Every growing home improvement company will eventually make a hiring mistake. Someone can look right during the interview and still become the wrong fit once they join the team. The harder problem often begins after leadership sees the warning signs. Managers may hope performance improves. They may avoid an uncomfortable conversation. Strong employees may begin to carry more of the workload. Standards can slowly weaken while everyone waits for the situation to fix itself.
Brian Elias, CIO at Refloor, brought that challenge into focus during his rapid-fire conversation with Greg Cummings at The Pinnacle Experience in Baltimore. Elias arrived with the experience of a leader who had already founded and grown 1 800 HANSONS, sold the company, and returned to building again with his son at Refloor. Yet when asked what he planned to discuss at Pinnacle, he did not lead with his wins. He led with one of the mistakes he wished he had handled differently.
“Some of the mistakes that I made over the years, hiring the wrong people, and even worse, keeping the wrong people,” Elias said.
He followed that with a lesson that gave the conversation its real weight: “Talking about success is easy. Talking about your mistakes is hard.”
For owners attending a home improvement executive conference, honesty matters because hiring mistakes are not rare. What separates stronger leadership is often what happens after the mistake becomes clear. Elias said one of his biggest lessons was learning to make those hard decisions earlier. His point was not about removing people without care. It was about recognizing when the fit is wrong and understanding that delay can affect more than one employee. A poor fit can touch morale, trust, workload, standards, and the culture that leadership is trying to protect.
Brian Elias, CIO at Refloor on stage at The Pinnacle Experience
Elias also explained how that experience shaped the way Refloor now approaches talent. Instead of hiring only for technical ability, the company starts with values.
“What we do is we interview to our core values, so we can train people for the skill set,” Elias said.
His view is that skills can be developed, while personality and alignment with the company are harder to rebuild after someone is already inside the business. He then made the culture lesson even clearer:
“Your culture is only as good as your weakest link.”
That idea gives his Pinnacle conversation lasting value. As home improvement companies face tighter leads and greater pressure to make every opportunity count, the people inside the business become even more important. A strong culture is not created only by finding great people. It is protected by leaders willing to act when the wrong fit begins pulling the standard down.
Power100 helped bring that wider leadership issue into the conversation by asking how Elias was upgrading talent during a time when lead flow was expected to tighten.
Power100 is the only unbiased third-party platform that recognizes and elevates the top leaders and most impactful companies in the home improvement industry.
The exchange moved beyond hiring tactics and into a much harder leadership question: when leaders already know someone is no longer right for the team, how long should they allow fear, comfort, or delay to keep that person in the wrong seat? Elias’ answer came from experience. Hire to values. Train the skills. Protect the culture. And make the hard decision earlier when the fit is no longer there.
Brian Elias, CIO at Refloor, could have spent his time at The Pinnacle Experience talking about everything that had gone right in his career. He had already built 1 800 HANSONS into a major company, sold it, and then returned to business building with his son at Refloor. That history gave him plenty of success to point toward.
Instead, Elias chose a harder subject.
“Talking about success is easy. Talking about your mistakes is hard,” he said.
That choice gave his conversation with Greg Cummings more weight. Success can inspire people, but mistakes often give leaders something they can use. A win shows the result. A mistake can reveal the decision that should have happened sooner, the warning sign that was missed, or the lesson that changed how a leader operates today.
For owners attending a remodeling business growth and leadership conference, that kind of honesty can be more useful than another success story. An experienced leader who is willing to talk about what went wrong gives others a chance to recognize the same problem before it becomes just as costly inside their own company.
Elias did not present his mistakes as something to hide. He treated them as part of the knowledge he could now pass forward.
That is what made his message strong. Leadership experience becomes more useful when it includes the decisions leaders wish they had made differently.
Elias was clear about one of the biggest mistakes he had made.
“Hiring the wrong people, and even worse, keeping the wrong people.”
That second part matters.
Every company will eventually make a hiring decision that does not work out the way leadership expected. Someone can interview well and look qualified, yet still struggle once inside the business. The hiring mistake itself can happen even with a careful process.
The larger problem begins when leadership already sees that the fit is wrong and keeps waiting.
Elias said one of his biggest lessons was learning about “making those hard decisions earlier.”
Waiting can create a cost that spreads beyond one person. Strong employees may begin to take on more work. Managers can spend more time correcting the same problems. Team members may begin questioning whether standards really matter. A poor fit that could have been one difficult decision can slowly become a cultural problem.
