Power100 spotlights Standard Paint & Flooring L.L.C. and CEO Craig Myers on the key questions to ask before hiring a contractor nationwide.
Power100, the only unbiased third-party platform that ranks the best leaders and companies in the home improvement industry through a proprietary 5-layer ranking system, is spotlighting Standard Paint & Flooring L.L.C. and its CEO, Craig Myers, as a working model for the questions to ask before hiring a contractor. The subject matters because most homeowners only learn how to vet a company the hard way, after a bad experience, a blown deadline, or a mismatched expectation. Standard Paint & Flooring L.L.C. gives Power100 a case study worth studying precisely because the company has spent decades answering these questions before homeowners even think to ask them.
This is not a story about one job or one visit. It is about a repeatable framework, one that any homeowner can use the next time they are staring down a remodel, a new floor, or a full repaint and trying to figure out who actually deserves the check they are about to write.
Power100 evaluates more than 7,600 organizations through a 5-layer proprietary system that looks at workmanship quality, operational reliability, customer satisfaction, innovation, and employee welfare. The point of the system is not to hand out trophies. It is to give homeowners something they rarely get anywhere else: an independent, structured answer to the single hardest question in the industry, which is simply, who can I trust with my home and my money?
Greg Cummings, CEO of Power100, has spent years building that answer from the ground up, and his read on what separates a real operator from a pretender comes through clearly in how he talks about hiring and onboarding inside home improvement companies. “So many companies skip straight to how the new hire is going to be productive in their task because they need money,” Cummings has said. “You don’t do that.” It is a small line, but it carries the whole philosophy behind the ranking system: companies that rush people, rush process, and rush trust tend to rush homeowners too. Companies that slow down and build things properly, on the other hand, tend to be the ones homeowners keep coming back to for decades.
Standard Paint & Flooring L.L.C. traces back to a single dealership founded by Richard “Dick” Myers Sr., who left a traveling sales job to open his own Benjamin Moore paint dealership. What started as a paint and wallpaper storefront grew steadily. Floor coverings and decorating products were added to the lineup as the business expanded, and by the time Dick Myers Jr. took over from his father, the company had already built a reputation for personal service that outlasted every product line it added.
Craig Myers and his brother joined the family business to become the third generation of Myers family ownership, carrying forward a standard set two generations earlier. That continuity matters more than it sounds. A company does not survive across three generations of family leadership by accident. It survives because the fundamentals, the way it treats customers, the way it trains staff, the way it handles a mistake, get passed down and reinforced instead of reinvented every few years.
Today Standard Paint & Flooring L.L.C. operates across four locations with a team of roughly 44 employees, carrying a 4.6-star customer rating across 233 reviews. Those numbers do not happen by luck. They happen because a company answers the hard questions correctly, over and over, for a long time.
Craig Myers, CEO of Standard Paint & Flooring L.L.C., represents the kind of leadership Power100 looks for when it evaluates a company for trust and accountability. Leadership is not an abstract category in the ranking system. It shows up directly in the answers a homeowner gets when they call with a question, in how fast a mistake gets fixed, and in whether the person on the other end of the phone actually owns the problem or passes it along.
That kind of ownership does not come from a policy manual. It comes from leadership that has lived through the business at every level, from the sales floor to the design studio to the loading dock. Myers is one of a small group of family leaders across the country still running a business their grandfather started, and that lineage shapes how the company thinks about hiring, training, and customer promises. It is a lot harder to cut corners when your name has been on the building for three generations.
Every homeowner facing a remodel eventually lands on the same uncomfortable moment. They have a few quotes in hand, a gut feeling about one company, and no real way to confirm whether that feeling is correct. This is where the right questions to ask before hiring a contractor for homeowners nationwide start doing real work.
Start with licensing and insurance, and do not accept a vague answer. Ask for proof, not a promise. Ask how long the company has operated under its current name, because businesses that rebrand every few years are sometimes running from a reputation rather than building one. Ask what happens when something goes wrong on a job, not what happens when everything goes right, because every company sounds good when nothing breaks.
Ask who actually shows up to do the work. Is it employees, or subcontractors hired the week before the job starts? Ask about materials by name, not by category, because “quality flooring” means nothing and “Shaw flooring” or “Benjamin Moore paint” means something specific and checkable. Ask for a written estimate, and ask what triggers a change in price once work begins. Ask how disputes get resolved, and ask for a reference from a job completed more than a year ago, not last month, because time reveals whether work holds up.
