Fabricator Focus: Block Tops Inc., Anaheim, Calif.

The reason: the company sells its products through a network of designers, home centers and kitchen-and-bath shops. Most end customers don’t know who’s putting in their new kitchen or bathroom until a Block Tops employee shows up to do the templates.

The growth of Block Tops has come because of the company’s willingness to take on another material or another type of job.

“We try to be a one-stop solution for our customers and their customers,” says Nate Kolenski, company vice president.

CHIP OFF THE OLD…

Block Tops’ name dates back to the 1970s when company founder Damien Bates began his career building redwood tabletops in Big Sur, Calif. Then, in 1977, Bates’ father, who constructed butcher-block furniture, bought a huge load of the assembled-wood material.

“They started talking, and Damien decided he ought to be able to make countertops with it,” says Kolenski. “He moved to Southern California, rented 300 ft² in the corner of a cabinet shop, and put in a radial arm saw and a belt sander.”

At that point, Kolenski notes, that most of the butcher block on the market was maple, rather than oak. However, the oak product became so popular that, by the early 1980s, the company was buying and supplying it to other cabinet shops.

During that time, the company started evolving in other ways. One was with the addition of solid-surface materials, and another was with selling the actual cabinets.

“There was an opportunity to bring a guy on board that had a cabinet company,” says Kolenski. “He came under our roof, and we did that for many years.”

While that set a pattern for Block Tops’ future growth, the real constant with the company hasn’t been Damien Bates, but rather his wife, Vanessa.

“He hired Vanessa in 1979, although she didn’t become Mrs. Bates until about 10 years ago,” says Kolenski. “Even though the company was sold in the mid-1980s, she stayed on doing the books and becoming more and more a part of the operation.”

Today, Vanessa Bates, with an MBA from UCLA’s Anderson School of Business, serves as the company’s president and managing general partner.

Kolenski, whose background includes working as a buyer for an independent home center and running a kitchen-cabinet company, joined the firm in 1996 to handle sales and marketing. He became vice president in 2004.

“I met Vanessa at the co-op advertising meeting for a large home center and we ended up talking,” he says. “We had the same business philosophies and the same morals and ethics.”

One of the first things Kolenski – who continues to live in the Sacramento area – suggested was that Block Tops open a satellite facility to serve Northern California. The company opened its first branch in Rancho Cordova, Calif., in 1998, and relocated in 2005 to a larger Sacramento facility.

In 2000, the company added slab granite to its product mix, and two years later opened a second branch in Vista, Calif., to serve the San Diego area. The company moved to its current Anaheim headquarters in 2005; the relocation allowed the addition of engineered stone to its product mix.

Kolenski says the next addition will be concrete countertops.

“We’ve been blessed to at least partially be in the right place at the right time,” he says. “We kept taking on opportunities as they became available and also adding products and running them through our systems so we could be efficient and make a profit.

“And, every time we’ve added a product, we become more valuable to our customers.”

TEAM EFFORT

When Kolenski talks about customers, he’s talking about the designers, contractors, home-design centers and kitchen-and-bath dealers working with Block Tops, as well as residential end users.

“We have an SF&I program– sell-furnish and install,” he explains. “We talk with the people who are our customers’ clients and then bring our showroom to them. We make samples and other things available to them, but we don’t have a retail showroom in any of our locations.”

He’s quick to add, “We don’t want to compete with our customers; they’ve been very loyal to us.”

Instead, the company goes with a sales force that’s made up partly of technicians servicing the displays and samples of existing clients, and partly of outside sales people calling on potential new clients.

However, part of the corporate culture at Block Tops allows people to wear several hats.

“It’s not uncommon for a branch manager to pop into a retailer or a kitchen-and-bath shop on the way to wherever he’s going just to make contact,” says Kolenski. “In one way or another, our entire company is part of our sales force.”

That’s not the only area where Block Tops sought employee buy-in. Kolenski explains that the company utilizes “Ownership Thinking,” a program that trains the workforce to be participants in its financial success.

That means that numbers are shared with everybody in the organization; managers are asked to forecast their costs twice monthly. There’s also a steering committee that includes both employees and managers that looks for ways to improve processes and communicate information to the rest of the staff.

“It’s a real culture change, but it’s the right way to go,” Kolenski says. “Part of it is telling people what’s expected of them and then reminding them.

“And, as someone said in the past, ‘You might as well share the numbers, because they think they’re a heck of a lot better than they really are.’”

Not surprisingly, the company has a very low turnover, but Kolenski says that management is always looking for people to add to the Block Tops team.

