In Episode 29, Patrick speaks with Geoffrey Gran, Owner of The Countertop Factory Midwest
Listen to this episode to learn:
- The 3 C’s of Consistency, Communication, and Caring
- What it means to be a “sales and marketing company that happens to make countertops”
- The advantage of choosing not to do retail
- The Rockhead group and what it’s doing for the industry
Be sure to subscribe to the podcast in iTunes… and please let us know what you think! You can leave comments for this show on the StoneTalk Facebook page or on this site.
If you have stories or insights that you’d like to share with other fabricators, please reach out to Patrick.
Transcript
Patrick: Welcome to Stone Talk, the podcast for countertop fabricators. Brought to you by Moraware, makers of JobTracker scheduling software and CounterGo estimating software for countertop fabricators. I’m your host Patrick Foley. Today I’m speaking with Geoffrey Gran, owner of The Countertop Factory in Addison, Illinois. Let’s give him a call.
Geoffrey: Hello, it’s Geoffrey.
Patrick: Hi, Geoffrey. Patrick from Moraware. How are you doing?
Geoffrey: Hey, Patrick. What’s going on?
Patrick: Not too much. Is this still a good time to chat?
Geoffrey: Yes, sir.
Patrick: All right, well, let’s dive in. Tell me about The Countertop Factory. What makes it special? How did it come to be? What’s your involvement?
Geoffrey: So The Countertop Factory Midwest, our official name, we go by the moniker of TCF. So we started back in 2005 with an idea that customers in the construction market were underserved and under-appreciated. So my business partner, Bill Heuer, and myself decided to pull ourselves from our corporate careers and deep-dive into the countertop market.
Patrick: Nice!
Geoffrey: Chicago being the third largest market in the country certainly had its fair share of fabricators, but we decided that we wanted to be different. We want to provide an experience which is positive, consistently rewarding, and exceeded our customers’ expectations. So internally, this comes alive with our mantra, “The customer is boss.” And what that means is everything that we do at TTF is on behalf of our customers, and when you make that an everyday passion, when you get all of your staff pulling rope in the same direction, it becomes very powerful.
Patrick: Were you like that from the beginning? Right from the beginning you focused on the customer? You knew that that was where you wanted to go?
Geoffrey: Right from the beginning. In fact, even before we actually started, Bill had come up with that mantra “The customer is boss,” and that really drove everything that we did. How we communicated with our customers, how we communicated with our employees, how we communicated with our vendors. And it’s served us well. If you fast-forward to today, we’re now 126 employees strong. We have a state-of-the-art facility and a really phenomenal customer base that is loyal and continues to grow with us. And Bill and I are family-first mindset, and we understand that our greatest asset and our greatest value is our employees, and without them, we don’t have a company. We just actually have a large facility that would sit dormant without an incredible staff.
Patrick: Sure.
Geoffrey: If you treat your employees as number one A and you treat your customers as one B then you kind of set yourself up for success.
Patrick: Nice! That’s a good point. So you mentioned that most of your…are all of your customers commercial customers? Or what did you say? Construction customers? Or do you also do retail?
Geoffrey: So we actually don’t do any retail.
Patrick: Wow, sweet!
Geoffrey: About 30% of our business…yeah, it’s interesting market in Chicago. So like I said, there’s a lot of fabricators and there’s a lot of really good ones, and a lot of them focus on the retail side. And so we wanted to be slightly different. So about 30% of our business is on the commercial side. About 30% of our business is the box store business. About 25% of our business is the production builders and custom builders. And then the rest of our business is made up of kitchen and bath dealers and remodelers, and flooring resellers, and things of that nature.
Patrick: So you let them do the retail work of having the customer come through the door then?
Geoffrey: Exactly. And the nice thing is what our sales team will go to promote our customers that we’re not going to compete with you. So we’re not going to sell you countertops that you, in turn, have to sell your customer, and then also have a retail show and won’t try to compete with you. And I think our customers really appreciate that.
Patrick: And so you have a customer-focus. You mentioned if one A is the employee and one B is the customer, is that one B further divided into your direct customer versus their customer? How do you deal with the fact that you still ultimately have to make a homeowner happy in part of this?
Geoffrey: Absolutely.
Patrick: Is that…I don’t want to say easy because obviously that’s never easy, but do you have to make a practical distinction, I guess is what I would say, between your customer and your customer’s customer?
