Anaheim Centsible Tile, Anaheim, Calif.

August 5, 2003

ANAHEIM, Calif. – In one respect, Tony Beber hasn’t come very far in the two decades since he started Anaheim Centsible Tile Inc.
The company opened for business in a 90-ft² office in a carpet store on Anaheim, Calif.’s South State College Blvd. – the “Tile Mile” hotbed of stonework. Today, it’s still in the same complex, less than a half-dozen doors removed from the original spot … but, as Beber observes, the company does have its own front entrance.
That’s about the only thing that remains the same, however. The days when Beber used to estimate, sell, deliver and sometimes help install jobs are long gone, replaced with a staff of almost 50 people, including an 18-man stone-fabricating shop.
The product line is a bit more diverse, too, with ceramic tile, hardwood floors, laminate flooring and carpet. As with the rest of the mix, he added stone tiles – and later slabs – as customers asked for them.
“We’re a one-stop shop,” Beber says. “Whether they’re looking for floors, showers or countertops, they can stay with us for the entire application and project.”

GIVING 100 PERCENT
It’s not that Beber started out planning to be all things to all people. However, when you combine some advice the young man received from his elders, along with knowledge he picked up studying business in college, it’s not surprising, either.
Although parents of some teenagers may wonder how much their sage advice sticks with their offspring, Beber says he’s was very influenced by his father
“My dad was tough; he believed you should show respect to others even before love,” says the son. “That was the foundation for his parental style. We feared him and we always tried to please. As long as I can remember, he used to say, ‘You had better to it right or don’t do it at all. Give 100 percent in whatever you do, because that’s how you’re going to feel right about what you did – and you’re never going to have to live knowing you could have given more of yourself and didn’t.’”
As with many young people, Beber’s college years were a mix of school and work. In his case, the courses were at California State University’s Fullerton campus, and the jobs ranged from fast food to selling computers to working in a campground.
Eventually, he ended up working at a lumberyard, where he met his long-time best friend and Centsible’s general manager, Steve Markle. In those days, Markle was a very creative and talented young man specializing in tile setting, and Tony would go out on jobs as the extra pair of hands.
As his graduation approached in 1982 and he began to have job interviews, Beber encountered an unhappy reality.
“Here I was, going to graduate with a bachelor’s degree in marketing, and potential employers were offering me less than I was making working at the lumberyard and helping Steve set tile,” he says. “I was pretty frustrated.”
Enter the owner of a carpet business in that Anaheim strip mall. At the time, few shops offered multiple products, and he felt it would help his business to have Beber selling tile there.
“He said, ‘Why don’t you take that small office over there, and when a customer comes in and wants a tile floor, we’ll send him to you and have you do it,’” he explains. “We were in a 90-ft² office with two desks back-to-back, and we had milk crates stacked with tile.”
From the beginning, the two young men took a slightly different approach with Centsible Tile. For one thing, they sold for any major manufacturer willing to give them loose samples and let them rep for it. And, at a time when most of the tile shops and distributors handed out business cards of independent installers, Centsible had its own in-house installation crew headed by Markle.
From the beginning, Centsible also had a firm commitment to word-of-mouth advertising. Despite classes spent talking about the merits of different types of marketing and advertising, Beber says he had a simple business plan: “Be the Nordstrom of the tile business.”
“We believe that if you treat your customers right, they’re going to tell somebody and they’re going to tell somebody else,” he says. “I believe that if we show somebody that we’re really fair, honest and good, they’re going to remember that more than if they’d read it in the newspaper seven times in the previous week.”
Of course, good word-of-mouth advertising requires customers to say positive – rather than negative – things. Not only does Centsible follow the Nordstrom philosophy, but employees go the extra mile to make sure things are done well the first time.
For instance, all of the installers have company credit cards and free rein to use them for cleaning supplies and property-protection products such as plastic and drop cloths. All of the crews are insured, licensed and bonded. The carpet installers vacuum all new areas before leaving a job; the tile and masonry crews know to hose off the driveway during an installation.
“That’s where I use my marketing knowledge,” Beber says. “If the customers see the attention to detail, then the obvious conclusion is that the job is going to be done right. If a woman has small children, her three-year-old and five-year-old are her top priority. If there are razor blades and tools left all over, she doesn’t care how good a job she got. I want her to see that every night our tools are placed in buckets in a corner of the garage with a tarp over them. I don’t care if it takes an extra hour if the job turns out right in the end.”

