He Can Only Get It For You Wholesale

And, with a crew in town, it’s always possible to fit in another template job at the end of an afternoon and weather becomes much less of an issue.

That isn’t to say stone isn’t still making trips between Portland and Bangor. It’s that most of the traveling is done by an 18-wheeler, twice a week, carrying slabs and finished jobs between the two locations.

Click photo for gallery“Portland is really a boutique facility,” says Qualey. “We have one slab there from each lot, so customers will get an idea of what a bundle looks like. Our inventory is also photographed when it comes in, so if there’s a need to see more, a designer can pull the inventory up on the computer. And, once they sign a contract, we can bring slabs there or bring them to Bangor to get what they want.”

Although he wouldn’t mind expanding his production into Portland, with such a good-sized Bangor facility to keep busy, Qualey says he doesn’t see that happening unless he can buy out a competitor there.

Despite talking about boutique products, Qualey breaks his business into three divisions: quartz, custom and commodity work. Today, quartz represents about 80 percent of his business.

“We know how to do quartz,” he says. “We stock a ton of it, we offer a lot of options with it that they don’t have to pay for, and we’re committed to it.”

Qualey Granite finds it so easy to fabricate that the company offers a five-day turnaround from template to install on it. That quick turnaround is one of the things that attracts a lot of clients to quartz.

Still, the company cut its teeth doing custom work, and Qualey says his staff includes one guy who’s a whiz with the five-axis CNC.

“He does all the projects the architects dream up,” he says. “I’ve had a hard time trying to incorporate those jobs into production, but they pay and they open up a lot of doors to other parts of those exclusive projects. Our system seems to be working.

“Then, we also have our commodity granites that keep the lights turned on. We have a couple dozen colors in stock and we turn them out for production work.”

With so much change within Qualey Granite in 2013, Matt Qualey says he’d like 2014 to be more-pleasant for everyone involved, particularly his 20 employees – a number that will grow again as he hires another sales rep and another install crew in Portland in the first quarter of this year.

“My big push in 2014 is more interaction with employees,” he says. “We have some good ones, but this is a bigger company now and I want to make sure we’re doing things to increase employees’ feelings of involvement and worth. I want to make them want to come to work in the morning because they’ve slogged through a nasty 18 months.”

Qualey admits that a few of his long-time employees left the company in the changeover to wholesale.

“Some of them were still too hung up on the retail mindset,” he says. “They weren’t problem solvers; they were just complainers. They could have changed, but they wanted to live in a vacuum, and that’s not how I operate.”

Fortunately, he believes he has good people in management positions that can take over a lot of the day-to-day operation of the company, leaving him to focus on keeping Qualey Granite growing and moving forward.

For now, though, he’s willing to also sit back and sit and enjoy his successes, including his exclusive arrangement with Cambria and the new Portland facility.

“The move to Portland is a big deal for me personally,” he says. “I came from a place where there were two people in my grade in school, so it’s a big deal to have a place in Portland. I’m really proud of my whole company.”

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