Setting a Course for Success

June 6, 2005

CORTLAND, N.Y. – Just as a rudderless ship doesn’t get very far, neither does a business when it doesn’t have a goal and a direction to steer toward.

With Wilbedone Inc., the problem wasn’t lack of vision, but rather conflicting views of what the two partners wanted out of their solid-surface operation. Only when Thomas Beames bought out his partner after 10 years in business did the company begin to realize its full potential.

With a single hand on the helm, Beames expanded the operation into stone and quartz surfaces, making substantial additions of employees and equipment in the process. Although Wilbedone has since backed out of the granite market, a judicious decision to focus on quartz surfaces allows the company to enjoy annual growth rates of more than 20 percent – and Beames says he has no reason to believe that won’t continue through at least the rest of the decade.

GOING HOME

Initially, Thomas Beames’ goal was simply to return to his hometown of Cortland, N.Y., a community of approximately 50,000 people located about 40 miles south of Syracuse, N.Y.

The year was 1988, and Beames already had a career track that included management positions with Grossman’s, a Stoughton, Mass.-based company that sells lumber retail under at least three different business names; management of a petroleum plant; and other lumberyard experience.

“A friend who knew I wanted to come back to Cortland called and asked if I’d be interested in starting a Corian® countertop shop,” he explains. “I told him I’d have to talk to my wife about it, then called back later and said, ‘Sure, why not.’ In July 1988 we started the countertop shop as Wilbedone Inc.”

Beames explains the name is a combination of his former partner’s last name, Williams, his own last name, and the pair’s commitment, “to get the job done.” The idea, he adds, was that he would provide the management and sales know-how, and his partner would be the hands-on, in-the-shop guy.

Unfortunately, the two men weren’t on the same wavelength in terms of what they wanted from the business.

“He was retired from another profession and he was looking at the job as a hobby,” Beames says. “I was looking at this as a way to fund my own retirement. He was thinking about doing two or three countertops a week, while I was thinking about three or four a day.”

By the time the company hit that three-or-four-a-day level – approximately 10 years after opening its doors – Beames’ partner decided he could no longer handle the pace of the business, and Beames bought him out.

Even before assuming sole ownership of Wilbedone, Beames says the company had been eyeing the granite countertop market for expansion, but felt the cost of buying the necessary equipment was too expensive. When DuPont began sales of its Zodiaq® quartz-surface line, Beames decided the time was right to take the plunge because of his company’s experience with Corian.

“We knew if DuPont was investing in Zodiaq there was something in the natural quartz that was important, and it was going to be a big thing down the road,” he says. “Once we saw the Zodiaq coming along we decided to make the investment.”

GIANT STEPS

The move into the natural-quartz and granite market required Wilbedone and Beames to take several large steps.
One was to find a larger shop. The company tripled its floor space by moving from its original location into a 20,000 ft² manufacturing facility. The space proved necessary to house the growing array of Marmo Meccanica S.p.a. equipment the company operates.

“We started with a bridge saw and an LTH 721 automatic horizontal polisher,” Beames explains. “We also purchased a couple hand routers from Regent Stone Supply, and that’s how we started. Since then, we’ve purchased a backsplash machine, another bridge saw and then two CNC machines. This year we’ve purchased another CNC and a waterjet.”

Beames says his decision to go with Marmo Meccanica was quite simple. He attended several tradeshows and talked with different vendors before making his choice.

“The Marmo rep I talked with seemed to be the most-informed,” he says. “He also had an attitude that he was more concerned about who we were and what we were doing over what equipment he was going to sell us. He wanted us to have the right equipment for the job, and I felt the most comfortable about buying the company’s equipment.”

If there’s anything ironic in all this, it’s that today Wilbedone offers neither Zodiaq nor natural-stone countertops.

Beames explains that about six months after the initial equipment went in and the shop began fabricating Zodiaq, the company was offered the chance to carry Cosentino’s Silestone®.

“We looked at the Silestone and they gave us a territory,” he says. “DuPont and Zodiaq don’t have any such animal. Plus, Silestone is a national account for Home Depot, so whoever the distributor/fabricator is for an area has all the Home Depot accounts. It was sort of a no-brainer.”

That initially gave Wilbedone a dozen Home Depots to service in upstate New York and as far west as Buffalo, N.Y. The number has since grown to 31, with number 32 on its way. While the figure is impressive, Beames says servicing them is quite similar to the way the company handles its other accounts.

