Athenian Marble, Oklahoma City

   In fact, its garage startup is about the only thing modest about the Oklahoma City-based company. From cultured marble, the business expanded its countertop operation – first into solid surface, and more recently into natural stone and Technistone® natural-quartz.
   The company has enjoyed some of its greatest growth in the past seven or eight years, the younger Cobb says, and recently completed a separate building – its sixth – to house its stone and Technistone shop and showroom.
   Along with an inherited inclination to think big, Curt Cobb brings his own experience to the table. He left the company for several years to follow his own dream of being a custom homebuilder, and certainly Athenian’s customer service is built around minimizing the types of delays that plagued him when he was on the other side of the equation.
  
BIG IDEAS
   Cobb says the birth of Athenian Marble can be traced back to 1968 and the family’s garage. At the time, he was young enough to do little more than get in the way.
   “I remember him (Phillip Cobb) messing around in the garage and on the kitchen counters with various things,” says the son. “After awhile, the cultured-marble business grew to the point where he had to quit working with my uncle and work exclusively for Athenian Marble.”
   Curt Cobb says perhaps the biggest advantage his father had in launching the company was that he already had relationships with many of the builders in the community, and he’d talk with them about cultured marble as he installed insulation.
   The senior Cobb moved out of the garage and into his first building in 1972. Already thinking big, he put his operation in a business park he developed. As the company grew, he’d put in another building; today, Athenian Marble operates out of 88,000 ft².
   Looking to expand beyond simply cultured marble, in 1991 the company entered the solid-surface market. Rather than distribute someone else’s product, Athenian Marble developed its own brand name, Ancör®.
   As with others in the solid-surface industry, Curt Cobb says the demand for that product in homes has seen a decrease as stone has become more affordable. However, the company has simply found commercial, markets in which to sell Ancör.
   “We provide signage for a lot of the hospitals and nursing homes that require room signs and hall signs,” says Cobb. “We have several projects going with Oklahoma City-based hospitals. In addition, we provide a lot of thresholds and similar items to Macklenburg-Duncan Building Products. Our products are available through them in more than 125 retail stores.”
   Curt Cobb took over day-to-day management of Athenian Marble eight years ago, and he says it was mainly residential buyers he had his eye on when the company entered the natural-stone market in early 2002.
   Actually, Cobb says the company first became a distributor for Technistone after seeing it at an industry tradeshow.
   “Obviously, we saw several different engineered stones there, but Technistone is the one we were able to talk to and get a distributorship with,” he says. “Now, we distribute their product exclusively throughout Oklahoma, Kansas, Missouri and parts of Arkansas, as well.”
  
BEST APPROACH
   Cobb says the move into both natural stone and Technistone was both easy and hard. Certainly, the easy part came from the company’s history.
   “Fortunately, our cultured-marble company and our solid-surface company were large enough and had such a large customer base that it was easy for us to move into stone,” he says.
   The company also had enough floor space that it could remodel an existing building into a stone shop.
   However, Cobb says that, because Oklahoma City has never had a strong workforce of experienced stone fabricators and installers, it quickly became apparent Athenian Marble would need to automate as much as possible.
   “Without a workforce to tap into, we thought the best answer would be to look into machines that would do the work,” he says. “That was really the best approach to take, and it allowed us to do things that we normally wouldn’t have been able to.”
   Still, it wasn’t the best answer. Cobb says putting stone equipment in a building not designed for it made things more difficult than they needed to be. By comparison, the new building the company moved into this past summer was designed specifically by Cobb to handle production of natural stone and Technistone.
   “We have floors that are sloping floors, so everything drains into various drains around the building,” he explains. “All our electrical systems, water systems and air systems are under the floor. There are no overhead lines that hang out of the ceiling to prohibit overhead movement of cranes and nothing running on the floor to cause trip hazards.”
   Keeping those air and floor spaces clear is important for the operation of the shop’s four overhead cranes which are station-specific, a conveyor system that moves the jobs around the shop in slave trays, and a truck on rails with a scissor lift that takes the trays with all the parts of a given project and loads them into a vertical rack system.
   Cobb, who’s been fascinated with design since high school, created the plan himself.
   “I looked at a lot of places and didn’t find anything readily available that didn’t have to be custom-built,” he says. “So, I had this custom-built for what we do. Our cultured-marble shop is designed with conveyors – nothing travels by hand – and I took a lot of my knowledge of that and pieced it together with the stone.”
   The shop operates exclusively with equipment from Park Industries, including Jaguar and Yukon saws, two Pro-Edge profilers, and Park’s newest offering, a Velocity belt-feed line machine. Cobb says the company received the third Velocity to come off Park’s production line.
   The company also operates one CNC machine and is awaiting delivery of a second one.
   “Our CNC runs nonstop,” he says. “Right now, we’re running split shifts to keep up with production.”
   The company’s newest showroom, at 2,500 ft², is also devoted exclusively to natural stone and Technistone, but Cobb doesn’t believe he’s just trading customers to fuel his stone activity.
   “That was a fear of mine, but what’s actually happened is that it’s increased sales in all departments,” he says. “There are a lot of times where someone has gone to several different places for their countertop needs, and they’re interested in getting everything at once.”
   Certainly one of his goals is to be a single source for all his customers’ countertop needs, and he says it’s not uncommon for someone to put natural stone or Technistone in the kitchen and master bath, cultured marble in the other bathrooms, and a solid-surface top in the utility room.
   “A lot of times we can do a whole house more cost-effectively than our competitors because we are able to integrate several product divisions under one central management system and this helps our costs decrease,” Cobb says. “The countertops aren’t made in the same shop, but they’re made by the same company and a lot of our overhead is spread over those different products.”
  
