We’ve added something that may interest some of you. I've matched some fine marble restoration products to work with the Cimex machines. In addition to the Cimex Diamond Finisher machine that we've been selling, we also have everything you’ll need to start servicing marble floors with the standard Cimex machines that we all use for carpet cleaning.

Marble floor care is hugely profitable! Typically, marble restoration professionals charge in the range of $1 per sq ft per step. A typical marble floor restoration job will require at least 5 grinding steps plus a powder polishing step. Do the math. That amounts to $6 per sq ft. And with the Cimex this becomes real fast and fairly simple to perform. My brother Dave does a lot of this type of work and he’s getting this kind of money consistently. BTW Dave’s website is 1800MARBLEGUY.com if you want to take a peek at his company.

Well I have looked diligently to find exceptional values in quality marble care products and I think I've found what represents the best value available. The diamond abrasives that I’ve come up with are excellent quality and the prices for them are much less expensive than comparable diamonds. And the polishing powder that we’re now handling is reported to be one of the absolute finest powders in the industry. The bottom line is that we now have some seriously hot deals on quality marble restoration products. Take a look...

Marble Restoration Products

It may be worth considering if you're walking over the marble floors to clean the carpets.




Rick Gelinas
encapman

Yeh, Rick. Marble floor care is profitable...unless you live in the highly culturized area of eastern NC. Here they want you to wax their marble. When you show them how to restore it or just to bring out the natural beauty in marble and other stones, they want you to DO it! Hmmmm...one small problem, they want it done for the same price! I lost my butt in marble products. Went to VIC International's school back in Sept. 01, bought some equipment, even did a white marble floor, 1857 sq. feet. It was an account we cleaned on a nightly basis. Silly me....everything had always been done by verbal agreement. I mean we did their janitorial, carpet, windows, 2 marble floors and 1 quarry tile floor. So when I presented him with a $6,400 bill, he suddenly had memory lapse. I know...it's my own fault. Attorneys said without a contract, we could win, but his attorneys would delay things so long we'd still end up losing the same amount or more! I still bid on several jobs, but when they saw the price (not for grinding, just proper maintenance) they ran back to their "waxing men". Yes, there is money to be made, but not here! Hey, but now I've found Releasit! I don't need any marble work!!

Kevin,

It's always best to put it in writing. A signed service agreement is essential with any service we provide. This protects the customer and it protects us.

I commpletely agree with you that there are some DUMB building owners who are willing to wreck their marble by putting floor finish on the floor. YIKES! Floor finish will not allow the marble to breath. Moisture will not transfer through the finish. Discoloration of the marble may likely occur and over the time a floor can be permanently damaged. Heck, they might as well install a VCT floor in this case if all they want is a "janitorial appearance". It's true that some buildings will be content to turn their floors to crap, there's no way around it. It's our job to educate them that there's something better, and some will respond. Sometimes they've just never been informed of how beautiful their stone can look with proper care.

Yet there are also some commercial building owners that recognize the value and beauty of their marble and will want to have there floors cared for properly. Often times the marble is in the entry of these building and this high profile area is important to them. Keep in mind that marble flooring is EXPENSIVE and if they've installed it they obviously have a few bucks. So some of these building owners will see the value of caring for their investment properly.

One of the PRIME markets for marble floor care is in upscale homes. Homes that sell for $500,000 or higher will frequently have some marble flooring. And when you're dealing with million dollar plus homes there's almost always some marble. These home owners KNOW what they have. Their marble flooring is one of the "show pieces" in their home. These clients are typically college educated, are somewhat materialistic, and generally recognize the value of caring for an investment properly. And best of all, they have the disposable income to cover having some marble floor care performed every year. So target the upscale homes and offices. There are high end homes and commercial buildings in every community where the owners have marble and money. It may be worth re-thinking doing some marble care Kevin, because there's serious money in it.




