BUSINESS BUILT ON A FRIENDSHIP
Flooring company focuses on training and education
New local businesses and non-profit organizations open regularly in Saskatoon. Today, we talk to Tarrant Cross Child and Christian Braid, who opened Prairie Flooring together in January 2019 with a focus on creating meaningful training and employment opportunities for Indigenous people. The company launched its Prairie Run Crew Outreach program this spring, which hosts free running clinics across the province.
Cross Child and Braid have known each other for more than two decades, having once worked together in Braid Flooring & Window Fashions — a company now owned by Braid and, previously, by Braid's father. Alcohol addiction problems sidetracked Cross Child from work and life in 2014 and he spent a year in a residential rehabilitation program. Once he got his life back on track, he and Braid joined forces again.
Q What inspired you to start Prairie Flooring?
Christian Braid: I've known Tarrant for quite a long time. And
Tarrant was always a guy who I thought was at his best when he was helping people. You could see that by a lot of the volunteer work he was doing in the community and by the way he interacted with his crew when he was teaching and training them. So when he graduated his rehab program we just thought there was a real opportunity to capture new business while supporting the community which we're doing business in. And Tarrant, being First Nations, opened up some new doors to achieve that. Tarrant Cross Child: In 2015 I had
graduated from a rehab program. Christian hired me back at Braid Flooring & Window Fashions. So when Christian and I started that relationship back up in 2015 we both found a need and saw an opportunity within our Indigenous community. So that's when our journey really began on creating this business of Prairie Flooring.
Q How easy or difficult was it to get Prairie Flooring off the ground?
CB: It took several years before we were comfortable with the approach. We spent a lot of time consulting in the community to see what kind of support there would be for this type of a business. So we spent time with those big companies in the natural resource sector, our provincial government and with training partners in different First Nations communities. And that almost took about three years until we were comfortable.
Q What are the products and services you offer at Prairie Flooring?
TCC: Anything flooring, pretty much — ceramic tile, porcelain, all the hard surfaces, we do a lot of luxury vinyl tile, luxury vinyl planks, hardwood, laminate, carpet, tile and deliveries. And we make use of the apps that are available — where customers can take a picture of their room and we can place any type of product in their room and they can see what it would look like.
But our focus is actually really training and educating people within Indigenous communities. A lot of it is on-the-job training, but we also take them aside (for online training).
Q How does Prairie Flooring compare to other similar flooring businesses in Saskatoon?
CB: We really focus hours to training and educating. So that's what I think separates us — we're taking the time to not only build a business, but we're really building people.
(One of our employees named) Michael, for example, when he started he couldn't read a measuring tape, he could barely swing a hammer. But we trained him and, in the five years Michael's been working as a flooring installer, he's gotten married, bought his own first vehicle, moved into his first home. And Michael now is the one training (others) on the job site today. So we're really building people's life skills. It's fun. We're very passionate about it. We love what we do.