J&S Flooring – Partnership With the CFA Provides a Foundation for Success

In these tough times, it is good to hear of a family business, virtually 50 years old, which is still going strong – and it attributes at least part of its success to the benefits it gets from its CFA membership!

Founded in 1976, J&S Flooring goes from strength to strength, concentrating on its core commercial market, with contracts mainly on its home East Midlands patch, but also tackling national jobs for its major repeat customers.

The company was founded in 1976 by the original owners (Jack and Sylvia – hence J&S). Jonathan Wells, Contracts Manager, has been involved in the flooring business since leaving school at 16, amounting to 33 years in the trade. Jonathan and a business partner, who has now retired, took over J&S in 2002.

Jonathan attributes a good part of the company’s success to its CFA membership. “We joined the CFA as we felt we needed the support and the back-up of a recognised organisation to help us grow the business,” he says, “along with being able to promote a more professional approach to our customers.”

The company has also derived direct benefit from its CFA membership. “For example, we used the legal support that our CFA membership provides in a situation where our supplier had delivered the wrong goods and then could not supply the correct ones for several weeks,” says Jonathan. “This meant we were going to be in breach of contract with our customer. The penalty was as much as the contract was worth but our supplier cited their terms stating that they are not held responsible for delays in deliveries. With the CFA’s legal help we established that this was an unfair contract term (due to the time elapsed from the original order to the new supply of materials).”

The company has also frequently used the templates provided by the CFA to help them with updates required by customers. This helped them hugely when first starting the company. They also use the CFA logo on advertising materials, the company website, vehicle signage and official paperwork, to provide a professional look and demonstrate they have met the high standards required of a CFA member.

Jonathan welcomes the CFA’s campaigning on issues such as winter working conditions and ‘Clear Our Workspace’. He also finds the information published by the CFA on its website, in the Floorscape newsletter and via Contract Flooring Journal to be extremely useful. “It is very informative and worthwhile reading in order to keep us up to date with the latest developments on a wide range of topics,” he says.

Importantly the company also believes it has been successful in the past in winning projects from clients who have made contact via the CFA directory. “CFA membership raises our profile with companies who are looking for potential contractors and we definitey benefit from that,” says Jonathan.

“We install flooring to quite a few new build care homes and, as the population continues to age, we do expect this area of work to increase. One of our most recent projects was in Hinckley, Leicestershire. This was a 72-bed care home, where we installed carpets and safety flooring to the whole home. The installation was made more challenging due to quite bad water ingress whilst the concrete was being poured, this resulted in the sub-floors having indentations that needed to have an additional 500 units of smoothing compound applied. Despite these challenges, the project was completed on time, within budget and without snags. At J&S we take real pride in the quality of our installs and we get a lot of repeat business as a result,” says Jonathan.

With regard to the type of work taken on, apart from real wood and ceramics, the company will take on any type of flooring job. The focus has always been on the commercial sector, and this is particularly so at the moment. Like many businesses, J&S enjoyed a bounce in the domestic market coming out of Covid, as pent-up demand led to a big increase in work. However more recently the cost of living crisis has caused residential work to become relatively depressed.

Interestingly one part of the business which is growing is the hygienic wall cladding sector. Jobs involving this are becoming more and more frequent, meaning that almost all of the company’s installers are now trained to do this type of work.