Stone People: Back Again (and Again and …)

“I went to him and said, ‘I have all this work and no place to do it.’ He threw me his keys and said, ‘My house is your house,’ and we’ve been operating like this for almost three years now.”

He explains that the Royal Marble shop includes a CNC machine; Graham’s focus is on production jobs, many for big-box clients. At the end of 2009, he certainly wasn’t using all his capacity, so he and Beber struck a deal where Beber uses his equipment, but the nine people doing Beber’s fabrication and installation date back to his Centsible Tile days.

Click photo for gallery“They’re still the best in the business as far as I’m concerned,” he says. “I’ve known some of them for 25-30 years, and I won’t do it without them.”

And, despite access to the CNC – something Beber never had at Centsible Tile – he’s still using production methods that today some might consider old-fashioned.

“We use the automation for the straight runs, but I still believe my ogee edge is better than anything that’s been done on a machine,” he says. “The machines can put a bullnose edge on – but once it comes off the machine, we’re going to take it to the level I want on it. I’ve always been about quality and I still think there’s a niche for that.”

It’s much the same way with cutting the pieces for a job. A decade ago, Beber was all about inviting his clients in to Centsible Tile to see their template placed on their slab and then staying to watch it being cut.

Today, he’s willing to take a photo of the slab and impose the template over it, but he’s still happy to have clients come in and watch as their stone is processed. These days, part of that is to explain how his people are artists and how they’re adding value to the material.

But, he says the clients have also changed over the years.

“People are now comfortable with stone,” Beber says. “That’s how it’s evolved as a product. They used to be intimidated by it.”

Beber says he respects the CNC’s ability to cut shapes, especially when the material is quartz and there are no veins involved. However, if the job involves multiple pieces of, say, Juperana, he’s going to put it on the bridge saw.

“I want to put the second slab next to the first slab so we can do what we can to make it as pretty as it can be,” Beber says. “We laugh sometimes because he (the sawyer) will cut a slab and I’ll say, ‘Why do you cut it in two pieces?’ and he’ll say, ‘Risk. There’s no risk if we cut it in two and have a joint.’

“I’d send four guys out to install the piece because when it’s done it’s going to look the way I know it’s supposed to look – without a joint,” he adds. “If we break it, we break it; that’s the risk in this industry.”

“IT’S A JOURNEY”

Beber may still be focusing on turning out a high-end product, but he says in the end his business is really about relationships.

He adds that a couple fortunate decisions regarding telephone service went a long way to help keep those jobs coming in. The first was that he paid for – and kept – his own cell phone when he sold Centsible Tile. And, later, after that bankruptcy, he worked diligently to obtain his old business phone number.

“When they went out of business, the first thing I did was call AT&T and tell them I wanted that phone number,” he relates. “Well, for a year it goes into a dead zone, but I would call religiously every month for that year. Finally, the last time I called, it had just come up and I got my number back.”

Initially, he says it produced a lot of repair calls from people who had bought jobs from the new owners. However, once he worked through those, he began to hear from people he’d worked for years ago.

He relates one recent experience he had involving a couple for whom he’d done a kitchen in 2003.

“They called the number and I happened to be about two miles away at a slab yard,” Beber says. “I told them to stay where they were and I’d come over. I recognized the woman right away and described the kitchen, and she couldn’t believe I’d remember that. Now, I’m doing another big job for them.”