Classic Stone LLC, Indianapolis
Equally beneficial is the fact that the two men have taken on different responsibilities within the company.
“Dan is probably more aggressive on the front end,” says Weddige. “He does a lot of shaking hands and making sales calls. I’m the one who talks to our current retail clients a bit more. I work with them to assure they have samples and displays for their showrooms and home-show projects. I guess I’m more of the back end, where he’s focused on future business and current sales.
“It’s ended up that more of the Cambria is also handled by me, and more of the granite and other services are handled by Dan,” he adds. “Part of that is because I still do all of the computer programming for the Cambria, so I’m more intimately involved in those jobs.”
Click to enlargeWeddige’s intimacy with each job actually goes a little beyond that. While Marsh says he’d rather not go out on installs these days – if he can avoid it — that’s still a fairly common part of his partner’s workday.
“We try to schedule at least two installs a day, and luckily we’ve been able to keep up that hectic pace,” says Weddige. “However, sometimes we have to beat it, and that’s when either myself or Scott Smith, who oversees templating and service calls, gets out in the field.
“If there’s a vanity that needs to be installed and it’s 30 miles away, there’s no reason to send the whole crew and maybe pull them away from a kitchen.”
All the templating for the Cambria jobs is done electronically with a laser system, converted to DFX files and then sent to the Cambria fabrication facility.
“The nice thing about that is we don’t have to do any physical templates or remove the countertops to take dimensions,” Weddige observes. “And, they spit them out exactly the way we send them: there’s no room for interpretation and so we get back exactly what we want.”
For granite work, the templating information is still handled electronically, but cut into transparent plastic material on a plotter made by Derry, N.H.-based Allen Datagraph Systems Inc. (ADSI).
“The bridge-saw operator still has to cut to the basic shape and then the guys have to finish it, but it definitely allows the end-users who want to be more involved in the process to come in and truly lay out their own kitchen on their slabs,” says Weddige. “We’d love to be fully automated, but we have to take these steps at the proper time, and we’re hoping to add more-sophisticated equipment soon.”
DIVERSIFICATION
The move to start doing their own fabrication of natural-stone countertops is part of the customer-service orientation the pair share.
“It was really a matter of being able to diversify ourselves,” Marsh says. “And, obviously, granite was something we were familiar with.”