Geoffrey: The answer is yes, but ultimately, in Moraware, for example, we set up an account, and then we set up a job. And so our account can be ABC Kitchen and Bath dealer. And then the job can be Mrs. Johnson’s kitchen. At the end, both of those…you have the customer and the client. Both of those are incredibly important to us.
The advantage that we have of working with other professional companies, for example, ABC Kitchen and Bath is that if they’ve done their job, they’ve educated their client and their customer. So by the time that they get to us, they understand the process, and our job becomes easier. So we’re really not working with a direct retail customer anymore. We’re now working with an educated consumer.
Patrick: Nice. And so in the end, it is all about satisfying those customers. What’s the key then to satisfying your customers? Why are you successful at it? Break it down a little between just focusing on them to what do your customers typically care about, and how have you delivered it to them? Or how do you ever fail to deliver it to them?
Geoffrey: That’s a great one. So very simply stated, although not always easily executed, we really have the three Cs of customer satisfaction: consistency, communication, and caring. And when we excel at all three of those, we have extremely happy and delighted customers. So every time a customer purchases from TTF, the experience should be the same. The workflow process should be the same, the end result should be the same, and that’s how we define consistency.
But in order to accomplish this consistency, we’ve spent many years developing the workflow process that’s defined and detailed by department by activity. So this then ensures that every employee understands the role within the life cycle of a project and how their interactions affect other parts of the job. And by giving everybody insight into the entire process, it provides accountability for all.
Patrick: How often does that process change? Have you tweaked it in the last year, or is this process literally the same as it was five years ago?
Geoffrey: No, I would tell you that we’re tweaking it all the time, and not major changes, but we have a great management team. And any time we ever have a breakdown, or any time we have an opportunity to improve, that’s when we take a look at that workflow process. So I would tell you it’s an ever-changing, very fluid document for us.
Patrick: So communication is the second one. This is an area where we’re starting to have more conversations with our customers because it seems to be an acknowledged problem. Our customers, people like you, know that this is important, but it’s not obvious what everyone means when they say it’s important. So can you tell me what does good communication look like to you? What are the mechanisms? Is it phone? Is it email? Is it text? How do you communicate with your customers, and what makes good communication?
Geoffrey: We could do a podcast just on communication in it of itself.
Patrick: For sure. I got time.
Geoffrey: I would tell you when we communicate effectively, our customer has a true understanding of their project and what the appropriate expectations are for them in advance before we ever start the project. And so that way if we do have a setback…look, we are a great, great company and as fabricators are across the country, but things happen.
So if we have a setback, for example, if a material breaks on a machine, communicating immediately to that customer, highlighting the issue, and then establishing a resolution immediately allows that customer to know that “All right, we recognize this is important. We value you, and we’re working with a sense of urgency to fix this issue.”
If we don’t communicate, even though we’re working on solving the problems behind the scenes, now the customer feels left out. They feel ignored, and they feel unimportant. So communication really affects everything that we do. It affects our relationships with our vendors, who we rely on to get our materials here in time, so we can in turn install on time.
Communication is key between our departments so that jobs manufactured on Monday get a quality control on Tuesday and install on Wednesday. If the communications between those departments aren’t crisp and clean, then we go outside of our workflow process. And we use Moraware as our main tool for communication internally with other departments. And then we will use Moraware also then to guide our project management team and to guide our sales team until they’re communicating with their customers.
Patrick: As I said, we’re kind of looking at what’s next for us, just kind of free-form if you can think of it, what’s missing? What do you wish was in Moraware that’s not that would help you make your communication, especially with your customers, better? Does anything come to mind, or that’s not something you’ve thought about?
Geoffrey: Absolutely. Because we use Moraware as the central hub, as our project management software, all of that data sits in Moraware, and so when we want to communicate with a customer, we do have to go outside of Moraware to do that. So we’re using an email system outside of Moraware. It would be amazing if Moraware could incorporate that.
Patrick: Nice. The idea of being the central hub and the important things you do as much as possible that you can do within that hub would make sense.
Geoffrey: Exactly.
Patrick: Give us 10 years and we’ll l be all over that.
Geoffrey: Sounds good.
Patrick: We’re trying; it’s just everything takes longer than you expect. So then…
Geoffrey: And it also takes longer than the lay people like us. So I’m not in software, so we’re like, “Oh, come on, just turn it on.” But we understand that it’s a complicated process.
Patrick: And then there’s the issue of we have a little bit more than a thousand customers now, and everyone has a different perception of…we don’t even understand the problem yet. We are still working on understanding the problem. We have ideas and snippets of solutions, but we just have more people we need to talk with to understand it. It’s hard. It takes time, but we’re working on it. Cool.
