Alaskan Granite Works, Fairbanks, Alaska

September 6, 2005

   Alec Turner knew he was somewhat off the beaten path with stone in Fairbanks – but that’s exactly why he opened up shop three years ago, some 400 miles from the nearest competing fabricator.
   While he’s the son of a geologist, his main motivation for getting in the business was less than academic: There was money to be made.
   And he’s right. He expects his little two-person shop will bill a million dollars this year. That’s pretty good, Turner says, considering he had no previous experience in stonework.
   “I’ve done a lot of things in my life. Prior to stone, I was a Bering Sea crab fisherman for 11 years,” he says. His range of knowledge is broad and he can tackle almost anything mechanical, from refrigeration to hydraulics.
   “Five years ago I was a siding-and-gutter contractor,” Turner says. “I was installing siding on a house and I looked in the window and saw two guys putting in stone countertops.”
   After talking to the installers that day, Turner spent a year or so researching the market. He discovered it was a popular trade in the lower 48, but rare in Alaska.
   “Turns out no one in Fairbanks touched natural stone,” he says.

LEARNING THE ROPES
   His first job three years ago involved installing granite countertops in a couple kitchens. Back then, he was contracting all the finishing work from a source in Seattle. But he watched his profits fly out the window between the cost of fabrication and shipping from Seattle.
   Shipping materials 2,000 miles from the contiguous United States costs Turner almost $500 per slab. Having it fabricated was costing him around $30 per square foot. Turner discovered he could buy it for $7 to $8 per square foot and cut it himself.
   “The money is in cutting and fabricating stone,” he says.
   Turner still has the slabs shipped to him from the Lower 48, but he does the rest of the finishing work himself. He uses only 2cm granite instead of 3cm to save in shipping costs.
   Even with the high cost of shipping the stone, Turner believes his prices are fair, since, he says, “In Alaska, people get $18 an hour to pick up trash.”
   For two years he used a track saw to cut the stone. With a half dozen slabs to cut, he found himself always waiting on the saw; last year, he invested in a Park Industries Yukon gantry saw and, most recently, in a Pro Edge III edge shaper and polisher.
   So far, he says, he’s been unable to find qualified employees who’ll stay with the company. He’s trained five men at Alaskan Granite, but they never seem to work out.
   “It’s just me and a helper now,” Turner says. “With this new edge machine I don’t really need people standing around. I hate to say it, but I’ve invested in equipment instead of employees.”
   With no real experience in the stone business, Turner had never even set foot in another shop. It wasn’t until he began training this year at Park’s Minnesota headquarters that he saw how things were done in the commercial stone industry.
   “I went to Minnesota to train on the Pro Edge in May, and I’m doing pretty good for being self-taught,” he says.
   He says he’s made more mistakes when it comes to hiring people than he’s made on countertops.

PUTTING IN THE HOURS
   Turner spends 14 to 18 hours a day, seven days a week, at work. He admits he might be a workaholic, but explains he’s worked like this for the past 17 years, including his career as a commercial fisherman.
    “I worked 140 hours a week when I was fishing. So as long as I get six or eight hours of sleep, I can work seven days a week,” he says.
   He begins almost every day at 4 a.m., tackling a couple hours of paperwork. By 7 a.m., he and his helper are in the shop where they cut, edge and polish granite countertops in preparation for installation. At 5:30 p.m., he cuts templates for more countertops.
   He can cut three kitchens a day, and says he “goes gangbusters” for four or five days. Then he spends the next couple of days installing everything.
   “And I do it over and over,” Turner says.
   Installation in Alaska is a whole different animal. Working in freezing conditions doesn’t faze Turner, although he admits he draws the line at –10°F.
   Granite tends to break in extreme weather, so Turner usually has to deliver the countertops to the job site a day before installation. It’s not unusual for 1/4” of frost to form on a granite slab during the time it’s moved from the delivery truck to the installation site.
   When working with stone, just about everything has to be wet. It’s not unusual for the building to be blanketed with a layer of frost.
   “When it’s –20°F below and 3-percent humidity outside, the shop will be at 90- to 100-percent humidity inside,” Turner explains. “You open up the shop door and it looks like I’m on fire. Steam is just rolling out.”
   Installations are commonly a good distance away: at least 20 minutes from town, Turner says.
   One customer asked Turner to template his kitchen, then handed him a map. The client’s house was 120 miles away, passable only in the winter by an ice road, which is a frozen waterway.
   “After I finished the countertop, he came to the shop this summer to get it and took it back to his house via riverboat.”

BRANCHING OFF
   Like any artisan, Turner would rather be in the shop, working hands-on with the stone, but paperwork is always a necessity. He’s thought about hiring a secretary, but says it’s difficult for him to let go of things.
   “I’ve always been a hard worker and always liked a challenge. If you don’t work,” Turner says, “then every day life is not a challenge.”
   Turner has learned to multi-task many times over. The saw, for example, might take five or six minutes to cut a slab, and that’s time for him to do a few other things.
   He keeps 40 to 50 slabs in stock at all times in basic colors. Since everything must remain inside to avoid the cold, Turner says there is just enough room in his small shop for his forklift to pull a piece of material out of the rack, and then back up to move the stone to the saw.
   Materials are handled a maximum of two or three times. That not only saves the material from possible damage, but it also saves the body, Turner says.
   So far, Alaskan Granite is just that – granite countertops. Customers are not interested in marble just yet, although Turner expects that may come later.
   Native granite and jade are available throughout Alaska, and Turner often turns a weekend camping trip into a granite expedition, hauling boulders home in the back of his pickup truck.
   “People wonder how the heck I got those in there by myself,” he says. “It might take four or five hours, but I make a ramp out of smaller rocks and then roll them up the ramp with a come-along.”
   Using Alaskan granite and jade, Turner also creates signage, plaques, headstones and memorial pieces. He recently created a plaque to commemorate the fallen police officers of Fairbanks over the past 100 years. The plaque is attached to a 4,000-lbs. jade boulder.
   The jade comes from a rich deposit called Jade Mountain on the Seward Peninsula on the west coast of Alaska. Natives own the mineral rights, but they donated the jade to Fairbanks for the memorial.
   “The natives have jade boulders lying around their village and they use them as parking barriers,” Turner says – and those barriers are likely worth $50,000 each.
   Turner hopes to do more signs and include sculpting in his repertoire as well.
   “There’s nobody here that fabricates or does any monumental work so I’m trying to tap into that too,” Turner says.
   And he probably will. He’s a firm believer in really thinking something through before attempting it, but he’s also a keen observer of the market in which he’s finding success.
   While his goal is to retire in 10 years, Turner knows he’s the only guy in town now with the knowledge, tools and expertise to create what his customers want.
   “It’s like being the first guy with a car wash with a mile of cars,” he says.
   Terri Chance is a free-lance writer covering industrial design and manufacturing.