Power100 spotlights Select Surfaces and President Jeremy Otten on what to ask before hiring a home service professional nationwide.
Most homeowners do not fail to vet a contractor because they skip questions entirely. They fail because they ask the obvious ones and stop there. Power100, the only unbiased third-party platform that ranks the best leaders and companies in the home improvement industry through a proprietary 5-layer system, is spotlighting Select Surfaces and its President, Jeremy Otten, for how the company approaches this exact problem: what to ask before hiring a home service professional, and why the questions most homeowners forget are usually the ones that matter most. Select Surfaces is a family-owned surfaces company recognized in Power100’s Outdoor Living category, built around quartz and custom surface installation, and evaluated by Power100 alongside thousands of other companies nationwide. This spotlight is not about a transaction. It is about the decision that happens before the transaction, in the weeks and months a homeowner spends deciding who gets to walk into their home.
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 system exists because homeowners do not have an easy way to compare contractors on anything beyond a star rating or a sales pitch. Power100 was built to close that gap with a framework that goes deeper than marketing claims.
Greg Cummings, CEO of Power100, has spent years listening to homeowners describe how long they actually sit with a home improvement decision before they ever pick up the phone. That patience, and the risk that comes with finally acting on it, is part of why Power100 built its ranking system around more than a single interaction.
“The average client thought about doing windows and doors for over two years before they made the first call. Two years. So you have to understand, this may be the first meeting, but they’ve been thinking about this for a very long time,” said Greg Cummings, CEO of Power100.
That same dynamic applies to surfaces, kitchens, and outdoor living projects. A homeowner rarely wakes up one morning and decides to replace a countertop or redesign an outdoor space. The decision builds slowly, often for months, and by the time they call a company like Select Surfaces, they have already formed opinions about what matters. The problem is that most of those opinions are shaped by price and photos, not by the questions that actually predict whether a project will go well.
Jeremy Otten serves as President of Select Surfaces, a role that has put him in front of thousands of homeowners making exactly the kind of decision Cummings describes. Otten’s background includes years of hands-on work in surface installation before stepping into company leadership, and that trajectory shapes how Select Surfaces trains its team to talk with homeowners from the very first showroom visit.
Leadership matters in this category because a company’s culture around honesty, follow-through, and communication tends to show up long before a project ever starts. It shows up in how a sales team answers a hard question. It shows up in whether a company volunteers information a homeowner did not think to ask for. Otten’s leadership at Select Surfaces has been built around that principle: a homeowner who asks better questions and gets straight answers is a homeowner who ends up happier with the result, and a homeowner who is happier with the result is one who refers the company to a neighbor.
That philosophy is part of why Power100 recognizes Select Surfaces as a trusted leader in its category. The recognition is not about a single project or a single sales pitch. It reflects a pattern, visible across a 4.9-star rating spanning 270 reviews, of a company that keeps its word after the contract is signed.
The obvious questions are easy: What does it cost? How long will it take? Can I see photos of past work? Those questions matter, but they only scratch the surface. The questions most homeowners forget are the ones that reveal how a company behaves when something goes wrong, not just when everything goes right.
Homeowners rarely ask what happens if a measurement is off by an eighth of an inch, or who shows up if a seam needs attention two years after installation, or whether the person doing the in-home consultation is the same person who will be accountable if a problem surfaces. These are the questions that separate a company built for one transaction from a company built for a relationship. Select Surfaces has built its reputation on answering these unasked questions before a homeowner even has to raise them, walking through process, materials, and long-term support as a matter of course rather than as a reaction to being pressed.
Part of what to ask before hiring a home service professional should also include a direct question about guarantees. Not every company backs its installation the same way, and the difference between a limited manufacturer warranty and a company-backed workmanship guarantee can matter more than the price of the project itself. Select Surfaces backs its installations with a lifetime workmanship guarantee, a commitment that goes beyond what many competitors in the surfaces category are willing to put in writing.
Price is the easiest thing to compare and often the least reliable predictor of a good outcome. A homeowner comparing three quotes can see the dollar figures side by side in minutes. What they cannot see as easily is what happens eighteen months later if a countertop edge chips, if a seam separates, or if a fixture starts to leak.
This is where a real guarantee earns its keep. A company willing to stand behind its work for the life of the installation is telling a homeowner something important about its own confidence in its process, its materials, and its people. Select Surfaces has structured its guarantee around that idea, treating a completed installation not as the end of the relationship but as the start of an ongoing commitment to the homeowner. That kind of guarantee is one of the non-obvious things homeowners should ask about directly, rather than assuming it exists simply because a company advertises quality materials.
