Milwaukee Marble & Granite Co., Milwaukee

   It’s also a company that has successfully mechanized while maintaining the craftsmanship buyers associate with hand-finishing. However, the current boom in residential countertops affected both lead times and scheduling until new owner Paul Baldino made some organizational changes and placed different operations under separate veteran executives.
   Although Baldino says some additional minor changes may be in order, he’s confident that Milwaukee Marble and Granite is good for generations to come.
  
SOLID PAST
   Baldino may be new to the company, but Milwaukee Marble and Granite began life in the latter years of the 19th Century. Thomas Byrnes, who currently heads the company’s commercial and institutional division, explains that Milwaukee Marble was founded in 1894 as a stockholder-owned corporation.
   “It required quite a few stockholders because of the big investment in equipment,” says Byrnes. “Wisconsin was still a young state at the time, the turn of the century was coming, and there was a lot of public-building work– city halls, courthouses and state buildings.”
   A lot of those buildings incorporated marble, and the company operated with gang saws utilizing water and a big steel rubbing bed where men threw sand on the bed gauging the marble. Byrnes adds that when he started with Milwaukee Marble in the 1950s, the company was still working with this equipment.
   Those weren’t the days of the granite countertops.
   “Marble was used in homes, but with a honed finish in the kitchens, especially in some of the high-end Lake-Michigan-front properties,” he says. “A lot of those homes are still there and still have marble from the 1910s and 1920s. In some cases, we’ve redone them with granite.”
   When Byrnes started, the company dealt with a lot of commercial buildings, and also specialized in church work. Milwaukee Marble has done specialty building and churches all around the country.
   Although simpler modern designs in churches is leading more companies to the niche, Byrnes estimates that Milwaukee Marble still averages about two church jobs a month, much of it restoration of intricate work.
   “We recently did a project for a church in Two Rivers, Wis., where we moved the altar,” he says. “It was a very decorative altar that had been built in the 1920s and had about 200 pieces, many of which had been shaped. We took it down, cleaned it up, refinished it, and reinstalled it in a new location.
   “Not many people are willing to attempt something like that.”
  
BIG CHANGES
   As Milwaukee Marble neared its centennial, the natural-stone industry underwent a big change.
   As Byrnes explains it, Indian and Brazilian granites started being imported in large quantity; designers and architects saw things in these materials they hadn’t found in traditional granites. At the same time new equipment made it easier to work with granite.
   Milwaukee Marble began to gear up with more equipment to enter the residential kitchen and bath market. To incorporate residential work into an established commercial business is a major undertaking, Baldino says. Employees who were working on commercial jobs would find themselves diverted to doing a couple kitchens.
   Since buying the business last July, Baldino says his main goal has been to realign employees to the areas of their expertise to better utilize their skills and talents in a more-productive manner.
   Baldino first became involved with Milwaukee Marble through selling materials to the company. “It was just a matter of being in the right place at the right time when the Brueckner-Drout partnership decided to sell after 40 years,” he says.
   "The sale process was a little out of the ordinary,” he explains. “They were entrusting me with the business that had been running for more than 100 years, so my philosophies and future plans of continued operation were really important to them. They were also concerned about the continued management of the institution.”
   Since taking ownership, Baldino’s changes are primarily operational, he says. He started by making residential work a separate business unit under the direction of Bruce Brueckner.
   “We needed to change to remain competitive in the marketplace and organize the operation for future growth and development,” Baldino says. “The divisions are now handled by different sales group, the marketing processes are completely different, and the bid processes are handled differently.”
   One of the things Baldino found is that – perhaps because of Milwaukee Marble’s long history – a lot of people aren’t even aware that the company does residential work.
   “We’re approaching that problem by getting name recognition through advertising on radio and in some of the higher-end home magazines in the area,” he says. “Of course, we market directly to builders and contractors. In addition we have tours and seminars for architects, designers and builders.”
   The company markets not just in the Milwaukee area, but southward to Chicago and west to Madison, the state capital. And for those who know Milwaukee Marble, its history and reputation are real selling points.
   “Our customers come to us because they know we aren’t just any stone company,” Baldino says. “It’s because we’ve been in the business for 112 years and our customers know when they come to Milwaukee Marble they’ll be receiving quality work and we’ll stand behind it for years and years to come.”
  
