The Sum or The Whole?

  Yes, we do it all. No piecemeal stuff, you betchum. All work done by our high-quality staff under one roof. You can trust us because we go from beginning to end, A-to-Z, and we guarantee it because it’s all our work.
  Say this kind of spiel today, and it sound like Mickey Rooney dressed up as a grease monkey in some Andy Hardy comedy on Turner Classic Movies. Stressing that you’re a full-service shop is old-hat enough to flash back to a time when almost everyone wore a hat (and ballcaps didn’t count).
  And, of course, a lot of us in the stone industry think of our businesses as full-service shops. Is this supposed to be funny or something?
  What you’re doing as a company – and how much of the process you’re performing on site – is serious business. It goes to the basis of what you’re doing as an ongoing member of the stone industry, and how you’ll fit in through the next five or ten years.
  Admittedly, this is pretty deep stuff for anyone just trying to get another kitchen out the door and in a home by Friday. But, it’s still worth considering, and soon.
  The full-service push of the 20th century came from several directions, although the main thrust came from the oil industry. Gasoline pumps went from something just out in front of the general store or by a corner shack to bright, gleaming garages and spiffy little showrooms full of lubricants, tires, batteries and the occasional snack machine and pop cooler.
  At one time, more full-service gas stations dotted the American landscape than, well, fast-food joints. Today, it’s a type of business that’s all-but-disappeared, save for the ornery holdouts in city centers and small towns.
  Several things changed, including environmental regulations concerning gasoline holding tanks and the fact that automobiles improved and required less work and maintenance. The main thing, though is that people changed their buying habits. They combined fuel fill-ups and quick food shopping with the convenience store, and also adapted to pumping their own gas.
  They also found that they could get everything offered at a traditional gas station – tires, tune-ups, oil changes and the like – from specialized shops with better goods and service. It reversed the trend of housing everything under one roof, but customers feel they get a bargain and a superior product.
  This memory-lane tour is more than just a wistful thought about having someone who wears the Texaco star and a little bow tie filling the tank with Hi-Test. It’s a good example of how the idea of doing everything may not be the best plan for growth – or survival – in the stone business.
  The supply of stone itself already altered the full-service concept in the past decade or so for many shops. Stone distributors tended to keep close to the biggest metropolitan areas, forcing stone fabricators in outlying areas to keep a large inventory and attempt to anticipate what their customers wanted.
  Today, the stone yard of a typical shop may hold a larger variety of stone, since old standbys are regularly available from new, close-by suppliers. Or, the yard may be all but gone, as customers go to supply yards to pick out and buy stone; fabricators give up the ability to charge for the raw material, where the margins are diminishing, and concentrating on profits from finishing and installation.
  To keep the backshop humming, everyone in the business thinks about expansion and bringing in newer and bigger saws, edgers and polishers. For some, there’s a CNC in the future. All of these machines run better and faster, and handle more work.
  Of course, that’s if you happen to have more jobs to feed the workflow. Idle machines are the bankruptcy auctioneer’s stock-in-trade; maybe it’s wiser to take on outside work to keep the equipment running, or find someone willing to cut and edge overflow work.
  Bundling a stack of Coroplast® templates and sticking a FedEx® shipping label on the pile, and then waiting a few days for delivery of cut stone, is a lot easier than sweating a delinquent payment on a machine that can’t quite earn its keep. Or, that shipment of templates coming into the shop can keep a second shift of employees happy and humming.
  And who says you have to be making those templates? Electronic measures of jobs cost next to nothing to send over the Internet to your own shop or someone else for cutting. You might even give up the templating process altogether and job the service out to someone taking measurements for a number of shops in a region.
  Okay, a lot of this sounds far-fetched. The only problem with putting it down to some guy’s what-if theories in a magazine office is that I’ve seen, out in the field, all these concepts turned into reality … a very profitable reality. Breaking up the soup-to-nuts idea of stone fabrication – or putting the job-shop factory workflow into a shop of craftspeople – works for plenty of stone businesses today. It’ll work for more of them tomorrow, next year and further down the line.
  There’s nothing wrong with keeping the full-service philosophy if it works. The do-it-all shop is far from being an anachronism, and I have a special respect for that independent, craft-driven spirit.
  Just don’t count out the idea of outsourcing to someone across the street or down the road. It’s better than seeing the finishing business drift somewhere else – like across the ocean.

This article first appeared in the February 2005 print edition of Stone Business. ©2005 Western Business Media Inc.