BowStone Inc., Ball Ground, Ga.

June 7, 2007

Bowker started his adventures in the stone trade looking for a top for furniture in his home office. Along the way, he met a man who told him about waterjet cutting. Interest met opportunity and BowStone Inc. opened its doors in July 2006.
It might be easy to dismiss Bowker as a dilettante with an expensive piece of machinery if you didn’t know he’d already had one career as a successful entrepreneur. With some experienced employees creating a mix of high-end countertops and custom furniture, he’s already looking to double his workforce and his facilities – and he’s only just getting started.

SOMETHING DIFFERENT
If the furniture-top experience had turned out differently, Bowker might still be running his other company … instead of cutting granite and marble and going out on installations.
“I went to the usual places for getting countertops,” he explains. “It was just so expensive. Then, I went by a place that sold mostly marble, and learned they did mostly commercial work and only large jobs.”
At that stop, he also talked with a man who told him about waterjet cutting. Gus Atmatzidis has been in the business for 30 years; “now, he’s one of my best friends, and he’s constantly pointing me in the direct direction through the fabrication business and life,” Bowker says.
Perhaps because he’s now in his early 40s, Bowker was feeling the desire to do something different with his life and, he says, “work with my hands and be creative.”
By just about any measure, Bowker was already a success. He holds a degree in electronics engineering; after being laid off from a computer-support job, he took $600 he’d saved up for a vacation and started his own business in his garage.
“I’d actually thought about opening my own business before, but I thought I’d take the safe way,” he explains. “Then, when I got laid off, I really didn’t have any choice, but I did have a start-up plan in my mind.”
The plan was obviously a good one. Today, the company employs some 500 people, and it provides computer service and support to a number of companies, including several in the Fortune 100.
“We do break-fix installations,” Bowker explains. “If a PC breaks, we fix it. It used to be called maintenance. We also do projects and changes for these companies, but we’re basically stuck with somebody saying, ‘I want my computer to do this.’”
Bowker is currently exploring different options for the future of that company, although as its CEO (chief executive officer), he says, “I still have to attend a meeting here and there.”
However, intrigued with what he’d been told about waterjets, he began researching the machines, ultimately purchasing a WARDJet Inc. C-813. (The company also operates a Komo Machine Inc. bridge saw).
“I put out inquires to all of them, but WARDJet was the most-responsive,” he says. “I thought if I was going to get into something that’s new and have a problem with my machine, I’m going to want someone who’s responsive.”
He adds that the company’s responsiveness was really put to the test only a few weeks after the machine went in. Tired of moving slabs around with a single helper, Bowker added a crane to the operation.
“The people putting in the crane dropped something on it (the waterjet) and it broke,” he says. “But, the people from WARDJet were right on it. The parts were trucked down and we had the machine up and running the next day.”

HAVING CREATIVITY
Rather than start in his garage this time, Bowker opted to put his new business in an industrial park in the small town of Ball Ground, Ga., some 40 miles north of Atlanta.
“I was actually looking for something closer to the city, but this is the only facility that had enough power and sewer, other than a rundown building in the city,” he says. “Since our goal is to do custom work, I didn’t think it was necessary to be right in the heart of the city. If people are going to spend that kind of money, they aren’t going to mind driving.”
It also offers some other important amenities, including a 12,000 ft² building on a four-and-a-half-acre lot, an acre-and-a-half of which is paved. That offers good space to display the approximately 500 slabs in 100 different colors BowStone typically has in stock.
The industrial-park location was also critical in the early days of the business when Bowker was subbing out the metal work that went into the company’s custom furniture.
“It got to be painful, so we all got some training in welding and became certified welders,” he explains, adding that the problem wasn’t necessarily the metal work itself, but the limitations of the people creating the designs.
“The benefit to us doing all the fabrication in-house is that when we’re making something and we draw it out on paper and then do it, we might end up going, “Hmm, that doesn’t look right,’” Bowker explains. “We can then change it, which is a lot better than subbing it out and then saying that it wasn’t what we wanted.”
It’s obvious that making high-end custom furniture incorporating stone is Bowker’s first love. He says because his typical client doesn’t know what he or she is really looking for, it involves a lot of creativity.
“They’ll say that they’re looking for a table, but they don’t know what they want,” he explains. “They’ll say that they want a particular stone, but when we ask them about the base, they really don’t know.”
In those cases, Bowker and his crew have the creativity to come up with an idea. Sometimes, if the customer doesn’t like the product after it’s built, BowStone keeps it and puts it the showroom, although it doesn’t always stay there long.
“We have nice offices here, with marble on the floors and on the walls that we did ourselves,” he says. “But, I’ll sell the office bookshelves with the marble on top, or the desks, or the conference table, because then we get to make some new stuff and try some new stuff. If the customers aren’t waiting for it, we can play with it a little and make it different.”
However, it isn’t always easy being creative, Bowker adds. Coming up with a new design isn’t something you can work on 10 straight hours. And, he says if someone comes up with a better ides two weeks into the process, that can also stretch out the completion time.
While some designs might come from a single slab, because of the waterjet, BowStone also creates a lot of intricate inlay work.
“Because of the stone characteristics, you can only get so small with some of these,” Bowker explains. “It’s not that you can’t cut it small, but when you touch it, it’s going to break.
“Often, it’s like doing a puzzle. The bigger ones are a little more manageable, but with the smaller ones, you can only work three or four hours and then you have to walk away.”

