ForConstructionPros.com

He says that right from the start RLH Sealcoating filled a niche because the big sealcoating contractors just weren’t interested in doing driveways, so RLH didn’t step on any toes. “The big guys were production-oriented, wanting to put a lot of material down quickly, and you can’t do that on a driveway job,” Hamblin says. “They didn’t have a problem with me starting up at all, and many of them directed driveway work his way.”

He operated out of a 6-ft. x 6-ft. corner of the garage, and he kept all his sealcoating customers, which for a long time were residential homeowners only, on 3 x 5 cards in a recipe box.

“At first 100% of my work was driveways, and I can’t tell you how valuable those driveways were to my business,” he says. “I found that people who owned those driveways, nine times out of 10 they own - or know people who own - a commercial business, and that lead me right into commercial sealcoating.”

After one year he had 150 accounts (in his recipe box). Currently he has more than 5,000 accounts (residential and commercial) that take up a full wall of files in his home office. Hamblin keeps track of when he does each driveway and tries to repeat sealcoating the same driveway every two or three years. “But I will tell them if I don’t think their driveway needs to be sealed,” he says. “I’ll do it if they want me to but I’ll tell them if I don’t think it needs to be done.” He does no cold calling and no marketing. “I only do what comes to me.”

“I have high expectations on the job, but that’s because it’s my name on the company,” Hamblin says. “We use a straight edge to get a straight line, we edge all the work, we take our time and do it right. But we have to do it right because this is how I make my living - the crew gets paid whether they make a mistake or not, but if we have an unhappy customer that affects my livelihood.”