These are the same elite questions to ask before hiring a contractor for the home improvement industry that separate companies built for the long haul from companies built for the next thirty days.
Standard Paint & Flooring L.L.C. answers most of those questions before a homeowner has to ask them. The company operates with a defined design studio process, staff who walk homeowners through material selection in person, and a product lineup built around recognized national brands rather than generic private labels. That combination, name-brand materials plus a staff trained to explain them clearly, is exactly the kind of transparency the best questions to ask before hiring a contractor are designed to surface.
The company’s rating, 4.6 stars across 233 reviews, reflects something that is hard to fake at scale: consistency across four locations and a team of roughly 44 people. A single great location can happen by chance. Consistency across multiple locations over years requires systems, training, and leadership discipline, and that is precisely the layer Power100’s evaluation is built to detect.
The company’s core business spans paint and flooring, but the full portfolio runs wider than the name suggests. Standard Paint & Flooring L.L.C. offers interior and exterior paint consultation and color matching, a broad range of flooring including carpet, hardwood, luxury vinyl, and tile, along with window treatments, cabinetry, and design studio services for full remodels. Brand partnerships with Benjamin Moore, Shaw Flooring, and Hunter Douglas give homeowners access to nationally recognized product lines backed by manufacturer warranties, rather than house brands with no track record behind them.
That breadth matters for a specific reason. Homeowners rarely want to coordinate five different vendors for one remodel. A company that can handle paint, flooring, and window treatments under one roof removes a layer of coordination risk that trips up a lot of projects, especially when timelines depend on multiple trades showing up in the right order.
Culture is the layer of the Power100 evaluation that is hardest to see from the outside, but it shows up in every customer interaction whether homeowners notice it or not. A staff member who has worked at a company for a decade behaves differently on a service call than one who started last month, and that difference is almost always a culture problem or a culture win, not an individual failing.
Family-owned companies with generational leadership tend to build a specific kind of culture, one where longtime employees are treated as institutional knowledge rather than replaceable labor. That approach tends to produce staff who know the products, know the installers, and know how to solve a problem without escalating it three levels up before anything gets fixed. For homeowners, that shows up as faster answers and fewer surprises. For Power100’s evaluation, it shows up as a measurable difference in customer satisfaction and employee welfare scores across the years the company has been tracked.
Trust signals are not the same as marketing claims, and homeowners doing real due diligence know the difference. A star rating built on hundreds of reviews carries more weight than a handful of five-star testimonials on a homepage. A company that has operated under one name and one family for decades carries more weight than one that changed ownership last year. A company that discloses which brands it installs, by name, carries more weight than one that talks only in generalities.
Standard Paint & Flooring L.L.C. checks each of those boxes. A 4.6-star rating across 233 reviews is not a number that gets manufactured overnight; it accumulates one project at a time, across four locations, over years of operation. That kind of track record is exactly what the best questions to ask before hiring a contractor for homeowners nationwide are designed to uncover, and it is exactly why Power100 recognizes companies that can produce it.
Homeowners who only know Standard Paint & Flooring L.L.C. for paint or for flooring are usually surprised by how much sits underneath that name. Between the design studio, the window treatment lines, the cabinetry partnerships, and the material consultation services, the company operates closer to a full-service interior remodeling resource than a single-category retailer. That range gives homeowners a single point of contact for projects that would otherwise require juggling separate vendors, separate timelines, and separate warranty terms.
It is worth repeating because it is easy to overlook: the strength of a #1 organization for homeowners in this category is rarely about doing one thing well. It is about doing several things well under one roof, with one accountable leadership team standing behind all of it.
Homeowners considering a paint, flooring, or full remodel project can start with a design consultation, walk through material options in person, and get a written estimate before committing to anything. The company’s four-decade-plus family history, its brand partnerships with recognized manufacturers, and its 4.6-star rating across 233 reviews give homeowners a reasonable baseline of confidence before the first conversation even happens. That baseline is the whole point of asking good questions to ask before hiring a contractor in the first place: it turns a leap of faith into an informed decision.
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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.