SPECIAL ABILITY
   In fact, while the name might suggest Milwaukee Marble is just selling stone, Baldino says its real specialty is quality.
   “Our specialty is the talented staff and equipment we have to do intricate work,” he says. “Each employee has the knowledge, understanding and skills to meet the demands that each job presents, whether it’s an office building or a kitchen.”
   That quality begins with the stone that goes into each job. Milwaukee Marble is a direct importer and averages five containers a month from India, China, Italy, Canada and elsewhere, as well as buying domestic stone.
   “The suppliers we buy from have known us for years and know the quality standard we demand,” says Baldino. “We spend a lot of time sending samples and photographs back and forth to meet the quality of stone our customers have come to expect.”
   The company holds some 100,000 ft² of active inventory in slabs, in addition to showroom samples; customers can see and select their slabs. Most of this inventory is for residential use, with an emphasis on custom kitchen countertops and vanities. 
   A majority of the company’s commercial work is cut-to-size and brought in. However, because of Milwaukee Marble’s ability to import from around the world, the company can also import fabricated products for residential developments.
   “We can engineer the job in such a way that we usually hit the budget targets people are after,” says Baldino. “We meet our customer’s expectations and realize that stone isn’t just for high-end projects any longer.”
   That ability to do larger jobs for condominiums and apartment complexes is a result of the reorganization Baldino instituted.
   “The company really wasn’t in a position to do that before,” he says.
   The company prides itself on its custom fabrication equipment.  Milwaukee Marble has a full compliment of automated equipment that include Jaguar and Cougar bridge saws, multiple Wizard work stations and Pro-Edge® II and Tru-Edge polishers from Park Industries. The company also operates a Master Stone 4000 CNC from Intermac.
   “The shop is geared primarily for the residential business,” says Baldino. “We still maintain a large group of hand-polishers. We re-polish every surface that comes out of the company and all the edges are touched by hand again.
   “We believe this takes our quality one step further than what the machinery does.”
   The company typically averages around 50 employees, although Baldino says that can grow dramatically if Milwaukee Marble is installing a large commercial project.
   “Our biggest challenge is finding skilled labor,” he says. “That’s especially true of the crews in the field. Our average employee has 15 years experience and they’re all marble setters and master masons. Unfortunately there aren’t schools full of them hitting the work force. We’re working more closely with the union to get more apprentice programs going.”
  
“THE RIGHT WAY”
   The lack of vacant office space at Milwaukee Marble is a growing concern for Baldino. The company moved in 1980 to its current building, after its former long-time location fell victim to the replacement of a major viaduct.
   “We’ve squeezed everybody into as small a space as we can to accommodate the shop, space for the crews and our stock,” he says. “We have about 45,000 ft², and about 20 percent of that is devoted to showroom and offices. We’re running out of room for people.”
   He doesn’t see doing anything major with the building in the near future. For now it’s still more cost-effective to run a little overtime, although a second production shift is possible in the future.
   “I think what we’ve done has set the basis for how we can move forward and have a nice, managed, sustained growth as we go forward,” says Baldino. “We’re trying to make things happen in the right way, but I don’t see the need to make any more major changes right away.”
   With the reorganization of both the commercial and residential departments, Baldino and Byrnes are confident that more growth is on the way. Baldino says he’s encouraged about the opportunity to get Milwaukee Marble solidly into the market for moderate and multiple-unit housing.
   “There’s certainly going to be more opportunities to do get involved with that work but at the same time, on the higher-end of the business, there are more people who always want the high-end products – the latest and greatest,” he says. “They had granite when nobody else did and now that the average home may have stone, they have to have the really exotic stones.”
   If anything, he says there will be more demand on Milwaukee Marble to stock more really beautiful and rare granites, as well as exotics such as onyx.
   On the commercial side Byrnes says the market is changing somewhat, but with Milwaukee Marble’s long history and reputation for quality the company already made a name for itself.
   “A lot of the older buildings that have stone are being restored,” Byrnes says. “There’s a lot of reworking and redesigning the stone, then putting it back again. Newer high-rise buildings only apply stone to the base, but those bases have more intricate designs and we’re involved in the application of those designs.
   “With new commercial projects and remodels, designers are still utilizing plenty of stone in elevator lobbies as well as in countertops for reception areas and even in higher-end furniture in offices.”
   Whether residential or commercial, Baldino is confident that Milwaukee Marble and Granite will be up to the challenges such work presents – just as it has for 112 years.
   “Everybody wants more output without increasing overhead,” he says. “We’re held to such a high standard by our customers because of who we are. Of course, we want to do more business and we want to make money, but the quality we’ve come to be known for will always remain.”
  
This article first appeared in the September 2006 print edition of Stone Business. ©2006 Western Business Media Inc.