DUAL CHALLENGES
   In the meantime, Cobb has set himself up with a daunting challenge: continue to grow the business without customer service suffering.
   From a local standpoint, Athenian is cashing in on the do-it-yourself boom in the media. The company markets its stone products heavily on a local television program called Healthy Home and Living that airs twice a week.
   “We have quite a presence there,” he says. “We go out and film installations. We’ve shown how non-invasive it is when we go into a home and measure for templates. Most people’s idea is they’ll have a mess for weeks on end.”
   He adds that one of the things his salespeople stress is that once a job is fabricated, it will only take 24-36 hours from tear-out to a sparkling new kitchen that’s ready to use.
   Cobb also co-hosts a Sunday night home show on radio, and both the television and radio presence are focused on boosting his local fabrication business, which generally covers an area within an approximate 50-mile radius of Oklahoma City.
   However, Athenian’s reach goes well beyond that. Along with the solid-surface products the company manufacturers, and its distribution of Technistone, Cobb says he discovered a niche market for natural stone that sends some of its products nationwide.
   “We began to notice there was a huge need for restaurant bars in stone,” he says. “The contractors we talked to told us the biggest problem they have is that as they move around the country, it’s difficult to find local fabricators who can do what they want in the time frame they want it done in, with consistent quality in the fabrication and installation.”
   Because these contractors transport many of their components in to a jobsite, he says it made sense to get into the market; now the company sends out crews nationwide installing those restaurant bars.
   That experience in shipping stone around the country also is a factor in what Cobb sees as Athenian’s next big growth area: an Internet expansion of its product lines.
   “We want to create a network of templater/installers where we can do high-volume blanks and they can finish them and install them,” he says. “Fortunately, we have a shipping department that’s incredibly good at crating stone and shipping it on common carriers.”
   Regardless of the market, Cobb puts a strong emphasis on customer service. After growing up with Athenian Marble, he left at the age of 20 to work for himself.
   Cobb had always had an interest in design and took all the classes in architectural design and mechanical drawing and drafting offered by the local school system. He told his dad he wanted to build houses, and did that for the next 11 years, until Philip Cobb asked his son to return to Athenian Marble.
   That hiatus has given the younger Cobb a perspective on what he’s doing that he doubts many of his competitors can bring to the table.
   “It’s a help when you’ve been on both sides of a scheduling issue,” he says. “I have all that experience of being a homebuilder and going through the difficulties in coordinating all the subcontractors to come together in a timely fashion, and be there when they’re supposed to be there so they can make way for the sub who’s next in line.”
   Sadly, he observes that he’s made inroads competing with shops that are not always able to do the job when the builder needs it done.
   “Most of the time, the mentality is, ‘You’ll get it when I get to it; you’ll just have to wait,’” Cobb says. “However, the homebuilders’ primary interest is focused on completing their work without delay. When somebody like us comes along, they’re willing to work with a company that will do it differently.”
   That may be even more important as homebuilders face extra pressure from the economic impacts created by Hurricane Katrina, Cobb concludes.
   “The challenges these homebuilders face are getting greater all the time,” he says. “I think we’ve done well in making it easier for builders and our other customers. They can find what they need right here, with good quality to satisfy all their surfacing needs.”

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