Northwestern Marble and Granite Co., Edina, Minn.

   Northwestern Marble and Granite Co. may have more than a century of history behind it, but Gramling faced some major challenges since taking over the business from his father in 1988.
   The business made two moves since then, along with doing major upgrades of its shop technology. It’s also undergone a name change to better reflect its current business mix, and dropped the installation of ceramic tile entirely.
   Still, with the increased popularity of residential stonework, Gramling notes the number of his competitors has grown. Only by paying close attention to detail and customer satisfaction and continually marketing the business does he believe he’ll be able to maintain his market share.
  
JUMPING IN
   If there’s one thing Northwestern Marble and Granite can lay claim to, it’s a history of good business decisions, starting with its founding in 1896.
   David Gramling explains that what began as Northwestern Mantel Co. was founded by the owners of Minneapolis-based Flour City Ornamental Iron Co. to supply marble to the office- and bank-construction industry.
   “Other companies were coming in with packages where they’d do the whole interior, including the woodwork, the millwork, the ironwork and the stonework,” Gramling explains. “Flour City was having trouble getting jobs because they were just selling iron, so they decided to jump into the thing all the way. “
   After 10 years of business, Gramling’s great-uncle, Charles N. Gramling, was hired to be Northwestern’s president. His great-nephew says he knows little of what attracted Charles Gramling to the position, although he had a background in business. One of his decisions was to change the company name to Northwestern Marble Corp.
   For the next 30 years, Charles Gramling ran the business. In 1912, his younger brother David, the current president’s grandfather, started working for Northwestern part time while still in high school.
   During the 1920s and ‘30s, Northwestern had one of the largest fabricating facilities in the United States, with eight gangsaws to cut blocks of marble and granite down to size for its own use and for sale to competitors. Prior to World War II, Northwestern was also a large terrazzo contractor, and the senior David Gramling was president of the National Terrazzo Association in 1941-42.
   In 1945, he was also a founding member of the Marble Institute of America (MIA).
   The late 1940s were significant to the company for a couple reasons. In 1947, David Gramling and two partners bought the business from Flour City. (Gramling bought out his partners in the 1950s). The following year, Thomas Gramling, father of the current president, began his own career with the firm.
   In 1962, the company moved from Minneapolis to the suburb of Bloomington, Minn. With David Gramling’s retirement that year, Thomas Gramling became company president and expanded the company’s services, changing the name to Northwestern Tile Co.
   In the 1970s, the company underwent yet another move – this time to the neighboring suburb of Edina – and another name change, to Northwestern Tile and Marble. It was also during the ‘70s that the younger David Gramling completed his own college degree in business from the University of Minnesota and started working for the company full-time.
   That’s certainly not to say Northwestern’s current president waited until completing his education to start work in the company. As is typical with family businesses, he started early … and at the bottom.
   “I started as a tile helper and delivery man,” Gramling says. “When I was in high school, I was on a work-study program where I’d go to school half-a-day and work half-a-day. I’ve worked all the different positions at one time or another.”
   Still, Gramling says he didn’t go through college assuming he’d have a job at the end.
   “After I finished school, I was spending some time gathering my thoughts when my dad called me and said, ‘When are you coming to work?’” he relates. “I told him, ‘Nobody’s made me any offers.’ There was a long silence as he tried to absorb what I’d said. Finally, he said, ‘Why don’t you come in? Maybe we should talk.’”
  
MOVING ON
   By the time Thomas Gramling retired in 1988, David Gramling says he was ready to hit the ground running when he took over as president. For one thing, he wasn’t happy with the company’s facilities.
   “When we moved to Edina, we were in a brand-new building that a friend of ours had built and we rented it from him,” David Gramling says. “It was set up primarily as an office with a very small shop and rather inadequate storage facilities. We couldn’t store anything outside there, but I couldn’t get my dad to take the step and move.”
   Gramling says he wasn’t real pleased that his dad signed a new lease on the space shortly before selling his son the business, so the younger man wasn’t able to look for a larger location until 1994, when he took over a lease from a friend and was able to move from 8,000 ft² into almost 20,000 ft².
   By that time, some major changes had occurred to the market for finished stone. Gramling notes that right around the time he purchased the business, the first orders began coming in for stone in residential kitchens.
   “Pretty much the kitchen designers got it going, and it was pretty slow at first,” he says. “What was unique at that time was the number of black countertops we did. That lasted about two years and then there was a backlash where designers almost never did black in kitchens. Now, it’s coming full-circle.”
   It’s not that Northwestern hadn’t been doing some residential work all along. Gramling says while his namesake grandfather spent a great deal of his career traveling around the country doing commercial work, stone also went into the homes of Twin Cities barons making money  on commodities such as flour and lumber.
   “A lot of marble was used in some of those homes,” Gramling says. “About 10 years ago, a house was being remodeled and one of our tags was found behind the stone. The owner called and said, ‘I want you to do the work because you did it originally.’ There was certainly support for the business here from people doing residential work.”
   The new wave of residential work did some amazing things to the market, too. Gramling says there were probably six companies in Minnesota doing stone fabrication when he purchased Northwestern; today he estimates there are more than 60.
   To compete, in 1990-91, the company completely retooled.
   “We bought all new machinery at that time and thought we were really doing well with it,” he says. “I needed to get as much technology going as I could to be as efficient as possible.”
   Gramling also discontinued the ceramic-tile portion of the business after determining it took the largest part of his time but returned the smallest profit. However, he kept tile in the company’s name until the 2001 move to his current 30,000 ft² facility.
   “We were moving, so we had to change all the stationery anyway,” he says. “While we were moving, I found an old inventory that was like 15 years old, and at that time, 80 percent of our inventory was marble. I pulled a new inventory and it was 80 percent granite. We were discontinuing ceramic-tile installations and I wanted to make sure granite was prominent in the name, so we became Northwestern Marble and Granite.”
   The 2001 move was also again time to retool.
   “The efficiencies and technology that has come forward in the last 10-15 years has been incredible,” Gramling says. “By buying this building, I was able to buy all new equipment and leave my old equipment running in the old facility. For six months I ran two facilities at once – they’re only a half mile from each other – but I got everything organized and it went seamlessly for my customers.”
   Due to the company’s proximity to Park Industries, his shop runs heavily toward equipment from the local manufacturer. Gramling operated the first Odyssey the company produced, doing time tests on it, and had input into the design of the Pro-Edge. Today, the shop operates an Odyssey, two Pro-Edges, and a Cougar saw with twin cutting beds, along with a radial-arm polisher and a stand-up edge polisher.
   While he does have a couple small Italian-made machines, he likes the fact that Park is “Johnny-on-the-spot” for service.
   “I had a long relationship with the original machinery I bought from them,” he says. “It’s worked very well, it’s done what I wanted it to do and they’ve kept me appraised of everything new as it’s come along.”
  
