Small Business Resources, Business Advice and Forms from AllBusiness.com

The importance of training

By Sweet, Jonathan
Publication: Concrete Concepts
Date: Friday, April 1 2005

There are a lot of worried decorative concrete contractors there,

While many still think of it as a niche market, decorative concrete has hit the mainstream. From cable television to The Wall Street Journal to books like FuTung Cheng's new Concrete at Home, it's everywhere these days.

>With that publicity has come the people looking for a quick buck, and that's got a lot of smart decorative contractors concerned. On both the manufacturer side and the contractor side, the market has been flooded with inexperienced people making mistakes. Whether because of inferior products, untrained installers or a combination of the two, a number of decorative projects are failing. That gives the entire industry a black eye and makes it that much harder for good companies to sell their services.

This month, on p. 32, we've got an article about Decorative Concrete Solutions, a Wilmington, N.C.-based company that's been doing reclamation projects to fix the mistakes made by other decorative contractors. In the project we profiled, the problems were caused by not using the right products and using poor installation techniques.

In addition, make sure to read these articles:

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AllBusiness.com's Sales Advisor Keith Rosen interviews David Thompson, author of Sales 2.0 for Dummies.