The Risks of Hiring Subcontractors

Question:
How do you usually handle your countertop installations? Do you do them yourself or subcontract the installation work?

Answer:
This question comes up fairly often, and there are a variety of ways to handle it depending on your situation. Are you too busy in the shop to spare man hours for installation? Or are you a one-man show and need installation help? The same question comes up for templating. Although that task is easily done by one person, it still takes you out of the shop and involves travel time.

One option is to use the services of a company that specializes in countertop templating and installation. Some granite and solid-surface shops subcontract their templating and installation to such companies. The advantage is that you keep your employees focused on producing countertops and staying productive in the shop. Unless you are doing very high-volume production, you will not have enough templating and installation to keep an employee or employees busy full time.

However, this approach has several disadvantages. First, if you don’t visit the site, you can’t plan for installation challenges. Visiting a site to template gives you important information about the site layout and any transportation challenges you might face. For example, if you must go up a narrow staircase to reach the kitchen, the maximum length of your slabs will be limited. You need to know this before making the slabs.

Second, if the template isn’t right, the whole project will go awry. Even though a templating and installation contractor is presumably an experienced professional, do you really want to take the risk that he makes a mistake on the template, and then you make countertops that aren’t going to fit? Your client bought the countertop from you, and if there is a problem with the installation, you are responsible. You will be expected to fix it, no matter who caused the problem.

Using an installation subcontractor can also result in finger-pointing. Nobody is going to respect your product or your clients as much as you do. An installation subcontractor is more likely to chip or break a piece or damage a client’s walls or cabinets.

I have a story about this from personal experience. One time when our production schedule was particularly busy, I had a large project that needed to be installed, and I simply didn’t have time to do it. We had several other time-critical projects to complete, and this project involved two kitchens and three bathrooms. So I hired an installation subcontractor. Unfortunately, this person did not spend the time to do the shimming and shifting that’s needed to get a good fit and good alignment. There were uneven seams and slabs that weren’t centered. For example, in the master bath the countertop was very long and installed in two slabs, with the seam in the middle designed to line up exactly with the center cabinet seam. Also, we had made the slabs slightly short so that the walls wouldn’t be damaged trying to get the slabs in. The installer should have carefully adjusted the horizontal position of the slabs so that the center seam lined up with the cabinet seam. He didn’t. He just plopped the slabs on wherever they fell.

The client complained, of course, and it was my responsibility to try to fix it. Unfortunately, there were also concrete backsplashes and there was no way to tear them out without damaging the walls and possibly the backsplashes and countertops as well. It turned out that the alignment problem could be alleviated by shifting the alignment of the drawers in the center cabinet (they weren’t installed very straight either).

The lesson here is that even if you don’t actually do the installation, you are responsible for the final quality. You can’t blame the subcontractor. You have to take responsibility and fix the problem, or make the subcontractor fix the problem without involving the client in any arguments.

One thing you could do, if you are a one-man show, is to hire subcontractors to help you with installation but make sure you are there helping with every slab and every detail. You can also use a variety of slab-handling equipment to help you do the installation with fewer people. (The granite industry uses this equipment all the time.) There is even a company, Concrete Countertop Plants (concretecountertopplant.com), that specializes in equipment that automates the manufacture and handling of concrete countertops.