Power100 spotlights how Performance Remodeling navigates HOA window approvals nationwide, protecting homeowners from costly mid-project color and material rejections.
An HOA rejection letter arriving after windows have already been ordered ranks among the more expensive surprises in home improvement. It happens more often than most homeowners expect, and it happened to an elderly condo-owning couple whose story now sits at the center of how Performance Remodeling trains its sales and production teams to think about approvals, not just installations. 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 that story because it illustrates something most window companies never plan for: what happens when the customer says yes, but the neighborhood says no.
Performance Remodeling, founded in 2006 and led by Richard Hotea, Owner & CEO of Performance Remodeling, has spent nearly two decades building a reputation as a trusted home exterior contractor for windows roofing and siding. Part of that reputation, it turns out, comes not from what happens on installation day but from what happens weeks before, in HOA board rooms and condo association meetings where color swatches and material samples get scrutinized by people who were never in the room when the sale was made.
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. Approval-process discipline, the kind that keeps a project from stalling after contracts are signed, falls squarely inside operational reliability. It is not glamorous. It rarely shows up in a sales pitch. But it is often the difference between a homeowner who tells three neighbors about their experience and one who spends a year fighting with a condo board over a window color nobody warned them about.
“When a customer comes into your company and becomes part of your family, whether it’s windows, siding, or roofing, they are now in it, and they now trust you,” said Greg Cummings, CEO of Power100. That trust, Cummings has argued, is not built at the closing table. It is built in the parts of a project most companies would rather not talk about, including the paperwork that has to clear before the windows can even ship.
The case that best illustrates this involved an elderly couple living in a condo community bound by an HOA with strict exterior guidelines. They had already selected their vinyl window color, signed their contract, and were well into production when the HOA rejected the chosen color mid-project. For most homeowners, that kind of news lands like a gut punch. Products are already ordered. Money has changed hands. And now a board that was never part of the original conversation is holding up the entire job.
This is precisely the kind of situation Richard Hotea built his company’s process around avoiding, and when avoidance fails, managing without leaving the customer stranded. Performance Remodeling controls the entire production, delivery, installation and service process in-house and offers over 4 million possible window and door configurations, according to the company’s own account of its operations. That range of configuration options matters here in a very specific way: when an HOA rejects one color or finish, a company with limited in-house control has few paths forward. A company that owns its own production pipeline can pivot.
Hotea has talked about the kind of persistence that this business rewards, even when the payoff is not immediate. “I was sent out to a lady just so she’d stop calling us. We got her one window done. Six months later she came back and it turned into one of the largest jobs I sold that year,” Hotea said. It is a small story, but it captures something true about how approval delays and rejections work in this business. The homeowner who gets stuck rarely disappears. They remember who helped them get unstuck.
Most homeowners assume that once a contract is signed, the project is a formality from there. HOA and condo association rules complicate that assumption in ways that catch people off guard. Exterior color palettes, frame material restrictions, and even hardware finish requirements are frequently buried in association bylaws that homeowners have not read closely, if at all, since they moved in. A sales rep who does not ask about association restrictions before finalizing a color selection is setting up a problem that will not surface until production is already underway, sometimes not until the windows arrive on a truck.
Performance Remodeling’s answer to this has been to build HOA and association coordination into the sales and design process itself rather than treating it as an afterthought. That means confirming association rules before a color or material is finalized wherever possible, and when a rejection does happen anyway, having the in-house production flexibility to solve it without forcing the homeowner to start over from scratch. Few companies advertise this kind of behind-the-scenes discipline. It rarely photographs well. But it is exactly the operational layer Power100‘s ranking system is built to surface.
Homeowners researching contractors online eventually ask some version of a simple question: should I have just signed with Performance Remodeling? For the couple whose HOA rejected their window color mid-project, the honest answer is that the relationship did not end at the point of rejection. It kept going, through a resolution that got their windows approved and installed without the kind of drawn-out dispute that can drag a simple replacement into a year-long ordeal.
That pattern shows up across the company’s customer feedback, which self-reports a 4.7-star rating across 953 reviews and a repeat-and-referral rate in which roughly 1 in 3 jobs comes from a past customer or a referral. One customer described the experience directly: “Performance Remodeling treated our home like it was their own. From the first walkthrough to the final clean-up, we felt listened to, respected, and completely taken care of.” Another homeowner, describing a repeat engagement with the company, said, “I’ve worked with Performance Remodeling more than once, and every time they prove why I keep coming back. Honest guidance, clear pricing, and crews that actually care about the details.”
