Custom Stone Interiors, Centre Hall, Pa.
“We don’t do a whole lot of marketing,” says Waltz. “We’ve been doing some newspaper-type advertising, but this year we’re going to do some TV ads.”
The company also has a new logo, and Waltz and Everhart are trying to keep up with their website, an area Waltz describes as “still evolving.”
“That’s certainly another important marketing area,” Waltz says. “Ultimately we want to have a unique website and we’ve talked to some guys about doing it, but it’s just not in our budget this year. We plan to update it to something we really like, but that’s more likely to happen in 2011.”
Even with the economy, CSI has remained strong. The company has continued to grow from year-to-year, and early projections are that 2010 will not be an exception.
Although the partners have not yet tapped into the pipeline for doing projects at their alma mater, the very presence of Penn State proves to be both a boon and a drawback to CSI.
“We’re a little more sheltered in State College,” says Waltz. “Because it’s a university town, we don’t see the ups and downs in the housing market that you find in other areas of the country.”
However, unlike many other areas, it’s not a place where there’s a lot of unused commercial or industrial space for the company to relocate.
“That’s why we’re probably going to have to build,” Waltz explains. “We keep socking money away and keep looking ahead to the time when we achieve that goal. It’s probably about a year-and-a-half away, but it might be a little more depending on how things go in 2010.
“That’s definitely when we would look at adding a CNC,” he adds. “It would get us that much farther in terms of production.”
As it is, the company is currently split between three separate spaces in the industrial complex where the partners first began their operation, with their original space now serving as their slab warehouse.
“We just moved into a new showroom that’s more spacious than what we had,” says Waltz. “We have about 700 ft², plus offices, so it’s not real small. However, the shop is about 4,000 ft², and that’s really cramped.”
Lack of space – and no CNC – certainly isn’t hurting CSI, though. As Waltz says, the company is known mainly for the quality of work, both in fabrication and installation.