Stone People: The Rocky Road to Recovery

By K. Schipper

KALAMAZOO, Mich. – A year from now, Thomas Reaume, founder of Southwest Michigan Granite (SMG), expects to be out of the business.

However, it’s not that either he or the business will be going very far. Reaume expects to be back doing more general construction, which first got him into granite fabrication 17 years ago.

Click photo to enlargeAt the same time, the company will continue under the leadership of his son, Tyler, who’s been running the production portion of the operation.

The senior Reaume has a lot of information to impart as SMG has gone from the mountaintop to the valley – along with the rest of Michigan’s economy – in recent years. He says he’s done his best to put his son and the company back into a rebuilding mode.

“A GOOD BUSINESS…FOR A WHILE”

Thomas Reaume’s background is a little atypical for the stone industry. He spent the first 18 years of his working life designing pension plans, although in the end he says, “I got sort of bored with it.”

Looking for something else to do, he bought some land and started to build spec homes – specs that included granite.

“I really liked the granite I was buying, but the guys who were selling it to me were just unbelievably difficult,” he says. “I thought, ‘If these guys can make money, I can be successful.’ That’s how I started.”

At that time, Reaume also felt he’d do better in something more specific than general construction. He took money out of everything he had and opened his own shop.

Reaume says getting started was a little tough, mainly because no one in his area wanted to open up about the industry. Instead, he ended up visiting shops in Colorado, Florida and Ohio to get more information.

“That’s how I started it, and we ended up doing real well for awhile,” he says. “We had a really good run for about 12 years, and then the bottom fell out of the Michigan economy in 2008, and we almost lost everything we had.”

Click photo to enlargeWhen Reaume says “almost everything,” he means it. At its peak, the business encompassed 26 employees, three shop/showroom operations and two standalone showrooms. Today, SMG consists of the Kalamazoo shop and showroom and a salesperson working from a home office in the Lansing, Mich., market.

If there’s any consolation, he says his biggest competitor shut its doors completely; it’s a fate Reaume estimates is shared by probably 30 percent of the fabrication shops in business in southwest Michigan five years ago.

Nor is the market bouncing merrily back.

“It was a good business for awhile, but it’s a very, very tough business to be in now,” he says. “If you don’t run it like every dollar is your last, you’re setting yourself up for a fall. There are fewer shops making granite and fewer people buying it, but it’s still very competitive.”

Not that Reaume has strictly been selling granite all these years. Although he started with natural stone, he later added quartz surfaces, then tile and then cabinets.

As with other aspects of the business, he says adding the cabinets has been a mixed blessing.

“Of course, the cabinet shops we used to do business with won’t buy from us any more because we’re a competitor,” he observes. “There’s also a learning curve involved with them. We’ve started to cut back on cabinets and not order as much because we’ve found some good relationships again with companies that are doing cabinets and we don’t want to step on their toes.”