Stone People: Finding the Best Solution

By K. Schipper

VINEYARD, Utah – Dan Nelson has a big piece of advice for people in the stone industry: Look at where your money’s being made.

For Nelson’s early career in stone, that meant countertops. And, he did quite well with them, going from being a guy with a rail saw to an automated shop and multiple employees as part of his MGS (Marble and Granite Solutions) by Design.

Click photo to enlargeHowever, Nelson grew up around stone importing, and in the mid-2000s he began to be concerned about the long-term health of the housing market. In 2004, he launched a second stone-related business, GSI (Global Stone Inc.), to tap into the commercial market with an emphasis on cladding.

Today, he’s in the process of building out a facility to fabricate panels, and he says his secret to success has been a lot of thinking ahead, learning from the past, hiring good people and then getting out of their way.

STEP-BY-STEP

If there’s possibly one advantage Dan Nelson brings to the table when it comes to business, it’s that he grew up in the stone industry.

As he explains it, his mother is from Mexico, and her family was in the business there.

“As I grew up, we’d go down there quite a bit,” he says. “Then, my dad started importing stone to this country in the early ‘70s.”

Given that background, it’s only natural the young man would turn to what he knew to make extra money for college. He started MGS in 1996.

“I was just trying to find a way to pay for school,” he says. “At that time, I didn’t have a real shop. It was just a small space and I was bringing in some prefab stuff that was being done in Mexico.”

However, Nelson says it wasn’t a good situation. Regardless of how he would send the specifications for his jobs to the prefab people – either template or dimensions – the result wasn’t cut correctly and he’d end up doing a lot of work once the pieces arrived.

It was at that point he started buying slabs. He would bring in as much stone as he could afford, then fabricate it.

Click photo to enlargeThere also weren’t a lot of people doing countertop fabrication, leaving him, he says, “my pick of the clients.”

He describes his fabrication methods in those days as “a lot of elbow grease.” He was polishing with ceramics for most of the first year, and cutting was a painful process in every sense of the word.

“I spent a lot of time on my knees at a little table I’d made with a rail saw that I had to hand-push,” Nelson says. “It was very, very difficult.”

Even in those early days, though, Nelson wasn’t convinced that his time was best spent in the shop. In 1999, he hired someone to run the operation for him, and went to the stone-rich Espirito Santo state in southeastern Brazil to sell granite blocks and slabs to the external market.

When he returned a year later, he began seriously expanding MGS, beginning with the purchase of a Park Industries bridge saw. Today, the company operates CNCs from Gmm and Marmo Meccanica, along with a polishing machine and a waterjet.

“We just did it step-by-step,” Nelson says. “There was no miracle. Well, I guess I shouldn’t say that; there were lots of little miracles.”

As for college – the reason behind all this work – he sheepishly admits that he never finished.

“I couldn’t do both, and by the time I was 22 or 23 I was making a six-figure income,” he says, adding that many of his friends who graduated with good majors made less than half that. “I just never got it done, but it’s still one of my personal goals. It’s just that I did better outside the classroom.”