When Jessica Ledger-Kalen bought out her business partner in 2013, their company had more debt than revenue. She didn't come from a "concrete family," but since launching Royale Concrete in 2006 she’d learned enough on jobsites and in customer/vendor negotiations to decide she could ignore people who told her to file for bankruptcy instead. She was right. Royale Concrete has been in the black since 2015 and expects to be debt-free by the end of 2018. Not once in the intervening years has an employee, vendor, or bank had to wait for a check or payment. “Bankers look at us and say, ‘I don’t know how you did this,’” says the 38-year-old.
She did it partly by forgoing her salary, but sole proprietors often do. More crucially, she transitioned the company from commodity work like sidewalks, driveways, and foundations to higher-margin surface preparation, polishing, and repair. Royale Concrete also provides maintenance or trains janitorial services to ensure their product isn't compromised by improper products and procedures. All this suits the perfectionism of a team that prides itself on bringing craftsmanship to every project.
“Contractors doing subpar work were passing, and it was frustrating,” she says. “So I asked, ‘How can we stand out like I know we can?’”
Royale Concrete is an hour’s drive from the nearest interstate highway (I-80 to the north) and metropolitan area (Iowa City, also to the north). Locating a labor-intensive business so remotely could be the kiss of death, but word about good work travels. The restoration of an 1920s high school auditorium floor in Des Moines (120 miles away) earned Concrete Construction’s sister publication Concrete Surfaces’ 2017 Polished Concrete Award for Educational Projects. Crews repaired scores of 12-inch-by-6-inch HVAC vent holes before working a 900-pound grinder over a 6,600-square-foot sloped floor. The entire job was done in 400 hours.
In addition to Ledger-Kalen, the company’s five full-time employees include a project manager, craftsman-certified polisher, salesperson, and just-hired office administrator. Every penny spent on overhead is one less penny of profit, so back-end functions are entirely paperless thanks to the ubiquitous smartphone and the cloud.
Internal assignments, like developing a new form or project research, are made and tracked through the free Trello project management app. Memberships in professional organizations like the America Society of Concrete Contractors’ Concrete Polishing Council (CPC, formerly the Concrete Polishing Association of America) exposes her to tools like Workforce Recon, an end-to-end project management app developed specifically for concrete contractors, including polishers.
A virtual assistant hired through Worldwide 101 uses the information to do estimating and takeoffs. (Ledger-Kalen stopped using a service based in the Philippines because, while only $7 or $8 an hour, the time difference hampered communications.) Receipts are photographed via the CamScanner app and uploaded to Quicken's QuickBooks small-business accounting software, which resides on WorkSpaces, Amazon’s cloud-based desktop-as-a-service. A part-time contract accountant logs into the virtual desktop to reconcile the books weekly.
Ledger-Kalen picks up these and other administrative streamlining tips from various sources. In addition to sitting on the CPC, she's chair of the Concrete Sawing and Drilling Association’s Polishing Committee and belongs to the Southeast Iowa Builders Association. Fairfield’s mayor asked her to step in when a city council member left. The Iowa chapter of the Entrepreneurs’ Organization (EO), a global peer-to-peer network, serves as Royale Concrete's board of directors.
“We consider ourselves successful when customers are excited to refer us to their friends and business associates,” she says. “Our goal is remain flexible and accommodating to each customer’s individual needs.”
