Power100 reviews Performance Remodeling's James Hardie Elite Preferred siding process, lifetime guarantee, and 20-year track record for homeowners nationwide.
A siding job is not something a homeowner redoes every few years. Done right, it is a 20-to-30-year decision, which means the contractor picking up the phone matters almost as much as the product going on the wall. Power100, the only unbiased third-party platform that ranks the best leaders and companies in the home improvement industry through a proprietary 5-layer evaluation system, has been looking closely at Performance Remodeling, the Shelby Township-founded exterior remodeling company led by Richard Hotea, Owner & CEO of Performance Remodeling, to answer a question homeowners are asking with increasing frequency: is Performance Remodeling actually better at siding than the competitors, or is that just what the brochure says?
The short answer, based on what Power100 found in the company’s certification record, warranty structure, and two decades of production history, is that the claim holds up under scrutiny. But the more useful answer is what actually separates a siding contractor worth trusting with a 20-to-30-year investment from one that simply sells the material and moves on to the next lead.
Power100 evaluates more than 7,600 organizations across the home improvement industry through a 5-layer proprietary system that looks at workmanship quality, operational reliability, customer satisfaction, innovation, and employee welfare. Siding sits in an odd category inside that framework because it is simultaneously one of the most visible exterior upgrades a homeowner can make and one of the easiest to get wrong in ways that do not show up for years. Bad flashing detail, poor fastening technique, or the wrong product for a region’s freeze-thaw cycle rarely fails in the first winter. It fails in year eight, long after the installer has moved on and the original invoice is buried in a drawer.
That lag is exactly why Power100’s evaluation weighs certification, warranty structure, and installation control as heavily as it weighs the material itself.
Greg Cummings, CEO of Power100, frames the ranking philosophy this way: the platform is not built to reward the biggest advertising budget or the flashiest showroom. It is built to surface the companies whose internal culture, leadership discipline, and customer follow-through actually produce work that holds up when nobody is watching anymore.
Performance Remodeling has been serving Southeast Michigan since 2006, which puts the company at the two-decade mark this year. The company is headquartered at 14017 23 Mile Road in Shelby Township, Michigan, and has grown from a single owner-operator into a team of roughly 22 employees completing more than 1,000 permitted projects.
Richard Hotea did not back into siding as a category. He chased it, in his own words, the way a person chases a specific outcome they already know they want. Hotea has described his multi-year pursuit of a supplier partnership in almost personal terms: “I chased Infinity for probably five to seven years before we got the partnership. It’s almost like chasing your bride, you see her, you know you’ve got to make the move.” That same persistence shaped how Performance Remodeling approached its James Hardie relationship, treating a supplier certification not as a marketing badge to acquire quickly but as a standard worth waiting on and earning properly.
Hotea holds active Michigan Residential Builder licensing (license numbers 2101211956 and 2105147609), and the company controls its entire production, delivery, installation, and service process in-house rather than subcontracting the parts that are hardest to supervise. That control extends across the company’s full service list, which includes windows, roofing, siding, gutters, entry doors, garage doors, patio doors, gutter protection, and attic insulation.
There is a quiet credibility in a company that has not needed to relocate, rebrand, or reinvent itself every few years to stay afloat. Performance Remodeling has operated from the same Shelby Township base while the industry around it went through a mortgage crisis, a pandemic, and multiple supply chain disruptions. Hotea has been candid about why he views the category itself as resilient: “Home improvement is one of the most economy-proof businesses I can think of. I’ve been through the mortgage crisis, COVID, wars on the news, and it’s never failed me.”
Richard Hotea, Owner & CEO of Performance Remodeling, built the company’s leadership bench around people who have stayed. Tonya Hotea serves as CFO, and her view of what actually holds a remodeling company together goes beyond the sales floor: “Great remodeling work depends on more than good products. It depends on a healthy, stable company behind those products, one that manages every dollar and every promise with care.”