Geoffrey: Awesome.
Patrick: So tell me about the third C, caring. Why is that a separate thing from, say, communication, which obviously you’d want to do. You’d want to show some caring. But why do you separate that out separately, and how do you deal with that with your employees?
Geoffrey: So today, consumers have many options. And quite honestly, every day that goes by, their options become more exponential. And so, customers want to know that they’ve made a good value choice. They want to know that their hard-earned money is going to go to a company that’s going to treat them with respect, understand their needs, and execute on what they promised.
So we simply just call that caring. We train our staff to have empathy for our customers. We teach them to be understanding. We teach them to listen. In fact, we teach them to always listen more than they talk. It’s about respecting our customer, understand their needs, and then delivering on our promises. And so “Our customer is boss” philosophy that we talked about earlier, that’s the essence of that motto.
Patrick: So it’s something like empathy or responding with empathy is more teachable than perhaps people might think? You don’t just look for people who are already empathetic, but you attempt to teach your employees how to show empathy?
Geoffrey: I think that by nature you need to hire people that are going to have the same values as the ownership. And so yes, I think you can certainly find people that have empathy. But look, when you’re interviewing somebody, everybody’s always putting their best foot forward, and maybe that’s not a quality that everybody has, or it’s immediately available. And so we do spend time teaching our employees that when a customer trusts us with their money, it’s more than just a countertop. And so having the old proverbial “Put yourself in somebody else’s shoes,” I think we do a really good job with making sure our employees understand that.
Patrick: Nice.
Geoffrey: And that’s how you build empathy.
Patrick: That’s cool. So Harry, my boss once mentioned…he said that he heard the expression from you that you’re a sales and marketing company that happens to make countertops.
Geoffrey: Yes.
Patrick: What does that mean? Break that down for me. How is that possible?
Geoffrey: So there are…and if I just look at Chicago, which we are intimate in this market, there are a lot of fabricators, and a lot of really good ones. And a lot of them focus on, I think we mentioned earlier, on that retail customer. And they’re relying on that customer to come into their shop and let them know that they need a countertop.
And what we decided to do is that we’re actually going to be a business that happens to make countertops. A little bit of different way of thinking about things. So for us, when Bill and I got into this industry, we come from a different part of the corporate segment, it didn’t really matter to us what particular product that we manufactured. But whatever we decided to do, we were going to do it to the best of our ability, give our customers the best option out there, and be the best value. It doesn’t mean the cheapest but to be the best value.
And in order to do that, you have to have a business mentality. So there are a lot of great fabricators out there that maybe second, third, fourth generation. Pretty incredible in terms of their technical skills, but maybe they didn’t have the opportunity to have some of the business analytics and some of the business skills that maybe some of us have. So we’re really running it like a business.
Patrick: And so thinking of things like the three Cs: consistency, communicating, and caring, is more business-oriented than focus specifically on countertops?
Geoffrey: I think so. And really if you look at the entire construction industry as a whole, not just segment out countertops. If you went and asked 10 of your friends, I think they would have more negative stories about contractors than positive.
Patrick: I would strongly agree.
Geoffrey: Right. And that’s not really fair to the construction industry because there are really some great, great companies out there, and our whole thing is we want to change that mindset a little bit. Even if it’s just changing countertops in our own little part of the world, we wanted to be a little bit different.
Patrick: Nice. So how do you reach new customers? How do you get new people to purchase from you? Or if there’s a new construction company, how do you reach out to them? Or you’ve developed so many customers over the years, you don’t really need to go out and reach them anymore?
Geoffrey: So I would tell you that every company always needs to be selling, and that’s something you can never rest on your laurels. So as a sales and marketing company, we spend all of our available marketing dollars employing professional sales teams. So we have a large group canvassing the Chicago landscape, building relationships at many different levels.
So part of our success is our diversity in the customer base. We service the commercial market, which we talked about, which, again, you can bifurcate into general contractors, mill [SP] workshops, healthcare facilities. We service the home building market, which, again, you can look at large production builders. You can look at semi-custom builders. You can look at high-end custom builders.
We then focus on Kitchen and Bath dealer network, the remodeler industry, dealing with architects, developers, who again, are also working in the commercial space or in the retail market. And so having that feet-on-the-street mentality, which we’ve had from day one, and we feel that if we can get in front of the customers, we have a great chance of securing a relationship.
