Tim Ailes on Flooring and Family Business in Johnston County

Jonathan Breeden: [00:00:00] Hello and welcome to another edition of The Best of Johnston County podcast. I’m your host, Jonathan Breeden.

And on today’s episode, we have Tim Ailes from Southern Flooring Solutions. He’s here to talk to us about his business that is based right here in the 4042 area of Johnston County, and all the different products he serves, including cabinets, which most people don’t do that are in the flooring business, and why his business has been so successful, and what he loves so much about Johnston County and why he loves making this his home.

But before we get to that, I want to ask you to like, follow, and subscribe to this podcast, wherever you’re seeing it, whether it be on Apple, Spotify, YouTube, LinkedIn, TikTok, or any of the other social media channels of The Best of Johnston County podcast.

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Welcome Tim.

Tim Ailes: Good morning.

Jonathan Breeden: Yeah. So anyway, I’m glad you could come in. Tell the audience who you are, what you do.

Tim Ailes: Okay. As mentioned, my name is Tim Ailes. I’m in Southern Flooring Solutions. We do cabinetry, as you mentioned. It’s not in our name, so sometimes we got to add that. But we do all types of floor covering and we also do sand and refinishing. We’ve been coming up on five years in January we’ve been a business. We’ve primarily been based out of Johnston County the whole time.

We are residents also of Johnston County. We moved here in 2016, so we’re coming up on our eighth year of being Johnston County residents. I’ve been married to my wife, Sandy, who’s also [00:02:00] owner in the business. So we have four children and two of them actually work with us to our two daughters work with us.

Our daughter Mariah does our cabinetry designs. And Amelia, our youngest daughter does all of our administrative support and things like that. So we are very much a stereotypical family business. So we do have our families mostly working with us. We do also have two outside sales reps that we’re trying to help develop their territory.

Both of them are also in Johnston County. So we’re trying to stay in Johnston County, support Johnston County. We do service other markets as well. We serve about almost the whole entire triangle because the wider your coverage, the better your business will ultimately be.

We’re coming up on five years. I have about 30 years experience in the flooring industry. I’ve worked anywhere from suppliers to distributors to even manufacturers of flooring. So I feel like we got a pretty good handle on what it should look like.

We opened our business right before they put the shutdown on COVID. We had signed a two-year lease and two weeks later, you can’t do anything. Fortunately for us, we were tagged essential. So actually, [00:03:00] and I feel really guilty for saying this but it is true, COVID is probably one of the best things that happened to our company because we do in-home appointments.

So we did all of our necessary care, sanitation, all that kind of stuff and made sure everybody was safe. But we were able to do selections in home at a time when people just didn’t really want to go into the marketplace to speak about flooring. So that really helped us get our roots in. And we’ve been basically nonstop ever since. So we’ve been really thankful.

The Johnston County community has been very supportive and a very big reason why that we’re more successful.

Jonathan Breeden: That’s awesome. Where are you from originally? Where’d you grow up?

Tim Ailes: So I grew up in I’m a Florida native. Actually, me, my wife and my four kids are all Florida natives. I was born in an area called Ormond Beach, Florida, which is most people know as Daytona. So it’s right off of Daytona Hospital, doesn’t exist anymore.

I was born and raised in Florida. I have two my kids were born in Daytona and two were born in Saint Augustine because the town we lived in didn’t have a birthing center. So I moved here directly from Vero Beach, Florida in 2016.

Jonathan Breeden: Okay.

Tim Ailes: So we moved here [00:04:00] directly from Florida and I took a job at a larger franchise flooring store in the Raleigh area. And I worked there for about two years, which allowed me to be able to meet everybody, find out what kind of market it is. And Raleigh is an outstanding market, with just about anywhere you put your finger on the map, you’re within 2 million people. That’s a crazy market to be in. And we’ve definitely been the benefactor of that.

Jonathan Breeden: So how did you end up starting out in flooring? Somebody gave you a job is what I’m assuming.

