A Throwback to Planning our Formula 1 Trip Ft. Alan Nicholson
“I still have years of work still available to me. But I’m looking to change this hat to a crown and be the king of casting.”
- Alan Nicholson
Hello and welcome to a new episode of the Epoxy Business Podcast. Today, your hosts, Steve Larosiliere and Jake Latvala, sit down with Alan Nicholson.
“It all started about seven years ago for me. I was in the cleaning business before, and it was the cleaning business that brought me into the epoxy industry. Some of the school districts were requesting certain jobs to be done and asked if there were certain things that I could do. So it was thanks to the school district that I got into the epoxy business.
After being in the cleaning industry for 25 years, I specialized in tile and grout restoration. They asked if I could restore those famous Bradley sinks in the school washrooms. The circular one where you turn it on with your foot. In figuring out how to restore it, I used epoxy, ground it all down, and then re-covered the entire thing with epoxy. So that’s how it all started.”
- Alan Nicholson
A Specialized Use for Epoxy
Alan ended up spending that entire summer restoring Bradley sinks. He did almost 150 of them for three different school districts. The reason epoxy worked so perfectly was because of the way that the sinks degraded over time. Alan explains that the dirt and grime from people’s hands eat away at the cement mixed with terrazzo. So he had to grind the sink to the point where it was smooth enough that the epoxy would adhere to it.
Soon after his success with restoring the Bradley sinks, Alan was asked to do some flooring for the same school districts, and he found that epoxy was once again the solution. After turning 50, Alan decided he had enough of doing the physical work of these laborious projects, so he pivoted into working for an epoxy brand instead.
“My first job as a distributor was with Chem Tex, and I learned a lot about how and what to do and not do.”
- Alan Nicholson
Website: https://labsurface.com
Ps. Since recording, Alan is no longer with Lab Surface