Granite Designs, Longville, Minn.

May 5, 2003

LONGVILLE, Minn. – It’s not easy finding this place on a map.
Located more than 100 miles northwest of the Twin Cities at the southern end of the Chippewa National Forest, it’s a dandy sport for fishing, hunting and boating, but not exactly where you’d expect to find a thriving stone-fabrication shop.
Customers from Alaska to the District of Columbia, however, find that Granite Designs, a division of Northland Monument Co., Inc., is a first-rate source for special and ornate stonework, as well as more mundane types of cut stone.
Company founder and president Mark Lange isn’t exactly your typical business executive, either. After a serious accident ended his first career in construction, he was initially grateful to just get back on his feet selling monuments a couple hours a day.
By recognizing market needs, he moved into the stone business, first with monuments and then with cut stone. And, he says being a bit off the beaten path is no hindrance to achieving his goals.

HIGHS AND LOWS
To say that Lange has known real peaks and valleys in his working life is probably an understatement.
A native of southwestern Minnesota, he says he first visited Longville in 1980.
“I came up here for a weekend,” he says. “I liked the area, rented a house, and stayed here.”
At that point, Lange was working as a supervisor for a large construction company, and he says as long as there was an airport near the jobsite where he could fly in and out, it didn’t make much difference where he and his family were living.
However, that life came to an end one day when he was helping set up a steel structure and a crane tipped over, breaking several vertebra in his back and putting him in the hospital and rehabilitation for 18 months. Getting back to work was a struggle.
“I know how to manage personnel, and after all that time, the workers’ comp people wanted me to go to work for McDonald’s,” he says. “I couldn’t do that.”
Still, Lange had to do something; the family had three small children, and his spouse, Patty, was working two jobs to keep things going financially. Instead, he went to work for his dad, Merle Lange, at Dent Lakes Granite selling funeral monuments.
“It looked like something I could work at on a day-to-day basis,” he says. “If the pain was bothering me too much, I could just quit and go home. That’s what I did. This all started out as a source to help out with the income my wife was bringing in.”
Thanks to some pain-management schools, Lange was eventually able to expand his workday until the monument sales became a second income for the family. However, the more he worked, the more he saw the need to speed up the production of monuments.
“Granite was very hard to get,” he says. “If you needed a monument, you might wait six or eight months to get it. The company I was working for didn’t need to get them out any faster because there was nobody in competition with them. I saw an opportunity and went from there.”
Lange started Northland Monument Co. in 1985, subsequently buying out several other companies, including his dad’s. Not surprisingly, over time, he saw a similar need for cut stone.
“Both in the line of work I’m in and in signage, people were looking for granite cut to size,” he says. “They’d have to wait for somebody to cut it and then they’d have to go get it. Sometimes it wasn’t the right size, and they’d always have to pay a lot of money for it. By the time it got to the customer, it was generally priced out of the market.”
Granite Designs began operating in 1990 working outside Lange’s Longville office. The first work was done using Skil saws. That start, plus Lange’s background with the monument industry, worked to the company’s advantage.
“We’re a little bit more-ornate than most granite cutters,” he says. “I like to have a customer bring me something that somebody else said can’t be done. We may have to alter it a little to fit the stone industry itself, but we’ll find a way to do it. A lot of people work with 1 1/4” or 2” material, but we’re used to working with the heavier materials, and we just put in bigger saws to handle it.”
Today, Lange says the shop – 27,000 ft² of covered space on 10 acres outside Longville – can handle anything up to 13’ X 5’ and weighing 10 tons.
Consequently, the company gets a lot of jobs other fabrication companies aren’t interested in tackling. For instance, Lange cites one corporate headquarters where the parking lot was done in granite pavers, all radius-fit.
“We can literally build anything anybody would like when it comes to stone,” Lange says.

