Specialty Concrete Products

You might say Clyde Cobb got into decorative concrete on the ground floor.

“When I was growing up, my father was in industrial flooring, and I’d give him a hand now and then,” he says. “I sort of grew up in epoxy overlays, and knowing concrete a little bit.”

After graduating from the University of South Carolina (USC) in 1985, Cobb joined his father’s company as a full-time employee. The enthusiasm in his voice makes it clear that this was a choice of passion, not of family convenience.

He recalls participating in a USC career day event that featured graduates of the business school. “I saw all my buddies going in wearing coats and ties, and I'm out front on my hands and knees troweling epoxy stone,” he says, chuckling. “They were kidding me: ‘Clyde, did you graduate?’” But his skill in combining industry experience with an education in business and marketing is giving him the last laugh.

Shortly after he and his father began installing decorative concrete in 1987, Cobb’s ability to envision and develop new products became evident. He developed an efficient color grout system that allowed suppliers to stock only two base colors of grout (white and gray), along with small packets of pigment that customers could add themselves. “But we found out real quick that people don’t like to mix on the job site,” he says.

That experience did not dampen his enthusiasm, though. His father’s installation company was making products for its own use, and Cobb saw an opportunity to expand. “I threw some products in the back of my truck and decided to see if I could sell it myself,” Cobb says. “The concrete contractors I talked to were very interested, so I started a company called Monolithic Polymers in 1988. I was formulating epoxies and sealers, and blending all my own grouts.”

The following year, he went a step further, spurred by a desire to speed up the installation process. “It would take the better part of a day to tape out bricks on a pool deck,” he says. A friend of his installed linoleum floors, and Cobb took home a scrap piece one day. “I cut little brick patterns out of that linoleum floor, and I laid it down over a pool deck I had to do the next day, and I sprayed a red grout over it. When I lifted that linoleum up, I thought, ‘Wow, I’m on to something here.’” That something ultimately led to a U.S. patent on Stencil-Crete, a system for decoratively resurfacing existing concrete.