Rick Gelinas
encapman

One thing to remember is to get some education before you mess with
Marble or many other stone surfaces. The money you spend on the classes
will more then likely be less then the cost of the flooring you may mess up

Maurizio Bertoli the God Father of stone is one of the best places to start
mbstone.com

I agree with both of you Rick and David! I didn't mean to post such a negative thought! Long days the last 3 days. You know...the up at 5 or 6 AM days and in after midnight types! Wow. I should have some money somewhere!! Now where did I put it?? Hmmmm....
Rick I do agree 100% with your post in response to mine. I put together a nice proposal for him explaining everything and we discussed it for 2 months before he gave me the okay. Yes, I made a huge mistake in not getting it in writing and I learned my lesson. I hope somebody else learns from my mistake. In fact, it ended up costing me more than $6,400. This was a $3,500 per month account. When he told me not to touch his floors anymore and then hung up on me, I gave him, through our point of contact, our notice that we would be performing no more services at the end of that month. That was Jan. 02. I keep running into people from that account who inform me they beg him to put the differences aside and bring us back in. That is a great moral victory, but doesn't do much for the ole pocketbook!! lol I was doing that floor at my cost in order to purchase the necessary equipment, in hopes that by doing his second floor I would make a nice little profit. Funny thing is, everybody else at his place, meaning his upper management, was telling me how great the floor looked and that it had never looked better since its original installation 11 years prior. His words to me? "My floor looks like s***." Oh well, ya win some, ya lose some. As far as upscale homes, I have quoted in several, but they go with less expensive people who have no formal training and really don't know what to do other than clean it and put finish on it. I even drove 2 1/2 hours to the Outer Banks to the Duck and Corolla areas to meet with property managers who manage the expensive homes there. They informed me they were very interested since their maintenance man was just mopping 'em because he didn't know what to do with natural stone. I sent them a price list as they requested and never heard from them. They wouldn't even return my phone calls. I sent with the price list a copy of my credentials so they would know I had received training. We're talking homes owned by the likes of Dick Gephardt, Tom Cruise, Julia Roberts (at least that's what I was told). Oh well...I'll stick to carpet, upholstery, rugs! I don't even do VCT anymore, I refer that to a friend.
I don't know, maybe it was my salesmanship. Nah, I close most that I get in front of.
As Shorty says...."Cheers"!
Have a great day and keep selling!! It's a grand industry even if I don't do natural stone care!

David,
That's a good suggestion to take in some marble maintenance instruction. Fred Heuston as well as Maurizio provide excellent classes. Education in this field is money well spent. And if this will become your vocation you'll find that Fred or Maurizio's class is a terrific asset. I have personally taken some marble care classes and my brother Dave has also taken marble care classes. In addition we have both serviced natural stone in our businesses (Dave has serviced more than me). But the bottom line about marble is that it's not as scary as some would like to make you think. If you mess it up (which is unlikely if you can follow basic instructions) you can always fix it - that's the beauty of marble. Dave and I can help you cover the ground work on how to perform basic marble maintenance.

Kevin,
I appreciate that your experience has left a bad taste in your mouth. And I agree that it's smart to stick with what makes the cash drawer go ChaChing. You've gotta pursue what works best for your company and your market. And commercial carpet cleaning is one of the biggest ChaChing's out there IMHO. I remember a few years ago when I would talk about commercial carpet cleaning on the message boards everybody would be saying - they couldn't be bothered with commercial carpet cleaning. How things have changed And it sounds like you appreciate the aspect of commercial carpet cleaning too. So maintain your focus. And you never know, maybe some of the stone care will pan out for you along the way too.






Rick Gelinas
encapman

Perhaps you are right, Rick. I do keep up with the trade magazine articles on stone care and am able to answer most of my clients' questions. As far as education, I don't know how familiar you are with VIC International in Knoxville, but they put on a great school with plenty of hands on. It is a very lucrative field, I just didn't do what you should always do before investing money in such a specialized trade...I didn't test the market first.

Kevin,

As a mater of fact, VIC put on one of the classes I attended. I felt it was basically an infomercial of their product line, but their information covered stone care basics. I think Fred Heuston’s or Maurizio's class may be an even better way to go. But it’s all good.




Rick Gelinas
encapman

Okay, I'm not taking a day off in the middle of the week anymore! I spend too much time on these daggone bulletin boards. Yes, Rick, now that you mention it they were hyping their products. However, the instructor, Mark (I can't remember his last name), in my opinion, did a great job. As far as diamond pads and the like, it would seem there wouldn't be much difference from one line to another. I would imagine it would be the chemical and machinery that would make the difference (of course there is no chemical other than water in the grinding process). I'm tickled to see that you are offering these products. Based on my trust of you and your company, if I were to get back into that arena (which I doubt I will ), I would certainly buy from you, kind sir!
Now that I have said that I trust you, I expect another email from Jimmy! lol Hi Jimmy.

