The Best Leaders Never Get Tired

“Do you know how many people set goals but still get stuck? A lot,” says Greg Cummings, CEO of Power100, a proprietary platform that ranks CEOs in the exterior home improvement sector. “People start to listen to outside noise and then they justify setting lower goals that are based on needs not wants.” 

And that can be the root of significant problems for many home improvement companies. 

“When you operate from a needs basis, you get tired,” he says. And that can drag down your business, hurt morale, and affect your corporate culture. “If leadership doesn’t believe in the goal, employees can feel it. But when you operate from a wants perspective, you have a goal and you’re always chasing something—you never get tired.” And what does that tell your team? “They think, damn, this place is booming and that’s going to motivate them.”

It's these home improvement goal chasers who Cummings has identified as the best in the business and the people he supports. He wants the industry to learn from them, and consumers to turn to them first.

Cumming’s own goal setting became the geneses for the power rankings when he somewhat unexpectedly found himself the co-owner of a window replacement company in Tampa, Fla. 

Path to Home Improvement

Cummings first found success in business development and marketing, but the travel required of those positions didn’t align with his goal of being home with his young family, so he sought other opportunities.

"I was talking to a friend and told him I wanted to start a company, and he said he wanted to do the same thing, so we decided that instead of starting our own, we should buy one,” Cummings says.

Together they investigated a host of industries—from restaurant franchises to healthcare practices to medical marijuana—but ultimately saw promise in a small window replacement company.  

The Making of the Rankings

Cummings didn’t know the players very well, so as part of his due diligence he had multiple replacement companies out to his house so he could suss out the competition. 

“They were all the same, every single one of them, whether the price was $10,000 lower or $10,000 higher. Everyone said the same thing. They did the same demonstration. And all the windows looked the same. It was wild to me,” Cummings says.

He realized he needed to sell his windows on something other than features, so he focused on customer satisfaction, and his goal was to earn an outstanding reputation and stellar reviews. The path was bumpy and sometimes costly, but within three years the company went from $800,000 to $10 million annually, Cummings says.

It was this focus on customer satisfaction and doing the job right that led Cummings to create his first power rankings. “I created a version of Power100 but on a local level. I produced a little laminated sheet for homeowners that said there are hundreds of window companies to choose from in this area, but the seven on this list are the only ones I’m comfortable recommending—or losing a job to,” he recalls. Those seven made his list because he believed the leaders could be trusted to do the right thing. (For the record, Cummings ranked his company at No. 5.)

That list of local companies expanded into national rankings for the most influential and accomplished CEOs of exterior home improvement companies. In 2021, Cummings rebranded the effort as the Power100.

The company now compiles three lists: rankings for top CEOs, home improvement partners, and private equity/buying groups. He won’t divulge trade secrets, saying only that he employs a five-layer proprietary ranking system that utilizes both AI and human intelligence to arrive at their unbiased conclusions (people can’t apply or pay to be on list). For the CEO rankings, more than 7,600 qualified leaders are scrutinized, with a particular focus on three key areas: companies that customers rave about, ones that value employees, and ones that have a positive effect on their communities. 

While Cummings says the top CEOs deserve to be acknowledged, he has two main drivers: 1) Serve as a third-party, unbiased source for homeowners looking for reliable exterior home improvement contractors, and 2) Showcase leaders who others in the industry can learn from and see how they made it happen. “We want to help leaders find what they need, have a network they can trust, and ultimately become the greatest outside resource for home improvement CEOs,” says Cummings.