Cindy Hamm: Mixing Faith, Inspiration and Delegation To Create Beautiful Work

Cindy Hamm, Owner The Ultimate Edge

For Cindy Hamm, owner of The Ultimate Edge in Dallas, Texas, building a team she can rely on has been a huge key to her success. But she wasn't always so ready to delegate and had to learn to do it the hard way. And like most who multi-task, Hamm initially had trouble leaning on others for help.

Slowly, she has built a team she could rely on, including a full-time office assistant. Hamm also recently hired a full-time salesperson to do her residential and (some) commercial bidding, which has also freed her up to focus more on growing her business.

"Thanks to (advice from) others, I learned a lot about delegating," Hamm says. Building a team has given her more time to expand both her knowledge of the industry and expand her training facility.

Hamm says the decision to delegate hit her right between the eyes when she began looking at her company's performance over the past three years. "I noticed we were growing 60 to 80 percent per year, but I felt like I wasn't giving 100 percent anymore," she explains with disappointment in her voice. "We were growing but we weren't the best we could be."

When a colleague told her, "You'll never grow unless you delegate work to others," she says it really hit home. "I'm a control freak, but I prayed about it...one day a woman came in and said she'd seen me and heard me speak and she needed to work for me. She's now my salesperson. Finding the right people with the same beliefs is amazing," adds Hamm.

Hamm looks at her competition much the same way, stating, "Good work helps the industry as a whole. If there is someone out there who is going to be (my) competition, the industry will only get bigger, better and stronger."

That industry growth is what motivates Hamm, and the competition excites her and feeds her work. She also likes to inspire others and says that she loves to help people discover concrete as a medium. "I've had people in training classes say I brought out their passion for decorative concrete – that's an amazing thing," she says.

Hamm credits her ideas to a higher power, saying that everything God created is beautiful and inspirational. She also looks to her customers to bring elicit her creativity. Since she relies heavily on her customer's tastes, she recommends spending time to get to know them.

"You have to know your customer before you even can know the project. If you walk into a project and only see the measurements, it's not going to be the best it can be," she says. "You have to take the time to get to know them and ask them questions." Which means asking questions without making statement, and then actually listening to the answers. "It's not about the numbers," she adds. "You're not going to be the best at what you do if you concentrate on numbers (only)."

Since the industry is only in its infancy, there's plenty of time for questions. "We're at the time people are starting to take notice and things are going to grow by leaps and bounds," says Hamm. "(The industry) won't peak for another 20 years, and until then it will grow and expand both products and knowledge because there are people making products better all the time. We're seeing (concrete) more in commercial designs and right now residential installs are huge."

So huge, in fact, that Hamm is working on her second training video, the sequel to her wildly successful Acid Stain Solutions video, which walks the viewer through the process from the tear out of the carpet or other flooring, to the final sealing of the floor. The video shows how old, worn, ugly concrete can be transformed into a one-of-a-kind, beautiful floor. Acid Stain Solutions Part 2 will focus on staining and engraving.

Hamm is also focusing on expanding the current training facility, which offers classes on acid staining and concrete countertops. She's opening a new facility to be used only for training sometime in 2004. Ironically, Hamm moved into a new training facility in July 2003 and has already outgrown the space due to the popularity of her classes.

But just because she's expanding doesn't mean she's spreading herself thin. "I'm focusing on expanding what we already do while maintaining our quality," she says. "If you expand and don't maintain quality, you never should have expanded." And that's one lesson she didn't have to learn the hard way.

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