Classic Stone LLC, Indianapolis
“He wondered if I was willing to take on a partner,” Marsh relates. “I told him I wasn’t going to be able to chew off all this by myself. The end result was he uprooted his family from Chicago and moved to Indianapolis. I took my family and moved back to Indianapolis, and the rest is history.”
As with much of history, however, things started slowly for the two. Despite their experience and a business plan, the initial going was a bit shaky.
Click to enlarge“For whatever reason, the banks and the SBA (Small Business Administration) weren’t willing to lend a half-million dollars to a couple of twentysomethings with zero ownership experience,” Marsh says.
However, the partners didn’t give up. Familiar with Cambria because of the industry tradeshows they’d attended, and from past clients, Marsh made contact with someone in the company’s higher echelon and learned that Cambria was in the process of building a fabrication facility in Indianapolis to serve the Midwest.
“They were looking for trade partners, and I was diligent about calling them every other day, asking them to give us a shot,” Marsh says. “I told them, ‘Let us sell it, measure it and install it. You can handle the material and the fabrication of it.’”
Additionally, Marsh says he and Weddige realized they were more sales and customer-service oriented because of their previous experience in the industry.
The folks at Cambria decided to give the pair a shot, and they became certified installation associates. Launching their operation with a templating machine, a trailer and some 18-hour days, the new business owners soon found that the material was generating a lot of interest, and it was time to massage their business model.
“We quickly decided to market ourselves more to the retailers, the kitchen-and-bath shops, the cabinet makers and the remodelers,” says Marsh. “We decided we wanted to be more of a wholesaler/subcontractor to other people in the industry.”
It was apparently the right decision; today, Classic Stone LLC sells and installs more residential Cambria than anyone else in the state of Indiana.
A GOOD MATCH
A key part of the company’s success today is that the two partners bring different – and complementary – skills to the business, Weddige believes.
“Dan graduated with a degree in finance,” says his partner. “He definitely thinks along those lines, which I don’t. My expertise comes from my sales and sales-management past.
That’s why, when we’re working on a presentation, I do a lot of the write-ups and things like that. We’ll even play ‘good cop/bad cop’ if there’s a conflict with an end user or retailer, and that works very well.”