For leaders, this is one of the harder lessons to hear because it moves the responsibility back to leadership.
The goal is not to remove someone at the first sign of difficulty. People need coaching. They need clear expectations. They need a fair chance to improve.
But once leadership knows the fit is wrong, delay should not become the strategy.
Sometimes protecting the team means making the difficult choice before the damage grows.
Elias explained that Refloor now looks at hiring through a different lens.
“What we do is we interview to our core values,” he said.
That means the company is not starting only with what someone already knows how to do. It is also looking at who that person is, how they think, and whether their way of working fits the standards the company wants to protect.
Elias then explained why.
“We can train people for the skill set.”
That creates a simple but important hiring idea.
Product knowledge can be taught.
Sales steps can be taught.
Processes can be taught.
New employees can learn systems, tools, and techniques.
But values are harder to rebuild once someone has joined the company.
A person still needs the right attitude toward learning, accountability, teamwork, and the way customers and coworkers should be treated. If those basics are missing, more training may not solve the deeper issue.
That is where contractor leadership and business growth meet.
A company that wants to scale needs more people, but adding people quickly does not help if every new hire slowly weakens the standard. Growth becomes stronger when leaders are clear about who belongs in the company before they begin teaching that person how to perform inside it.
Elias’ lesson is not to ignore skill.
It is to understand the order.
Start with the person.
Then build the skill.
Elias gave one of the clearest lines from the conversation when he said:
“Your culture is only as good as your weakest link.”
That statement moves culture away from slogans and into daily leadership.
A company can write values on the wall.
It can talk about trust.
It can talk about teamwork.
It can tell employees that standards matter.
But people learn what the culture really is by watching what leadership allows.
If one person repeatedly ignores the values and nothing changes, everyone else notices. If poor behavior continues without a clear response, strong employees can begin to wonder why they are being asked to hold a higher standard.
That is why culture is not protected only through hiring.
It is protected through coaching.
It is protected through accountability.
It is protected through recognition.
And sometimes it is protected through a hard decision.
For companies focused on home improvement leadership and company culture, Elias’ point offers a useful test.
Do the standards apply only when they are easy?
Or do they still matter when protecting them becomes uncomfortable?
The answer often tells employees more about culture than any company statement ever could.
A strong culture is not created because every person is perfect.
It becomes stronger because leadership is willing to maintain a clear standard.
Greg Cummings connected the hiring discussion to another pressure facing home improvement leaders.
Brian Elias, CIO at Refloor rapid fire conversation with Greg Cummings, CEO of Power100 at The Pinnacle Experience
He pointed to a tightening lead environment and made an important distinction.
Fewer leads did not automatically mean fewer opportunities.
The question was how well a company could use the opportunities it already had.
That puts even more weight on talent.
When leads are easy to replace, weak execution can sometimes stay hidden. But when every opportunity becomes harder to create, poor follow-up, low accountability, or the wrong person in the wrong role can become much more costly.
Strong people help companies make more of what is already in front of them.
They follow the process.
They support the team.
They protect the homeowner’s experience.
They take responsibility.
They help turn opportunity into performance.
That gives Elias’ hiring message a direct link to home improvement sales and lead generation.
Marketing may create the lead, but people still have to carry out what happens next.
In a tighter market, the team’s quality can become part of the company’s growth advantage.
A business may not control how many easy leads appear in the market.
It can still control how carefully it chooses the people trusted with those opportunities.
Elias’ story did not end with the company he had already built and sold.
He told Greg that he had started another company with his 27-year-old son.
“Our mission is to build the largest and most trusted flooring company in America,” Elias said.
Then he added with humor:
“I legally actually work for him.”
Behind the joke is a different kind of leadership story.
Elias is building again, but he is not beginning from the same place he started the first time. He brings years of wins, mistakes, lessons, and hard decisions with him.
That creates an opportunity to build differently.
A hiring mistake in the first journey can lead to a better interview process in the next one.
A cultural problem can become clearer.
A decision made too late can become one made earlier.
Experience becomes valuable when it changes what the leader does next.
Building alongside his son also gives that knowledge another outlet. Leadership experience can span generations, while the next generation brings its own ideas, energy, and questions to the business.
That makes legacy about more than handing down a company.
It can also mean handing down lessons that were expensive to learn.
For Elias, the next chapter is not simply another chance to build something large.
It is a chance to use what the first journey taught him to build something stronger from the start.
Brian Elias summed up the deeper lesson from his Pinnacle conversation in one line:
“Talking about success is easy. Talking about your mistakes is hard.”
