Perfectly Polished
How All The Marbles, Inc. perfected natural stone restoration and pioneered the concrete polishing industry
Jerry Maltz, President of All The Marbles, Inc., knows floors. The third-generation Houstonian’s family has been in the floor-care chemical manufacturing and distribution business for 107 years. He started out working for the family business where he helped develop products for the natural stone maintenance industry. But what he found was most people didn’t understand natural stone nor did they have the time, patience or knowledge to fix issues and do the work right.
When Maltz decided to get into the natural stone business on his own, he had just finished a four-hour presentation on granite floor polishing for Mountain Bell in Denver. After the presentation, he walked outside with the president of the company. He remembers the president putting his arm on his shoulder and telling him he did a great job, but they couldn’t buy the products because they didn’t have anyone who would take the time to use them correctly.
Dejected, Maltz got back into his car for a lonely one-hour drive back to the hotel. He turned on the radio, only to hear an infomercial for a marble restoration franchise. It was a sign; after 17 years in the family business, he made the jump and bought a franchise.
Maltz established All The Marbles, Inc. in Houston in 1991. But he soon realized, after investing his life savings, that the franchise had nothing special to offer and the processes sold to him were inadequate in delivering the quality results his customers demanded.
“I quickly learned when I purchased the franchise business that the normal industry standard techniques relied on diamond restoration, which resulted in delivering floors with rolled edges, a wavy look that customers perceived as a horrible finish to their floors,” he says. Maltz knew, with all his money invested in the business, he had to figure out how to deliver a better product.
Although Maltz eventually separated from the franchise, All The Marbles, Inc. continues to be a leader in the industry. It offers natural-stone care, restoration and finishing for commercial and residential buildings—all while constantly improving its techniques to produce a better product. Maltz says, “It’s all about the quality of the work. We love ‘WOW.’”
Maltz’s quest has been to develop a process that can be duplicated job after job, so he would have the confidence to say that All The Marbles, Inc. offers the best floor restoration in the marketplace. He took the skills he learned in the engineering technology department at Texas A&M University and perfected the ability to flatten stone floors.
After visiting a stone fabricator one day and seeing the results of a radial arm polisher in action, Maltz came to a remarkable conclusion. He realized he needed to be able to profile a tile floor so flat that he could apply the same stone abrasives and polishing techniques used on automated machines in marble and granite quarries around the world to deliver this amazing product. Eliminating the lippage, or uneven floors, was the challenge since the automated systems operate at +/-300,000s of an inch in tolerance. But Maltz figured it out. And while he admits that he doesn’t like the word “perfect,” the stone restoration gallery on the All The Marbles, Inc. website shows that his floor flattening work is close to it.
In fact, Maltz’s stone restoration process allows him to deliver what he deems is the flattest floor in the industry.
“We’re able to run the same grinding stones used in quarries around the world and deliver the same results as the factory does,” he says with pride. “We get the floor almost perfectly flat.”
Another benefit to Maltz’s technique is that it’s easily replicated. That means every single one of his team members can deliver the same better-than-expected, quality results. For Maltz, it’s all about being able to predict the results and deliver on the customer’s expectations every time.
Concrete Polishing Pioneer
About two years into the business, Maltz began seeking a solution to another problem he had witnessed repeatedly in his years in the coatings side of the industry, especially with concrete finishes: coating failure.
While in the process of grinding a granite floor flat, Maltz began to see similarities between natural stone—such as granite—and concrete. He knew granite was a composite of sand, rock or gravel that had been fused together slowly through geological processes. Concrete was similar. The only difference between the two was that concrete had been pasted together using sand, rock, gravel, water and Portland cement. Maltz concluded there was no reason concrete couldn’t be polished the same way as granite or any other natural stone.
He remembers going to his shop at 4 a.m. and experimenting with polishing concrete. Around the same time he was developing his technique, another industry colleague was working on his own method. Maltz used his same profile process on the concrete and achieved great results, but the problem was cost. Maltz tested various abrasives from all around the world but discovered these products fail quickly.
When Maltz attended his first World of Concrete trade show in 1994, he remembers stopping by every booth trying to find someone who might have machines or abrasives for polishing concrete. But when he asked about it, no one had any idea what he was talking about. “They thought I was nuts,” Maltz recalls.
Eventually, Maltz found a solution that worked. In 1999, Maltz’s colleague officially patented a method for polishing concrete, helping launch an entirely new industry.
“It’s a full-blown industry now,” Maltz says. “You see polished concrete everywhere you go: grocery stores, retail stores, homes, car dealerships. Today, if you go to the World of Concrete, 50 percent of the show is polished concrete.”
Delivering on Expectations
One of the first jobs Maltz was hired to do when he started his business was to restore the floors at what was then the Ritz-Carlton hotel in Houston. The Ritz-Carlton has since become The St. Regis Houston, but All The Marbles, Inc. has continued to perform all the stone restoration and repair work—certainly a testament to the company’s ability to deliver on its promised outcome.
Maltz is also now a certified Marble and Stone Inspector through the IICRC, Institute of Inspection Cleaning and Restoration Certification.
While the business has had its share of challenges over the years, it’s still going strong. “We’ve had every reason in the world to close the business,” Maltz says. In 2001, during Tropical Storm Allison, the shop was under 12 feet of water for 96 hours and Maltz lost everything in it. A year later, Maltz contracted West Nile virus and was out for several months. He was out again for 90 days when he broke his back in 2003.
But today, Maltz, who is also a five-year cancer survivor, has no plans to stop anytime soon. In fact, he makes it a point to teach his techniques and share his trade secrets to ensure those who work for him have the same knowledge he has.
And it’s his people who have helped make the business a success. “All The Marbles is 28 1/2 years old,” Maltz says, “and what I think has made us successful is the people that we’ve hired are good people to the core.”