Stone People: Amping Up the Business
MORE THAN JUST AFLOAT
Despite those fearful salespeople wanting to lower prices, Wyman has enjoyed something else that many people haven’t in the past decade: He’s posted steady growth numbers every year since opening his doors.
It isn’t just having a small number of competitors, either. Although Poulsbo may be small, Wyman says Kitsap County has approximately a quarter-million residents, and a strong military presence thanks to Naval Base Kitsap, the third-largest Navy base in the United States.
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“The military has kept us afloat,” he says. “Those guys have steady paychecks, and our county hasn’t been hit quite so bad.”
Today, Wyman estimates up to 50 percent of his work is granite, with another 30 percent to 35 percent in quartz, and the remainder with solid-surface products. However, he says a couple of his recent large projects have specified Corian.
“We’re doing a 50-unit hospital annex here and several different military jobs, and they’re all specifying solid surface,” he says. “The nice thing is that some of my competitors who do granite don’t do quartz, and almost none of them do Corian. When somebody specifies Corian they don’t have much choice but to call us, and we tell them we also do granite.”
Wyman adds that Creative Countertops is beginning to see more commercial and institutional jobs than it did even a few years ago. He estimates that market segment has grown to as much as 20 percent of his work. and some of it is coming from unique places.
Leading the list is a Portland, Ore.-based company, Boden Alexander, which supplies casework and cabinets to some retail heavy-hitters. Wyman says he’s done several cosmetics counters for Nordstrom Inc. department stores and similar high-end outlets, as well as for Union Bank branches.
“They send us the templates from Portland,” he says. “We build them and they send a truck to pick them up, so we don’t even have to do the installs. It’s really easy.”
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Despite that long reach, Wyman says as much as 90 percent of his work is within 10-20 miles of his shop. And, despite the presence of Seattle across Puget Sound, he says there’s not a lot of spill-over either way, because people have to drive around the sound or take a ferry.
Not surprisingly – and despite his gift of gab – he says much of his work comes from referrals.
“We’ve done probably 250-300 jobs a year for the last ten years, so we get a lot of referrals,” Wyman relates. “They may say, ‘You did my neighbor’s house five years ago and now I’m ready to do my kitchen,’ or we even get repeats where we did a bathroom years ago and now they’re ready for that kitchen.”
MOVING TOWARD THE FUTURE
Although Yellow Pages ads once had their place in his marketing plan, “I’m starting to shrink those down,” he says. Instead, he relies on his website and blog, and on ads in a local home-and-garden magazine that publishes quarterly.
