Good Neighbor Podcast South Charlotte
Bringing Together Local Businesses and Neighbors of South Charlotte.
Good Neighbor Podcast South Charlotte
Ep. # 132 Exterior Excellence: Transforming Homes with CLT Improvements
Meet Carl Rubidge, a South African transplant who's made Charlotte home for the past 25 years and built CLT Improvements into a trusted exterior home renovation company. After pivoting from real estate during the 2008 economic downturn, Carl found his passion in transforming homes through quality exterior improvements.
What makes CLT Improvements stand out in a crowded marketplace? Their comprehensive approach to exterior renovations. While many contractors specialize in just roofing or just gutters, Carl's team understands how these systems work together. This expertise allows them to install gutter guards without voiding existing roof warranties—a common concern among homeowners. Carl shares budget-friendly transformation tips that can dramatically change your home's appearance, like switching white gutters to dark bronze or black and matching that color on shutters and front doors.
Perhaps most valuable is Carl's candid assessment of gutter guard systems. While many homeowners believe all gutter guards are ineffective, Carl explains that among hundreds of available systems, about 5% actually work exceptionally well. This kind of honest industry insight characterizes the relationship-focused business Carl has built, where former clients often join him for weekend adventure motorcycle rides through Western North Carolina's beautiful mountains. Whether you're considering a full exterior renovation or simply want to refresh your home's look, this conversation offers practical guidance from an industry veteran who values quality, integrity, and lasting relationships. Ready to transform your home's exterior? Visit CLTImprovements.com to learn more about their services and approach.
CLT Improvements
Carl Rubidge
415 E. Woodlawn Rd #7
Charlotte, 28209
(980) 480-6002
This is the Good Neighbor Podcast, the place where local businesses and neighbors come together. Here's your host, Regina Lee.
Speaker 2:Hello everyone and welcome to another episode of the Good Neighbor Podcast. I love talking to local business owners and I'm super excited today to talk to Carl Rubidge. He is owner of CLT Improvements. Welcome, carl.
Speaker 3:Well, thank you, regina. It's nice to meet you and we're very glad to be invited and to be part of this.
Speaker 2:Absolutely. I detect a little accent. That's not a Charlotte accent. Where are you from?
Speaker 3:My joke. Sometimes I'll tell people I'm from Northeast Georgia and they always just chuckle at me like yeah, right, actually I'm originally from South Africa, so from the far south, way down south, and came to the United States about 25 years ago and I've been here since. I picked up some of the local southernisms and learned how to say y'all and fixing to and so on. So yeah, but originally South Africa, british South African.
Speaker 2:Well, speaking of fixing to, I think that's kind of the industry you're in.
Speaker 3:Tell us about your business. Oh, the business. Okay, clt Improvements is the business and what we do is exterior home improvement. So we'll take care of the outside of your house, everything from the roof down to the gutters and gutter guards, to protecting the gutters from debris, and build up to your fascia boards that the gutters attached to, all the way down into the siding, the windows, the window trim, the doors, basically almost anything on the exterior of the house. That is what we handle. We don't do a lot of stucco work that we have to subcontract because we are it's just not in our our wheelhouse, but basically almost anything else we can handle on the exterior of the home so how did you and why did you get into this business?
Speaker 3:okay, yeah, that's a. That's an interesting story. Um, well, as probably many of you all of us, almost all of us remember, in 2008 there was a little change in the economy and prior to 2008, I was a real estate and I had specialized in corporate relocation, where we would help big companies move staff from one area to another and I would help find homes for the staff coming to Charlotte. It was a great business up until 2008, because it was a constant stream of people coming into the Charlotte area, so we stayed really, really busy doing that. However, in 2008, when a lot of companies shut down their funding or business shut down and changed a lot of their funding due to the economic situation, that, pretty much, was going to dry up very quickly. So I ended up moving into home improvement. So I figured I'd stay in the industry where I'm helping people with homes, but getting into the repairs and renovations side of it, and we started that business originally with Gutter Glove, gutter Guards, so that was the actual starting point in 2011.
Speaker 2:Gotcha. So you own Gutter Guard franchise here.