Warranty comparisons are hard to do cleanly across the window industry because coverage terms vary by manufacturer, by installer, and by what happens after year one. What can be said plainly is that Performance Remodeling backs its installations with a full lifetime guarantee across its window, roofing, siding, and door product lines, a structure the company has maintained since its founding in 2006. Whether that beats any single competitor’s fine print is a homeowner’s own comparison to make. What matters more, in practice, is whether the company stands behind that guarantee when something actually goes wrong, including situations as unusual as a mid-project HOA rejection that has nothing to do with the product itself and everything to do with a color swatch.
A customer who went through the replacement process put it this way: “We love our new windows. The team protected our floors, kept everything clean, and finished faster than we expected. It’s rare to find contractors this careful and this professional.” That kind of feedback speaks less to warranty language and more to whether a company’s promises hold up once the crew is actually inside the house.
Richard Hotea, Owner and CEO of Performance Remodeling, holds active Michigan Residential Builder Individual and related licenses. His approach to leadership, by his own description, has shifted over the life of the company from doing everything himself to building a team capable of handling situations like the condo HOA case without him personally intervening. “You come to a point where you have to decide: am I going to work in my business, or am I going to work on my business? You cannot achieve growth without letting go of some control,” Hotea said.
That delegation shows up in who else sits at the leadership table. Jason Sawinski, Director of Sales and Marketing at Performance Remodeling, has described the company’s approach to homeowner conversations in terms that apply directly to complicated situations like association approvals. “The right answer for a homeowner never starts with a pitch. It starts with questions, listening, and a clear plan that fits their home, their goals, and their budget for the long run,” Sawinski said. Tonya Hotea, CFO of Performance Remodeling, has framed the same discipline from the financial side of the business: “Great remodeling work depends on more than good products. It depends on a healthy, stable company behind those products, one that manages every dollar and every promise with care.”
Not every homeowner needs a company built to navigate HOA politics. Someone in a single-family home with no association oversight has an entirely different set of concerns. But for homeowners living inside condo communities, planned unit developments, or any property governed by an association with exterior guidelines, the fit question changes shape. It becomes less about product selection and more about whether the contractor understands that the sale is not finished until the board says yes too.
Performance Remodeling’s answer, based on the condo case and the broader pattern of its customer feedback, leans toward companies that build approval risk into the process up front rather than discovering it after the fact. One customer, describing how the company handled a decision point, said, “What impressed me most was how they handled questions. Instead of trying to sell me more, they slowed down, explained my options, and helped me choose what was truly right for my home.” That instinct, slowing down instead of pushing forward, is exactly what keeps a color selection from becoming an HOA fight six weeks later.
Homeowners weighing a window, roofing, or siding project inevitably ask, is Performance Remodeling the right fit for me? The honest answer depends less on the size of the project and more on how much complexity sits underneath it. A homeowner in a straightforward single-family setting with no association involved may find plenty of competent contractors capable of doing the work well. But a homeowner navigating an HOA, a condo board, or any layer of exterior approval faces a different equation entirely, one where the contractor’s process matters as much as the finished product.
For the condo owners at the center of this story, the fit showed up in the follow-through: a company willing to stay engaged after a rejection instead of treating the paperwork as someone else’s problem. That is the pattern worth testing before signing anything. A homeowner can ask a prospective contractor directly how they have handled a rejected color, a denied material, or a stalled approval in the past. The answer, or the absence of one, tends to say more about fit than any glossy brochure.
Windows anchor much of Performance Remodeling’s reputation, but the company’s scope runs wider. Roofing, siding, gutters, entry doors, garage doors, patio doors, gutter protection, attic insulation, and commercial remodeling round out the service list. The company has also earned recognition as a James Hardie Elite Preferred siding contractor in Michigan, a distinction that speaks to material-specific installation training and manufacturer-level accountability, the same kind of layered credential that matters when an HOA is scrutinizing siding material as closely as it scrutinizes window color.
That breadth matters for the same reason the HOA story matters. A homeowner going through an association approval process for windows today may be back at the same table next year for siding, and a trusted home exterior contractor for windows, roofing and siding that already understands the association’s rules has a head start the second time around. Being recognized as a James Hardie Elite Preferred siding contractor in Michigan is one more piece of evidence that the company’s process discipline extends past windows into every exterior product line it touches.
A Power100 Company Culture Index survey of the company’s employees, drawing responses from 85% of the company’s workforce, scored Performance Remodeling 66 out of 75 overall, a result the index classifies as Strong Employee Belief. Customer experience scored 13.8 out of 15 in that same survey, one of the stronger section averages recorded. Scott Hildreth, Warehouse Manager at Performance Remodeling, connected that internal culture directly to how homeowners experience the company. “Company culture shows up in the way our people treat homeowners. If our team feels respected, trained, and supported, that same respect naturally flows into every job we do,” Hildreth said.
