M S Granite, San Antonio

   He spent those early days working in a small operation with minimal equipment, personally crafting as much of the jobs as he could.
   “Right when I started working with stone, I liked it,” says Sandoval. “It was something different than I’d ever done. For me, I liked seeing the entire process, from the raw stone all the way through to the finished product.
   “You start off with that raw material, and you turn it into something that looks really nice. Seeing that process as it happens is what I liked about it so much.”
   He continued working at the shop throughout high school, eventually working there full-time after graduation.
   In 2002, when Sandoval realized it was time to get into the business for himself, it was a no-brainer to keep the new operation small – it allowed him to maintain the hands-on approach that was so enjoyable in his first years in the industry.
   Sandoval had a friend who operated a local tile business with some extra space in its 2,000 ft² facility. Some 1,500 ft² of it would become the first physical location of M S Granite.
   “At that point, I was paying him a little rent and started working under the name M S Granite doing mainly kitchen countertops for remodels and new homes,” he says.
   After cutting his teeth on some of those initial jobs and taking on a few more employees – M S Granite now employs four people, in addition to Sandoval – he was finally ready to find shop space of his own.
   Just last August, the entire operation moved to a leased 5,000 ft² building across town.
  
GROWING UP, SETTLING IN
   While Sandoval certainly has fond memories of that original space, he’s excited about the prospects offered by the new one. It offers the company a little room to grow … and breath, for that matter.
   “It’s a nice tall warehouse with big garage-style doors, which makes it really easy moving in big slabs,” he notes. “They can basically back right in and I can pull them off with a forklift without having to worry about the tops of all the doors. It’s a big, wide-open space with plenty of room to work.”
   From that space, Sandoval and his staff – Ezekial Bergez, Erasmo Serna and Heliodoro Serna in the shop, and Rachel Ramos handling office duties – produce a modest two to three kitchens each week.
   “That’s about the average, depending, of course, on what types of jobs we’re doing and how big they are,” he says. “A good number of our jobs are for custom home builders, and those are bigger jobs that can take a while. In an operation of this size, that can have a big effect on how many jobs you’re getting done.”
   While those custom home builders provide some of the biggest jobs that M S Granite produces, the highest volume of work comes from remodeling projects and from the company’s ongoing relationships with a few local builders.
   “They’re not doing massive mansions or anything like that,” he says. “It’s mostly spec homes and tract homes. They’re generally smaller projects, but more of them.”
   Almost all of these jobs utilize natural granite, as opposed to quartz-surface or solid-surface materials, he says.
   “We do a lot of the basic granite stone, and then a lot of exotic-colored granite as well,” says Sandoval. “We do some marble vanities and projects like that, but somewhere in the range of 95 percent or more of our jobs are done with granite.”
   He said that in the San Antonio area, he just hasn’t run across much demand for quartz- or solid-surface products: “In the last few years, I can really only think of a couple of customers that have even asked me about it. If the need were there for it, I would certainly consider doing more of it, but that just hasn’t happened.”
   For natural stone, he primarily sources his raw material from VF International, a local slab yard, and from distributor Midwest Tile. The amounts vary by month depending on various factors, he says.
   “On average, I probably go through about 15 slabs a month,” he notes. “That obviously varies quite a bit by how many jobs we’re working on and the quality of the stone. If it’s lower-end stone, it doesn’t cost that much. If I’m buying a lot of exotic, it can get pretty expensive.”
   Sandoval says the granite generally originates from Brazil or India, and about half of that would be considered exotic granite.
   “I get a pretty even split between customers,” he says. “Some want the really consistent stone, like Uba Tubas and other types like that. Those customers don’t like a lot of movement within the stone. The other half really likes that movement and all the swirls and character of some other types of granite.”
   According to Sandoval, the company specializes in offering a wealth of finishing options.
   “We pride ourselves in offering a lot of different edging,” he says. “We really try to give our customers a nice variety to choose from, even though we don’t have the same resources that a bigger company would have.”
  
BEING THE LITTLE GUY
   Operating as a smaller company, with comparably limited resources, does present some unique challenges for M S Granite. Because of the business realities of a small shop, a premium is placed on efficiency.
   “We try to waste as little as possible in terms of materials,” says Sandoval. “We even came up with our own water-recycling system to be more-efficient in that sense.
   “Keeping the shop as clean as possible – which isn’t very easy in this business – is also important,” he notes. “It’s hard while you’re really busy, but we always try to keep it clean.”
   Beyond that, he says, “Our guys are really meticulous about measuring and making sure we’re using the raw material as efficiently as possible. Eliminating mistakes is really important in being efficient.”
   And, while it might not typically be the first thought in someone’s mind when they think of efficiency, safety is a big part of that equation, he says. Thus far, the shop has run accident-free since its inception.
   Operating on a smaller scale genuinely seems to fit Sandoval just right; while he’d love to make the money a big shop could provide, he doesn’t want to live his life at work. He loves it, but it isn’t everything, he says.
   “I really try not to take on too much, honestly,” he says. “I have a child on the way, so I really try to keep my wife and family as my top priority. I don’t let the work consume my life.”
   He says he knows all too well how easy it is to get wrapped up in a career and lose sight of the more important things in life.
   “Keeping that control is really important to me,” he adds. “I don’t want to get burned out on the work itself. I’ve been there before, where I’m working 12 hours a day, seven days a week. That gets old really fast, not to mention that it takes a huge toll on your body as well.”
   It’s not that he isn’t ambitious—he’d like to break ground on a new facility in the next two years—he just doesn’t want to lose sight of why he got started in this business in the first place.
   “I really don’t want to become a huge company,” he notes. “I’d like to have a new shop and I’d like a nice bridge saw, but that’s about it. I don’t want to invest a bunch of money into edge profilers or those big CNC machines. To me, that’s not appealing and that’s not why I got into the business.
   “I like to work with my hands, instead of just sitting there and watching a machine do it for me. What’s the challenge, or reward, to that?” he asks. “I like to really get in there and polish and grind and do the custom work. For me, doing that work by hand makes me feel good.”
   And that, as simply as anything else, explains exactly why Michael Sandoval continues to love the stone business.
   Jake Rishavy is a freelance writer in Denver.
  
This article first appeared in the April 2007 print edition of Stone Business. ©2007 Western Business Media Inc.