Tim Ailes: I grew up, both my parents were entrepreneurs. My dad knows the lawn care business. My mom knew the cleaning business when we were young, so we were always helping them after school or on summer. And cutting lawns in South Florida is not a fun task. But what we did, we did make sure we were up every morning by seven and we were done by noon, because it just gets so incredibly hot.

But as life progressed and I met my wife, Sandy, and we ended up having our first son, I had to get a job. So I just applied for a flooring warehouse helper, basically. So I got in, I was a flooring warehouse helper and it was in a large tile distributor in Central and South Florida.

And [00:05:00] I did all their warehousing and deliveries. And I ended up staying there for about 15 years. From the age of 19. And the only reason I’m probably not working there today is because the housing crash, like 2008, and 2009. Everybody in construction, and especially in Florida was really hard hit with that. I was actually laid off from that job.

Still friends with the owner of the company and a bunch of colleagues there, but they were a very well-run company. Very owner-involved, so I learned a lot of things there. I ended up, basically starting at an entry-level warehouse position to eventually managing that particular branch in Palm Coast, Florida.

Everything that I’ve experienced, good or bad in flooring, whether it was a layoffs and things like that has led to where we’re at now. So there’s some things you go back and sometimes you’re like, Hey, I wish it had worked out this way.

And I have that conversation with myself sometimes, but it would have led to where we’re at now. And right now, being in business for ourselves five years later, it’s the best decision, like job wise financial wise that we ever made.

It was scary at first. Don’t get me wrong. But when we did it and if I had done this 10 years ago, probably, someone else would be [00:06:00] sitting here representing my company because I’d probably be retired. So it’s been great.

Also, part of what we do is we’re trying to help others. The sales reps that I mentioned before and even our daughters that work from us, they don’t work standard office hours. We don’t demand that they be there. They’re technically independent contractors, they’re not employees. So they work from home when they want to, they work from the office when they need to come for some support or whatever. So we’re trying to help out with that.

Michael, one of our sales reps has two young twin boys. He’s able to spend more time with them at home. He’s not like Monday through Friday, 7:30-6:00, you have to be here. I don’t think that’s the future of employment. So we’re starting to see, COVID led to more at-home jobs and offsite, then that trend has continued. And people are just like not wanting to go back.

Jonathan Breeden: Right. It’s a different workforce now. There’s no doubt about that. So what was your vision for starting Southern Flooring Solutions?

Tim Ailes: If I’m being bluntly honest about it, I’ve worked at several places working for, and I made a lot of people a lot of money in the foreign industry, I was always lucky enough to be in the right place at the right time. And so [00:07:00] I always excelled at selling for companies. The previous one, I was selling about three million dollars a year for them and just product. And they were keeping most of the money. So I really got tired of making other people rich. And I thought, we had enough experience and the time was right.

They say you get older and wiser, and you become less afraid to make those changes, and we just made the change, and we basically got tired of not getting a better split and not making as much money on our efforts. So we decided that we were going to take the plunge and we did.

Again, it was the best thing we’ve ever done.

Jonathan Breeden: I don’t disagree. I think, owning your own business is great. I have owned my own business now right here since October 1st, 2000. So I know what it’s like. And it’s not always easy, and it’s not always a straight lineup, but it is definitely worth it because every day I come to work, I have a smile on my face because whatever it is, I created it, good or bad, I have created this. And if it’s bad, I got to figure out a way to fix it. You know what I mean?

So what are some of, I know I was on [00:08:00] your website. You talk about, you got three core values that you really try to instill in all of your employees and all your work, what are those?

Tim Ailes: First of all, in no particular order, we want to make sure that we’re being a reputable company by providing quality products and services.

So many times we’re in people’s homes and they’re apprehensive about going forward with the project because they’ve been burned by a contractor. Your attorney, I’m sure you’ve probably heard of being burned by contractors, probably on a bigger scale. But we hear that so much in our industry, and people make mistakes and there’s misunderstandings all the time, but as long as both parties are reasonable, we’re going to come back out, we’re going to address it and try to unlearn the habits.