Speaker 3:It's not actually a franchise. I became a gutter glove dealer because the company I worked for very briefly after being a real estate agent. They had a product which was gutter glove gutter guards, and I loved this product. I thought it was fantastic. I actually bought some from the company and tested them on my own home, which had trees all the way around the house, and so it was a great testing ground. So I tested out a bunch of different guards over a few.
Speaker 3:It was a good few months before I actually got to decided that gutter glove was the best gutter guard system out there and from there actually just decided to go ahead and start the business and rolled right into starting the business and found some crews that we had worked with in the previous company that shut down and the guys were all looking for work. So we just we just basically got started with the same group that we were together before, just under a different name, and love doing what we've been doing and we're we're all together still the same crews from back in 2011. We're still working together and loving it.
Speaker 2:Wow, that's super, super cool. There is so much new construction, but when you're line of work, so many people are redoing their homes. What are you seeing as some of the biggest trends here in?
Speaker 3:Charlotte. Let's say, for example, someone's got a house, they don't have a huge budget, but they want to make the house look pretty different and they need a gutter system. So something we can go in to do is to remove an older gutter system, which may be a white color, and then replace it with a dark bronze or with black, and it gives the house a very different look. Then something that they can do to add to that is to go ahead and paint the shutters the same color as the gutters and the front door, just to give it some accents, and you can look at that, pull up to the house and it looks like a different house. Sometimes we'll also do a roof to give them a color change if they need a roof or the roof is getting old or perhaps needed it was from an insurance claim and we'll put together this package of a new roof with a color change on the roof, color change on the gutters and then some other little accents, and can get a very different looking house out of it.
Speaker 2:Can you paint your existing gutters if you want that black or dark brown look.
Speaker 3:Yes, you can paint them. However, the gutters come with a factory finish that is very easy to clean and easy to degrease, whereas if you now go and paint with an acrylic paint, you've got a surface that's not that smooth, easy to clean, easy to degrease type of surface and the cost of painting all the gutters comes fairly close to the cost of replacing the gutter system. So most times people just want to go ahead and just do the actual replacement of the gutter system and then they've got a warranty with it for five years in the workmanship and 50 years on the materials of the gutters. So most times people just say, look, let's just do the new gutter system.
Speaker 2:Gotcha Well, walk us through your process if somebody is listening, and they need gutters and exterior work.
Speaker 3:Okay, the first thing to do would be for them to reach out to us in some manner. They could either call us on the phone number on the website or they could fill out the form on the website and we'll receive the information and then one of us will reach out and get in touch and set an appointment at a convenient time for whoever it is to come out. Get some measurements. Come out, get some measurements. Sometimes we can price the project right there on the spot, if it doesn't involve something where we've got to go and get other pricing, like maybe some siding or an unusual gutter color or gutter material. So very often we can price it out there immediately. And once the customer sees the dollar amount and they accept the offer on it, then the next step is to get our office manager to send out a work order. We'll get them scheduled with a date that's good for them, schedule the installation. Then, on the day of the installation, what we do is the crew will arrive whatever time that this office manager sets up the arrival time to arrive.
Speaker 3:We'll go through the basics of the project and then handle a project it may. If it's a, for example, a gutter changing out, we're changing to an input gutter system. It can be done in sometimes half a day or one day, and the home we don't always require homeowners to be home, to be present, but at least is giving us this, their contact number, so that they can still stay at work and if we we need something, we can call them or video call them to handle whatever needs to be handled. We try and make it as easy as possible or as painless as possible, because that way people don't have to take a day off work to have their gutters done, whereas some companies actually require them to be home the whole time. Well, you're in a competitive business.
Speaker 2:I'm interested and your reviews are amazing, so you're doing a lot of things right. So I'm wondering how do you approach building a quote when it's you've got to have the quality, but yet someone's on a budget?
