Business Development, Advanced Product Knowledge & Natural Stone Tiling Course
Course duration: 1 day
Course cost: £99 inc VAT
0% Finance payment option available with 
Discounted accommodation available for all of our students
This 1 day course is an optional add-on day for our 4 Day Professional Intensive Course. It is included as standard in our 9 Day Advanced Intensive Tiling Course and our 13 Day Expert Tiling Course.
About This Course
This course is a must if you really want to be successful in your new career. Set yourself apart from the average ceramic tiler!
Our 1 Day Business Development, Advanced Product Knowledge & Natural Stone Course offers you an extensive insight into how to best set up and run your tiling business, maximise your profits, and offer a wider range of services to your customers. It also covers all natural stone products and how to cut, clean, seal, and fix them. This course is ideal for anyone who has completed our 4 Day Professional Intensive Tiling Course
This course is extensive in its content. You can expect to learn the best ways to set up your tiling business, how to increase your income and customer base by offering more advanced services such as wet rooms complete with tanking systems. You will also benefit from an in-depth look into some of the more complex products you may use such as anti-crack matting or underfloor heating.
This day is also about Natural Stone. You need to know the difference between all of the different types of natural stone products on the market, how to cut and fix them, and how each one needs sealing – they’re all different!
Business Development
This is the key difference between tradesmen who are making enough to get by, and tradesmen who are financially successful and run an established and well thought of tiling business. Simply being a knowledgeable and skilled tiler is only half of the battle. The business side of running a tiling business is equally important to your success. Setting up your business and choosing a name, marketing your business and getting exposure to potential customers, keeping accountancy records, gaining customer trust and securing work, all of these things are key to being successful. The biggest area for improvement in most tiling businesses is the marketing and then sales approach. Knowing how to get the best value from your marketing budget, or even targeting customers through free marketing is vital to the success of a new tiling business. Once you get the opportunity to quote for a customer’s job, that is when your sales skills come in. Being able to turn more quotations into paid work is massively important, not only in terms of generating income for your business but also in terms of limiting the amount of running around pricing up jobs that you never win.
We will guide you on all of this, our vast experience over numerous years will be passed on to you and will prove invaluable for your future success.
Advanced Product Knowledge
As part of the advanced product knowledge module, we will teach you about wet rooms and tanking systems, how to offer these to your customers and what to charge. We will show you when and how to use cement backer boards, commonly used for timber floors which have some expansion and movement in them. You will also learn about using self-levelling compounds to correct un-level floors. During this part of the day we will deal with some unusual situations that you may come across which can cause you problems if you don’t know how to deal with them. Underfloor heating, cracking concrete floors, anti-fracture matting, expansion joints and different height floors will all be covered during this course. We will also show you how to set out some more complex tiling patterns & bonds. This additional information should enable you to tackle any hurdle you’re likely to come across in the process of running your tiling business.
Natural Stone
The final part of this course covers natural stone. There are a wide variety of natural stone tile products on the market at the moment and they’re becoming increasingly more popular with customers due to their high-end aesthetics. In fact, natural stone installation makes up about 35% of tiling jobs these days! While the earnings potential for fitting natural stone is significantly higher than ceramic or porcelain tiles, they do need a bit of special treatment – they’re natural products carved out of the earth and are all porous (they stain easily!). By the end of this course you will have a full understanding of how to identify, clean, cut, drill and fit natural stone tiles. You will also know how to seal each different type of natural stone using the correct choice of the many different sealers on the market.
Tiling Manual
This 1-day course is packed full of information that will prove invaluable for your tiling career. As with all our other courses, you will also receive additional printed information to add to your Tiling Manual, covering everything you have learnt about business development, advanced product knowledge, and natural stone. Like all our manuals, this handout has again been carefully formatted to ensure that any information you need is easy to find and clear to understand. You’ll want to keep it close to hand!
Ongoing Support
As always, anybody who completes one of our courses will have our contact details and be able to take advantage of our ongoing support and advice on any of the topics covered.
This course runs every Friday and is perfect for those who have completed our 4 Day Professional Intensive Tiling Course, give us a call with any questions you may have!
Course Content
Business Development
- Setting up your business
- The different business structures
- Choosing a business name – important to get right
- Insurance
- Revenue streams
- Maximising your income
- Marketing cost effectively
- Targeting your marketing for the jobs you want to do
- Pricing up jobs
- Providing quotations
- Converting quotes in to paid work – sales!
- Up selling materials for increased income
- Utilising trade accounts and discounts
- Trade pricing
- Bookkeeping and Accounts
- Tax
- Paying yourself a wage
Advanced Product Knowledge
- Wet room installations
- Tanking systems
- Cement backer board
- Anti-fracture matting
- Underfloor heating
- Self-levelling compounds
- Expansion joints
- Cracking substrates
- Differing floor heights
- Complex tiling patterns/bonds
Natural Stone
- How to identify natural stone tiles
- Explanation of the issues with porosity
- Cleaning natural stone
- Cutting natural stone
- Drilling natural stone
- How to fix natural stone and which adhesive products to use
- Sealing your tiles and which sealing product matches with which type of stone
- The many different sealing products on the market
- The risks of grouting natural stone
- Issues with slate floor tiles
- How much you should charge to fit natural stone