Brothers in the Big Sky

It’s a testament to how busy the company has been that the new building has been used mainly for storage, although the process is now underway to clean it out and convert its 4,500 ft² of space on three acres into a new fabrication shop.

“It should be much more conducive to the flow of work,” Malisani says. “It will have updated electrical and everything else. Our current building wasn’t built to do that; it was built to prefabricate terrazzo, and there are still wood slats in the concrete floor because of that. It works because we’ve made it work, but with the new facility, hopefully we’ll pick up some efficiency.”

Click photo to enlargeThe stone shop is modestly automated and includes a radial arm polisher, a Gmm gantry saw, a C-arm polisher, and a radial-arm polisher. The company also has a lathe for turning stone and terrazzo products.

A lot of the production is still done with hand tools, and with a team of a dozen full-time employees, many are versed in everything from working in the fabrication shop to setting a tile floor to installing terrazzo and cladding.

The only real specialist on the staff is the sawyer, and a lot of that has to do with the company’s need to have someone capable of cutting everything from a basic granite kitchen to exotic materials and even doing book-matching for cladding.

“A good example of something out of the ordinary is a job we did last year,” Tony Malisani relates. “A guy bought a bunch of slate for flooring and it didn’t come the way he thought it would. We spent about three days cutting 2,500 ft² of slate down to dimensional size, squaring it up, and gauging the thickness so it would work for him.”

While the Malisanis are justifiably proud of the skills their crews bring to any job, Tony Malisani is particularly pleased that the shop was among the earliest to seek – and receive – Marble Institute of America fabricator accreditation.

“When you look at what’s coming down the pike, we just wanted to do better,” explains Malisani, who worked in the formation of the MIA program. “Anybody who’s in business now has to be thinking about what’s in the future and how they’re going to meet those requirements.”

Then, of course, there’s the idea of differentiating the business in a competitive marketplace.

“Everybody wants to show how they’re different and how they’re better, but I don’t think anything speaks more loudly than accreditation,” he adds. “That’s a third party – in this case the Marble Institute of America – certifying that we have these abilities and talents, we have the facilities, we have the history and we have the business acumen to meet their standards.”Click photo to enlarge

The fact that the family name is on the business also makes it important, he says.

“Everybody knows who you are when your name is on the business,” Malisani observes. “We’ve both been around it as long as we can remember, so to have somebody else recognize we’re doing a good job is a pretty satisfying thing.”

Also pretty satisfying is that indications are a fourth generation of Malisanis will be taking over the business some day. Art already has a daughter and son-in-law working at Malisani Inc., and Tony’s oldest son is majoring in business management in college and spending vacations – you guessed it – in the shop.

“I don’t know what will happen with the rest of my kids,” Tony Malisani says. “My one daughter who worked for me two summers ago got a different job last summer because she didn’t want to work here. That’s fine. I don’t want to force it on the kids; being in business is tough enough as it is, and you should want to do it.”

And, in the meantime, the Malisani brothers will continue to be as flexible as possible and keep planning for the future – whatever it holds.

“Could we be busier?” he asks rhetorically. “You bet. Could we have more employees? Sure. But we try to maintain our core and remember that there are opportunities everywhere. It’s just a matter of how you’re going to pursue it and how you’re going to position yourself for it.”

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