Our sales teams are very professional. We’re equipped with a tremendous amount of knowledge. And they have access to a state-of-the-art facility and allows them to sell a lot of our services, which our customers need. So we create our own fate when it comes to sales.
Patrick: And having different segments like commercial, box store, etc., I would assume that there’s a little bit of a sense, I would hope, that all the segments aren’t going to tank at the same time unless there’s truly an economic downturn. But if the box stores might be down, maybe the commercial is up or something like that. Is there any of that kind of protection from being spread?
Geoffrey: Absolutely. Absolutely. Everybody always talks about, “You don’t want to put all of your eggs in one basket,” and a lot of times people talk about that as a particular customer. We took that to the next level, saying, “We don’t want to just focus on one particular area.” Now, look, it causes more pain for us because how you handle a kitchen and bath dealer is different than how you handle a production builder, which is different than how you handle a big box store customer. And so, again, going back to that workflow process that we spent so much time and energy building just made it all that much more incredibly important to us to make sure that workflow process is so well defined and followed every single job. That’s how you get your consistency.
Patrick: Cool. And given that you are a sales and marketing company that happens to make countertops, what’s your favorite part of happening to make countertops versus something else? Or what’s your least favorite part about the countertop industry in specific that makes you say, “Ah, we should have gone into cabinetry,” or something like that?
Geoffrey: Ooh, that’s a loaded question. But I think our favorite part, with our business, we get to provide customers with a product that they can truly appreciate and enjoy. Certainly electricity and plumbing are essential to our survival and well-being, but they’re not sexy things. Most people don’t bring their guest down to their basement to show off their fuse panel.
Patrick: Some do.
Geoffrey: But people are passionate…some do, that’s true. But people are passionate about their countertops, and that drives us to be continuously passionate about what we do. I think the…
Patrick: That’s a good reason.
Geoffrey: …the frustrating thing for us is that when people think about countertops, they think of it as a very simple process. And we know because we live it every day, that it’s not that simple. And there’s 25 different data points that we need to collect in order to make sure that we make the countertop exactly how the customer wants it. And so somehow, we have to do a better job of an industry of letting people know that countertops while they’re incredibly important, also not as easy as everybody thinks they are.
Patrick: That’s interesting, and I would assume that the Marble Institute of America, the ISFA Stone Fabricators Alliance, etc….it would be nice to pool resources in an attempt to get that out, but it’s very expensive to have the kind of coverage of say a “Got Milk?” campaign.
Geoffrey: Right.
Patrick: But I wonder what those organizations can do to try to communicate to people, “Hey, this is hard.” You know?
Geoffrey: I think what those organizations do, and I think what they do a really nice job of is they are making sure that they are educating the fabricator base. And the tide raises all ships. And so the idea is if you can get better fabricators, and they can do a better job of educating their customer…educated consumers are our friend, and we’ve all been in situations where a customer says, “Well, I read that on the Internet.” But that doesn’t mean that it’s true and we all know that. So educating fabricators, and in turn, educating customers, that’s how we’re going to get people to understand.
Patrick: So I noticed something interesting. You’ve mentioned a couple of times on this call that there are lots of other good fabricators in your market. You didn’t speak ill of them. You said, “Hey, these are good people.” Now I see a little bit of a connection there that you really don’t want bad fabricators around because it just makes everybody’s job harder. If the end homeowner is thinking they’re going to get screwed anytime they buy this product, then that hurts everybody.
Geoffrey: Absolutely. And if we look at the Chicago market, it’s the third largest market in the country, and so there’s enough business for all the fabricators out here in Chicago. And if we can all do a better job, it’s great for our industry. We’re going to have a lot more people that are going to want to do a remodel. We have plenty of people that are sitting in their home with a kitchen with maybe laminate countertops that is 20 years old and they really want to remodel, but all they’ve heard is horror stories. And so they’re not going to do it. So if we can get the entire industry to be better, it’s great for all of us.
Patrick: Is there any meeting for the developer or, excuse me, the fabricators in your area, or are you friends with any of your competitors? We know they exist and we respect them, but hey, we’re still competitors and we don’t ever hang out.
Geoffrey: Great question. So we actually are friends with a lot of fabricators, and not only just in Chicago, but really across the country.
Patrick: You’re part of Rockheads, right?
Geoffrey: We are! Yes! We are part of the Rockhead Group, which is incredibly…
Patrick: Tell me about that.
