International Granite and Stone LLC, Odessa, Fla.

October 6, 2003

Chris Stewart, president of International Granite and Stone LLC, certainly thinks so. The son of one of the founders of Hooters Inc., Stewart admits to knowing a lot more about marketing than about stone when he decided to focus on the industry a couple years ago.
He must be doing something right; since opened its doors earlier this year, the company expanded from 12 to 42 employees and recently added a second production shift. And, while Stewart doesn’t see his company growing into a nationwide franchise, he says his near-term goal is to become the dominant stone fabricator in central Florida.

BOOMING MARKET
Stewart and his family aren’t exactly a stranger to hard work. Before his father, L.D. Stewart, and some friends made a success of Hooters, the elder Stewart worked as a coal miner, a house painter and in road construction.
A graduate of Furman University, Chris Stewart says about two years ago he was looking for something to do. At the same time, both he and his dad were struck by the large amount of construction in the Tampa, Fla., area.
“The development in this area is just unbelievable,” Chris Stewart says. “There’s a huge demand for stone. My dad had had some bad experiences in the past with other granite companies; we just felt it was an area that wasn’t getting addressed properly. We saw this as an opportunity.”
At that point, neither Stewart had any experience in the stone business, so Chris Stewart went to work for a shop in the Tampa area. He says that, at the time, his main goal was to get his feet wet with the fabrication side of the business.
The Stewarts also began attending trade shows, talking with people and absorbing knowledge. When they began to seriously consider opening their own stone fabrication business, they started working with Barrington, Ill.-based U.S. Granite Machinery.
“They gave us an open door to their shop so we could look at every aspect of it,” Chris Stewart says. “We just tried to learn as much as we could from them. A lot of it was watching the production flow and what operators were necessary for the different machines.”
The company was also helpful in working with them to come up with a design for what’s become a 26,000 ft² plant with two overhead cranes, a high-end drainage system, enough storage for 700 slabs and 6,000 ft² of showroom space.
“It was a hard year-and-a-half to get it all together,” Stewart says. “We spent six months in the development stage determining how to get the most out of our building. We spend endless hours working on the drainage system, material flow, storage, office space and the showroom. Once all our ideas were on paper, actual construction of the building took about a year.”
The Stewarts were as particular about their location as they were the facility itself. They chose an industrial park in Odessa, Fla., which is about a 25-minute drive north of downtown Tampa. Most of the established stone shops in the area, meanwhile, are based closer to downtown Tampa.
Chris Stewart says it’s about five minutes from the Sun Coast Parkway, which has done a lot to fuel development north of Tampa.
“A lot of the development is a result of the new parkway,” he says. “People are moving out here faster than they can build houses. There isn’t any end in sight; this area should keep on developing for the next 15-20 years.”

