you thank you you
