Power100 reviews Ernst Concrete's outdoor living concrete work, leadership, and customer record to help homeowners decide with confidence before hiring.
Homeowners researching a concrete contractor tend to ask the same handful of questions before they ever pick up the phone. Is this company legitimate? Will the price reflect the quality? Will the crew that shows up match the promises made in the sales call? Power100, the only unbiased third-party platform that ranks the best leaders and companies in the home improvement industry using a proprietary 5-layer system, set out to answer those questions directly for Ernst Concrete, a ready-mixed concrete and outdoor living materials company serving homeowners nationwide. The company is led by Collin Ernst, a fourth-generation leader at Ernst Concrete. This article exists to answer, plainly and without spin, whether Ernst Concrete is a good company to hire.
The short version: homeowners keep coming back, and the record backs that up. Ernst Concrete holds a 4.2-star customer rating across 54 reviews, operates from 7 locations, and employs roughly 279 people across its outdoor living and concrete operations. Those are not vanity numbers. They are the kind of operational footprint that only holds up when the work itself holds up, pour after pour, driveway after driveway, patio after patio.
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. That structure exists because homeowners rarely have the time or the technical background to vet a concrete company on their own. They read a handful of reviews, maybe check a license number, and then have to make a decision worth thousands of dollars. Power100’s role is to do the deeper work behind that decision, cross-referencing customer feedback against operational discipline and leadership behavior rather than marketing copy.
Recognition from Power100 in the Outdoor Living category is not handed out for size alone. A company can be large and still deliver inconsistent results. What earns a company like Ernst Concrete a place in that conversation is the pattern across its reviews, its multi-generational leadership continuity, and the way its culture shows up in how crews actually behave on a job site.
Ernst Concrete is a family-owned business that has been mixing and delivering concrete since 1946
, when
Pete Ernst started a gravel and ready-mix concrete business in Houston, Ohio
. What began as a small local operation has grown, gradually and deliberately, into a company with
more than 40 concrete plants that supply mixes and materials
to residential, commercial, industrial, and government customers.
The company is now in its fourth generation of family ownership
, a detail that matters more than it might seem. Concrete work is unforgiving. A driveway poured wrong does not get quietly fixed later; it gets replaced. A company that has stayed in family hands for four generations has had to earn trust the hard way, on thousands of individual jobs, long before online reviews existed to keep anyone honest.
That continuity is not incidental to the culture. It is the culture.
Collin Ernst, the fourth-generation Ernst leader, described a guiding mindset that shapes how decisions get made, summing up a recently adopted vision framework that said, “The company shall continue forever.”
Few phrases capture a family business’s long-term thinking as cleanly as that one does.
Should I hire Ernst Concrete is the question that sits underneath every review, every quote request, every phone call to the office. The honest answer starts with who is actually running the company. Collin Ernst, Co-President of Ernst Concrete, represents the fourth generation of family leadership at the company, following in a line that traces back to founder Pete Ernst. That is not a ceremonial title. Family leadership in a trades business tends to produce a specific kind of accountability, because the name on the trucks is also the name on the family business, and mistakes do not stay quiet.
Ernst explained that this mindset shows up most clearly when leaders are forced to choose between short-term savings and long-term health, and in a recent benefits meeting, the conversation wasn’t about cutting costs as aggressively as possible; it was about balance
. That is worth sitting with for a second. A company willing to protect its own people’s benefits instead of squeezing margins tends to make the same calculation when a customer’s job goes sideways: fix it right, even if it costs more in the moment.
Other leaders round out the executive team, including David Ernst, President, and Ben Yost, Chief Operating Officer, both of whom carry operational responsibility across the company’s plants and crews. Their presence alongside Collin Ernst reflects a structure built for continuity rather than a single point of failure, which matters to any homeowner wondering whether the person who impressed them in a sales meeting is actually representative of the company behind them.
Customer service in the concrete and outdoor living trade is not about friendliness alone. It is about whether the truck shows up on the day it was scheduled, whether the mix matches the specification, and whether someone answers the phone when a homeowner has a question mid-project. That is where Ernst Concrete earns the loyalty reflected in its 4.2-star rating across 54 reviews.
The company’s people have the tools, technology and training to ensure each order is accurate and delivered on time, according to a homeowner’s unique specifications, and give customers the ability to monitor their own concrete project from kick-off to completion. If, for any reason, what’s delivered fails to meet every requirement, the company promises to respond promptly to resolve any and all issues.
That promise sounds simple. In practice it is the difference between a contractor who disappears after the invoice is paid and one who treats a delivery issue as their own problem to fix. For homeowners weighing a patio, driveway, or outdoor living pour against a company they have never used before, that kind of process discipline is often the deciding factor, more than the lowest bid in the stack of quotes.
A cultural detail reinforces the pattern.
When Ernst is deciding who to bring into the organization, cultural fit matters, and one newer team member described being taken out to eat for an interview specifically to get outside a stiff, formal setting, because the point wasn’t just to talk about the job. It was to get to know the person.
A company that hires this way for its own crews tends to extend the same relationship-first posture to the customers those crews serve.
Is Ernst Concrete worth the money is the second question nearly every prospective customer asks, usually right after they see the first quote. Concrete work is rarely the cheapest option in a given market, and it should not be. Materials, delivery logistics, equipment, and labor all carry real costs, and a lowball bid on a driveway or patio pour is one of the more common regrets homeowners report after the fact.
