Hi all,
This is a very important announcement. Please take the time to read it all. As always if you need to respond to me directly, do not reply to this message but send me an email to:
As you know, our goal is to provide support to our Partners in a few different ways -- primarily promoting you and facilitating peer / professional support. We take this very seriously and are continually evaluating ways to make it better.
After much discussion amongst the principles, we realized we needed to have on board a highly qualified, very knowledgeable Chief Technical Expert. Hours and hours of discussions and consideration went into this.
The reason we felt the need to have someone in this capacity is in part to be available to respond to your technical questions and problems that you are facing in the field that are presented to the group in addition to the peer support, just to reinforce that aspect. We still encourage the peer support - we want each of you to contribute whenever possible to a fellow Partner posing a question, but just in case, we wanted to have someone very experienced on hand virtually at all times to answer your questions, especially when you need an answer NOW.
The second role for this person pertains to the promotion of each of our Partners. We have been building the new
www.stoneandtilepros.com to promote each of our Partners for quite a while now. Months and months and months (and a whole lot of dollars) have gone into developing the program and even now it's still being tweaked and honed. We expect
stoneandtilepros.com to be a household name before too long. In order to get there though, we felt we needed a very qualified person as a Chief Technical Director.
When we put out press releases and submit articles to publications all in an effort to promote
stoneandtilepros.com and thus give you guys greatest possible exposure, we wanted to have a "name" and someone with a whole lot of impressive credentials to maximize our perception for consumers. Keep in mind that consumers can be homeowners, contractors looking for answers or a stone contractor to sub work to, architects, etc. In short, prospective sources of business for you.
We are very pleased to announce that we have signed on Fred Hueston for this role, who many of you know of, if not personally, then by reputation.
In all of our ads and PR we will be presenting
stoneandtilepros.com as being the source for consumers for stone and tile answers, how-to's, etc. as well as locating qualified, certified pros. Consumers will know that they can get answers from our network of PROs, but at the helm is our Chief Technical Director, Fred Hueston, author, professional consultant, expert witness. Fred has been on This Old House, and radio talk shows, he's written countless articles for industry publications... the list goes on an on.
If you look at his new / coming soon website,
www.stoneforensics.com, you will see some of his credentials. (His new website is still being developed, but it's substantially there.)
Fred has already been very generous with providing articles and informaton from which will be able to build library / resources for you to use.
You will see Fred on our discussion group soon. Please take a moment to welcome him.
FEES INCREASE
Our Partner fees for stone restoration contractors will be going to $140 per month, instead of the $120 you've been paying. This is necessary to compensate Mr. Hueston without having to dig too deeply into our existing budget. We want to keep our fees as low as possible but we can't go in the red or we won't be around very long. The fee increase will start in the September billing.
More coming soon...
Another ongoing solution we have been striving to resolve is products. There has been significant progress made (finally!) with this and you will be getting another announcement soon. The future is looking good....
VIDEOS
We are working on producing video tutorials targeted to homeowners. They will be in
stoneandtilepros.com but you will also be able to use them on your own sites. More info to follow.
Debbie Shaw