The home renovations business took off during the pandemic. Here’s how this small business owner kept up with demand.

Even as a child, Zack Dettmore always had a clear answer to what he wanted to do when he grew up: carpentry. At 13, he attended timber framing school. At 18, he bought his first house. While Dettmore studied engineering in college, he worked for a local contractor in his spare time.

His high-end residential building and renovation company Dettmore Home Improvements started as a one-man operation 10 years ago — today, it’s a thriving business with employees of its own. When he’s not meeting with clients or working on the job site, Dettmore shares videos about the tools of the trade on social media. He started posting on Instagram years ago, a time when, he jokes, there were about seven other contractors on the platform. “I’m really passionate about being a tradesperson, and I’m passionate about trying to change the perception of it being a fallback career,” Dettmore said.

Dettmore has always known that carpentry was his passion — what was less clear is how to turn his chosen career into a financially sound business. “A lot of us are drawn to the trades because we like the work, but to make enough money to survive, especially where I live right outside Manhattan, you need at least a six-figure income basically,” he said. “If you want to be profitable, you probably have to own a business.” Dettmore’s dream is building a business that’s both operationally and environmentally sustainable — but for many small businesses, achieving those dreams requires access to financial resources. One resource small businesses might be eligible to take advantage of is the Employee Retention Credit (ERC), a payroll tax refund for businesses that kept employees on payroll during the pandemic and meet a number of other eligibility criteria. Small businesses can determine their eligibility for the ERC with the help of an ERC originator like Innovation Refunds.*

Because Dettmore didn’t come from the corporate world or a business background, he had to learn how to run his business through trial and error. Dettmore said he had to stumble through a few bad hiring choices, contracts that lost him money, and clients that took advantage of him to learn crucial business lessons. Each time he made a mistake, he studied how to avoid it in the future — doing his own research, reading books on business, and listening to podcasts to build up his knowledge as a business owner.

When the first wave of the COVID-19 pandemic began in March 2020, Dettmore once again found himself at the bottom of a steep learning curve. At the time, Dettmore and his team were in the middle of a live-in renovation. For days, they worked round-the-clock to complete enough of the house so the homeowners could stay in one section while the construction crew worked in another. On top of that, Dettmore’s team offset their hours so no one had to share space. “One of us would work 4 am to noon, someone would work noon to 6 pm, and then someone would work 6 pm to 10 pm,” Dettmore said. Taking meetings standing outside on the patio while the homeowners stood inside the home became the norm. Even before the CDC recommended the use of masks, Dettmore directed his crew to wear the respirators they use for lacquer vapors, figuring they would filter out viruses as well.

Though he was ahead of the curve with safety precautions, Dettmore still felt overwhelmed by the pressure to keep his employees and clients safe. “The worst part was really just all of this extra work I was doing managing homeowners and employees, all of whom had a different opinion of what was acceptable behavior,” he said. “That just created thousands and thousands of dollars of extra work that I couldn’t charge for.” For two years, Dettmore required face masks on all of his projects. Even when he got pushback from employees or subcontractors who weren’t so safety-conscious, Dettmore remained focused. “No one ever got sick on any of my projects, and my clients all felt protected,” he said. “That’s what it took to keep the customers satisfied, and they’re the ones who were keeping our business afloat through all this.”

Just as Dettmore figured out his safety precautions, the pandemic threw another curveball: supply chain disruptions. Faced with a dwindling supply of available materials, Dettmore and his team pivoted, tweaking designs to feature materials they knew they could get on their timeline. Instead of buying cabinets already painted, he ordered unpainted cabinets and painted them on-site. It wasn’t possible to shop in-person, so Dettmore ordered everything for delivery. Material shortages also meant that the products he could source often came with higher price tags. Luckily, Dettmore was able to take out a Paycheck Protection Loan to offset some of the spiking material costs.

The ERC is another piece of pandemic-era government assistance that could prove helpful to many small businesses. Companies that retained existing employees throughout 2020 and for the first three quarters of 2021 might be eligible for a payroll tax refund from the IRS. The ERC isn’t a loan — it’s a payroll tax refund that could provide the money small business owners need to help fund their dreams. Small business owners can find out whether their business might be eligible for the ERC by contacting Innovation Refunds. It takes around eight minutes to determine if Innovation Refunds’ team of independent tax professionals can help your business receive ERC assistance, and the company already helped businesses claim more than $3 billion in refunds.

Dettmore said this type of government support gave him a little more financial breathing room, and allowed him to focus on responding to the growing number of inquiries from clients. As homeowners spent more time at home during the pandemic, the demand for renovations just kept increasing. “We had fewer employees, a tougher supply chain, and just an unreasonable amount of work,” Dettmore said. “I didn’t really grow the business, but we did double what we normally did the year before. And we pretty much doubled growth each year post-pandemic.”

The incredible demand for renovations had run Dettmore ragged — and along the way, he lost track of his end goal: building a business that’s both operationally and environmentally sustainable. He knew he needed help, and hired a consultant to help him take a hard look at what was and wasn’t working for Dettmore Home Improvements. Some of these changes are simply more efficient, like ordering trim in the exact length needed to minimize cut-offs that wind up in the dumpster. Others are more overarching, like planning for extra insulation to make each home’s heating and cooling system as effective as possible, and working with interior designers and architects who respect the original architecture of each home — even in a renovation. “If we are working in a Victorian-era house, we try to match the historic details of the room we are working in to the rest of the original house so it feels cohesive,” Dettmore said. “If we were to try and shoehorn a modern kitchen into a Victorian home, it could have the potential to make the rest of the house feel disjointed and encourage an unnecessary remodel of perfectly good spaces.”

Looking forward, Dettmore is also hoping to take on a more strategic role instead of being involved in all of the minutiae of daily operations. “The important thing is to understand the difference between being a business owner and being self-employed,” he said. Building a successful business means creating systems and processes that can function in your absence — work shouldn’t grind to the halt every time you go out of town. “If you can’t walk away from that business, then you don’t own a business, you own a job,” he said. “People who run small businesses like I do typically get into it for the passion, which is almost immediately extinguished by taxes and payroll. My goal post now is how do I empower other people to run this business so that I can develop the business more.”

*Innovation Refunds does not offer tax or legal advice. We solely provide ERC assistance and recommend seeking advice from our network of highly qualified independent tax or legal professionals regarding your specific situation. Please refer to our Frequently Asked Questions to learn more about eligibility, fees, and other information related to our services.