About Us
Hi, I'm Tom Hay, President and founder of Project Masters. A native of Indiana, I've been doing construction and handyman work in the New York area for over 20 years. But I also spent many years working in the client service side of marketing, and that's what gave me the idea for Project Masters. I wanted to bring big-company customer service to the business of small-scale home improvement and repair.
Who You Gonna Call?
As my friends and I graduated from apartments to homes, I kept hearing the same thing over and over: "I can't get to the things I want done around the house, but I don't know who to call." The more I helped out friends and friends of friends, the more I heard it. I created Project Masters to address that need: someone you can call when you want reliable, quality results for small household projects.
Tom Hay comes from a long line of builders and tradesmen in South Bend, Indiana. His great-grandfather built homes for the Studebaker brothers, his grandfather and father helped build some of the city's most important structures, and his brother has designed and built a wide array of distinctive, high-end homes in the area.
So why is Tom doing handyman work? "Because I love it!" he says. "I've always loved building and fixing things - it's what I think about all the time. It just took me awhile to realize I could make a career out of it."
Tom originally set out to depart from the family business. He got an MBA and ventured into marketing & advertising in NYC, spending many years as a senior executive in Account Management. But he couldn't get home improvement out of his system. "I started out doing jobs for friends, and then for friends of friends, and before long I had a thriving side business," he recalls. "The more it grew, the more I realized how much better I liked it than working in an office."
After working with different building crews on a variety of projects as a volunteer, he decided to step away from the advertising business altogether and pursue handyman work full-time. Project Masters, Inc. was launched in 2002 to focus on small-scale projects. "From my client service background and side jobs, I knew how important details are to people, and I liked getting them right. But most contractors I worked with hated the small stuff. It seemed like a great opportunity for me to do what I love and to make people happy at the same time."