“We have three templaters/installers in the Buffalo market and another in the area north of Syracuse for Home Depot,” he says. “All we do is deliver the finished product to them.”

And, he admits that the association isn’t always an easy flow. Early on, Beames says some of his kitchen and bath dealers balked at what they saw as having to compete with the retail giant. Plus, Home Depot has its own timelines that need to be met.

“It’s not a problem meeting them, it’s just the way they’re scheduled,” says Beames. “As soon as a job goes into the hopper for Home Depot, the timeline starts, even though the customer may not want the job for three months. The way they read it is totally different than the actual timeline.”

In reality, he says, the company expects a 10-day turnaround from template to installation, which is the schedule on which Wilbedone does its other work, as well.

Beames stresses his company is strictly a wholesale supplier. Besides its Home Depot and kitchen-and-bath-shop clients, it also works with homebuilders and remodelers, and he has a salesperson dedicated to building those relationships.

AIMING HIGHER

Wilbedone’s clientele isn’t the only place where Beames has been selective. Although he first started buying stone-fabrication equipment with an eye on the granite countertop market, these days the company’s sole product is Silestone.

“We found the natural quartz and the granite really didn’t go together as far as being able to send it through our manufacturing system and have it come out in one piece at the other end,” he explains. “If the guys would do five natural-quartz jobs and then a granite job, they’d grab onto the granite job and it would break.”

Beames stresses the move is not to say there isn’t a demand for granite from his customers, or that people haven’t told him he was nuts for dropping the product. He’s even been offered the opportunity to pick up overflow from the shop that cuts granite countertops for the Home Depots in his area, but he’s declined.

“We got so busy we couldn’t do our job correctly,” he says. “We took a step back, said, ‘Our problem here is granite; let’s eliminate that.’ We’ve gone back to our basics, and we do what we do right.

“Our sales have also gone up, so it wasn’t a bad move.”

Wilbedone still does solid-surface countertops as well, although that part of the business is small by comparison. Of the company’s 50 employees, only six to eight work in the solid-surface shop.

Along with the four contract installation crews for its Home Depot work, Beames currently has six full-time crews of his own. Besides the approximately 20 people in the fabrication shop, he also employs a general manager, an office staff of five and two computer operators who diagram templates and program the CNC machines.

While the shop does electronic templating, Beames says the company also does some of its templates the old-fashioned way.

“If we’re doing a straight edge on a bridge saw, we want a final template,” he says. “Even if we do an electronic template, we end up making a physical template with plastic and our printer so that we have something before it goes out the door to match it up with.”

Dual templating aside, Wilbedone is in the process of making its biggest technological leap yet. The company is currently upgrading its Website to including an electronic quoting system that should be in place late this spring.

“When it’s all set up, our customers will be able to go in with their own codes and do their own quoting,” he says. “They’ll also be able to go in and find out where their jobs are situated in our workflow, as well as e-mail back and forth with us.”

That new, improved Website is only part of a larger computer upgrade that will give the company the ability to track each job from beginning to end as it moves through the shop, generate reports on inventory, and provide bar codes for tracking materials.

“All of this should make things considerably easier for us,” says Beames. “It will give us control over a number of things we’ve wrestled with, including inventory control and management, as well as workflow.”

Although Wilbedone has utilized different systems for doing quotes in the past, Beames says having an up-to-date system is particularly critical as the company continues to grow. And, with the addition of its third CNC machine and Marmo Meccanica USA’s first waterjet in the United States, growth is definitely what the company is prepared for.

“Once the equipment and everything is in place, we’ll start looking at putting on a second shift,” Beames says. “We don’t need to be adding equipment; we can double our production that way.”

Even though he says the economy in his market area isn’t as robust as in some other parts of the country, Beames notes that Cosentino is adding production lines and increasing its advertising of Silestone, and he plans to grow right along with it.

“Our greatest success is growing every year, from two guys and $10,000 to $4 million a year in sales,” Beames concludes. “This whole market is going to continue to grow.

“Everybody needs countertops, and places like Home Depot and Lowe’s have made them a commodity. A few years ago, people would look at these and say, ‘That’s expensive.’ Now, it’s just the price you pay for something nice. Granite and natural quartz and solid surface are all selling, and I think they’re going to continue to do that.”

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