Aspen Countertops, Salt Lake City

   Good business sense and an eye for customer service, however, helped the partners use the last six years to turn an under-performing laminate shop into one of the area’s leaders in stone, solid-surface and laminate countertops.
   Part of their secret is a commitment to avoiding the types of subcontractor mishaps and snafus that used to drive them crazy when they were working remodeling homes. And, they were smart enough – when they added natural stone three years ago – to bring in experts for handling the things they didn’t know how to do.
   Now, with 40 employees, their immediate goal for Aspen Countertops is to turn out at least 30 stone kitchens per week by the end of the year.
  
“WE COULD GROW”
   In some respects, the story of Pearson and Taylor isn’t a lot different from those of a lot of other people in the stone industry. They went from being young guys with some construction experience. plus a desire to own their own business,  to operators of their own fabrication shop.
   However, what does set them apart is that Taylor was accepted to medical school, and Pearson has an MBA.
   That desire to control their own fate led them first into the business of remodeling houses. Pearson says part of the attraction was some limited construction experience they’d had, and some of it was the willingness of banks to loan them money to do the work.
   Then, they became aware of Aspen Countertops in 1999.
   “It was a small business when we bought it, and we certainly didn’t have a whole lot of money to buy something big,” Pearson says. “However, we figured it was a small business we could grow.”
   At that point, the company was operating out of a 2,000 ft² space serving a limited clientele. The two men brought their expertise and contacts from remodeling houses to the business and started expanding. Solid surface came first and, after another 30 months in the business, stone came into the picture.
   “We started getting a lot of people asking for stone,” says Pearson. “We broke into stone initially by contracting the fabrication and installation from a Las Vegas company that’s no longer around.”
   However, it wasn’t a satisfactory solution for the partners. The problem: lack of control.
   “We didn’t feel that our customers were getting the same level of service they were used to,” he says. “We try to be very customer-service-oriented. Our goal is to have good communication with our customers and to do what we say we’ll do. One of my pet peeves remodeling houses was not having subcontractors showing up when they’re supposed to.”
   After about six months of problems with their supplier, the two men decided it was time to get their own equipment and slowly get into the stone-fabrication business. However, some research convinced them there was no way to move slowly into the market.
   “A lot of people think you can just go from making Formica® to making Corian® to making granite,” Pearson says. “There are a lot of similarities to it, but the nuances are very different.”
   Recognizing their ignorance, the partners opted to make granite a separate division of their company and to bring in help. They began by hiring a shop foreman to handle that part of the operation, and a division manager familiar with selling and installing granite countertops.
   “We had a customer base of two or three granite kitchens a week at that point,” says Pearson. “Clark and I were capable of sitting down and learning the processes, but we brought in somebody who was familiar with the marketing side, and someone who had connections to the skilled fabricators, polishers and installers we’d need.”
  
NUANCES
   That ability to tap into the local labor pool has perhaps been the greatest positive to come out of the partners’ approach. As with so many other parts of the country, Pearson says it’s not always easy getting enough of the right employees to keep up with demand.
   “The key to success is having good rapport with the workers so they’ll stick around,” he says. “This is a market where most people know each other, and guys move from shop to shop. When people come to our shop, we don’t take their word they can do certain tasks; our foreman puts them to the test. But, human resources has definitely been the key to making it work.”
   Even so, there have been missteps along the way. Pearson says one of the first was the company’s purchase of a bridge saw. In an effort to keep their payments low, the pair bought a saw that wasn’t up to the demands of the Salt Lake market.
   “A lot of places people cut 3cm stone, but we do mostly 2cm and put an edge build-down on it,” he explains. “In Utah, people don’t like the line you have when you laminate two pieces of 2cm together. Instead, we miter the front and miter the build-down so the line is at the corner.”
   These days the old saw is gone, and the company operates a Park Industries Yukon, which compliments their second equipment purchase – a Park ProEdge III – and their most recent purchase, a Park Destiny CNC machine.
   Pearson says the company originally bought the ProEdge after seeing it work in a couple other shops. Its performance, and the fact that Park is a U.S. company, explains the rest.
   “We know what happens if you buy the wrong equipment,” he says. “With Park, if it’s a small part, I can call around and get it from someone locally, because a lot of suppliers stock parts. In a worst-case scenario, we broke something on our CNC. They put the part on a plane in the morning and we had it by the end of the afternoon. We worked through the night and didn’t lose a day’s production.”
   Pearson admits the Destiny, which the company added last November, was a big step up for Aspen Countertops. However, it not only addressed issues the shop had been dealing with, but it’s allowed the company to go on expanding.
   In fact, he says in some ways it’s actually paying for itself.
   “To get kitchens out the door, we were working guys 20 hours a week of overtime,” Pearson says. “When you take six people making $15-$18 an hour for overtime pay, it pays for itself right there. Plus, with more automation, we can have our guys doing more of the specialized technical things you can’t do with the machine.”
   Even before adding the CNC, the company had automated its templating with a PhotoTop® system. The need for good templates was one of those nuances the two men learned about when they added stone; Pearson says he’s not a fan of stick templates, and cardboard simply took too long.
   “One of the things that was hard for me to figure out when we were learning about stone was how much less-forgiving it is,” he says. “With Formica, the installer can scribe it to the wall with a jigsaw. With Corian, I can take out a disk sander and sand it to fit. I just felt this should be easier.”
   Even then, Pearson wasn’t a fan of plastic templates output on a plotter because the company kept getting wavy vinyl. Recently, Aspen added an overhead-mounted Z-Laser pattern generator from Carter Products to completely automate its templating.
   “We added the digital templating about six months before we got the Destiny,” he says. “We didn’t want to be learning two things at once, and we didn’t want to have just one person proficient on it. We don’t like to depend on only one person for a particular job. We try to systemize things so we have two or three people who can cover the primary person in case there’s a problem.”
  