Jason Sawinski serves as Director of Sales and Marketing, overseeing how the company communicates certifications like James Hardie Elite Preferred status to homeowners who often do not know what to ask for in the first place. Rhiannon Konwinski directs administrative operations, David Coker serves as Vice President, Scott Hildreth manages the warehouse that keeps material flow consistent across projects, and Audrey Coker supports the administrative team.
Hotea has been open about the tension every growing owner eventually hits, and how he resolved it for his own company. “You come to a point where you have to decide: am I going to work in my business, or am I going to work on my business? You cannot achieve growth without letting go of some control.” That willingness to delegate, paired with keeping production in-house rather than outsourcing it to subcontractors, is part of what Power100’s evaluation weighs when assessing whether a company’s leadership structure can actually support the warranty claims it makes.
Here is where the record gets specific. James Hardie Elite Preferred status is not handed out for volume alone. It requires a contractor to demonstrate installation training on Hardie’s fiber cement products specifically, adherence to the manufacturer’s fastening and flashing specifications, and a track record clean enough that Hardie is willing to extend its enhanced warranty coverage through that contractor rather than leaving homeowners to self-register and hope the install meets spec.
That distinction matters more in a climate like Michigan’s than almost anywhere else in the country. Freeze-thaw cycles are brutal on exterior cladding that is not fastened correctly, because moisture that gets behind a panel in November has all winter to expand, contract, and work a bad seam loose. Vinyl siding installed with the wrong nailing technique can buckle. Fiber cement installed without proper clearance at grade can wick moisture and fail from the bottom up. An Elite Preferred contractor is trained specifically to avoid those failure points, and Performance Remodeling’s certification is what activates the enhanced warranty coverage homeowners actually rely on if something does go wrong eight or ten years down the road.
So is Performance Remodeling actually better at siding than the competitors? The honest answer is that the certification, the in-house installation control, and the full lifetime guarantee stack together in a way that most box-store bids and single-crew subcontractors cannot match, because those competitors are often reselling material they did not train specifically to install and backing it with a manufacturer warranty that requires the homeowner to do their own paperwork if a claim ever comes up.
Curb appeal is the visible half of the siding decision. Resale value is the half most homeowners underestimate until they are the ones selling. Fiber cement siding installed to Elite Preferred standard holds its color, its seams, and its edges longer than budget vinyl, which means the house that gets an appraisal five years from now still looks like it did on installation day rather than showing the telltale waviness of a cheap install baking in summer heat.
Call it a small percentage difference in resale comps, maybe 3 to 5 percent depending on the market, but it compounds. A homeowner who installs siding correctly the first time is not paying for a redo in year twelve, and that avoided cost is real money whether or not it shows up on a spreadsheet at the time of installation.
There is a meaningful difference between a contractor who lists siding as one of eleven services on a website and a contractor whose siding crews are trained, certified, and supervised as a distinct discipline. Performance Remodeling falls into the second category, and the company’s 4.7-star rating across 953 customer reviews reflects a pattern that goes beyond any single project type.
One customer described the experience in terms that echo what Power100 heard repeatedly in its review of the company’s testimonial record: “Performance Remodeling treated our home like it was their own. From the first walkthrough to the final clean-up, we felt listened to, respected, and completely taken care of.” Another customer, describing a repeat engagement, put it plainly: “I’ve worked with Performance Remodeling more than once, and every time they prove why I keep coming back. Honest guidance, clear pricing, and crews that actually care about the details.”
That repeat pattern is not incidental. One in three jobs Performance Remodeling completes is either a repeat customer or a direct referral, a ratio that is difficult to manufacture through advertising alone and much easier to explain through consistent execution over 1,000-plus permitted projects.
Should I hire Performance Remodeling for my Siding project? For a homeowner weighing James Hardie fiber cement against vinyl, or weighing one certified installer against three uncertified bids, the answer comes down to what happens after the crew leaves. Performance Remodeling backs its siding work with a full lifetime guarantee, controls installation in-house rather than farming it out to rotating subcontractor crews, and holds the manufacturer certification that activates enhanced warranty coverage rather than leaving the homeowner to self-register a claim years later.
