Avalon Stone Products, Fort Worth, Texas

  A good indication that McCracken would take the road less traveled came about ten years ago when, at the start of a promising career with one of Dallas’ leading architectural firms, he quit to go to work for a fledgling cast-stone company. A few months later, the owner died in an accident and McCracken found himself running the place with a staff of two: an inexperienced mold maker and an office manager.
  “The three of us decided to pull together and try our best to keep the business going,” he says.
  McCracken later purchased the Fort Worth, Texas-based Avalon Stone Products from its founder’s heirs. After growing the cast-stone portion of the business, he began to look for another challenge – and found it with cut limestone. Before long, Avalon Stone began offering that product as well, with McCracken developing an interest in hand carving..
  A skilled salesman, McCracken often lands jobs that require large-scale product, and he works closely with other limestone fabricators for much of this type of residential and commercial work. And, in the meantime, his skills as a draftsman are in such demand that he’s started a separate company to keep up with the jobs he takes doing field measurements and shop drawings.
 
A FRIEND IN NEED
  Thirteen years ago, McCracken seemed to have the world by the tail. While earning a graduate degree in architecture from Texas A&M, he began working for HKS, an international architectural firm based in Dallas.
  There was only one problem. He didn’t like what he was doing.
  “I was 24 when I started there,” he says. “A professor from A&M got me the job and I was drafting a lot, but I got tired of being inside all day behind the computer.”
  After three years at HKS, McCracken began to look at other options. Along with architecture, he had a background in construction. Members of his family have been in the building business in Texas and New Mexico for more than a century and he knew that side of the business from years of summer jobs.
  His apparent deliverance came in the form of a three-line ad in a newspaper seeking a draftsman for a cast-stone company headed by Russell Boyd, who was in the process of changing the direction of his business.
  “Russell had a little sheet-rock business he was trying to sell,” McCracken explains. “When I got there, what he really needed was someone to help him start the cast-stone business. Right away I started doing marketing and shop drawings and teaching myself to sandblast. I was pretty much running the production aspect of his cast-stone operation.”
  Then, only seven months after McCracken went to work at Avalon Stone Products, the unthinkable happened. Boyd and three friends were killed in the crash of a small airplane.
  “We had a couple big jobs at the time, and Russell’s dad decided to keep the place open,” he explains. “We kept the business running and we continued from there. But, without Russell, I found myself making all the sales calls, doing all the bidding, designing and delivering the stone in addition to my original responsibilities.”
  Four years later, McCracken bought a majority of the business from Boyd’s parents. By then, he’d recognized the popularity of another product he’d seen while out selling cast-stone jobs: custom-cut limestone.
  “I was working on a job doing exterior stone veneer when I saw an interior cut-stone fireplace surround and was very impressed,” he says. “So, I started searching to find out who does that kind of thing. From there, I set out to meet the people who own the different mills around the state.”
  McCracken liked what he saw and began selling limestone. He says the limestone and cast-stone markets are closely related in Texas anyway.
  For instance, he says there’s quite a demand for cast stone as Texas renovates some of its old government buildings, such as courthouses.
  “We do a lot of old courthouses where we have to match the red sandstone they were made of,” he says. “They don’t like to cut that Pecos Red Sandstone anymore because it releases a lot of silica in the air, so we make a lot of cast stone to match that rust-colored sandstone.”
  At the same time, he says there’s a heavy demand in the Dallas market for such decorative architectural elements as columns and window, door and fireplace surrounds. These days, he’s happy to offer limestone as an alternative to his cast-stone customers.
  “I can usually make a limestone fireplace for the same cost as the cast stone unless there’s something ornate, like a Corinthian capital, on it,” he says.
 
HANDY MAN
  When McCracken talks about making a limestone fireplace, he actually means doing the design and field work himself. One of the things that interested him about limestone was the ability to hand-carve, allowing each piece to be unique.
  “I really wanted to get into hand-carved stone, particularly,” he says. “Now, we do a lot of interior and exterior hand-carved architectural elements.”
  McCracken, who’s on the board of directors for the Southwest Stone Carving Symposium, says he’s found the hand-carving niche fits in nicely with a lot of his company’s other work. The annual symposium allows him to share his field experience for one week a year with others interested in hand carving.
  He’s also teaching his crew – whose major experience is with cast stone – how to carve limestone.
  “They like it that I’ve introduced them to a new material, and one where they actually get to cut and shape something,” he says.
  McCracken still does much of the drawing at Avalon himself. He also does contract work, which has led to some really interesting jobs, he says. A good example is a job involving the cladding of a complicated stairway with Italian marble.
  “The builders had framed up a radius stairway with a landing in it,” he says. “I went in and field-measured every bit of it, then created as-built drawings which were sent to Italy. The Italians rebuilt a copy of the wooden frame of the stairs, clad it with marble, numbered each piece, disassembled the cladding, and sent the marble back. This ensured it would fit precisely when installed at the job site.”
  While many of those projects he becomes involved in are large, he also does similar work for homeowners. For instance, he recently was involved in a job for a homeowner who got his name from someone with whom he’d worked at HKS.
  “The homeowner’s existing cast-stone contractor needed assistance,” McCracken says. “They could do drawings of simple window surrounds, but they couldn’t handle the structural design work involved in 22” diameter, fluted columns and a pediment entry.”
  While the original company finished the job, they used his shop drawings and fabrication tickets, and McCracken says he takes pride in that aspect of his work.
  “People pay me to make sure that the stone will fit the first time,” he says. “I do this by verifying the field conditions before the first piece of stone is cut.”
  McCracken operates that portion of his business under the name CDM, which are his initials. It has become so lucrative that he has hired an additional person to come in and do his final CAD drawings and assist with field measurements.
  Aside from his drafting skills, probably the biggest factor in McCracken’s success is his ability as a salesman. He’s able to be involved in jobs much larger than his crew would normally service simply because he goes out and finds them.
  He modestly attributes at least some of that to what he calls his, “extended workforce,” which includes numerous high school and college friends who are constantly sending him referrals. But, it doesn’t stop there.
  “I recently had a garage sale and actually passed out business cards and brochures to home builders and developers who happened to stop by,” he says.
  He always keeps his eyes open for new opportunities.
  “If I’m driving down the road and see a sign go up announcing a new construction project, I’ll start calling to find out who the architect and general contractor are,” McCracken says. “I’ve gotten several big jobs that way. I did a new mall here in Dallas and I just finished a new charitable foundation headquarters.”
  This year marks McCracken’s tenth anniversary with Avalon Stone Products, and both he and the company have come a long way over the past decade. Today, his sales are about equally divided between cast stone and custom-cut limestone, but that’s not to say they’ll remain that way.
  Probably his biggest plans center around expanding the company’s product line. McCracken says he’s interested in adding several other types of stone – such as calcite, granite and marble – as well as expanding the limestone Avalon offers to include architectural and landscape elements and even sculpture and monuments.
  Whether he’s drafting, detailing/designing, taking field measurements, selling or introducing a new product line, he’s happier than his time as an architectural draftsman. And, it’s also a sure thing that, whatever he’s doing, McCracken will stay busy looking for new opportunities in the stone business.

This article first appeared in the September 2003 print edition of Stone Business. ©2003 Western Business Media Inc.