That’s one of the biggest things we have is quality and craftsmanship, and doing a great job so that you tell your customers about it. Because we talk about SEO, we talk about podcasts and all those things are important in today’s society and get your name out there.

But we have found, and I’m sure you’ll echo what I’m saying, but the word-of-mouth referrals. Hey, I know Southern Florence Solutions. They did a great job. That’s still the most valuable [00:09:00] referral or advertisement that we can get, and we take that into consideration. That’s probably the forefront of our company.

To be our age, we are trying to be very forward, public-facing as possible with Facebook and things like that, because that’s how serious we are about it. We’re not hiding behind some page and you can’t get ahold of it. You can’t call me or Sandy when there’s a problem. Our phone numbers are on our business cards because that’s how serious we take it.

Another one would certainly be quality products. Unfortunately in the construction industry, flooring industry, and what we’re doing, it very much can be a race to the bottom, like who’s got the cheapest price, who’s got the cheapest material. We try not to play in that pool too often. So we’re going to sit down, we’re going to listen to you about your lifestyle, how active the house is, what your plans are with the home, and then suggest a product. We’re not ever going to pull in something that we got a special buy on or a pallet deal on or truckload deal on and try to push that product on a customer. We literally try to face every project like, what would I put in my house? What would I do? Try to make that personable approach to [00:10:00] your flooring cause it is a big expense.

I think we went back and looked our average sale this year’s $7, 500. We’re not talking about a $250 ceiling fan install or something like that. It’s much more, you really have to think and do some homework and research before you spend that amount of money. It’s a good piece, it’s a good chunk of change. So we try to make sure, we’re educating them and picking the right product for them.

So integrity is another great thing. We pride ourselves. It is hard to get Google reviews anymore. It’s just hard. We do try, we don’t pay anybody to do that cause it needs to be organic to be accurate.

And fortunately, so far, we have all five star reviews, which is amazing. I’m really proud of that. But I think it speaks volumes for the things that I just mentioned about how we try to speak. Have there been disagreements on jobs? There will be from time to time, but are you approachable? Are you amiable to fixing the problem? And will you like commit to that? And I think, sitting here today, we’ve always done that.

Jonathan Breeden: Right. And I, being an attorney, I get calls about this kind of stuff all the time. Even though I do family law, but [00:11:00] people do call you because you’re an attorney. And really, I’ve tried to help some people I know that have had problems with flooring that the number one problem that I’ve gotten at least two or three calls on in the last two years from neighbors right here in Johnston County has been, I hired a company and the owner did not know how to install whatever I bought. So he went and got a sub, and the sub messed it up.

Now the owner cannot fix it himself and doesn’t have the money to have the sub come back. Did not vet that sub as to whether that sub could do that job, just assume they could. And now the owner’s got an uneven floor and they’re out of money and the flooring guy is judgment proof. Everything is in a truss somewhere. It is a nightmare for that owner. You know what I mean? So do you install anything that you personally can’t fix?

Tim Ailes: We do not. And that’s a great point that you bring up because that does happen all the [00:12:00] time. We do sub out all of our jobs. But we have outstanding relationships with everybody.

You can’t come in off the street and sub, we don’t give you jobs like that. But one important thing that I would mention to homeowners is, you can go directly to, you can find companies on Facebook or whatever that install floors, and you can go directly to an installer, and potentially save some money. However, you’ll still just be one job to that installer unless you have multiple projects and use them in the future, whether it’s drywall pain or whatever, you can go directly to the source of the labor, but you’re just one job to that sub or that company or that floor installer.

If you come to us, it’s going to be a little bit more coming through a company like mine, but we are hundreds of jobs to that person. So we have a lot more leverage to say, Hey, go back over and fix Mrs. Jones’s trim. Or go back over and install this correctly or whatever.

