Lone Wolf Coatings: How a Philadelphia Epoxy Company Learned You Go Further Together

In college, on the basketball team, he was the Lone Wolf.

“I was always to myself, I was always kind of in a shell, but that was me being tunnel vision. That was me being focused,” he says. He was a workout fanatic, always watching, studying and practicing the game.

When he started an epoxy company in Philadelphia, he wanted a name with a story behind it, something more natural than “Philadelphia Epoxy.” Lone Wolf stuck.

The irony is that building the business taught him the opposite lesson.

What Lone Wolf does

Lone Wolf Coatings installs epoxy floors, including metallic and flake, and Venetian plaster. It has recently added grind and seal and urethane finishes. It also does art, turning old furniture into something new.

The company is involved in the community too. “We give back,” he says. “We’re just a growing company out here in Philadelphia that’s just trying to make a big name one day.”

A barrier under every floor

Asked how he tests a slab for moisture, the owner describes a moisture meter. Then he goes further.

“We put a moisture vapor barrier in every single one of our floors. Every single one of our floors,” he says.

A moisture vapor barrier, or MVB, is a coating that stops moisture rising through the concrete from pushing the floor off the slab. It costs extra. He pays for it anyway, including on jobs where the customer could not afford it.

“As a business owner, I don’t mind paying that extra expense just to keep the satisfaction and the longevity of our floor,” he says. “We don’t cut corners, we coat them.”

It is about his name. “Our name on a floor means everything to me,” he says. “The last thing I want is a client calling me back because their floors is failing because of a moisture problem.”

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“We don’t cut corners, we coat them.”

What homeowners should understand

The thing homeowners most often miss, he says, is what quality costs.

People see beautiful floors online without realizing the work behind them. “Not cheap, it’s not cheap at all. You pay for what you pay for,” he says. “Cheap isn’t better, cheap is just cheap.”

He also wants homeowners to trust the expertise. “You have the problem. We have the solution,” he says. “We know exactly what you need, exactly where it needs to be done, exactly how it needs to be done. Not only is it a craft, but it’s also art.”

Referrals beat followers

Social media helps a company reach people in other cities and states and build an audience. But for the best customers, he says, nothing beats word of mouth.

He gives an example. A recent floor came from a countertop he did earlier in the summer for an older client who has no social media at all. She simply told people.

“Word of mouth spreads like wildfire,” he says, “and that definitely has worked in our favor more than social media.”

You go further together

His most valuable lesson undoes the Lone Wolf name.

“I started out this journey and I told myself I wanted to be the biggest epoxy installer in the world. I thought I can do it by myself,” he says. “I treated it like basketball, not realizing that it’s a business.”

What he learned instead was to network, build relationships and listen more than he talked. “Especially being new in the game, I don’t know nothing,” he says.

He credits a long list of well known installers who helped him along the way. “A success story is never by itself,” he says. “You go further together and you’re stronger together than by yourself.”

The same lesson changed how he runs the company. He used to handle everything himself. Now a team handles the calls, and systems keep things running.

“Learning that you need to have a team and systems in place helps everything,” he says.

A room full of heroes

He was nominated at the Golden Pour Awards, and he spent the night interviewing other attendees on camera.

“My experience at the Golden Pour Awards was phenomenal,” he says. Almost two years earlier, when he was just starting out, he had watched many of the same installers online and hoped to meet them one day.

“It’s kind of surreal. It’s like a manifestation in a way,” he says. “It showed that no matter what, there’s always somebody looking. There’s always somebody watching. Never think that you can’t make it.”

Bigger than metallics

Five years from now, he wants metallic floors to be “something that we do just for fun.” The goal is commercial work: retail stores, factories, airports, universities.

Being around industry veterans showed him how much he had limited himself. “I just wanted to do metallics, I just wanted to do flakes,” he says. “This industry is so much bigger than metallics.”

He wants to use epoxy in every form he can, to build something that takes care of his family “and generations after me.”