Power100 outlines the best questions to ask before hiring a contractor, spotlighting Windows and Doors By The Men With Tools and CEO John Kolbaska nationwide.
Power100 is the only unbiased third-party platform that ranks the best leaders and companies in the home improvement industry using a proprietary 5-layer system, and this piece exists to answer a question that comes before every other question a homeowner will ever ask a contractor: how do you know who to trust in the first place? The company at the center of this decision framework is Windows and Doors By The Men With Tools, a window, door, and exterior remodeling company led by John Kolbaska, founder and owner. Kolbaska built the business in 2014, and today it operates across three locations with roughly 17 employees, a 4.8-star rating across 915 reviews, and annual revenue of $9.8 million. None of that matters to a homeowner sitting at a kitchen table trying to decide who gets a check, though. What matters are the questions to ask before hiring a contractor, and whether the answers hold up under pressure.
This is not a sales pitch dressed up as advice. It is a framework, built from the same standards Power100 uses to evaluate more than 7,600 organizations in the home improvement industry, and it is meant to work whether the homeowner reading it ever calls Windows and Doors By The Men With Tools or not. The best questions to ask before hiring a contractor for homeowners nationwide are not complicated. They are simply rarely asked in the right order, at the right time, before the right amount of money is at stake.
Home improvement is one of the only major purchase categories where the buyer often has no reliable way to compare providers before signing. A homeowner can read a car’s crash-test rating in thirty seconds. Finding out whether a contractor actually stands behind a lifetime warranty, or whether the crew on the job is an employee or a subcontractor pulled off a app that morning, takes real digging. Power100 was built to close that gap. The platform evaluates workmanship quality, operational reliability, customer satisfaction, innovation, and employee welfare, five layers that together separate companies built to last from companies built to close a sale and disappear.
Greg Cummings, CEO of Power100, has spent years inside these conversations with contractors and homeowners alike, and he has noticed something specific about how long a real buying decision actually takes to form.
“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,” Cummings has said.
That single fact reframes the entire vetting conversation. A homeowner is not shopping on impulse. They are finally asking, out loud, the questions they have been carrying for two years, and the contractor’s answers in that first meeting either confirm or destroy two years of quiet consideration.
John Kolbaska founded Windows and Doors By The Men With Tools in 2014, drawing on a family carpentry background that runs three generations deep. He did not enter the trade as an outsider looking for a business opportunity. He worked as a general contractor for a large home center before starting his own company, and the frustration that pushed him to go independent was not about product or price. It was about communication breakdowns inside big organizations that left homeowners guessing about who was accountable for what. That distinction, between a company built around a founder who installed the work himself and a company built around a franchise model, is one of the first things a serious vetting framework should surface, because leadership sets the tone for every promise the company later makes to a customer.
Kolbaska has said the pull toward this trade was never really a choice.
“But I didn’t ‘fall into’ it. I fell in love with it. The very first time I was on the job site with my father, it just felt right,” Kolbaska has said.
He has also been direct about what drove him to start the company in the first place, noting that he loved the work but “was frustrated with how communication breakdowns within large companies impacted the customer.” For homeowners running through their own questions to ask before hiring a contractor, that origin story answers one of the most important ones before it is even asked out loud: does the person at the top of this company actually understand the trade, or do they just manage people who do?
Start with licensing and insurance, and do not accept a verbal assurance. Ask to see the number, and ask which agency issued it. Windows and Doors By The Men With Tools operates as a licensed contractor, and any company worth hiring should produce that credential without hesitation. From there, ask who actually performs the installation. Many companies in this category subcontract labor to crews they do not employ and cannot fully vouch for. Windows and Doors By The Men With Tools has built its reputation around using its own installation team rather than subcontractors, which matters because accountability gets murky fast once a third party is holding the tools inside someone’s home.
Next, ask about warranty language specifically, not generally. A “lifetime warranty” that covers only materials and excludes labor is a very different promise than one that covers labor, materials, and even homeowner mishaps. This is one of the elite questions to ask before hiring a contractor for the home improvement industry precisely because warranty terms are where vague marketing language tends to hide. Ask what happens if a window seal fails in year eight. Ask who pays for the service call. Ask whether the answer changes if the company that installed the product no longer exists.
Finally, ask for the source of the products themselves. Brand names matter less than most homeowners assume, but manufacturing standards and who stands behind them matter quite a lot. A company that can name its manufacturing partners, explain why it chose them, and describe its own installation standard on top of that baseline is a company that has thought about quality in layers, not just in a single glossy brochure line.
