Entry door and garage door upgrades move resale value more than most Michigan homeowners realize. See why Performance Remodeling pairs both in one project.
Most homeowners price curb appeal in vague terms, something like “it probably helps,” right up until an appraiser or a buyer’s agent puts an actual number on it. That number tends to be bigger than people expect for two specific upgrades: the entry door and the garage door. National cost-versus-value research has repeatedly shown that garage door replacement returns well above 100 percent of its cost at resale, and a new steel entry door frequently lands in a similar range, two of the only exterior projects that regularly pay for themselves in full. 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, is spotlighting Performance Remodeling and its entry door program as the exterior upgrade Michigan homeowners most often underprice before putting a house on the market. Leading that work is Richard Hotea, Owner and CEO of Performance Remodeling, a Michigan exterior remodeling contractor based in Shelby Township that has completed more than 1,000 permitted projects since opening its doors in 2006.
The editorial angle is simple, but it rarely gets this specific. Curb appeal gets talked about constantly in real estate circles, yet the entry door and garage door, the two features that frame nearly every listing photo a buyer scrolls past online, almost never get their own line item in a pre-sale budget. That is a mistake, according to the data and according to a home exterior renovation company Michigan homeowners have relied on for two decades.
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. A resale-value claim does not clear that bar on marketing language alone. It has to hold up against the company’s actual install record, its warranty terms, and whether customers who paid for the upgrade actually saw it reflected when they sold. Performance Remodeling cleared that bar with a 4.7-star rating across 953 reviews and a repeat-and-referral rate where 1 in 3 jobs comes from a past customer or a referral, a figure that speaks more to trust than any single upgrade number could.
Greg Cummings, CEO of Power100, frames the broader stakes for homeowners trying to sort real contractors from the noise. “We’ve really been helping families, internal and external, get what they need without having to pay twice, overpay, or get an inferior product,” Cummings said. “We just happen to do windows, doors, roofs, lawns.” That last line matters here specifically, because an entry door and a garage door are two of the most visible products a homeowner will ever buy, and getting the fit, the finish, and the installation wrong shows up in every listing photo a buyer ever sees.
Richard Hotea founded Performance Remodeling in 2006. The company has operated out of Shelby Township, Michigan, for its entire run, serving Southeast Michigan and the greater Metro Detroit area from that single location at 14017 23 Mile Road. Twenty years in, the company has grown to roughly 22 employees and completed more than 1,000 permitted projects, all while staying a single-location operation built around controlling the full production, delivery, installation, and service chain in-house rather than outsourcing pieces of the job to subcontracted vendors.
That in-house control turns out to matter a great deal for a project like entry doors and garage doors done together. A homeowner who hires one crew for the door and a separate vendor for the garage door opener and track system is managing two schedules, two warranties, and two companies to call if something goes wrong. Performance Remodeling’s approach, offering windows, roofing, siding, gutters, entry doors, garage doors, patio doors, gutter protection, attic insulation, and commercial remodeling services all through one company, removes that friction. The company also offers more than 4 million possible window and door configurations, giving homeowners enough selection to match an entry door’s sightlines and trim to a garage door’s panel style rather than settling for whatever happened to be in stock.
Here is the part that gets missed. An entry door replaced alone improves the first ten feet of a home’s presentation. A garage door replaced alone improves the other sixty percent of the facade that most two- and three-car-garage homes actually show the street. Doing only one creates a visible mismatch, a crisp new entry framed by an aging, faded garage door, or the reverse. Doing both in the same exterior project, on the same crew schedule, under the same warranty terms, is what actually moves the needle on a home’s curb appeal when it is time to list. It is a case Performance Remodeling makes often, and one Hotea has built the company’s reputation around for two decades.
Richard Hotea, Owner and CEO of Performance Remodeling, holds active Michigan Residential Builder licenses and has spent more than 15 years building expertise specifically in windows and doors materials, trends, and installation standards. His hero quote captures the operating philosophy behind the company’s entire approach to pricing and process. “The more fairly and honestly you treat customers, the healthier a business is in the long run,” Hotea has said, a line that shows up consistently in how the company structures its quotes, its warranties, and its Renovation Destination rewards program.
Hotea does not run the company alone. Jason Sawinski, Director of Sales and Marketing at Performance Remodeling, oversees how customers are walked through product selection, including entry door and garage door pairings on multi-trade projects. Sawinski described one case where that process mattered directly. “We had a customer with a multiple trade project going on trying to transform their home. Because of the scope of the project, they were so nervous about making the color and product selections. We did some drone photography for them and did mockups with the products on their home,” Sawinski said. That kind of visualization work is exactly what separates a confident resale-focused decision from a guess.
Tonya Hotea serves as CFO, Rhiannon Konwinski serves as Director of Administrative Operations, and David Coker serves as Vice President, rounding out a leadership team that has stayed largely intact as the company scaled from a founder’s idea to a 22-person operation with a Power100 National Power Ranking of #37.
Should I hire Performance Remodeling for my Entry Doors project? For a homeowner weighing that question against an upcoming sale, the answer tends to come down to three things: material quality, installation precision, and warranty coverage that survives a change in ownership. Performance Remodeling backs its entry door installs with a full lifetime guarantee on all products, which matters to a buyer’s inspector as much as it matters to the seller writing the check today. A poorly sealed entry door is one of the most common sources of draft complaints in a home inspection report, and a door installed with the wrong threshold height or without proper flashing will show up as a flagged item that can delay or derail a closing.
