Sky and Monte Job at Quality Surfaces, Inc. Photo by James Kellar
BY LEE ANN SANDWEISS
Monte and Sky Job have had one of the hardest years of their lives—grieving the loss of their brother, Mike, while assuming responsibility for his business, Quality Surfaces, Inc. Mike Job, 57, a local businessman, philanthropist, and community activist, died on Christmas night 2011 in a motorbike accident while vacationing in Mexico.
“Everything was a blur at the time,” remembers Sky. “Since it was just the two of us left, we knew that Monte had to come home and help run the business.” Sky had been working off and on with Mike since he started Quality Surfaces in Bloomington in 1990, specializing in the making of solid surface countertops.
Shortly after Mike’s passing, Monte moved back to Indiana from Austin, Texas, where he’d been working in the IT industry. Since then, he and Sky have been managing Quality Surfaces, its 21 employees, and its large state-of-the-art fabrication facility, design center, and stone building in Spencer, as well as its mobile showroom.
“Mike was an extreme multitasker who worked things through in his mind but didn’t write everything down,” says Monte. “The biggest challenge has been trying to understand where he was trying to go and follow through with what he wanted. Fortunately, he believed in group decision making and had an amazing, informed staff that has been helping us figure that out.”
Monte and Sky say that Mike’s presence still looms large at Quality Surfaces. Visitors to the showroom immediately see some of the artwork he collected over the years and his open, smiling face in a photograph on a large easel near the front desk. His beloved rescue dogs—Ellie, a ten-year-old chocolate Labrador; Becca, a three-year-old shar-pei mix; and Sierra, the two-legged German shepard-huskie “wonder dog”—have the run of the place and greet visitors. Ellie likes to hang out on the conference room floor when the Jobs meet with clients.
Not only are Monte and Sky carrying on the day-to-day operations as their brother would have wanted—from helping a customer select a piece of granite for their kitchen counter to overseeing the delivery of exotic stone from Brazil, India, or other faraway places—they are supporting the charities that were important to him.
“All three of us were 4-H kids growing up in Owen County,” says Sky. “We want to keep doing things in the community that were important to Mike, like Habitat for Humanity’s Women Build that we’ll be taking part of in May. Mike is with us every day in spirit.”