FAST LEARNER
When it comes to natural stone, Beber didn’t wait to jump on the bandwagon until it started gathering speed in the mid-1990s. He was still going out on tile setting jobs with Markle – some 15 years ago – when he had his first encounter with the material that now plays such an important role in his business.
The two men went to a new home to set some 400 ft² of ceramic tile. Another workman was installing marble tiles in the entryway.
“We said, ‘What are you doing?’” he relates. “He said, ‘I’m laying the marble.’ I said, ‘We could do that.’ He said, ‘You don’t understand, there are marble guys and tile guys. You’re tile guys and I’m a marble guy.’ Steve said, ‘Okay, you go be the marble man and we’ll be the tile guys.’ So we went in and put our kitchen down and we watched this guy. He was nothing but a prima donna, but he showed us all we needed to see, which was mud-setting. ”
A couple weeks later, the two men bought a box of marble tile, laid it out so the veins showed to the best advantage (their “teacher” worked straight from the box) and butt-jointed them.
“I told Steve that the guy was a magician,” Beber says. “He made the customer think he was something magical and special. And, I said we’re going to be in the stone business, because I’m going to go out and sell marble.’”
From floors, Centsible Tile expanded into doing showers, getting a wheel to put on a 10” saw to do bullnose profiles. When a customer wanted stone slabs in the kitchen, Beber contacted a friend in the business, and then watched the fabrication and installation.
From there, it didn’t take the men long to invest in a slab and fabricate a top for themselves. Markle built a homemade wet saw – a Skil saw and a gallon milk jug with a hole in the bottom to allow water to fall on the work area.
“We cut a countertop,” Beber says. “Then, we glued it and shaped it and polished it. There are several pieces we made that don’t fit any place but where they are now, which is in the landfill. But, we learned.”
In 1988, Centsible invested in its first bridge saw – a Johnson – and set aside a portion of the warehouse and showroom for a fabrication shop. However, it took two other key events to push Centsible into the stone business.
The first was a traffic accident that took the life of a local stone fabricator who had done some jobs for the company. About the same time, another company that had also done some of its fabrication work closed its doors.
“We knew most of the people who had worked there,” says Beber. Some of the guys came to us looking for work, and that was the point where we decided to go headfirst. We hired them, and six of them are still with us today.”
Still, Beber admits it was a slow start, because the market still wasn’t quite ready. In fact, it was necessary to take slab customers into Los Angeles, since there were no stone yards in Orange County.
“We were doing maybe two kitchens a week, one kitchen a week, whatever we could find,” he says. “I’d say it wasn’t until about five years ago that consumers were really becoming aware of our world of stone.”
Although the company may have started with tile samples in a milk crate, today Anaheim Centsible Tile has some 12,000 ft² of showroom and warehouse space, along with a 5,000-ft² fabrication shop. However the sales staff is still taking clients out to look at slabs.
Beber says he actually did have a yard for a couple years, taking a section of the parking lot for it. But, ultimately, he felt he was limiting his customers. Instead, he relies on trusted relationships with some of the better stone sellers within a few minutes of the shop.
“We’ve done some of their homes and showrooms,” he says. “When new materials started to come out, I felt it was not in my clients’ best interest to pick from only the 31 flavors we had here. We utilize their inventories and do what we do best, which is fabricate and install.”

