Trindco, Suffolk, Va.

   After planning and studying to be a lawyer, he found he practicing law less than desireable. Looking at different career options, he chose to buy a small solid-surface countertop manufacturer. A year later, he bought another, and then more after that.
   While busy integrating his purchases into an entity with a single manufacturing facility and multiple satellite showrooms, Trinder noticed he was losing market share to natural stone. Soon, the company he christened Trindco was fabricating and installing stone products,as well.
   More recently, enamored with the production capabilities of his CNC machines, Trinder wondered how he could translate their efficiencies into different work – and that’s added yet another car to his ever-building business train.
  
MULTIPLE TEMPLATES
   Ken Trinder readily admits that while growing up, being a lawyer was as far as his life plan evolved. The Virginia native took an undergraduate degree in government, finished his legal education, and spent a year clerking for a federal judge.
   From there, he joined a large Norfolk, Va., firm and went to work specializing in corporate and bankruptcy law. For a smart, hard-working young man, it was a definite template for success.
   Except….
   “I thoroughly enjoyed law school,” he says. “I love the academic side of the law. I love the learning aspect of it, and I think it’s a wonderful tool to have, but the actual practice of law itself was not where I wanted to spend the rest of my life.”
   Trinder began putting the word out that he was considering a career change, all the while weighing his options, from opening his own practice to going back to school to study architecture.
   At that point, a friend who’s an investment banker told him about an opportunity he was evaluating. The owners of Suffolk-based Solid Surface Technologies sought for a buyer for their solid-surface manufacturing and installation business, which included a 7,500-ft² plant.
   Initial plans called for the friend to buy the business and Trinder, who worked construction jobs in college, would run it. When the friend backed out of the deal, Trinder put together his own financing and bought the company.
   “For us, at that time (1998), stone really wasn’t on the radar screen,” Trinder says of the business he renamed Trindco. “We just though the company was a good niche company with a good product and a good margin with a lot of potential for growth.”
   Even better, he realized the sellers wanted to remain with the business, which gave him some breathing space while he got his feet on the ground as an owner. Being a quick study, he purchased a similar-sized operation in Richmond, Va., within a year.
   “For me it was a lot to take on right away,” Trinder admits. “It was kind of hectic at first.”
   Almost immediately, Trinder realized running two separate manufacturing facilities didn’t make much sense. He consolidated his production in Suffolk, and moved the rest of the Richmond operation – the first of his satellite facilities – to a more-upscale address.
   Today, Trindco also has satellite offices in Roanoke, Charlottesville and Norfolk, Va., and Raleigh, N.C., and Trinder says he anticipates that number will grow in the years to come.
  
MATTER OF CONCERN
   While that might be enough for some business owners, Trinder became concerned as early as 1999 that his company only offered solid-surface countertops.
   “I thought it isn’t very prudent to have just one product,” he says. “What would happen if people woke up and decided they didn’t want Corian® any more? That’s when we made the decision to get into natural stone.”
   Thanks to some family connections in Italy, Trinder started bringing in containers of material directly. However, he says the rest of his approach was mainly one of getting a toe in the water and making mistakes.
   “We bought a saw and some hand-held polishers and some hand-held routers and went to town,” he says. “Looking back, I should just immediately have bought a CNC machine, but back then very few people had CNC technology for stone, and we thought it was a risk without knowing we had a good market for it.”
   After doing things by what he calls, “the hard way,” and seeing stone take off in his markets, Trinder began to invest in more serious equipment. By the second year the company did stone fabrication, it had two Park Industries Pro-Edge machines and stone became more than a third of Trindco’s output.
   As Trinder continued to add CNC equipment (the company now owns four Park machines) and Silestone® quartz surfaces, the 7,500 ft² Suffolk production facility became too crowded, and late in 2003 Trindco moved into a 25,000 ft² plant.
   By that time, natural stone and natural quartz represented more than half of the company’s sales. The increasing automation of the stone-fabrication side of his business also started Trinder thinking about the possibility of doing something similar for his solid-surface production.
   “It’s always been an industry built on very skilled craftsmen who are really carpenters,” Trinder says. “All the work they were doing involved wood routers and sanders and table saws and panel saws.”
   Trinder began to question the assumptions that solid-surface could only be fabricated that way, or that the product had to be a half-inch thick.
   “I thought the best way to solve this problem was to make the product thicker,” he says. “If it was as thick as stone you could put it on the stone machines and run it the same way. I thought the labor-savings would be tremendous.”
   At that point, Trinder didn’t even know if it would be possible to create a 3cm solid-surface product. However, he contacted a good friend, Evan Kruger, who operates a similar business and who’d encouraged Trinder to add Silestone to his product mix.
   “He said, ‘Do you realize what this would do to the industry,’” Trinder says. “At that point, we figured we just had to try, even if it was a product just for ourselves.”
   With none of the leading manufacturers in the industry interested in creating a 3cm product, the two men spent more than 18 months finding the right factory and the right engineers to come up with a product.
   The end result, dubbed Eos for the Greek goddess of dawn, is now available from a network of 38 stocking fabricator/distributors and still growing.
  