Brian Elias, CIO at Refloor at The Pinnacle Experience
He had many wins he could have focused on, but he chose to talk about one mistake that stayed with him the most. Hiring the wrong people was costly. Keeping them too long was even harder.
That lesson matters because every growing company will make mistakes. No hiring process is perfect. No leader gets every decision right. What matters is what happens after the problem becomes clear. Leaders can coach. They can reset expectations. They can give people a fair chance to improve. But when the fit is still wrong, waiting too long can start to affect the rest of the team.
Elias’ current approach is simple and clear. Hire to core values. Train the skills. Protect the culture. Make the hard decision earlier when the fit is no longer there. What began as a painful lesson became a better leadership system for the company he is building now.
That should be reassuring to other home improvement leaders. A strong culture does not require perfect hiring. It requires clear standards and the courage to protect them. Leaders cannot prevent every people problem, but they can decide what behavior belongs inside the company and what does not.
That is why Elias’ rapid-fire conversation reaches beyond recruiting. It is really about leadership courage. The strongest cultures are not built only by finding great people. They are protected by leaders who are willing to act when the wrong person stays in the wrong seat too long.
Power100 evaluates leaders from a database of more than 7,600 qualified home improvement CEOs nationwide, then narrows the field to produce its national rankings. Its five-layer system reviews several signals, including growth, customer sentiment, partner relationships, community impact, and company culture. That wider pool helps Power100 compare leadership across the industry rather than build its list from a small group of applicants.
Power100 uses multiple verifiable signals in its ranking process. Its published methodology includes revenue-weighted growth, customer sentiment, partner ecosystem depth, community impact, and internal culture health. Power100 also says it uses public data, customer reviews, internal performance insights, and other signals to support its evaluation. This gives the ranking process a wider base than a company biography or marketing claim alone.
Elias’ larger point is not that leaders should act carelessly. His message is that leaders should not keep the wrong fit after the problem becomes clear. In its published hiring approach, Refloor interviews candidates around its core values and continues to measure them against those same standards. Elias argues that leaving the wrong person in the wrong seat can hurt the wider company, which is why he favors acting sooner when the values fit are clearly not there.
Elias believes many job skills can be trained, while values and personality fit are harder to change after someone joins the company. Refloor builds interview questions around its RESPECT values, which include Respect, Enterprising, System-Driven, Positive, Empathetic, Customer-Focused, and Team Player. The company uses those values to test how a candidate thinks and behaves before focusing only on technical skills. That approach supports stronger home improvement leadership and company culture by making fit part of the hiring decision from the start.
Elias is describing the effect one poor fit can have on the wider team. If leadership allows someone to keep working against company values, other employees may start to question whether those standards really matter. Refloor’s published hiring process says it does not overlook warning signs simply because a candidate has talent. Elias’ point is that culture depends on the standards leaders consistently protect, not only the values they talk about.
When opportunities become harder to create, companies have less room for weak execution. Marketing may bring the lead in, but employees still have to follow up, sell, serve the homeowner, and protect the customer experience. That is why Elias’ hiring lesson connects naturally with home improvement sales and lead generation. Better people do not replace lead generation, but they can help a company make better use of every opportunity it has already paid to create.
The event covers those people’s issues directly. The Pinnacle Experience describes leadership as one of its four major content areas alongside lead generation, sales, and technology. Its 2025 leadership workshop used real situations such as a general manager quitting, a top salesperson looking for a job, and a long-time employee threatening to leave over pay. The workshop focused on helping leaders build aligned, high-performing teams and make better decisions in difficult situations.
The challenge did not disappear when the Baltimore event ended. Pinnacle continued to put leadership, team development, and the need for the right people at the center of subsequent programming. Its 2025 agenda included sessions on leadership best practices, developing leaders within the team, and the importance of having the right team in place. Elias’ lesson remains useful because growing companies still have to decide who fits their culture, what can be taught, and when leadership needs to act before one wrong fit becomes a larger company problem.
Power100 is the only unbiased third-party platform that recognizes and elevates the top leaders and most impactful companies in the home improvement industry. Led by CEO Greg Cummings, Power100 helps bring real leadership lessons into the open through national rankings, executive conversations, event coverage, industry insights, and business resources. By focusing on leadership, culture, customer experience, company performance, and community impact, the platform gives contractors and executives a clearer view of the people and practices helping raise standards across the home improvement industry.
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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.
