If at First You Don’t Succeed . . . How the Jahn Certification Program Came to Be
When I started importing and selling Jahn Mortar in 1982, my goal was to introduce and popularize the absolute best masonry restoration mortars to the US market. The idea of training masons on how to use the products had never occurred to me.
That changed quickly. Within a year or two of Jahn Mortars being used on US restoration projects, specifiers and other customers started calling me--and they weren’t happy. They had purchased the best, yet they were seeing failures. I was flying all over the country to consult on these failures, trying to keep my customers happy. At site after site I inspected, I found the failures were not caused by the Jahn Mortars; the failures were a result of application.
But customers want results, not excuses. Why should they specify the best products if the restoration is going to fail in a year? I needed to do something—and quickly. My idea was to offer a two-day, hands-on training workshop to every Jahn customer. I sent an invitation out to every purchaser from these past two years to join me at my workshop. I was expecting to have a good turnout. Two people came—and both were from the same company!
So I made one of the boldest business decisions I ever made: I sent another letter out, letting my customers know that while getting certified was voluntary, they had one year to come for training or I would… STOP SELLING TO THEM! Crazy, right? It was an ultimatum: Either use our Jahn Mortars correctly or not at all.
Almost nobody took the letter seriously—until I kept my promise and cut off sales. When I did that, quite a howl went up. From coast-to-coast I heard what an arrogant so-and-so I was. Who was I to presume to train them—these were professional masons after all. But I wasn’t questioning their professionalism—I just knew how to get the best results with these mortars. I also heard “mortar is mortar,” a lot. “No, Jahn mortars are different,” I’d respond—there are no bonding agents, no acrylics, no synthetic adhesives. Jahn Mortars require masonry skills forgotten in the era of gluelike additives that make the application easy but result in short lifespans and damage to the original substrate.
When I made the workshops even more demanding, something remarkable happened: training took off like a rocket. Architects and engineers especially loved the training—they were getting better results. Suddenly we were swamped with people. We held classes every two weeks, with a maximum of 20 participants, but demand was so strong, sometimes we had 24 or 25. Two weeks later we would hold another one, just as big. It might have been 40 or 50 people in the shop every month.
It’s almost 40 years later now, and our training is still popular. The Jahn Certification Workshop has been refined into a two-day intensive course for masons, and we keep the student/instructor ratio small. We also regularly hold a one-day event called The Jahn Hands-on Masonry Restoration Workshop; this is for specifiers, engineers, architects, and other preservation professionals. The classes now give an introduction to the complete Cathedral Stone Products catalog, including masonry cleaners, coatings, strippers and removers.
Our workshops are as demanding today as they were at the start because we want people who use Jahn on their projects to get the best results. That’s why I recommend specifiers insist every restorer working on their project be certified. While I’m at it, here’s another tip for specifiers: Ask for mock-ups on site before significant work begins. Have each restorer do a patch for your sign-off. If anyone can’t do it to our standards—insist on more training or exclude them from your project.
These days I have some great people working with me to handle the training. Still, I pop in on classes when I can. I like to watch as masons “get it” with regard to how to do their work better and faster. I like to watch them lean in to get a better view of what the instructor is doing. This gives me a sense of professional fulfillment like I feel when a project comes together exceptionally well.
I think it’s fair to say that we’ve become the industry standard for teaching traditional masonry repair methods. That was never part of the plan, but I’m okay with that outcome.