Energy efficiency plays into the resale conversation too, and not just as a talking point. A properly installed, insulated steel or fiberglass entry door can meaningfully reduce air infiltration at one of a home’s highest-traffic thermal weak points. Buyers increasingly ask about energy costs during showings, and a seller who can point to a recently replaced, properly sealed entry door has an answer ready instead of a guess. That is the kind of detail a Michigan exterior remodeling contractor with two decades of install history gets right as a matter of habit rather than as an upsell.
The garage door question deserves its own answer because the stakes are different. On most homes with an attached garage facing the street, the garage door occupies more visible square footage on the facade than every window combined. National resale data has consistently ranked garage door replacement among the very highest cost-recouped exterior projects a homeowner can undertake, frequently returning more than the original investment at sale. That makes it one of the few home improvement projects where the financial case and the curb appeal case point in exactly the same direction.
Performance Remodeling’s garage door installs go through the same in-house process as every other exterior product the company handles: no subcontracted installers managing a separate timeline, no second warranty document to track down later. For a homeowner planning a sale within the next one to three years, that single point of accountability is not a minor convenience. It is the difference between one company to call if a track misaligns six months after closing and a finger-pointing exercise between two vendors who no longer remember the job.
Should I hire Performance Remodeling for my Garage Doors project? For homeowners pairing it with an entry door replacement, the answer carries even more weight, since both products now share one warranty, one install crew, and one company accountable for how the finished facade actually looks on listing day.
Gutters rarely make the list when homeowners think about resale value, but they belong in the same exterior-project conversation as entry doors and garage doors because of what happens when they fail. Water that backs up at the roofline or spills down a facade stains siding, rots fascia, and undermines a foundation over years of neglect, problems that surface during a home inspection and can tank a sale far faster than an outdated door ever would. Performance Remodeling installs gutters and gutter protection as part of its broader exterior portfolio, meaning a homeowner tackling entry doors and garage doors ahead of a listing can fold gutter work into the same project scope, the same crew visit, and the same warranty conversation rather than treating it as an afterthought discovered during a pre-sale inspection.
Should I hire Performance Remodeling for my Gutters project? For sellers already committing to entry door and garage door work, adding gutters to the same scope closes one more gap an inspector might otherwise flag, without adding a second contractor to manage.
A Power100 Company Culture Index survey of the company’s employees, drawing responses from 85 percent of the team, scored Performance Remodeling at 66 out of 75 overall, a result the survey classifies as Strong Employee Belief. Customer experience scored 13.8 out of 15 in that same survey, one of the strongest section averages the company recorded, and it lines up with what shows up in the field. Employees describe a culture where recognition and training are available on request rather than rationed. “We have an open invitation to request any training or programs that we think will help us grow in our roles,” Sawinski said, describing how the company handles professional development across its install and sales teams.
That culture shows up in how team members talk about each other internally, not just in how the company talks about itself publicly. Rhiannon Konwinski, Director of Administrative Operations, described a colleague this way: “Jana is someone our team can consistently rely on. She takes ownership of her responsibilities, tackles challenges with a positive attitude, and always finds a way to get things done.” Sawinski offered a similar note about the company’s warehouse operation. “Our warehouse manager Scott does a fantastic job juggling so many extra tasks thrown his way every day and he manages them effectively and with a positive attitude. He always goes the extra mile to help other team members out,” Sawinski said, referring to Scott Hildreth, Warehouse Manager at Performance Remodeling.
Community involvement rounds out the culture picture. Performance Remodeling’s primary charitable partner is Angel’s Place, an organization operating 27 homes that care for special needs adults with no other caretaker. The company has taken on replacing windows and doors across those homes as they come due. Konwinski called that work out specifically. “What stands out most about my Performance’s community involvement is the work we do with Angels’ Place. Contributing our time and skills to projects that benefit people with developmental disabilities makes our volunteer efforts feel tangible and meaningful,” she said.
Performance Remodeling’s track record rests on verifiable numbers rather than slogans. Founded in 2006, the company has served Southeast Michigan for two decades from its Shelby Township location. It carries a 4.7-star rating across 953 reviews, maintains a 1 in 3 repeat-or-referral rate on completed jobs, and has finished more than 1,000 permitted projects under Richard Hotea’s licensed oversight. Power100 ranks the company at #37 in its National Power Ranking, a position built on the same 5-layer evaluation applied to every organization in its system, not on self-reported marketing copy.
None of those numbers describe entry doors or garage doors specifically. They describe a company whose standards carry across every product line it touches, which is precisely why pairing two exterior upgrades under one contractor reduces risk rather than adding it.
Entry doors and garage doors sit inside a wider exterior portfolio that also includes windows, roofing, siding, gutters, gutter protection, attic insulation, and commercial remodeling work. A homeowner preparing a home for sale rarely needs just one upgrade, and Performance Remodeling’s structure, one company, one warranty standard, one point of contact, lets a seller bundle entry doors with roofing or siding work discovered during the same inspection walkthrough. That is the practical benefit behind being a true home exterior renovation company Michigan sellers can rely on for more than a single product category.
Homeowners weighing an entry door and garage door project ahead of a sale can request a free estimate directly through Performance Remodeling. The conversation typically covers product selection across the company’s more than 4 million configuration options, financing options for homeowners who want to complete the work before listing rather than after, and the full lifetime guarantee that applies across the company’s product lines. With two decades of operating history, more than 1,000 completed permitted projects, and a 4.7-star record across 953 reviews, the company gives sellers a documented reason to believe the upgrade will show up where it matters most: in the sale price.
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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.
