Composed of a team boasting more than 25 years of experience in helping clients make the most of remodeling, Pensacola, Florida-based Jansen Kitchen & Bath has the goal to help owners make stunning spaces of their kitchens and bathrooms with minimal stress and hassle. Providing a premium offering with a personalized touch, Jansen’s designers assist in visualizing the ideal remodel with the help of cutting-edge imaging software that displays the finished project before it’s even built.
The company’s ability to meet and surpass every challenge stems from its unique combination of workmanship, knowledge, expertise, and a positive attitude based not only on extensive experience but the capacity to build enduring connections with clients.
In search of a niche
Founded in March 1997 by Owner/Estimator Paul Jansen, Owner/Production Manager Ron Jansen, and Granite Department Manager Richard Jansen, now retired, the company grew steadily doing “any kind of construction,” from replacing wood on homes to installing overhangs and siding.
“In the early days, we actually built about five houses along the way—slowly, at different times,” Paul Jansen says. “It was a slow growth process until about 2004 when Hurricane Ivan came through Pensacola; that had a big impact on the company. We grew fast for about a year and a half, and then we had to trim it back after that when the hurricane work was done.”
The team had to get “pretty lean” during the recession from 2008 to 2009, and an oil spill in 2010 in Pensacola kept them on their toes, he adds. “I don’t think the phone rang between May and August that year. We only had repeat customers on our project board; that’s how scary it was. But we got through that and suddenly grew back in 2015 and made a major shift where we rebranded ourselves.”
Until that point, the company was known as Jansen Quality Construction, but now does business as Jansen Kitchen, Bath, Granite, and Glass, with a focus on those key areas. “We did things that other contractors don’t normally do—that branding helped us grow a lot in the last 10 years,” says Jansen.
That rebranding also resulted in the company finding and filling a niche in town, adds Tessa Boudreaux, Owner/Sales and Design Manager. “We’re the only people who do what we do and how we do it—having everybody on staff and focusing on interiors of houses,” she says. “We do our one thing, and we do it really, really well.”
This focus has earned the firm loyal clients, with 70 to 80 percent of its business coming from referrals or repeat customers. “We do almost no marketing,” Boudreaux explains. “We do a little social media, we do Google ads, and that’s about it… it’s word of mouth.”
The company’s approach, rooted in quality work and customer satisfaction, was established by the three founding brothers. “Our focus was always to do a job so well and keep the customer satisfied so that they would tell other people,” Jansen says. “That one job would lead to the next and we would go out of our way to keep our customers happy,” an approach that sets the company apart.
In-house and in-demand
A wealth of in-house expertise is another competitive advantage of Jansen’s. The company handles most work itself, including sheetrock, tile, painting, plumbing, and carpentry work. “We keep our quality up by having our own employees on the job,” Jansen says. “We know their skills and we’re able to control not only our schedule but the quality of work—and we have a master plumber on staff, which is critical for the things that we do.”
These in-house processes serve to instill plenty of confidence in the client. “We also have a fantastic design service available,” Boudreaux says. “We have extraordinary designers on staff who work with clients from the day they call in till the day they walk out the door, finished.”
Jansen has project managers on staff who focus on each project as it’s happening, so clients not only have a designer they can call at any moment, but also a project manager who talks to them every day and visits projects regularly. The company’s design process works to assist clients from start to finish. Designers schedule a time to come to the house and help with the difficult choices that frequently call for a designer’s input, working with clients to design the floorplan and choose the fixtures, cabinets, colors, and tiles.
“People call in and tell us what they’re looking for, and based on that, we assign a designer to them, and then from there, we set up a consultation to go to their house,” explains Boudreaux. “It’s a little easier to get people to focus on what they want and what they’re thinking when you’re standing in the room with them, instead of them just describing something to you. One of the owners and a designer always go out to the house and walk through what they want out of their space while we stand there with them,” she says.
“Many of our customers say they feel like they’re on HGTV,” she says. “It helps to see what we’re talking about and what they’re really getting when we hand them these price points. Once they decide what direction they want to go, sometimes we’ll give them four or five options to choose from. And once they make that decision, we go into the process of it in the showroom, picking out different cabinet lines and going through every single part and piece. We’ll break down their kitchen into everything we’re going to use, so they know exactly where everything’s going to be. Before they ever sign the contract, they know what they’re getting.”
Spaces are measured and then the design team comes back to the store and puts together full presentations with 3D rendering. Following the design decisions, the building process starts with Jansen’s experts demolishing the existing area and installing brand-new cabinets, countertops, tiling, plumbing, and glass, all with regular updates throughout the journey.
Everyone who has ever renovated has contractor nightmares to share, which is one of the reasons Jansen uses architectural home design software Chief Architect for much of its work. “We do that because we’ve had people say, ‘a contractor came out to my house and they quoted me this, but they never showed me anything,’ or, ‘they never told me what they could do,’” says Boudreaux. “They just want to come in and start tearing stuff apart. We’ve been in houses where people had bathrooms torn out and left like that. The way we do it, we try to avoid any of that unease.”
In control of it all
Avoiding unease also means that, along with its host of skilled tradespeople, Jansen fabricates its own granite via a stone department that can do “anything imaginable,” offers at least four different lines of cabinetry, and is a full glass company able to do all its own shower enclosures and replacement glass in-house. “It’s set so we can control almost every single aspect of it,” says Boudreaux.
Although COVID created some supply chain issues for the company, inflation is the ongoing challenge at present, with prices continuing to rise. “We’re not the cheapest in town, but we’re certainly not the most expensive,” says Jansen. “It’s hard sometimes to tell people what it’s going to cost to do what they want to do, but we aim to provide the best value we can for what we charge.”
“As Paul said, we might not be the cheapest, but we are 100 percent the best in town,” agrees Boudreaux.
Eyes on the horizon
Looking ahead to the future, the brothers will be retiring over the next six years, with three new owners stepping up—Boudreaux along with Karen Smith, Controller, and Jesse Miller, Project Manager. And the team is obviously doing something right: voted the Best of Pensacola in 2023 for Interior Designer in VIP Pensacola Magazine, the company was nominated again this year in four categories.
“We have four excellent designers here on staff, and we have a showroom, which other contractors don’t have—they send their people to look at our cabinets,” says Jansen. “We’ve been in business 27 years, and the experience we’ve acquired in the accumulation of hours between all the owners and the designers and other employees is just a huge asset for us.” It promises to be a winning formula for a bright future.