SUCCESS IN THE DETAILS
   Today, the bulk of Northwestern’s work is kitchens, although not necessarily residential kitchens and sometimes far afield from the Twin Cities area. Much of the company’s commercial work is done for the food-service industry.
   “We do work around the country with casinos and things like that,” Gramling says. “We’re also seeing a jump in colleges and universities. A lot of schools are upgrading student cafeterias so they’re more like restaurants with buffet lines.”
   Gramling says he tapped into this particular market through a friend who sold products to the restaurant industry, and because a number of restaurant designers are located in the Twin Cities.
   “When you do good work for them and deliver on time, they just keep coming back,” he says.
   Doing good work and delivering jobs on time are hallmarks of Gramling’s business philosophy. In fact, he believes that’s what’s helped make Northwestern an award-winner, including taking top honors in Stone Business’ first Best of Home competition, and earning an honorable mention in the latest MIA Pinnacle Awards.
   “It’s all in the details,” Gramling says regarding what’s brought his company such kudos. “We follow the job carefully all the way through. When a job is ready to measure, we show up when we say we’re going to show up. We ask when they need it delivered and finished and we do what we say we’ll do.
   “We follow that up with a customer survey asking how the job went that includes a stamped envelope addressed to me. If something comes back that isn’t up to standard, we’re on it right away.”
   Another Northwestern policy is to send a StoneTech Professional gift box of care products as a “thank you” from the salesperson after each job. It includes extra business cards to give to acquaintances asking who did the work, and Northwestern’s own brochure on stone care.
   “We leave the StoneTech (instructions) in there, but we put ours into layman’s terms and it should give the customer everything there is to know,” he says.
   Gramling certainly doesn’t leave his marketing to word-of-mouth and goodwill, although he admits he does a couple residential kitchens each year in locales as far away as Washington and Colorado, based on the recommendations of satisfied customers. The rest of the effort is carefully choreographed.
   “We run the biggest ads in the Yellow Pages, we have a year-long contract with Minnesota Public Radio to do about 80 30-second spots a month, we do direct mail, and we do television shows,” Gramling says.
   Remodeling and home makeover shows have become an obsession with some segments of the public, and Northwestern’s countertops have been featured on HGTV and public television. When Dean Johnson, host of the home-renovation program Hometime®, remodeled the kitchen and laundry room of his parents’ condominium on a recent show, the work included countertops from Northwestern. 
   While Gramling’s contact at HGTV is an old competitor who approached him when he was had a need for ideas and assistance on remodeling 13 different kitchens for the cable channel, he says much of his access to this type of exposure is just keeping up contacts.
   “What happens is I’ll give Dean a call and he’ll tell me what’s coming up and what he needs,” Gramling explains. “I usually get my suppliers to donate the material and then we donate the fabrication and installation.”
   In return, he gets a custom-made tape with excerpts from the show and an endorsement from the show host. Not only does Gramling alert his local media as to when the segment featuring Northwestern will air, but those tapes make a nice mailing to residential builders and designers.
   While that’s probably not something every shop can do, Gramling notes that customers who come to the showroom are quizzed on what brought them there (he dropped one Yellow Pages book as not being cost-effective), he’s constantly monitoring how much referral business he’s getting from designers, and he hired an architect to design the showroom in his current building.
   “We spent a lot of money on our showroom, but I told the architect that when the customers leave, I want them to remember where they’ve been,” he says. “Photos from magazines are mounted on the wall museum-style – they’re backlit with plaques under them. It’s a radius wall and it pulls the customers in. We also have separate work areas and we have some very interesting restrooms.”
   For all his efforts, Gramling admits that at this point his marketing effort is done mainly to maintain his current market share and keep his 25 employees busy. His competitors may not have more than a century of history behind them, but they don’t have the overhead of a union shop, either.
   In the long run, he believes he’ll have to continue to do things still better just to remain competitive.
   “Over the next 10 years, it’s going to be alliances with suppliers and getting materials at the best possible cost that will make a difference,” Gramling concludes. “We plan to increase our imports, even if we have to get an off-site facility to do it. And, we have to keep getting better and better at what we do, although the efficiencies we’ve achieved over the past four years though things such as materials handling are just amazing.”

This article first appeared in the March 2004 print edition of Stone Business. ©2004 Western Business Media Inc.