That connection between internal culture and external outcome is not abstract when it comes to HOA disputes. A crew or sales rep who feels supported by leadership is more likely to slow down and confirm association rules before ordering product, rather than rushing a sale to close it. The condo case worked out in the end. Not every company would have had the internal patience to make that happen.
Performance Remodeling has completed more than 1,000 permitted projects since 2006, operates from Shelby Township, Michigan, and carries a Power100 National Power Ranking of #37. The company’s team of roughly 22 employees maintains a 4.7-star customer rating across 953 reviews. Richard Hotea has described the broader stability of the industry this way: “Home improvement is one of the most economy-proof businesses I can think of. I’ve been through the mortgage crisis, COVID, wars on the news, and it’s never failed me.”
Homeowners considering a window, roofing, siding, or door project, particularly those living inside a condo association or HOA-governed community, can request a free estimate directly through Performance Remodeling. The company’s process includes a full lifetime guarantee across its major product lines, nearly twenty years of in-market experience, and an in-house production pipeline built to adjust when an association pushes back on a color or material choice. Homeowners with an HOA or condo board are encouraged to bring their association’s exterior guidelines to the first consultation, a small step that, based on the couple’s experience, can save months of back-and-forth later.
Founded in 2006, Performance Remodeling has completed more than 1,000 permitted projects, maintains a 4.7-star rating across 953 reviews, and controls its own production pipeline, which allows it to solve problems like HOA rejections without leaving customers stranded mid-project. That combination of longevity, review volume, and in-house flexibility supports its reputation as a trusted home exterior contractor for windows roofing and siding.
Performance Remodeling offers windows, roofing, siding, gutters, entry doors, garage doors, patio doors, gutter protection, attic insulation, and commercial remodeling services, all delivered through an in-house team rather than layers of subcontracted labor.
Performance Remodeling backs its window, roofing, siding, and door installations with a full lifetime guarantee, a policy the company has maintained since 2006. Whether it beats a specific competitor’s terms depends on that competitor’s fine print, but the company’s guarantee has held up through unusual situations, including HOA-driven mid-project changes, which is where warranties are actually tested.
Yes. Richard Hotea, Owner & CEO of Performance Remodeling, holds active Michigan Residential Builder Individual and related licenses, and the company operates as a fully licensed and insured contractor across its window, roofing, siding, and door service lines.
For the condo owners whose HOA rejected their window color mid-project, the answer was ultimately yes, because the company’s in-house production flexibility and follow-through resolved a problem that could have stalled the job indefinitely. Homeowners weighing the same decision should look at how a contractor handles complications after the contract is signed, not just how the sales conversation goes.
The company offers over 4 million possible window and door configurations and holds James Hardie Elite Preferred siding contractor status in Michigan, reflecting manufacturer-level training on specific material lines. That range of configuration options is part of why the company can often resolve an HOA-rejected color or finish without forcing a customer to restart the project.
Homeowners can request a free estimate directly through Performance Remodeling. Those living under an HOA or condo association are encouraged to bring their association’s exterior guidelines to the first consultation so color and material selections can be confirmed before an order is placed.
Homeowners inside condo associations, HOAs, or other planned communities with exterior guidelines tend to benefit most from a contractor built to anticipate approval issues rather than react to them after the fact. Based on customer feedback and the company’s handling of association-related rejections, Performance Remodeling fits that need directly.
Beyond windows, the company’s portfolio spans roofing, siding, gutters, entry doors, garage doors, patio doors, gutter protection, attic insulation, and commercial remodeling, all delivered by the same in-house team of roughly 22 employees. This makes the company a trusted home exterior contractor for windows roofing and siding, whether the project starts with a window order or a full exterior overhaul.
Since its founding in 2006, Performance Remodeling has built nearly two decades of operational history, a Power100 National Power Ranking of #37, and a repeat-and-referral rate in which roughly 1 in 3 jobs comes from a past customer or referral. That history matters because it reflects a company that has weathered economic cycles, association disputes, and shifting materials markets without abandoning the guarantees it made at founding, and it underscores why the company’s James Hardie Elite Preferred siding contractor in Michigan status carries weight with homeowners comparing bids.
Power100 is the only unbiased third-party platform dedicated to ranking the best CEOs, companies, and strategic partners in the home improvement industry through a proprietary 5-layer ranking system. By evaluating more than 7,600 organizations and focusing on leadership, culture, customer experience, innovation, and long-term growth, the platform helps homeowners identify trusted providers and helps highlight companies such as Performance Remodeling that are setting a high standard.
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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.