Kevin,
You mentioned "As far as diamond pads and the like, it would seem there wouldn't be much difference from one line to another."

Actually a lot of the diamonds on the market come from countries such as China, and their abrasives can produce inconsistent results on the floor. So I think maybe I should make a new slogan... "We Got No Stinkin China Diamonds Round Here"

Actually I looked hard to find high quality diamond disks at a fair price . And these are the best 3" disks I could find. Their unique starburst pattern does an excellent job of directing the slurry flow through the pads without clogging. So there are some differences in diamond disks. Oh and one more thing - our diamonds are some of the least expensive diamonds. I think they're nifty!




Rick Gelinas
encapman

Looks like a nice package. So, how long would it take to ship such a package to mine doorstep? A week, two?

You guys pretty much covered all the points up above. Absolutely, like anything, the more you know about it, the better you’re going to be able to provide your customer the highest level of service and product. Classes like Fred’s or MB’s or even Tom McNall’s if you’re up in Canada are all things you’ll want to keep in mind. In time, who knows, maybe even Excellent-Supply might even offer some classes. At both BSCIA and Connections there were quite few that asked me if Excellent-Supply would be offering classes and I think Rick saw the same kind of interest. Once I had explained some of the basics to stone restoration to them and they could see for them selves what kind of results we were getting with just the little floor we had there, they realized to that stone restoration is not this great big “mystic” thing that some people make out to be. The one concern with offering classes if you also sell product, is that it can become like what has already been mentioned, an infomercial. If and when ES offers formal classes I’m certain that it will be done as open, honest and ethically as Rick has done everything else related to ES.

By the time I did my first stone floor I had done a lot of research on stone and how to do different things and I had even attended a couple of those “infomercial classes” put on by a few of the local suppliers and even a few manufacturers. This floor was in an incredible home over looking the Gulf of Mexico. The main areas of the house were a very high polished marble but in the kitchen / family room combination they had used the same honed finished stone that they had used outside around the pool. They wanted this stone inside to shine more like the stone they had in the rest of the house but not quite as shiny. After I think it was like three days their floor looked pretty good. (Boy was I relieved!!!) Yes it was a little “exciting”, I tried what some recommended as well as a few things that I made up as I went along. I’m sure that some of the things that I had learned from those classes help out some but honestly I think that several years doing floor care helped out more. Absolutely there are things that you’re gonna want to know like using as little water as possible when your working on a green serpentine marble because it can warp or that when you’re working with a black many times it’s gonna stink real bad like rotten eggs and when it comes to powder polishing it you’ll want to try and keep it as cool as possible and it’s going to take awhile to polish it. But at the same time there are also people around that are willing to help you out with technical help when you need it. After more than eleven years of doing stone work, I still go to people that I consider knowledgeable and we bounce ideas and techniques off each other. Just recently I discovered a much simpler, faster and easier way to polish vertical surfaces. I don’t know anybody (fortunately) that is arrogant enough to say that they know everything about every type of stone there is. What it comes down to is that, “hard” surface maintenance & restoration is not as “hard” as some people make it out to be.

With a little help, some decent equipment and some common since stone work isn’t that difficult. I recently spoke to someone that couldn’t believe just how much easer stone work is now that they are using a Cimex instead of their old weighted slow machine. How much more simple it is, not to mention how much faster. He said that he would have no problem letting a 18-20 yr old kid run the Mex on a stone floor as long as he was there supervising him. He said he could never let anybody but himself run their weighted slow machine before, it was just to easy to mess up the floor before. Jokingly, his partner said they wanted to install a DVD player up on the handle of the Mex so they would have something to do to pass the time now when they are doing stone work. (Maybe that’s an option that Rick will start offering, what da ya think?) I’ve been working with stone about eleven years now and I’m still learning things, actually that’s part of why I love working with stone so much, its never the same old thing. It’s kinda funny when you think about it, when it comes down to it, its really just some old dumb rock they pulled up out of the ground somewhere. It’s okay though, because they pay me a lot of money to make it look beautiful. If there is some way that I can help some of you guys out I’d be glad to, I don’t know everything, but I’ll be glad to share with you what I do know.

Take care & happy grinding.

David Gelinas
Marbleguy

why do you have to go and prove me wrong??
I think the Chinese make excellent diamond pads! just kidding. I kinda figured if I was wrong on that one, you would straighten me out. I still love ya, though! lol