PLENTY OF PLUSES
Certainly a large reason for Lange’s confidence is his company’s mix of first-rate equipment and top-notch employees.
Although Granite Designs started cutting with Skil saws, Lange appreciates the benefits of automation, and with good reason. He says when he bought his dad’s business – which operates out of Dent. Minn., about 110 miles away – he upgraded it with computerized equipment and it became his sandblast plant.
In the six years since then, he’s added a second CAD operator, and the operation has gone from doing fewer than 100 monuments a year to 1,800 in 2002.
He says when he bought his first saw for Granite Designs, he based the purchase on the fact that if the company cut two kitchens a month it would pay for the saw and the personnel to run it. Last year, the company cut more than 1,500 separate projects.
He says he’s also been fortunate to have the help of the St. Cloud, Minn.-based Park Industries in customizing some of its machines to fit his company’s needs, too.
“We’re running a single diamond-wire saw, a double table Jaguar II profiling saw with a C-4000 package, a Wizard radial polisher, an Odyssey CNC machine, a Pro Edge II, and an Excel Edge,” Lange says. “That way, we can polish our own flats if we need to, or if we need something custom-polished.”
The monument plant has its own two-line polisher.
Lange admits that his shop crew of 23 couldn’t turn out as much work as they do without having the computerized saws, which run even when the rest of the plant is shut down. Since building a new facility three years ago, Lange says he tries to operate with only one manned shift.
“Prior to that, we did run two shifts, but that was a good thing to get away from,” he says. “The second shift would generally cut more stone because they had fewer interruptions, but you still have to have management personnel around … and, inevitably, if something would break down, it was in the middle of the night.”
That’s not to say that Lange doesn’t feel he has great employees.
“We spend a lot of time training most of the people who come to work here,” he says. “The pay is better than most people make in this area, we have a benefits package, and they’re here to stay.”
He says he’s particularly benefited from the two people who do a lot of the design work for Granite Designs.
“I was very fortunate to have a gentleman named Donnie Soderstrom come to work for me who loves stone and is an excellent draftsman,” he says. “He’s very open-minded and good at working with people and their drawings to come up with what they need. He’s come up with some excellent designs over the years, and I now have a second person, Mark Carstensen, that works with us like that. It’s great to have personnel like that.”
Lange says there are also a couple other benefits to being in Longville. Certainly one is its proximity to Cold Spring Granite Co., which supplies approximately 90 percent of the stone his company fabricates.
“We have regular truck routes on a daily basis, both with our own trucks and commercial trucking,” he says. “Cold Spring has its own trucks up here twice a week, so freight probably isn’t any worse than being in a large metro area.”
And, he says along with a loyal workforce, his tax base is considerably less than for businesses in more-populous areas, which is also one of the reasons the company has 10 acres for storing materials and equipment.
Surprisingly, Granite Designs’ customer base probably isn’t much different than if the company was in a larger community, either. For instance, about 80 percent of the work is done, “locally,” with most of that being kitchens and bathrooms the company cuts and installs.
The business has a pair of two-person crews for installations, although – if the job demands – it has additional trained employees to send out for installs. If the job is larger or further away, the shop schedule is adjusted accordingly.
“If we get into a really large project, we can handle it,” Lange says. “If the guys have to go out on the road for a week or two, they don’t care what they work; they just do whatever it takes to get the job done so they can come home. They’re very, very dedicated people.”
The remainder of the work is a mix of monuments and construction projects that are cut and shipped. For instance, the company has been working regularly for almost three years on a courthouse being built in Alaska.
“It’s all being done by drawings they send us, and then we cut and ship the materials back to them,” Lange says. “It seems like they take material every month. We often get large projects where it takes months to get done. For instance, that exterior paving and curbing job was for a corporate headquarters near Chicago. We started that one January and we were still working on it when it froze the next fall.”

GOALS AND LESSONS
Of course, how Lange defines what’s local in terms of his business may be a little bit different than some other companies.
While those large cut-and-ship jobs to faraway locations are often the result of Granite Designs’ reputation and its Website, Lange also employs an active sales staff to help bring the jobs in from a market that includes the Dakotas, and parts of Iowa and Wisconsin, as well as Minnesota.
For his residential work, Lange gets his products in front of the public in much the same way as his urban competitors: he’s opened showrooms in larger communities outside Longville.
The most recent is in Grand Rapids, Minn., a city of about 8,000 people some 70 miles northeast of Longville. While Grand Rapids supplies a steady source of business to the company already, Lange says the new showroom will let people shop at home, rather than making the trek to Longville.
“Most people are drawn to do business in the area where they immediately live,” he says. “They trend to trust their local vendors more, which is why we’re looking at adding two or three more stores in the Minneapolis-St. Paul metro area. We already have one in Ramsey, which is northwest of Minneapolis.”
Lange doesn’t add showrooms lightly. Not only does he like them to have customers saying that they’ve never seen anything like it in terms of materials, but he says experience has shown it takes two to three years before the outlet is producing the revenue stream he would like to see.
Just as when he figured he could pay for his first saw doing two kitchen jobs a month, Lange still keeps a close eye on the bottom line, aided by Patty Lange, who plays an active role in the business and is responsible for the books for all Northland’s various activities.
Some of that may be attributed to the days when Lange knew his two hours selling monuments would boost the family finances, but he says a lot also comes from the way he got into the business.
“I believe I have to pay particular attention to the bottom line in everything to help learn from my mistakes,” he says. “You’re never going to go without making some mistakes, and being self-taught in the stone industry, I probably made more mistakes than most people have. However, you have a tendency to remember your lessons more when it hits your ego and your pocketbook at the same time.”
Still, as a goal-oriented person, Lange says he’s always looking ahead to the next challenge because, “if you achieve your goal and you don’t have another one right on top of that, you don’t have anyplace to go.”
That’s one of the reasons he enjoys the stone industry, he says. There’s always another project to get started on, and especially enjoyable are the very large projects. For instance, he’s excited the company was just hired to do a large war memorial for Park Rapids, Minn., that will be one of the larger ones erected in the state this year.
His other pleasure is that Northland Monument Co. and Granite Designs have become family businesses. Along with Patty, son Nathan took over as head of production about a year ago, and both a sister-in-law, Liz Lange, and a brother-in-law, Bob Rhoades, manage showrooms.
“We have a lot of family support,” Lange says.
His father is particularly proud of Nathan’s involvement. Although only age 20, his father says the young man was making cemetery visits with him while still in diapers and has worked for Granite Designs since the age of 14.
“He knows a lot about the stone industry because he’s been there, seen it and done it,” says Mark Lange. “If there’s something new, he takes time to learn it and he’s a good teacher. He takes a lot of time with the employees explaining procedures and how they fit with the rest of the job. He takes care of the scheduling and makes sure the jobs get through.”
Lange is somewhat more modest about his own accomplishments. He says he still remembers when he just hoped to make a living for himself and his family with stone, and he didn’t expect to be in a position to employ some 60 people, 35-40 of them full time, in a place where some people wouldn’t think such a business would work at all.
“Some days Patty and I sit back and look at it, but since we grew with it on a daily basis, it doesn’t seem that big,” he says. “It’s only when somebody who doesn’t know all we’ve gone through looks at it that it seems staggering.”