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He first started in decorative concrete in the 1970s, using Brad Boman's "cookie cutter" stamps. In the early 1990s, Pettigrew was introduced to chemical staining. "It instantly struck a chord with me, and I realized why I was in concrete — I could take all these designs I had been doing with the stamps and add the color work to the concrete and go wild with it."

Pettigrew then moved indoors with his decorative work. Around the same time he learned about Buddy Rhodes and concrete countertops, and Pettigrew got his hands on whatever information was available on the topic at the time. He started out creating cast-in-place countertops and just recently teamed up with local concrete precaster Dave Weber, with whom he now shares a precasting shop. Pettigrew says he has an edge over contractors who can only do jobs one way or another, and he's even worked on projects where he used precast and cast-in-place in conjunction to get the best results. "I believe whatever works best on a project is the way to approach it," he says. "I've heard people say that if you cast concrete in place you might as well just lift up a sidewalk 3 feet and call it a countertop, but I beg to differ. There are some people who do some beautiful cast-in-place concrete, and I'm one of them."

Marketing countertops
Jarman and Pettigrew have different approaches to marketing their countertops, but they've both found ways to dovetail their countertop and mold-making businesses with the rest of their services.

"It's hard to make it in this trade doing just countertops," Pettigrew says. "That's the crown jewel that we really look for, but I have to charge so much for them because of the labor and trips to the jobsite that if I just relied on countertops I couldn't do it. We have to diversify and do just about anything precast like benches and bowls."

Pettigrew says he's also often called out to bid a small decorative job and ends up introducing the client to concrete countertops or another decorative element. He tries to sell multiple jobs to one homeowner in order to make the smaller jobs worth his time.