DEFINITE GOALS
   While the partners may have needed to bring in outside help to get and keep their shop running efficiently, Pearson says he and Taylor had definite ideas going into the business about how they wanted operations outside the shop to run.
   Most of their sales come through relationships they’ve built over the years through memberships in area homebuilder associations, and with general contractors, cabinet shops and design centers.
   To reinforce that, they have a staff of six outside sales people who also manage the projects they sell.
   “I don’t like it when a salesperson promises something that production can’t fulfill,” says Pearson. “This way, if the salesman promises something that can’t happen, he’s the person who gets chewed up. Customer satisfaction is their job.”
   He admits that he could probably do with fewer people on outside sales but, “Our goal is to be 100 percent on customer satisfaction, and people really like that about us.”
   A year after buying Aspen, the duo moved to a larger industrial facility and the company has been adding 2,500 ft² modules to a current total of 16,000 ft² … and it’s still growing. However, only about 1,000 ft² is devoted to walk-in clientele.
   “We have a small showroom and we show a few slabs, but we have a good relationship with our supplier,” Pearson says. “Their people know when our customers go over there to take care of them and help them select slabs. We have about eight colors that we stock just because we can turn them every month or six weeks.”
   While Pearson adds he wants walk-in customers to have a good experience and he isn’t going to turn people away, he’d rather help cabinet shops and design centers with their displays and let them do his selling.
   Most of Aspen’s work is residential, and the bulk of that is kitchens, although the company has done some large slab showers and fireplaces. The company has also worked on some commercial projects, including the recent renovation of the skyboxes at Salt Lake City’s Delta Center sports arena, as well as offices and restaurants.
   It’s there that the partners are seeing the greatest demand for quartz surfaces, and they feature several lines, including CaesarStone®, Zodiaq®, and Cambria®.
   “It seems like we’ve done more commercial work just in the past year,” says Pearson. “That’s where a lot of the natural quartz gets speced, although it depends on the application. We still see reception desks going granite, but high-traffic, high-use surfaces tend to go quartz, probably because it’s certified for food-prep areas and some medical applications.”
   As with the rest of the operation, the partners are very particular about the installation of their projects. All the installers are employees, and each crew specializes in one surface type because, Pearson notes, the products seam differently.
   “Again, we have better control of our quality and better customer service keeping it in-house,” he says. “Our customers may have a three-hour window on an installation; they may be taking time off from work, and I don’t want the guys showing up whenever they please. It’s more-expensive, but it works better and our customers like it.”
   Aspen’s location puts the company in a prime spot to do jobs in some of Utah’s high-end ski and resort communities. Pearson says those jobs may be high-dollar, but he’s not necessarily excited by them.
   “Especially if it’s a spec home, you get into situations where you can get nitpicked to death,” he observes. “You also end up spending a lot of time at the front end helping with the design, and then they’ll shop the job and find somebody who will do it for five-percent less.”
   Right now, he sees the demand for those homes cooling off somewhat, which is okay, since that’s not really where the partners have found their niche.
   “We like to keep busy with our base,” says Pearson. “If a builder is doing 200 homes a year with five plans and 100 of them will be in granite, that’s the work I want. We can turn those out really quickly and make OK money on them.”
   Still, he wouldn’t mind a few more of them. With 24 of the company’s 40 employees involved in the granite side of the operation and the additional capacity Aspen has gained with the Destiny, Pearson says the immediate goal is to boost the number of stone kitchens the business does each week from its current 18 to at least 30 by the end of the year.
   Within the next couple years, Pearson also believes the company will need to expand into at least 30,000 ft², probably in its own building.
   Beyond that, the picture isn’t as clear. Pearson says logical next steps would be to grow geographically, expanding to Idaho or south into Nevada or possibly gain market share locally through acquisition.  Those steps will depend on how well the home-building market performs during the next few years.

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