Your Industry Portal

Web Mail

Admin Staff

Contact Us

Tips from a Stone Expert

Maurizio Bertoli

I have been reading the internet posting boards for the last year or so and monitoring all the questions on various types of stone care and helping out where I can.

One thing has emerged from my little “study”: the scary ignorance about natural stone and its maintenance requirements displayed by just about all the participants of this board. Now, calm down you guys and put down those baseball bats, will ya! :-) I did not mean to insult anybody. A professional cleaner will never get to be knowledgeable about something unfamiliar, if he or she is not taught about it. It makes sense. The fact is that all too many operators who sell and install stone don’t know much about its maintenance requirements. Hence, a professional cleaning person does not know whom to get the proper education from. Oh, yes, there’s a whole army of “salesmen” out there representing chemical companies who go around with fancy brochures telling everybody: “this is what you have to do” and so on, but do they hit the nail in the head?

Hardly!

 Each and every one of them is mostly pushing sealers for stone (which are, by far, the most profitable items in any specialty product line) as if they were the “miracle-in-a-bottle”, the solution of all stone related problems. Oh, yes, the word “sealer” has its own magic built right in! A couple of weeks ago I held a training class on stone restoration in Perth, Australia (my second one there). As I began to talk about sealers, one of the students – distributor of a local chemical company – started challenging me maintaining that his sealer was the best in the world, and so on. To which I answered: “I make a sealer myself, and it does an excellent job. That’s all I care. Is the sealer that you sell better then mine? How qualified are you to make such as statement?  What is it that makes one sealer better than the next one? But that’s beside the point. Even if it were, how much better could it possibly be? And then again, who cares?? With a sealer you solve a little problem. I am here to teach you how to solve the big ones! And the biggest problem of them all is that you – who sell sealers and stuff – clearly don’t know the first thing about stone (and you’re in good company), because if you did, you would not give so much importance to a sealer!”

As you know I teach classes on stone restoration. Some of you attended one of them in the past, and I do hope that more will. It’s a prestigious and very profitable trade and there’s a growing demand for qualified services. But I do understand that it may not be for everybody. So, what to do for those who’re not interested, but still have to deal with stone in their everyday activity?

A business associate of mine, Tom McNall from Canada that most of you know, suggested a seminar designed to introduce professional cleaning people to the fine art of stone care. I’m not talking about restoration, here: I’m talking about everyday care: what to look for, what to do and what to use in order to deliver a good job and stay out of trouble! You have no idea of how many damages have been made to stone by professional cleaners who didn’t have the proper specific education and, consequently, did the wrong things and/or used the wrong products. I wholeheartedly agreed with him and offered my volunteer participation. Ever since I chose to make education on stone matters the centerpiece of my business activity, I will do my best, with the help of all my business associates, to organize more seminars like this one in order to offer true and unbiased information.

 Information that works. Information that makes sense. Information that will help making more complete professionals out of those who want to learn.

So, here I am, looking forward to a trip to the Great North in the dead of winter (the seminar will be held on January 28). Brrrr!...

Nine people already signed up. For more information, gimme a holler!

And to all those who read articles on this site and are in the distribution business, whether in Canada or the US of A, we could use your cooperation to spread the word and, possibly organize seminars like that through you, wherever you’ll see it fit. It’s a good cause that will produce good results. Think about it.

Ciao and Season’s Greetings,

Maurizio Bertoli

www.mbstone.com

MB Stone – Education before any sale!