Father-Son Team Guide JAK's Flooring Through Recession To Emerge Stronger, Smarter

HARTFORD When Jeff King was laid off from a construction purchasing job in 2007 two years after he graduated college, it was just the beginning of a major recession for the construction industry.

His father, Allan, who was running both a hardware store in Hartford's North End and a flooring installation company, was suffering from the same market forces that led to his son's layoff.

"The recession hit our hardware business really hard," Jeff King said, to the point that his father had to close it after 22 years of operation.

He kept the flooring business, called JAK's Flooring, but several of the contractors who were repeat customers shut their doors in 2007 and 2008, King said.

In 2009, the firm wasn't paid for work it did in Bridgeport, a five-figure hit.

"It took me about a year to dig my way out of that," King said. He went without a salary for a while, and in 2010, he said, he worked almost 80 hours a week for a year trying to get more work.

When he joined JAK's, King said, the company was doing between $200,000 and $300,000 a year in revenue. By 2011, the company's business grew to $500,000 a year.

He said going through those tough times forced him to tap into his reserves. He said in those early rough years, he sometimes thought: "I'm up against the wall. How am I going to figure this out?"

But now he says getting laid off and having to start over was the best thing that ever happened to him. "This is what capitalism in America is about, working for yourself."

Getting stiffed when a developer ran out of money changed two things for JAK's. One, it insists on terms where payments come throughout the project. And perhaps more significantly, the company concentrates more on public sector work. Those projects are bonded and the odds of the project failing are lower, he said.

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Father-Son Team Guide JAK's Flooring Through Recession To Emerge Stronger, Smarter