Crystal Sims: A star installer emerges
Feb 07, 2022
Crystal Sims began her career in the flooring industry nearly 10 years ago when she was asked by her brothers—Jose and Daniel Gonzales, owners of Preferred Flooring in Grand Rapids, Mich.—to join the business during a particularly busy season.
What began as a pit-stop has become a passion-fueled career with Sims boasting impressive trade skills—namely, flooring installation. In fact, today Sims is a finalist in the 2022 National Installer of the Year competition, which held its finale at TISE 2022 in Las Vegas.
What makes Sims stand out is not only that she is a woman and mother of three in an otherwise male-dominated industry, but that she has embraced her installation prowess while continuing to learn and teach those around her. “I think part of success is to never stop learning,” she said. “It took me a while to learn that. For a while, I was more in it because of loyalty to my brothers. It wasn’t until the birth of my last son that I had to make a choice—come back or find another job. I decided that I’d already been in this business for so long and I needed to put forth all of my effort or it wasn’t going to be worth it. Since then, I’ve been learning as much as I can.”
But it wasn’t all smooth sailing. Sims joined the business as a self-proclaimed “grunt man,” who couldn’t even read a tape measure. “My first week I was carrying rolls of carpet up four flights of stairs. I thought, ‘This is crazy.’ But it was my brothers, so I decided to stick it out. I didn’t actually start installing until probably a year and a half in; however, going out on jobs where they could actually trust me to cut in a piece of carpet and not mess it all up was probably into my second year.”
Sims noted that, in the beginning, the idea of making a mistake could be frightening, especially when her family’s business and reputation were on the line. However, over the years her perspective changed. “In hindsight, now that I’m training others, I feel that it’s so good to mess things up,” she explained. “The things I learned, how I got so good with my hands, is learning how to fix my own mistakes. I think that’s really an important part of the process, part of learning flooring. You’re going to make mistakes. Nobody’s perfect. When you make mistakes, being able to fix them is really big. And owning it is really big, too.”
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