We like to leverage that sub company, subcontractor relationship to our advantage because they are paid by the job or square foot. They are paid when the job is completed, when the [00:13:00] customer is happy. They do come back usually in our floor, in the flooring industry, it’s one year warranty on the labor, which is like building the house.

The manufacturer flooring product has different manufacturers that outside on top of that. So we’re able to leverage those relationships and we provide them with enough work. We don’t have a thousand installers. We have five, and we like to get the jobs, and the money stays in North Carolina for the most part.

Now what I mean by that is the materials probably goes off to some corporation like Mohawk and Shaw. They take the money for the product, but the labor and everything else stays here in North Carolina. And a lot of times in Johnston and Wake County is probably where most of our business is done.

That’s an installer we’re using in Johnston County. That’s an installer we’re using in Wake County. So we’re keeping more of those funds in our pool instead of just sending them out to pit more jet and Arthur, jet fuel and Arthur Blank’s jet or something like that.

Jonathan Breeden: So you’ve been in the Florida business a long time. What are some of the most common mistakes that homeowners like [00:14:00] me that are looking at getting flooring make? And what advice could you give for them to not make the most common mistakes you see every week?

Tim Ailes: The most common mistakes, it’s not checking out the quality of the product.

Again, we don’t want to use entry level products for the most part. There are some times when we’re putting houses on the market. We’re flipping things where it needs to be a little more cost effective than normal, but picking out the right product for your circumstance.

Pets seem to be the biggest thing. I think it’s something like 70% of all families in the United States have a pet or two, like at least one pet. So pets are probably the number one source of our business because either they’ve damaged it or it wasn’t the right product or whatever. So your active lifestyle, that includes your pets. Are we talking about your pets? Do you have big dogs? Do you have cat, like those kinds of things. It’s probably the biggest mistake that I see.

The other thing would be budgeting. And that has more to do with the price spikes that we’ve seen since the Coronavirus. Everybody’s aware, your grocery prices are up 30, 40%, but everybody’s not aware so much that flooring [00:15:00] went through all the same price increases that those other products, but most people are not buying flooring every week.

So they know a price of when they did flooring in 2020, and they come and get a price in 2024 when it’s 40% more, they have a little bit like, whoa, like I don’t understand. So if they call us, our first initial step with them is usually going to be, here’s a budget range number that you should consider for this project.

That way, we can preliminary get away from all of it. Cause a lot of times, we went out, through the Coronavirus period and the shutdown and things like that, we’d come out and do quotes and we’d give the estimate and it’d be like, Oh, this is a $15,000 hardwood job. I was thinking it was gonna be 4,000. So we hear that a lot.

So we try to do a little bit of preliminary qualifying basically, to try to find, here’s about what you range. Now, there’s always going to be cheaper than the price range that we give you, but we try to give you a price range that includes a good quality product, and it’s a turnkey like demo and all that kind of thing. So we try to set an expectation upfront. And then that way, you know, and you don’t have to go through three, four quotes, not being where you thought they were going to be [00:16:00] in wasting, saving a lot of your time and effort.

Jonathan Breeden: I can understand that. And I’m not a foreign person, but a lot of it is oil based, right? What goes into these products?

Tim Ailes: Lot of petroleum in it. The issue becomes like we want greener products for environment, but right now, they’re probably the most expensive.

So you got this catch 22 of, Hey, we got green products that are good for my pet or hyper allergenic and things like that. Then it’s when it’s triple the cost of whatever. So there’s no all natural flooring other than solid wood floors, but we still put an oil based or water based stain on them. So even when you get unfinished hardwoods, you still have to put chemical.

Someone told me a long time ago, we live in a chemical world, unfortunately.

Jonathan Breeden: Right. So does Southern Flooring do insurance claims? I had my floors redone a few years ago because we had a water leak. The homeowner’s insurance paid for it. Do y’all do that? Do you work with insurance companies to come in and fix flooring?