A STEP ABOVE
BowStone might’ve been strictly a maker of custom furniture, but Bowker opted to advertise his new business, and that’s when things really got busy.
The whole idea of advertising was a new one to Bowker. He explains that his computer business was built strictly by word-of-mouth.
“I thought that wouldn’t work for this because it was new and something I wasn’t familiar with,” he says. “We did some mailings, and it paid off.”
One of the first responses came from a major flooring manufacturer that wanted to refer its distributors to BowStone. Then, the company started hearing from custom homebuilders in the area.
“They asked if we could do countertops, and now we’re doing all their custom countertops and vanities,” he says. “Then, we started hearing from landscape companies wanting to know if we could cut boulders. As people have gotten to know we can do the work, the word on BowStone has spread quickly.”
Luckily, the company was up to the challenge of that additional work. Among his first hires (he now has four employees) were a couple men who had moved to the Atlanta area from Florida, where both had been working for stone-fabrication shops there for almost a decade.
“They were looking for jobs and I gave them a chance and it’s been wonderful so far,” Bowker says. “We’re all trained to do everything. Everybody’s certified in welding; everybody knows how to program the computer. Everybody knows how to fabricate, and everybody knows how to install.”
It may not be the most-efficient way to do things, but he adds that it’s definitely preventing employee burnout. Also atypically, Bowker or one of his employees carries a job from start to finish.
“I’ll sell the project, I’ll build the frame and I’ll finish the stone,” he says. “My enthusiasm is so much more this way. When I was selling computers, I’d say, ‘This is what we offer; take it or leave it.’ When I’m selling a piece of stone or a piece of furniture, I’m totally into it.”
In fact, if Bowker has a complaint it’s that as the business has grown, he’s been forced to spend more time in the office. It’s not unusual for him to be to work at 4 a.m.
“I come in early, so I can get some time in the shop,” he says. “As we grow, I’m going to hire someone to do the office stuff. That’s not what I signed up for; if I’d wanted that, I could have stayed at my other job.”
Possibly the only thing Bowker has really tried to bring with him from his previous job is a passion for quality.
“We feel our seams are beyond anything our customers have seen before,” he says. “Often, you can put your hand on a new countertop and feel the seams, but we pride ourselves on doing things better, and that gives us an edge. We also guarantee everything we do, and there aren’t a bunch of add-on charges or anything like that.”
And, he adds, by doing quality work for custom homes, it showcases the company’s abilities and helps in the end to sell more furniture.
Some volunteer work by Bowker for Habitat for Humanity in the Atlanta area led to the company providing everything from countertops and vanities to a sign – custom-cut from a boulder – for a local stop of the ABC home-improvement show Extreme Makeover: Home Edition. BowStone has since done similar work for the program’s makeovers in Arizona, Arkansas, Kansas, Missouri and New York.
“We’ve done other work in Alabama and Florida,” says Bowker. “We did some work for a $4 million hone in Charlotte, N.C., but it wasn’t just countertops; it was something creative.”
All this exposure has the future looking pretty bright for BowStone. The company has booked three months of orders in custom tables alone, and Bowker’s preparing to do a mass-mailing to interior decorators and designers in the Atlanta area.
Even without the boost he expects that to bring, he’s already lined up financing to erect a second 15,000 ft² building on his property, and to add a CNC machine to the mix. And, before that happens, he expects to at least double his workforce.
Until all that comes together, though, Bowker is working seven days a week, often from that 4 a.m. start time until 9 p.m.. Not that he’s complaining … much.
“I eat my dinner and I’m content,” he says. “I just didn’t see this coming, and when you’ve got customers willing to spend $30,000, you can’t make them wait another couple weeks. I’d like to be working eight-to-10 hours, five days a week, but it’s hard starting a business.”
And, will he be looking to start another business 10-15 years from now? He doubts it.
“I just don’t want to get in the cookie-cutter mode,” says Bowker. “My goal has always been to do something that nobody else is doing, or that nobody else can do. If somebody else is doing it, we’ll make sure we can do it better.”