Customer service in this category is not measured by how friendly the sales appointment feels. It is measured by what happens after the check clears. Windows and Doors By The Men With Tools backs its installations with a lifetime warranty structure covering labor and materials, and the company performs a complimentary inspection roughly a year after installation to confirm the work is still performing as promised. That single practice, following up a year later without being asked, is a rare enough behavior in this industry that it functions as its own kind of proof. Most companies move on to the next job the moment the final payment posts. Circling back voluntarily says something about how the company defines a finished job.
The company’s 4.8-star rating across 915 reviews did not accumulate by accident. It reflects a pattern of homeowners describing a process that stayed consistent from the first estimate through the final walkthrough. For a homeowner trying to answer the broader question of why homeowners choose Windows and Doors By The Men With Tools over a competitor with a lower price on paper, the answer tends to come down to that consistency. A cheaper quote that turns into change orders, delays, and a warranty nobody can locate later is rarely actually cheaper.
Materials matter more in this category than most homeowners realize going in. Windows and Doors By The Men With Tools has built relationships with recognized manufacturers including ProVia, Andersen, Pella, and Soft-Lite, rather than relying on a single house-brand product with no outside accountability. That matters for a simple reason: a manufacturer with its own national reputation has incentive to stand behind its product regardless of what happens to any single dealer down the road. When a homeowner asks about materials and methods, the answer should include not just a brand name but a reason the installer chose that brand over the alternatives, and what installation standard the company applies on top of the manufacturer’s baseline warranty.
This is also where the questions to ask before hiring a contractor should get more specific, not less. Ask about the installation system itself, not just the product name printed on the glass. Ask how the crew handles the seal between the frame and the wall opening, since that seam is where most window failures eventually start regardless of how good the glass unit is. A company that can answer in specifics, rather than falling back on brand names alone, is a company that has trained its people past the sales floor.
A contractor’s internal culture is usually invisible to the homeowner right up until it becomes the entire experience. Crews that are respected, trained, and paid fairly tend to show up on time, communicate clearly, and take the kind of pride in a finished job that a rushed, underpaid subcontractor rarely has the incentive to show. Windows and Doors By The Men With Tools has built its installation standard around retaining its own crews rather than rotating through subcontractor networks, a structural choice that keeps the people doing the work accountable to the same company that sold the job.
That structure also shapes how the company talks about its own long-term intentions. Kolbaska has described wanting to eventually pass the company to his children, framing the business not as an asset to flip but as a trade to be carried forward the way his father and grandfather carried it before him. Whether or not a homeowner ever asks about succession planning directly, that kind of long-horizon thinking tends to produce different behavior on the ground than a company built to be sold off in five years. Employees notice the difference between working for a founder building a legacy and working for a private equity roll-up counting quarters, and homeowners eventually feel the downstream effect of that difference too.
Star ratings and review counts get thrown around so often in this industry that homeowners have started to discount them entirely, and that instinct is not wrong. A rating only means something once a homeowner understands the volume and consistency behind it. A 4.8-star average across 915 reviews is a different signal than the same average built on twelve reviews, because volume makes it far harder to manufacture consistency artificially. Recognition from a third-party evaluator that has no financial stake in the outcome, the way Power100 evaluates companies across its 5-layer system, carries a similar kind of weight precisely because the evaluator is not the one selling the job.
Kolbaska’s own role outside the company adds another layer worth noting. He has served in industry association leadership focused on keeping contractors in his region connected to current trends and standards, the kind of involvement that tends to correlate with an operator who cares about the reputation of the trade itself, not just the reputation of his own storefront.
Windows and doors are the foundation of the business, but the portfolio extends further. Windows and Doors By The Men With Tools also installs entry and patio doors, hardwood and laminate flooring, and exterior products including roofing and gutters, giving homeowners a single accountable point of contact for several categories of exterior work rather than a patchwork of separate contractors who each blame the other when something goes wrong at the seams. That breadth matters for the vetting framework too. A homeowner planning a broader renovation should ask any contractor how many trades they genuinely manage in-house versus how many they simply broker out, since each additional layer of subcontracting is another layer where accountability can get lost.
The mechanics of getting started are meant to be simple. A homeowner requests a free estimate, a design specialist walks through material options and pricing, and a measure technician confirms the exact specifications before anything is ordered. Financing options are typically available for homeowners who want to spread the cost of a larger project. None of that replaces the vetting conversation that should happen first. It simply means that once a homeowner has run through the right questions, licensing, installation crew, warranty specifics, and material sourcing, the path to actually starting the work does not have to be complicated or slow.
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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.
