Stone People: Amping Up the Business

By K. Schipper

POULSBO, Wash. – You might say Bill Wyman knows a lot about hitting the right notes.

The owner of Creative Countertops Inc. spent several of his younger years in a traveling band, and even today his hobbies are writing music and playing lead guitar in two bands that practice in his shop.

However, he’s also in tune with his granite-fabrication business – his fourth career, he says — that he started in 2001.  Wyman says not only has the business continued to grow through the recession, but he’s personally been able to make the transition from being one of the guys back in the shop to become a true owner/manager.

THE STUFF OF DREAMS

A Virginia native, Wyman was driving a forklift when he and his then bandmates got the sort of break that seems to happen more frequently in Hollywood than in real life.

A large Richmond, Va., radio station ran a contest for bands to record a song and send it in. The station then put the songs in rotation and asked listeners to vote on them. After two rounds of competition, the listeners chose his band and the song Wyman helped write.

The prize was an opportunity to headline a concert at one of Richmond’s larger music venues. And, waiting backstage was a man who said he managed music groups and would shop their songs around.

“He also said, ‘You guys ought to quit your jobs and go on the road; I can get you gigs every night,’” Wyman relates. “So, we quit our jobs and went on the road for six or seven years, playing every little town in the South.”

Eventually, maturity intervened. The band broke up and Wyman decided to marry a young woman he had met in a small town near Wilmington, N.C. His next step: selling insurance door-to-door.

“I needed the job,” he says. “Most people last about two months, but I lasted seven years, and I ended up being able to talk to anybody about anything.”

Click photo to enlargeWyman eventually tired of the door-to-door routine. Assessing his interests, he decided to answer an ad for woodworkers.

“But, they tricked me,” he says. “It was really to do (DuPont™) Corian® fabrication.”

Trick or not, Wyman was still making Corian countertops eight years later when he and his wife decided to relocate from Wilmington to Washington state to be closer to her family.

Just like all those years ago when he and his bandmates won that contest, Wyman says things clicked and have kept on clicking. Not only did he find pay scales to be better in the Northwest, but the couple chose to live in Poulsbo, a community of some 10,000 people where, he says, “There wasn’t a lot of competition.”

Still, developing Creative Countertops wasn’t an easy birth. Wyman says they arrived with about $13,000 from the sale of a duplex. After renting a house with a garage that served as Creative’s first shop, paying some bills and buying a van in which to do deliveries, not much remained for working capital.

“I’d do a job and buy a tool, do a job and buy another tool, do another job and buy another tool,” he says. “It’s a hard way to start, but everything I had was paid for; there was no debt.”

The business started slowly, but then Wyman got a job for countertops for a 40-unit subdivision. With that much work, he was able to hire a couple helpers and rent a shop space. Six years ago, Creative Countertops moved into its current location; two years later, Wyman rented additional space for a larger showroom.