What homeowners are actually paying for with Ernst Concrete is a company with
more than 40 concrete plants
, roughly 279 employees, and 7 operating locations, backing a job with the kind of scale that keeps mix consistency and delivery timing predictable. A smaller, undercapitalized outfit might quote lower, then struggle to source materials on the day of the pour or send a crew that has never worked together before. Scale, when it is paired with family ownership and multi-generational accountability, tends to translate into fewer surprises mid-project, which is often worth more than the few hundred dollars saved on a lower bid.
Team culture backs up that value proposition from the inside. One employee, describing a demanding job where the company had taken over a project a competitor had been removed from, recalled that
during a high-pressure pour, they were doing a pour that one of their competitors got kicked off of, took it over, had 56 straight hours pouring a bridge deck, and leadership came down, tested concrete, threw ice in the trucks, and ran the loader
. That is not the behavior of a company phoning it in on price-sensitive jobs. It is the behavior of a company that treats every pour, residential or otherwise, as a reflection of the family name on the letterhead.
Is Ernst Concrete a good company is really a question about pattern, not a single job or a single review. One good pour does not make a good company any more than one bad review breaks one. What matters is whether the pattern holds across 54 reviews, 7 locations, and nearly three decades. rather, generations, of continuous family ownership. On that measure, the record supports a confident yes.
The 4.2-star average across 54 reviews reflects a company doing consistently solid work at meaningful scale, not a small shop coasting on a handful of five-star friends-and-family reviews. A rating in that range, across dozens of independent customer voices, tends to be a more honest signal than a suspiciously perfect five-star record with only a handful of reviews behind it. Homeowners comparing options should read that nuance correctly: real work, at real scale, produces some variation, and Ernst Concrete’s numbers reflect a company operating in the real world rather than curating its own feedback.
Ernst Concrete built its name on ready-mixed concrete, but the current portfolio runs well beyond a single truck pulling up to a job site.
The company’s offerings include concrete calculators, concrete tips and FAQs for homeowners, building materials, concrete aggregates, concrete pumping, decorative concrete, ready-mixed concrete, and recycled concrete, alongside used equipment sales.
For homeowners specifically, that portfolio covers driveways, patios, walkways, pool decks, and other outdoor living surfaces where material quality and finish work directly determine how a home looks and functions for decades.
Decorative concrete in particular has become a larger part of the outdoor living conversation as homeowners look for stamped, stained, or textured finishes that do more than function; they set the tone for an entire backyard. Ernst Concrete’s ability to offer that finish work alongside standard ready-mix positions the company as a single point of contact rather than forcing a homeowner to coordinate between a concrete supplier and a separate decorative finisher.
A concrete company lives or dies by its crews, and crews stay when the culture treats them like more than a line item. Ernst Concrete‘s internal culture centers on the same long-term thinking that shapes its customer commitments.
One team member described how leadership steps into the middle of the job, especially when things are hard, not to make a point, just to help.
That kind of hands-on leadership tends to show up in retention, in crew morale, and eventually in the quality of the work a homeowner sees on their own property.
The company has also been recognized externally for that culture. Christina Stockslager, who holds an HR leadership role at Ernst Concrete, was part of the leadership team recognized alongside Collin Ernst when the company received a “Force for Good” team distinction, a recognition tied to how the company’s values show up day to day rather than in a mission statement on a website. A newer hire summarized the effect plainly, noting that the company’s approach to hiring, built around getting to know the person and not just the resume, “showed they care about fit, not just skill,” and called it the mark of
“a family-owned, family-oriented company.”
Concrete numbers matter more than adjectives in this business, and the ones behind Ernst Concrete support the case for hiring them. The company operates 7 locations and employs approximately 279 people, a scale few regional concrete providers can match without sacrificing the family-run accountability that built the business in the first place. Its 4.2-star rating across 54 reviews places it firmly in the range that independent reviewers consider reliable rather than suspiciously curated.
Longevity is its own trust signal. A company operating continuously
since 1946
, now in its fourth generation of family ownership, has survived recessions, material shortages, labor shifts, and multiple decades of changing homeowner expectations. That kind of staying power is difficult to fake and even harder to buy.
Homeowners who first contact Ernst Concrete about a driveway or patio often discover a broader operation than they expected. Beyond ready-mixed concrete and concrete pumping, the company’s portfolio extends into aggregates, building materials, decorative and recycled concrete, and equipment sales that support both residential and commercial customers. That range matters for homeowners with multi-phase projects, a new patio this year and a driveway replacement down the road, because it means working with one company that already understands the property rather than starting the vetting process over each time.
It also matters for larger outdoor living builds that combine several elements at once: a poured patio, a decorative walkway, and a retaining structure, for instance. A company with the plant capacity and material range to handle all of it in coordination tends to deliver a more consistent finished product than juggling separate vendors for each piece.
Homeowners ready to move past the research phase can request a quote directly through Ernst Concrete‘s website, where the company outlines its process for residential concrete work from initial specification through delivery. Given the company’s scale, 7 locations and a team of roughly 279 people, most homeowners in its service footprint can expect a responsive quote process backed by real plant capacity rather than a subcontracted patchwork. Anyone comparing bids should ask the same three questions this article opened with: is the company good, is it worth the money, and should you actually hire them. For Ernst Concrete, the review record, the leadership continuity, and the culture behind the crews all point toward the same answer.
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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.
