Concrete Decor Archives — Manufacturer Profile

Versatile Building Products,
Carson, Calif.
Once a specialist in deck coatings, Versatile Building Products has enjoyed exponential growth with the addition of concrete and epoxy coatings.
by John Strieder

By the time he was 22, Mike Meursing was already married and owned his own floor-coating installation business. He was reaching for the stars — but at the same time, he couldn’t help but see the cracks forming under his feet.

It was the heat. Meursing lived in southern California, or as he called it, “the land of the sun.” And when the temperature shot up, he noticed, floor coatings tended to go south. “Coatings had a lot of issues with cracking and leaking,” he says.

Luckily, Meursing was heir to a wealth of expertise in the coating industry. His father was a texture coating manufacturer who successfully launched and sold companies in Canada, Australia and South America. His uncle founded Old Quaker Paint during the Depression, and the brand became a familiar name on the West Coast — so much so that The Sherwin-Williams Co. eventually bought it from the Meursing family.

Mike and his wife, Vicki, took a formula developed by Old Quaker for a fiberglass deck coating and began making and selling it as Versa-Deck.

Fifteen years later, their company, Versatile Building Products Inc., aims to offer almost anything a contractor could brush onto a deck or floor. They want it to be a one-stop shop for floor coatings, whether for waterproofing decks, decorative finishes in homes, or commercial sealers.

The more their business diversified, the more lucrative niches they found. “We did not want to be a one-product company,” Meursing says. “Versa-Deck is just a little blip on the map compared to what we do now.”

In fact, the company’s fastest growing product lines are concrete coatings, which debuted in 1995, and epoxy coatings, introduced in 1998. “There’s a lot of money floating around out there because interest rates are low,” he says. “A customer can go spruce up a garage for $2,000. That’s a small amount of money to pay for it.”

Up to 40 percent of the company’s products are geared to decorative concrete contractors, from decorative overlayments and garage floor coatings to concrete stains and sealers. “You can take some commercial technology, you can modify and tweak it and have something for the decorative concrete industry,” he says.