“Let’s say we’re always looking for the right people,” he says. “We’ve had people we’ve talked to over the years, and we know some day they’re going to work for us. But, we also run ads and use all different avenues to get people in.”

Also, not surprisingly, Kolenski says the company wasn’t caught flat-footed by the recession, and so hasn’t had to make a large number of layoffs.

“Back in 2007, Vanessa talked with some of the people she associates with, and we looked at things and saw they weren’t going to be as rosy as they’d been,” he says. “Some of our reductions were made by attrition, and in some places we upgraded people.

“When things are great, everybody throws bodies at it, but it’s not necessarily the right way to do it. We have a leaner staff now, but a stronger one.”

Because of the economy, the remaining people in the shop and on the trucks have also become more-versatile.

“When things were booming, we had guys that just worked on the stone side,” Kolenski says. “They didn’t know what the solid-surface business was. Now, we’re more cross-trained. It’s the same with the installers; we’ve had the stone installers and the solid-surface installers, but now the majority of them in the company can cross over.”

And, training is an important thing with Block Tops. For instance, Kolenski says even an experienced installer doesn’t immediately go out on his own. He’s first paired with another seasoned installer, and then, later, with the installation manager’s approval, he’s sent out with an experienced helper.

“We do audits and we’re very in-tune with our customer survey scores,” he says. “Some of the large retailers do customer surveys and we also do our own customer surveys. We track call-backs by installer, and by problem, and we can even forecast what our numbers will be.”

CREDIT’S DUE

It’s probably telling that the company’s two satellite facilities aren’t simply smaller versions of the parent. In fact, the Vista operation is less than 5,000 ft² and only fabricates solid surface.

“It covers the San Diego market, but all the stone fabrication is done in Anaheim,” Kolenski says. “They run trucks daily to drop off their templates and pick up the fabricated tops.”

The Sacramento facility is closer to 10,000 ft² and includes both solid-surface and stone fabrication. The Anaheim facility, some 35,000 ft², includes stone and solid-surface fabrication, along with the company’s business and accounting offices and a corporate sales and training office.

Kolenski says the amount of automation also varies by location, a testament to Vanessa Bates’ philosophy of spending the money on equipment when it makes sense. The Anaheim facility even has footings in place for equipment that’s been planned for, but not yet purchased.

“We’d rather not have the equipment sitting there doing nothing,” Kolenski says. “For example, Anaheim has CNC (part of its CMS/Brembana lineup) and we do digital templating, but in Sacramento the volume isn’t as high, so the investment wasn’t needed. We have Park Industries equipment there, but the production is more manual and they do stick templates and more handwork.”

Regardless of the location, however, Block Tops is heavily skewed toward residential remodels, although Kolenski says the company does some new construction, some commercial and some hospitality work.

“Those are areas we want to improve on and expand in the future,” he says.

The company generally services within a 100- to 150-mile radius of its facilities.

“In Northern California, that extends into northern Nevada and the Reno area,” Kolenski says. “The Southern California operations cover all the way to the border, out through the desert and up into central California, although that’s an area where we’re a little weak. We like to get the guys out to do the install and back the same day.”

Just as important to the company are lead times. It’s not unusual for Block Tops to tear out and install the same day, and templates are often done over existing countertops.

“A lot of times, getting the paperwork processed by our customer adds more to the lead time than the actual fabrication,” Kolenski says.

Regardless of which product is being installed, Block Tops stresses quality. The company was named Fabricator of the Year for 2009 by the International Surface Fabricators Association (ISFA) and has also earned Marble Institute of America (MIA) accreditation.

“I think that brings credit to what we’ve been trying to do,” the company’s vice president says. “We want to offer high levels of quality and service, and this is just another thing that gives the customer peace of mind.

“We want to take care of our customers, and having that recognized by an organization like MIA is a big deal. We’re excited about it.”

Somewhat ironically, Kolenski acknowledges that recently the company has seen the most growth from its engineered-stone products.

“Still, the slab granite has probably done more for us, because we were able to really expand with it,” he says. “And, people are always looking for the beauty of natural stone.”

However, the nature of Block Tops is providing customer service, and Kolenski says company officials are excited at the prospect of adding still more products to the mix. For instance, the demand for recycled products is growing, and in late January training was scheduled to begin for the manager who’s agreed to spearhead the addition of concrete.

“We continue to look at some of the new surfaces that are coming out,” he says. “There’s a lot of opportunity out there and we’re challenging our managers to say, ‘I’ll take it on.’”

It’s all part of a formula that Kolenski says had led to Block Tops’ greatest success: surviving and thriving in the current tough economic climate.

“Going forward,” he says, “I think we’ll do very, very well.”

©2010 Western Business Media Inc.