GETTING BUSY
Once the building was in place, Stewart filled it with new equipment, including two bridge saws and two edgers from Sassomeccanica s.r.l, a U.S. Granite Piranha polisher, a Park Industries Wizard, and – as of mid-July – a Park Odyssey.
“We’re still working into that,” Stewart says. “It’s going to take time to get the production we anticipate out of it. At the moment it’s more of a hindrance because the guys could do it faster by hand. However, six months from now, I know it’s never going to call in sick or get hurt. There’s just a learning curve associated with this.”
One of Stewart’s biggest concerns has been hiring the right people to run the equipment and fill the other niches in the operation. He calls that aspect of the business his biggest struggle, and an on-going one, since the company continues to grow and hire.
“We’re hiring people as fast as we can,” he says. “We started our night shift in mid-August. It started out as a bare-bones shift, but now we have two saw operators, a guy on the edger, and two teams in the polishing room. That’s close to a full crew and it will ensure that we deliver on our two-week lead time.”
Of course, Stewart also probably works a little harder than most at staying busy. Although International Granite has its own installation crews – all uniformed and driving company trucks – a lot of the work turned out by the shop is fabrication only. While some of that goes to contractors, some of it is also produced for some of the solid-surface companies in the area.
Much of that work, Stewart says, is driven by the fact that along with natural stone, the firm fabricates DuPont’s Zodiaq® for the Florida distributor.
“We’ve established relationships with numerous Corian® dealers who also sell Zodiaq but don’t have the ability to produce it,” he says. “They template the jobs and give us the templates. We produce and deliver, and they install.”
He adds that more than a few of the solid-surface dealers also now offer granite, which they also buy from International Granite.
“Frankly, we do a lot of granite for them,” Stewart says. “Zodiaq still hasn’t caught on big here.”
While that offers a solid base for the company, Stewart hasn’t forgotten to reach out to individual retail customers. For instance, International Granite has its own outside sales people on the road driving Chrysler PT Cruisers that are distinctively marked, and the company has dropped money into ads in some of the area’s high-end magazines.
However, he says his biggest impact in the retail market comes from the business’ presence on one of Tampa’s AM talk-radio stations.
“We advertise during the morning drive, and again in the afternoons during the Sean Hannity and Bill O’Reilly shows,” Stewart says. “We’ve been doing that since we opened, and it’s brought in a ton of business compared to the print ads. We have a constant presence on the radio, and after awhile if people in the area are thinking about buying granite, they’ll think about us.”
The same ownership group of the AM outlet also controls an FM station that focuses on financial news, where International Granite also places advertising.
“Not a lot of people listen to that station, but a lot of those listeners are people we consider our clientele,” he adds. “It’s working out great.”
Stewart also uses some untraditional methods to encourage those radio listeners to give his company a try. At different times he’s offered 10-percent-off of work, or a free stainless undermount sink with the purchase of a kitchen at retail value.
Once a customer comes through the door, Stewart and his staff also work hard to make sure the person has a good experience buying granite. That 6,000 ft² showroom features two different kitchens and 15 freestanding islands done in number of different finishes.
“We have granite tops in all the colors we stock in-house and they’re removable,” he explains. “We can mix and match any top with any colored cabinet. Not only is it better than trying to match a slab with a door sample, but you get a better perspective on how it’s going to look. People like that.”
Stewart says he also tries to keep his slab selection simple and consistent.
“We’re not going to import something with a ton of movement in it that’s going to vary a lot,” he says. “If we need something like that, we’ll get it from a distributor. We stock probably 35 colors and we like to offer customers just enough options.”
International Granite also utilizes a fairly simple pricing structure.
“We have three price breaks and within that we include nine standard edge details,” Stewart explains. “The only things that are additional are undermount sinks, ogees and a triple-waterfall edge. Every other edge is included in our square-foot price.”
If there’s one problem Stewart foresees with his approach, it’s the need for space. While he says the shop and offices should be more than ample to keep the company growing for some time to come, maintaining such a large inventory of slabs could quickly get to be a problem.
In fact, he envisions a time when the shop’s yard might have to relocate to another spot in the industrial park.
“We’d want to move the inventory to another building, because we want to keep our slabs inside,” he says. “We have a lot of storms here, and it’s hot, and people don’t deserve to go out in the dirt and the heat to look at granite slabs.
“We want it to be a controlled environment, and while we’re not talking air-conditioning, it would have lights and cranes. It’s also safer that way because you don’t have guys jockeying around the floor with slabs on fork lifts.”

EYEING THE FUTURE
Some people may wonder where the craft has gone with International Granite, but Stewart says that’s not his goal. He’s taken his family’s previous business experience and moved it into a different market.
“I like to think we’re pretty creative in what we do,” he says. “But, we’re not doing anything particularly different. We’re running this like a business and the product just happens to be stone.”
It’s also likely to remain a granite and natural-quartz business, he adds, and one that focuses strictly on kitchens and bathrooms. Stewart says he has no interest in expanding into tiling or into different stones.
While the company is currently importing about a container a month, mainly to maintain color selection, Stewart says he certainly has no plans to become a distributor.
“The distribution business is not something we’re looking at getting into,” he says. “We buy a lot of our material locally. In the central Florida area, slabs are reasonably priced. It doesn’t make sense for us to bring them in on our own.”
However, Stewart definitely has plans to continue to continue to grow International Granite and Stone as a fabrication and installation firm.
“We definitely plan to be the biggest player in the Tampa area market,” he says. “Right now we service an area from Brooksville to Sarasota to the Orlando area. When you factor in the people for whom we just do fabrication, the area expands even more dramatically.”
Stewart says realistically, he would like to serve at least half the state, although he’s not sure whether that can be done from a single location. It’s possible he might also expand into other parts of Florida, or even the entire Southeast.
He says it’s even possible he might consider offering franchises. After all, that’s how L.D. Stewart helped grow Hooters, and while the older man is pretty much retired (he’s no longer a partner in the beach-theme restaurants), he doesn’t mind giving advice when asked.
“I know there are a few companies that have shops in three or four cities within a state, but I don’t know of any that operate on a regional or national scale,” Chris Stewart observes. “I’m not going to say that it’s a goal – because our goal is to just be dominant in this market – but it’s a possibility.”
In the meantime, Stewart’s confident he’s chosen great products on which to base his new business. While he likes the Zodiaq and says it’s great to work with because of breakage issues, what he and his customers really like it the granite.
“Granite is definitely a trend here,” he says. “It seems like people are putting it in every house, whether it’s new or a remodel. The other products are just an afterthought. We talk to people all the time, and most of them can’t believe how much granite has taken off just recently.
“You hear from everybody about how hot it is, and I don’t see it slowing down any.”