DOING IT RIGHT
Anaheim Centsible Tile may not have its own yard, but the company packs a lot of punch in its small shop. That first bridge saw has been joined by a Matrix bridge saw, a Zonato bridge saw, and a Luca Super 88 profiler. Plans are to add a CNC machine in the near future.
“We’re all very high end and the quality we ask for is impeccable,” says Beber. “We template every job and every customer is invited to come lay out the templates so we can show them the direction of their stone.”
The showroom caters to customer involvement as well. A window between the showroom and the shop allows customers to watch their jobs being cut. And, while they sometimes wonder how he can have a small shop with 18 craftsmen right next to high-end carpeting and flooring, he says it’s because of the effort his employees make to keep the shop clean.
“We recycle all our water,” he says. “At quitting time the guys hose it down, so the shop stays clean and our clients can come in any time and not feel threatened. We like to have the customers watch the edge machine do a profile because they can see the quality.”
Still, every job is finished by hand, and since the fabrication crew averages seven to ten years of experience, Beber is confident they and his three stone-installation crews are turning out first-rate work.
“We have the tightest seams in the business and the best looking edges you’ve ever seen in your life,” Beber says. “Every day our polishing is improving; sometimes we produce a finished edge that seems like it’s been polished better than the factory-polished surface. We don’t ever want to see a job where you get a shiny surface and a dull edge.”
Additionally, Beber says every kitchen customer received a set of cutting boards from their material at no charge as a way of saying, “thank you,” and every job receives two coats of sealer.
“Centsible Tile wouldn’t be anything if we didn’t have the team of people doing what they do every day for us,” he says. “The image and products we produce really do sell the next job.”
Nor is Beber’s claim mere hype. The company’s only advertising is a basic ad in the Yellow Pages and a Website. He says more than 60 percent of his jobs are referrals, and he’s able to charge $55 ft² when his nearby competitors are often in the $25-30 ft² range.
“When people come to us and say, ‘Your quote is $1,000 higher than this other guy,’ we tell them, ‘We’re putting that money into your job because that’s what it needs to be done right. Besides, you’re standing here writing us the check; you know you want it done right,’” he says.
Centsible’s quality and service has taken the firm well beyond mere kitchens and bathrooms. The firm has done work for Disneyland and makes custom tabletops for conference tables for a high-end New York furniture manufacturer. One of their recently completed projects featured a 20’-long executive conference table for a prestigious law firm.
“They have pop-up stations built into the tops for data communications,” Beber explains. “Our seams are so tight you’d can’t even find them because we cut them using a waterjet. We polish he cutouts and put them back where they match to hide the pop-ups.”
Perhaps the company’s greatest challenge to date, however, involved more than two years of design work and a frantic summer of fabrication and installation that started when Centsible went to help with a backyard remodel for the chief executive officer of a multimillion-dollar manufacturer of utility vehicles and specialty trailers.
What started with a slab countertop for the barbecue started to grow when the client asked if the company could replace the existing ceramic tile from the pool and spa with matching granite.
“Then, he said he’d like to rebuild the rear area and add a new water feature like a waterfall or fountain that could feed the water into the pool,” Beber explains. “The, it turned out he didn’t like the existing cantilevered concrete deck he had and he wanted to add some uniqueness there.”
Ultimately, the project involved totally redesigning the swimming pool and spa, even though the Centsible crew had never worked on a pool. To further increase the pressure, the client gave the green light on the project the weekend before Memorial Day – with a completion date before Labor Day so it would be available for a fund-raising event he’d planned.
“Our employees hardly saw their families last summer because we worked six and seven days a week straight for 10 weeks,” Beber says. “Our guys worked an average of 90 hours a week. We were in the pool almost every day and never swam. We’d completed our normal workload during the day, as well as fabricating the pieces the project needed to stay on schedule. We really pulled together and everyone was very proud and very tired when it was done.”
It’s also a case where word-of-mouth is paying off. The CEO entertains often and hands out Centsible’s business cards.
“He’ll call and say so-and-so will be calling about such-and-such,” Beber says. “Yeah, it’s been good for business.”
Only in his mid-40s, Beber says he intends to keep on doing what’s good for the company. Having come from selling ceramic tile from milk crates to the full-service operation Centsible is today, he’s still looking for different vertical markets into which to expand.
“We keep our eyes open and if there’s another specialized product that we can incorporate, we ill,” he says. “We feel we’ve created a company blueprint on how to do this. As long as our people fee confident that they can learn new products, we can bring this to our customers. We have a talented group of people and we offer our products with confidence.”
Anaheim Centsible Tile is a family operation, since Beber’s wife, Candice, is the company’s director of operations and office manager. All of the couple’s five children – the oldest is 16 – have spent time at the business doing chores or homework. The parents recognize that they may want to do other things when they grow up, but they hope there will be someone in the next generation to carry on
“We want them to see the business gives back what effort we put into it,” Beber says. “There are long hours with difficult projects compounded by high expectations by everyone. This is the real world.
“Still, I want the children of the people I’m selling to today to say, ‘We came here because Centsible worked on our parents’ homes years ago. That’s why we’re here.’”