That’s its own thing. You got to work with the insurance company. You got to get them to pay. They delay when they pay. [00:17:00] They don’t want to maybe pay complete market value all the time, depending on which insurance company. So do y’all do that? Are y’all somebody that works with insurance companies on homeowners claims?

Tim Ailes: Yeah. So part of the reason our company was so successful early on is because at the time of the shutdown, not only were we coming into homes, but we were working probably with just about every water damage company in the triangle. So when house floods, doesn’t matter about Coronavirus, you got to get them old mildew out there and make your house livable again.

The first year or maybe two years was probably 70% insurance claim water damage in some vein. Now, we didn’t work directly with the insurance companies, we worked with the restoration companies. And to be short, insurance companies don’t like companies like ours because when they come back and say, Hey, this carpet here is worth a dollar a square foot. We’re more like the ones that say no, it’s more like this price.

So you’re exactly right, insurance companies are hard to do. They use a software called Xactimate, and they just basically plug in what you have, where you live, how many square feet it was, what your zip [00:18:00] code was, and it comes out with the price. It’s not very accurate.

From what I could tell at the time, it’s running about two years behind the actual price of things. So we will certainly work. So sometimes, the reason homeowners end up going to, they don’t really have the time or the context to do the whole project themselves, or do they know enough people?

So relatively, recently, we actually can handle paint and drywall, and those types of things for that very specific reason. Because a lot of times, the water damage has damaged some drywall or damaged and paint and it needs to be done. So we will work with the homeowner that will work with it, but we don’t ever want to be in a situation where the insurance company is paying us.

Jonathan Breeden: I was 99% sure what your answer was going to be. But I thought I would ask it. And ultimately, we worked with a restoration company. They hired a boring contractor who was local, who happened to be a friend of ours. But he didn’t want to do it. He didn’t want to deal with insurance company. He wanted to deal with sort of the middleman, the restoration company, which kind of becomes like a general contractor the project.

Tim Ailes: The homeowner gets a project manager to deal with. So some of those [00:19:00] reciprocation companies are much larger companies than mine. And we’re not in a position, probably don’t ever want to be in the position to wait extended periods of time for funds and revenue. And that can happen sometimes when you’re back and forth with an insurance company. It can be 60, 90 days, sometimes, and we’re not in that business.

Jonathan Breeden: So do you offer financing?

Tim Ailes: We do have offer financing. We include 0% financing for 12 months. That is included in any quote cause for us as a business, the cost is about the same as a credit card fee. So we include that. If they want to go out, they can go up as far as I think four years, just adds a little bit more.

It’s almost exactly, if you’ve ever had an experience with Ashley’s furniture, you walk in, like our last set of furniture, we didn’t even know they were having a five year 0% financing. So we ended up like, why not? So we did it. But you also pay the sticker price, so they recoup some of the costs of that way. It’s not as like that, but the process is very similar. They can go on our website. There’s Apply Now financing link right on there. It’s a through Wells Fargo. It will say Shaw credit card program. It [00:20:00] is only sponsored by Shaw Flooring. You can use the financing for any home improvement that we do. It could be painting, cabinetry painting, countertops, cabinets, whatever we’ve done it in all aspects. And it confuses a lot of people cause it says credit card program, it only rolls into that type of scenario if you don’t pay it off in the free interest period, basically. And simple three minutes and you know.

Jonathan Breeden: Right. And the other part of the consumers need to be aware of is, if you don’t pay it off with a free interest period, the interest rate goes all the way back to the beginning, and those interest rates are often 30, 35, 39, 40%.

Tim Ailes: Predatory on that interview. You got to pay attention.

Jonathan Breeden: Correct. And I think a lot of people mistake that. And so you got to make sure if you do that, that you do pay it off within that period, or they’re going to go all the way back, and the project could have doubled or tripled in costs on you. And they don’t always make that clear. I don’t think everybody reads the small print.

Tim Ailes: Yeah.

