Mike Stewart has a problem many business owners might like. Quality Court Industries, which he launched in 2001, cannot keep up with demand.
“At any given time I’ve got 15 or 20 customers waiting on me,” Stewart tells Business Report in its new Entrepreneur feature. “That’s where we’ve been at the last year: taking what we can handle and turning down the rest.”
In the last decade QCI has been a turnkey contractor, building tennis, basketball and multisport courts, as well as running tracks and now playgrounds. The company provides everything from dirtwork, post-tension concrete and flooring systems to fencing, lighting and accessories. Its clients are public entities as well as private clubs and residents around the Southeast. In Baton Rouge, QCI made the UREC tennis courts at LSU; it has the contract to do the new Lee High School tennis courts.
“We created the demand with good work and references,” Stewart says. “It’s easy to sell work when you do good work.”
The phones are ringing off the hook now at QCI headquarters in Baton Rouge, but Stewart got to this point gradually. He grew up in Spanish Town, attended Christian Life Academy, then studied marketing at Southeastern. He’d always dreamed of owning a business, he says, but first he did industrial civil and electrical work at area plants. He was 24, with a wife and baby, when he left shift work—“It just wasn’t who I was”—and started QCI, focusing on tennis court surfacing, a niche that attracted him.
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