Geoffrey: …exciting for us. This is a group of best-in-class fabricators across the country. There’s north of 40 current companies right now based in large cities across the United States, and we get together and we share best practices, and we share opportunities, we share ideas, and we share some of the issues that we’re having with the hopes that we all can learn from each other and come back to our respective businesses and be better. At the end of the day, it’s about servicing our customers, and if we can do a better job of that, our employees are happy, our companies are happy, and we’re all happy.
Patrick: So an organization with about 40 companies, that’s fairly exclusive. What’s the bar for getting into Rockheads, and how does one get into it if someone was interested?
Geoffrey: The program is set up so that fabricators and like-minded fabricators can help each other. So there are some size requirements. There are some technology requirements. You need to be using a project management software system like Moraware. You need to have a digital shop. Within two years of joining, you can become a member of the Marble Institute of America. And the reason that we have these requirements is that if you have a fabricator that does, say, two kitchens a week, and then you have a fabricator that does 35 kitchens a day…
Patrick: It’s pretty different problems.
Geoffrey: Different problems, they’re not going to have the same experiences, and truth be told, they’re not going to be able to help each other.
Patrick: Right. So obviously then your shop must be digital. Give me an idea of that. Are you tied to a specific brand of saw, or do you take best of breed across multiple different ones? Or what’s hot today?
Geoffrey: So we are 100% digital, and we refer to ourselves as a state-of-the-art facility. Bill and I, one thing we’ve been extremely consistent on from day one is that we’ve always reinvested back into the company in terms of employees and in terms of technology and machinery. So our entire facility…and again, we manufacture stone and quartz as well as solid surface and laminate.
And so on the stone side, we have all Park Industries equipment. We have dual-table water jets. We have three seated [SP] seeds [SP]. We have a Slabsmith that we use with our digital imagery technology that goes hand-in-hand with our field-measure guys and their laser measuring capabilities. And then we have an engineering team that really kind of puts it all together and makes it all work.
But to answer the second part of your question, as technology continues to change, we see some pretty amazing stuff out there. There’s a company right now called Baca Systems that has a robotic arm. Pretty amazing stuff. And as we continue to grow and expand, we will certainly be looking at opportunities to take best-in-class technology and machinery and infuse that into our facility.
Patrick: I spoke with Chuck from Baca Systems recently.
Geoffrey: He’s also a Rockheads member.
Patrick: Very nice. And I’m big fans of Park Industries as well, particularly the…regardless of what saw you buy, they put on a great event to help fabricators get together. Similar goal to Rockheads but Rockheads is more on-going. Park does those digital expos that are more of an event. Based on what you said, I could see you hosting one if you haven’t yet.
Geoffrey: We’ve been asked; it’s just a matter of finding the time.
Patrick: Like everything else in this world.
Geoffrey: Exactly.
Patrick: I hope I see you at one of those. If you do host it, that will be fun.
Geoffrey: You got a deal.
Patrick: But that’s really interesting to hear from someone about the new stuff coming as well. When I was in Las Vegas earlier this year for the big trade show, it was fascinating to me how many more saw companies there appear to be this year than last year. And many of them are just trying to…it appears to be just to try to grab a slice of the market, a tiny little bit. But then there also seems to be different technologies developing and keeping everybody on their toes. It’s not standing still, and I think that’s good for everybody.
Geoffrey: It’s actually very exciting, and that’s a testament to our industry and a testament to where our market is going. And so whenever you see investments and new technologies happening, that’s a great thing.
Patrick: So let’s talk about your growth for a second. Are you the size you want to be, or do you want to grow more capacity in your existing shop, more stuff from your existing base of customers? Or do you want to expand geographically? How do you think about growth?
Geoffrey: We’ve been very lucky, although again, I think I mentioned earlier that we believe that we create our own fate. So we’ve had 20% to 25% growth every single year since we started in 2005.
Patrick: Nice. Wow!
Geoffrey: Very easy to do when you’re zero. A lot harder to do now. But we have no expectations of slowing down at this point. We are always a few steps ahead in terms of production and capacity, ahead of our sales team so that when we bring on new customers, we’re never suffering from that perspective. And if you dissect our name a little bit, The Countertop Factory Midwest, the Midwest for us suggests that we’re going to eventually open up in other Midwest cities. So that’s our plan. With that said, if you look at the Chicago market, we’re all private companies, so it’s difficult to determine how much market share we actually own. But pretty sure we can grow several times over and not make a huge dent in the market of Chicago. It’s just so big.
Patrick: Got it. And when you think about expanding your capacity, you said expanding your capacity, staying ahead of what sales requires, which part is harder? Adding employees or adding new equipment or space? Are they all just part of the same problem, or is one part harder than the other for you?