Jonathan Breeden: That is something that we do see. We get those calls too at this law office, but that’s how it goes. And I think those are great programs, but you got to get it paid [00:21:00] off within the program period, for sure. So what are some of the things that y’all do that more than flooring?

I know you do cabinets.

Tim Ailes: Yeah.

Jonathan Breeden: You do bathroom remodels?

Tim Ailes: So we’ve done, but we do bathroom remodels. Tile showers, take it. The most common one is people take out their fiberglass unit in one tile with a shower floor. We can do that. We also do painting drywall, countertops only, backsplash.

So a lot of times people say, I really don’t want to spend 30, $40,000 on a new kitchen or new cabinetry. But if I just change the countertops and the backsplash, it would be a dramatically different. So we do have that option to do that, as well. We refinish hardwood floors. So pretty much anything with the flooring scope, we can do it. And we might end up changing out a hot water heater on this next job coming up, but we just happen to be there with a plumber. So it’s easier just to get it done while everybody’s there and you’ll have to take more time of work or whatever.

Jonathan Breeden: I got you. So how could people reach out to your company if they want to see if you can help them?

Tim Ailes: Our website, so we grew up in May. And we actually paying someone to do our website. And there’s a good contact form on there from [00:22:00] us, and there’s even a, it’s called Podium. You can chat with us right away, like a text chat. If it’s after hours, it will send you an auto reply, we’ll get back to the next day.

That’s at SouthernFlooringSolutions.com. Or our Facebook page is a good place. I’d say, it’s probably about 60/40. Like 60%, we’re getting contacts through our website, and about 40% through social media anymore, social media is starting to slow down for us anyway. But messaging us on Facebook Messenger is a good way.

Jonathan Breeden: What’s your phone number?

Tim Ailes: Phone number is 984-200-9641 is the office number. And we primarily have that so people know we’re local. We used to have our business, our cell phones from South Florida, and everybody’s like, what’s this 386 number calling? So we basically got a landline, just so we can have a local number to avoid that confusion. And it rolls right over to my cell phone anyway.

Jonathan Breeden: All right.

Tim Ailes: So I don’t even actually have a phone. So sometimes, it gets a little hectic with that, so anytime you call the 984 number, it’s going to roll right over to my cell [00:23:00] phone and Sandy’s cell phone, my wife’s cell phone. So you are calling into the owners when you call.

Jonathan Breeden: That’s awesome. The last question we ask everybody, and you’ve been here for eight or nine years now, what do you love most about Johnston County?

Tim Ailes: What I like most about Johnston County is, you can still get just about all the things that you need in a big city, and it’s not a big city. If you go down to Main Street, Clayton, it still very much feels like the old time hometowns that we grew up with, and that kind of thing. Three of my four kids graduated from Cleveland High School right over here, so I got to experience the school system here. But still, it’s the very hometown feel.

You don’t have to go to marry me in place. You’re like, Hey, I know that guy. And sometimes, if you’re in busier places or larger cities, you could go a day without seeing someone you know. That very much does not happen in Clayton.

If you go down to Fair Game or some of the businesses downtown, Manning Steakhouse, Clayton Steakhouse, you’re going to see somebody you know.

Jonathan Breeden: There’s no doubt. It’s great. It’s the people in the still, the small town field. And you don’t have to go to Raleigh to get anything now. You can get flooring [00:24:00] right here from Tim. You don’t have to go to Raleigh to get lawyers, dentists, financial planners. Everything you would need is right here in Johnston County. And you probably would get better service and better quality if you shop local kind of thing. And that is a true statement. And that’s one of the reasons we do this podcast.

So anyway, we would like to thank Tim for Southern Flooring Solutions for coming on and being our guest on today’s episode of The Best in Johnston County podcast. As we mentioned earlier, please like, follow and subscribe to this podcast, where you’re seeing it, so you’ll be aware of future episodes. And give us a five star review and tell us in the comments what you liked about what Tim had to say and what you learn. We’re always fascinating. We share those with the guests as well.

Until next time, I’m your host, Jonathan Breeden.