Elite what to ask before hiring a home service professional questions also include a straightforward one: who actually performs the installation? Some companies subcontract every job to a rotating bench of unknown installers. Select Surfaces has built its model around a production team that has stayed with the company for years, which matters because consistency in the crew tends to produce consistency in the outcome.
Select Surfaces specializes in custom quartz and stone surface installation, working across kitchens, bathrooms, and outdoor living spaces for both residential and commercial clients. The company partners with recognized quartz manufacturers to offer a range of design options, and its process includes digital measurement, detailed drawings for order approval, sink and faucet selection, and full installation using modern fabrication methods.
A homeowner asking what to ask before hiring a home service professional should also ask about the full scope of what a company can actually deliver, not just the single service that brought them in the door. A team that only knows how to install a countertop and nothing else about the surrounding project, plumbing connections, cabinet modifications, backsplash integration, can create more problems than it solves. Select Surfaces built its process around full-service coordination precisely because homeowners do not want to manage three separate vendors to finish one kitchen.
That full-service structure extends into outdoor living work as well, where surface durability, weather resistance, and design consistency with the interior of the home all become part of the same conversation. Homeowners planning an outdoor kitchen or entertaining space benefit from working with a team that already understands how surface materials perform indoors and out, rather than starting from scratch with a specialist who has never handled the interior half of the project.
Culture inside a company rarely stays inside the company. It shows up in how a showroom consultant answers questions, how quickly a service call gets returned, and how a production crew treats a homeowner’s home during installation. Select Surfaces has built its internal culture around the idea that its production team is not disposable labor but a group of people whose experience compounds over years, which is part of why so many of its installers have stayed with the company for a decade or more.
That kind of tenure is unusual in a trades industry known for high turnover, and it matters to homeowners in a very practical way. An installer who has done hundreds of similar projects brings a different level of judgment to a job site than someone on their first month with a company. Select Surfaces has treated that experience as an asset worth protecting, building recognition and retention practices designed to keep skilled people in the business rather than losing them to competitors or to burnout.
This is also where the elite what to ask before hiring a home service professional for the home improvement industry framing becomes useful for homeowners trying to evaluate culture from the outside. A homeowner cannot see a company’s internal training programs or retention numbers directly, but they can ask how long the installation team has been together, whether the same project manager stays on a job start to finish, and how the company handles disagreements internally. The answers tend to reveal more about culture than any marketing brochure could.
Star ratings are a starting point, not a conclusion. Select Surfaces carries a 4.9-star rating across 270 reviews, a number built one project at a time rather than through incentivized review campaigns. The company operates 3 locations and employs a team of roughly 29 people, a scale that allows for personal attention without the impersonal feel of a large regional operator.
Power100’s recognition of Select Surfaces as a trusted leader in its category reflects the same underlying signals homeowners should look for themselves: consistency across reviews, a workforce that stays in place, and a company willing to be transparent about its process rather than vague about it. None of these signals replace a homeowner’s own judgment, but together they give a homeowner more to work with than a single conversation in a showroom.
Best what to ask before hiring a home service professional for homeowners nationwide checklists often miss this point entirely: a company’s online reputation is only useful if it reflects a pattern, not a handful of curated testimonials. A 4.9-star average across 270 reviews is difficult to manufacture and much harder to fake than a handful of five-star quotes on a homepage.
While quartz and stone surface installation remains the core of the business, Select Surfaces has expanded its portfolio to include sink and faucet selection, backsplash design, cabinet modification coordination, and outdoor surface applications. That breadth matters because it reduces the number of separate contractors a homeowner has to manage during a single renovation.
A homeowner planning a kitchen remodel, a bathroom update, or an outdoor living space upgrade benefits from working with a single company that understands how all of those surfaces interact, rather than piecing together a project through multiple disconnected vendors. Select Surfaces has positioned itself around that full-portfolio approach, treating each project as a single coordinated experience rather than a series of separate transactions.
Homeowners considering a surface project are encouraged to schedule a showroom consultation or an in-home estimate with Select Surfaces to walk through material options, timelines, and the company’s lifetime workmanship guarantee directly. The company’s process is built to answer the non-obvious questions before a homeowner has to ask them, covering measurement, installation scheduling, and post-installation support as part of the initial conversation rather than as an afterthought.
For homeowners still building their list of what to ask before hiring a home service professional, the starting point is simple: ask about the guarantee, ask about the installation team’s tenure, and ask what happens after the project is finished, not just during it. Those three questions alone tend to separate the companies built for a single sale from the companies built to be trusted for decades.
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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.