SMART POSITION
   Today, he only has two employees in his 65-person company devoted to mounting bowls and creating shop seams for Trindco’s solid-surface countertops. Trinder estimates 90 percent of all Trindco countertops are run through the shop’s four CNC machines.
   “There’s a 10-percent factor where machines just don’t want to do the work or the job needs to be done by hand because of whatever reason,” he says. “But granite, marble, Silestone and Eos are all run on the same machines with the same bits.”
   About the only special consideration necessary to keep the mix going is to switch out the products among the four machines so the Eos doesn’t dull their bits.
   The installation crews at each of the company’s satellite offices install the complete variety of Trindco products.
   “The guys who were our stone installers got a two-hour lesson on installing solid-surface and that’s all it took,” says Trinder. “It’s a little more forgiving with the seams than stone.”
   He adds that each of the company’s satellite offices has a showroom, and a staff that includes sales people, template people and installation crews. However, retail sales are only the smallest portion of the company’s total business mix.
   “About 50 percent is the remodelers, the kitchen and bath dealers,” Trinder explains. “New construction is about 30 percent of our business. Then, a good, strong 20 percent is retail, and that’s getting to be a bigger and bigger part of our business.”
   Just as Trindco has matured, he adds that he’s seeing a maturing of the industry as a whole.
   “The box stores have changed the dynamics of the industry,” Trinder believes. “Six years ago, having 20-percent retail would have meant we would have lost business on the wholesale side; people would have been angry with us. Now, our wholesale clients understand these are different market. Customers are going to go direct to market; it’s part of the new reality.”
   Trinder also believes that his approach of concentrating his production in one location and doing sales out of multiple facilities is part of the changing face of the industry.
   “In order to be successful in this industry, you have to make a strong investment in technology and machinery,” he says. “It’s so expensive that you don’t want to duplicate it in a lot of places.”
   Not that such a setup doesn’t have its own limitations. Trinder believes the main one is geographical, and that his company works now because everything is within than five hours of his plant.
   That means construction of another Trindco production facility will likely happen if the company adds more satellites further from Suffolk. Otherwise, the current plant is more than sufficient to handle all its production needs.
   “One thing we’ve found with our current setup is we have enough room to add four more machines and literally double our production in our one shop,” Trinder says. “With the constriction of our solid-surface production, we’ve opened up half of our building, which has just freed up space for more machinery.”
   Still, a second production shop isn’t out of the question, Trinder adds.
   “We have two more potential satellite locations on the horizon,” he says. “Our long-term vision is to add another plant. We’re probably looking at expanding south of us. I think there’s more opportunity for us in the North Carolina/South Carolina area.
   “Obviously, it takes a different set of coordination and skill, but once you get in a rhythm, it’s really quite manageable,” he adds.
   For now, though, it’s easy to get the impression that Trinder is not only happy with his career change, but also pretty satisfied with where Trindco is today.
   “I love all my products,” he says. “I love natural stone, I love engineered stone and I love Eos. There’s a place for all of them, and I’ve always thought strongly as a business person that having just one product was not a very smart position to put yourself in.”

This article first appeared in the November 2005 print edition of Stone Business. ©2005 Western Business Media Inc.