Speaker 3:Well, there's various ways of doing that. The first thing you do is number one is have options available. So that I'll give you an example I worked with someone just last week who's on a really, really tight budget and wants to replace his gutter system and then wants to do gutter guards, but the cost was a little bit more than he could afford. So what we ended up doing was we actually, because his downspouts from the old gutter system were in acceptable shape, we left his downspouts on and actually just replaced the actual gutters and then installed the gutter guards. So by doing it that way, we actually find ways to where someone can save money but yet not compromise the quality of the job. Then we also have different tiers, for example, the gutter guards. We've got three different levels of the gutter guard, all of which are really good quality, but then more heavily reinforced guards for the heavy duty applications where you've got trees right over a house, where you need a heavier, sturdier frame than something that has trees close to the house, but you're not going to have tree limbs falling onto the roof and then potentially damaging the gutter. You're not going to have tree limbs falling onto the roof and then potentially damaging the gutter. So we've got different tiered levels and different ways to work it out, but the most important thing is to never compromise the quality. Well, that's a good point. What sets you guys apart? Share with us.
Speaker 3:I'd say what sets us apart from a lot of other gutter companies is we do roofing as well.
Speaker 3:We do siding and windows.
Speaker 3:So we could come in and actually install a gutter system and then, even if we did not install a roof, we won't affect the roofer's warranty because we know how to handle the roofing.
Speaker 3:We know how to treat the roofing so that when installing a gutter guard system that slides under the first row of shingles, we know exactly how to do it in such a way as not to damage it. And in some cases, where someone's just had a new roof installed that we didn't install, we will actually go contact the other roofing company and just let them know hey, we're going to install a gutter guard system here. We know what we're doing. Can you just sign off as that? It's okay for us to install a system in this method, that we install it, and very often the other roofing companies are fine with it. They they'll still carry the warranty, even with our gutter guards installed because that, because it's a common issue that homeowners get nervous about installing a gutter guard system because the other roofing company wouldn't actually wouldn't validate the warranty any longer, because it's been altered or the gutter guard system slides between the starter and the actual shingle.
Speaker 2:Okay.
Speaker 3:Wow, are there any misconceptions in your industry that you hear over and over? Yes, yes, with gutter guards there are a lot of misconceptions, because there are so many. There's a major misconception that gutter guards just don't work, period, but it's. It's based on a fair amount of truth there, because of the few hundred gutter guard systems that are out there, there's probably only five percent that are truly effective. So on average, people are probably right with that. But if you do a bit of research, you can find that there are some systems that are really effective and that function best, that that require the most, by far the least amount of maintenance and by far the most effective for that small amount of maintenance.
Speaker 2:I had no idea. That is good information. Well, again, you have just amazing reviews and congratulations on your work. So when you're not running this fabulous company, what do you like to do for fun?
Speaker 3:Oh, the hobbies. Oh, yes, we have to get into that. So there's two major things that I spend a lot of time doing, but one of them, which is barefoot water skiing or water skiing in general, which is what actually brought me to the United States originally, when I first came over, it was all about water skiing, and then I ended up falling in love with the country and staying and always water skiing on the weekends, when I can or when I have some free time. And the other one is adventure motorcycling, where we take a motorcycle and go exploring the mountains. Western North Carolina has got some really beautiful mountains, and so going out exploring is a lot of fun. And then we have a lot of customers that actually come and join us, people that we've done work for that I'll invite them out and we'll go and do a joint ride where a bunch of us will go ride together, so we can have a lot of fun like that.
Speaker 2:Well, that's a good testimony. Right there, you're a good guy too.
Speaker 3:Well, thank you.
Speaker 2:Yeah, so tell our listeners how they find CLT Improvements.
Speaker 3:The simplest way is to just go to a Google page, just type into cltimprovements. com or just CLT Improvements, and that'll be the easiest way to find us. Or you could find us on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn. We're all over the social media as well.
Speaker 2:Well, I love that. Carl, it's been a pleasure getting to know you and congratulations on your success.
Speaker 3:Well, thank you very much. It's been great to get to know you too, Regina.
Speaker 1:Thank you for listening to the Good Neighbor Podcast. To nominate your favorite local businesses to be featured on the show, go to GNPSouthCharlotte. com. That's GNPSouthCharlotte. com, or call 980-351-5719.