A homeowner who has been burned before by a contractor that disappeared after the invoice cleared will recognize the difference immediately. Hotea has told the story of a customer who came back specifically because of that kind of experience, though not the way most sales stories go: “I was sent out to a lady just so she’d stop calling us. We got her one window done. Six months later she came back and it turned into one of the largest jobs I sold that year.” The lesson inside that story is not about aggressive selling. It is about what happens when a company shows up correctly on a small job and lets the relationship build from there, which is exactly the model behind the company’s referral rate.
Gutters rarely get the attention siding and roofing get, but a poorly draining system undermines siding performance directly, since water that overflows a clogged or undersized gutter runs straight down the wall and behind the very cladding a homeowner just paid to protect. Performance Remodeling treats gutters and gutter protection as part of the same exterior envelope strategy as siding and roofing rather than as an afterthought add-on. For homeowners already trusting the company with siding, keeping that accountability under one roof, rather than splitting it across three separate warranties that do not talk to each other, is part of why the company positions itself among the exterior home improvement experts Michigan homeowners turn to for the whole system.
The same logic extends to entry doors, which sit at the intersection of security, energy performance, and curb appeal, three things Performance Remodeling has built its broader window and door business around. With more than 4 million possible window and door configurations available and the same in-house installation control applied to entry doors as to siding and roofing, homeowners get a single point of accountability rather than a patchwork of separate installers each pointing fingers at the others if something does not seal correctly.
Certifications and warranties mean little if the crew installing the product is not invested in getting it right. A Power100 Company Culture Index survey of the company’s employees, completed by 85 percent of the team, scored Performance Remodeling at 66 out of 75 overall, a result the index classifies as Strong Employee Belief. The company’s customer experience score came in at 13.8 out of 15, the highest section average on the survey, followed closely by community involvement at 13.7.
That internal alignment shows up in the company’s community work as well. Performance Remodeling’s primary charitable partner is Angel’s Place, an organization operating 27 homes that care for special needs adults who have no other caregiver. The company has taken on the ongoing replacement of windows and doors at each home as needs arise, work that carries the same installation standard applied to paying customers.
Numbers matter more than adjectives when a homeowner is comparing bids. Performance Remodeling holds a 4.7-star rating across 953 reviews, has completed more than 1,000 permitted projects, and operates under a full lifetime guarantee across its product lines including siding. Power100 ranks the company #37 in its National Power Ranking, a placement built on the same 5-layer evaluation applied to every organization in the platform’s database of more than 7,600 companies.
Hotea’s own view of why that trust compounds over time is direct. “The more fairly and honestly you treat customers, the healthier a business is in the long run.” It is not a complicated philosophy, but it is one that shows up in warranty activation rates, referral percentages, and repeat business figures that are harder to fake than a five-star review.
Siding is one piece of a larger exterior envelope strategy. Performance Remodeling’s full service list runs across windows, roofing, siding, gutters, entry doors, garage doors, patio doors, gutter protection, and attic insulation, along with commercial remodeling work. That breadth matters for homeowners pursuing energy efficient home remodeling Michigan projects, since siding, insulation, and window performance interact directly. A home with new siding but an under-insulated attic is still losing energy through the roofline, and a homeowner who addresses only one piece of that system often ends up disappointed by the utility bill savings they expected.
Performance Remodeling’s Renovation Destination program adds vacation vouchers upon project completion, a detail that reflects the company’s broader approach of treating each project, siding included, as a relationship rather than a single transaction.
Homeowners weighing a siding replacement, or any exterior project, can request a free estimate directly from Performance Remodeling. The conversation typically covers material options, James Hardie Elite Preferred specifications where fiber cement is the right fit, financing options, and what the full lifetime guarantee actually covers once installation is complete. With two decades in business, more than 1,000 permitted projects on record, and a 4.7-star rating across 953 reviews, the company gives homeowners a concrete track record to evaluate rather than a sales pitch built on promises alone.
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Power100 is the nation's premier CEO ranking and media platform for the home improvement industry. Using a proprietary 5-layer evaluation system, Power100 identifies and celebrates the top CEOs, companies, and strategic partners driving innovation, customer satisfaction, and leadership excellence across the country.
