Alright – so today we’ve got the honor of introducing you to Tony Martin. We think you’ll enjoy our conversation, we’ve shared it below.
Tony, thanks for taking the time to share your stories with us today Risk taking is something we’re really interested in and we’d love to hear the story of a risk you’ve taken.
“Is taking risks in life worth it?” As a child, I was always willing to take risks without thinking twice. When I was 9 years old and living in a small town called Pegueros Jalisco Mexico, I wanted to help my parents since we were always barely making ends meet. Without telling my parents, I went looking for a job at my uncle’s furniture factory where I worked on and off until I was 18 years old. Not only was I working, but I was also going to school. In 1994 I lost my father and I had to find a way to help my mother and my 4 siblings, so I decided to give the American Dream a shot. In 1996, I arrived to Arizona where I worked in any job I could get. I would milk cows on a dairy and take care of horses in a farm until I landed a job doing hardwood flooring. In that company, I learned the trade and fell in love with it, but after 8 years I constantly felt that something was missing, like I was spinning my wheels. Without giving it too much thought and even though I had a baby on the way and no savings, I decided to take one of the biggest risks of my life. I started my own hardwood floor company from scratch. While I was working on other companies, I would also do side jobs that I completed on the evenings and weekends, but when you work on them as a regular gig, those jobs were done fairly fast leaving you with nothing else to do and not a single job on the horizon. I decided to design and print flyers and go door to door with the possibility of getting one lead out of a thousand flyers, especially since I didn’t have a contractor’s license, insurance, etc. I even went to Home Depots, Lowe’s, flooring stores, and anywhere I could find a client or two. After a while, I was able to get my license, but unfortunately the moment I thought I was making some progress, recession hit. Something important that helped me stay afloat was that I learned to work on basketball courts on the first hardwood flooring company I worked on. I was able to start doing gym floors on schools because no matter what, schools continue to be in secession and the gyms needed maintenance. Over time our company grew as well as our reputation. After 16 years in 2020, we were given the opportunity to start working on the floors for the Phoenix Suns. Looking back at my journey, I can honestly say that the bigger the risk, the bigger the reward.
As always, we appreciate you sharing your insights and we’ve got a few more questions for you, but before we get to all of that can you take a minute to introduce yourself and give our readers some of your back background and context?
As I mentioned before, I started building furniture when I was pretty young so it was pretty natural for me to incline to liking the hardwood flooring industry. At EXCALIBUR HARDWOOD FLOORS, we supply, install, repair, sand and refinish hardwood flooring on residential and commercial, including and specialize in Gym Floor/Basketball Courts where we do everything in-house from concrete grinding/leveling to lines, lettering and logos. I believe one of the things that set EXCALIBUR apart from the competition, is that we take the quality we learned from residential floors and put it into the basketball courts, and over time we were able to fine-tune our techniques so every floor we touch is a work of art. Even though we enjoy doing big important floors that you get to see often on TV like the Phoenix Suns, Mercury, GCU, ASU, etc. we are also blessed to do tons of High Schools and Elementary Schools around the valley but nothing beats the feeling of giving back to our community helping organizations that their budget doesn’t allow them to maintain their floors and keeping them safe for the kids.
Any stories or insights that might help us understand how you’ve built such a strong reputation?
As lots of things in life, to build your reputation you need consistency. Ever since I started my business, I had my mind set to build something I could be proud of, and often all you need to do is listen more and talk less. One of the things that I have learned, is to listen to my clients from their needs to their criticism (good and bad). Every client is unique so you will have to take you clients input one by one, so over time you create a long list of things you have to either avoid or put a check mark on. One thing is for sure, we always go above and beyond to make sure our clients are 100% satisfied, and that’s what makes a big difference from our competition.
What’s worked well for you in terms of a source for new clients?
The best source for clients has definitely been word of mouth. We get a lot of our clients through social media because as they say, a picture is worth a thousand words. But the most effective source has been when we get recommended by a coach, friend, a colleague, from School to School, or even better when people see our guys and our vans working on a floor and they get to see the final results, so they can compare the quality of other floors they have seen or payed on.
Contact Info:
- Website: www.ExcaliburHardwoodFloors.com
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/excalibur_hardwood_floors/
- Facebook: [email protected]
- Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/tony-martin-6632b940
- Twitter: https://twitter.com/excalibur_az
- Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCjQa7C5u2vLRiLchx-PFtng
- Yelp: https://www.facebook.com/ExcaliburHardwoodFloors/posts