Geoffrey: I think adding machinery and space tend to be the easier of the two. The challenge is always getting great employees. And that’s true, really, in any industry. If you talk [inaudible 00:26:15] again, we spend a lot of time, obviously, in construction markets, there’s a labor pool problem right now. And finding great quality people is always going to be a challenge. The great thing about what we do, and because we’ve elected to invest so much money into technology and machinery is that every time we add a machinery, it’s not like you’re adding X amount more people. You’re adding one or two more people. The machines are really doing the majority of the work. So that really has helped us. So we now can add a lot of capacity and only add a few folks.
Patrick: Nice. Before we wrap, let’s put on our prognosticator hats and think about how things are going to continue to change. We mentioned more saw manufacturers, new technology coming, what do you think our industry or just your business is going to see three to five years from now? Can you think of anything specific that you expect to be different or just, don’t know, we’ll get there when we get there?
Geoffrey: We moved into it a little bit earlier, but I think we’re going to see the continual rise of professional companies entering the countertop space, or ones that are already in the space but taking their process to the next level. Again, I use Rockheads as a great example that where the Rockheads membership is looking to grow to a 100, 150, 200 members.
So they have some pretty aggressive growth styles. And again, the ideas continue to improve that space. I think for a material perspective, obviously, we see the continued popularity in quartz. We see the design [inaudible 00:27:45] continue to become more diverse and complex, beautiful for that matter. We also see more manufacturers entering the quartz market. You mentioned you see manufacturers, but if you start going to some of these shows, they have a whole level dedicated to quartz manufacturers, and they’re coming fast and furious into the United States.
Patrick: Indeed.
Geoffrey: I also think you’re going to have some new product segments that gain some popularity. So porcelain slabs have entered the market a few years ago, starting to gain some popularity. And I think you’re going to have some new product segments. For example, Cosentino has their Dekton ultra contact surface. I think you’re going to see some manufacturers continue to innovate, which to us is very exciting.
Patrick: Nice. It’s interesting to me to see how slow some of these things take off. So I saw my first Dekton countertop a couple of years ago, and occasionally ask people, “Hey, what do you think of this?” And it all just depends on that customer adoption. I suspect it’s one of those things where you get little bits here and there, here and there, and then eventually, a tide turns and it appears like an overnight success, but it actually really crept up over a period of many years.
Geoffrey: Well, you’ve got to figure quartz came into the United States many, many years ago, 20 years ago, and it has finally gained so much momentum and speed now in the last couple of years. So you’re right. Things do take time. I will tell you with the advent of social media and some of these larger manufacturing giants, you’re going to see some of these products, I think, gain in popularity a little bit quicker than they used to before.
Patrick: Do you get any benefit from social media? Do you participate in it much? Is it useful for you or not much yet?
Geoffrey: So right now because we don’t play in that retail arena, we really don’t participate in the social media market. Again, we don’t want to take away from our customer base.
Patrick: Got it. Because I think that’s another place where it’d be interesting to see how many of your customers are getting benefit from it. I think it’s still very young in that process, and people are still trying to figure out, “How does this actually cause me to get more business?” I don’t think we’ve figured out.
Geoffrey: Absolutely. And when you do figure it out, let me know.
Patrick: Exactly. So before we wrap, anything else you want to share? Any random thoughts or ideas?
Geoffrey: We are having a lot of fun, and I think at the end of the day, if you can remember what’s important to you when you’re running your business, that will keep you grounded and will keep you on track. And we’re really just enjoying ourselves and looking forward to the next three to five years. I wish I was a procastinator [SP], but it will be interesting to see what happens. We’re pretty excited for it.
Patrick: Awesome. Thank you so much for sharing some of your experiences and talking with me. I enjoyed it immensely. So thank you so much.
Geoffrey: Thanks, Patrick, I appreciate it.
Patrick: All right, I’ll talk to you more soon.
Geoffrey: All right, take care.
Patrick: Take care. Bye. Thanks for listening to Stone Talk, the podcast for countertop fabricators. If you liked this episode, be sure to visit stonetalk.org or subscribe to Stone Talk on iTunes for more. Visit the Stone Talk Show Facebook page to join in the conversation and follow @stonetalkshow on Twitter. Stone Talk is brought to you by Moraware, makers of JobTracker scheduling software and CounterGo estimating software for countertop fabricators. I’m your host Patrick Foley, and I look forward to spending time with you again on the next episode of Stone Talk.
