Mario & Son Inc., Spokane Valley, Wash.

   Mario & Son Inc. began in the early 1990s with the tile-installation skill of Mario Marcella and his two sons, Joey and Mike. Today, the firm employs two-dozen people, operates from multiple warehouses and plans for further expansion as it services a variety of clients, including Home Depot.
   But, we’re getting ahead of the story.
   “We launched Mario & Son, Inc. in 1991,” says Joey Marcella. “Our father, Mario, had been a tile installer since 1953 and he taught us.
   “When Mike and I were installing tile in the early 90s,” he continues, “we had jobs where we ended up putting stone in, around fireplaces and the like. We had to polish the stone and the next thing you know, it leads us into fabrication of smaller pieces and small countertops.”
   In the beginning, the Marcellas relied upon their garage and their ability to snag freelance tile-installing gigs.
   “The idea of owning our own business wasn’t new to us,” says Joey Marcella. “But it was all pretty simple. We started our stone-fabrication business very humbly in our father’s garage and worked there for a few years. Then we moved into a small shop. We financed everything ourselves, and when we first started buying machinery, our homes were on the line for a while.
   “Back then, it was just me and my father in a 900 ft² shop,” says Joey Marcella. “And, we did everything by hand – we used Skill saw – no machinery, all handwork. We did everything that way for a couple of years.”
   If timing is everything, the Marcellas sensed where the stone-fabrication market was headed and stuck while the iron was hot. At the time, little competition existed and futuristic machinery was just that – not yet available – but Mario & Son saw it all coming.
   “When we opened up our stone business, there was only one other like us in the area,” says Joey Marcella, “and we had already determined that there was a need for more fabrication. Once we saw the need, we decided to step up to the plate and seriously get into it.”
   Getting serious meant moving out of Mario Marcella’s garage and into a facility that afforded growth opportunities. However, even that move had its modest elements.
   “Our first major step was that we moved into a small warehouse with other businesses; we shared space with some machine shops,” Joey Marcella says. “But we began adding employees and we ended up muscling them out.
   “From there, we took over that building, added another 6,000 ft²., and now we use the entire place, which is at about 13,000 ft².”
   Evolving into a serious business with added space included upgrading and adding to the Mario & Son equipment line. Though it took a few years, Joey Marcella says that the brothers soon needed equipment to match their work demands.
   “We stayed in the garage for two years but when we moved to our first shop, we bought our first serious equipment,” he notes. “We got a Park Industries bridge saw and, after that, we purchased a Park Pro-Edge®.”
   A few years later, Mario & Son took the plunge into CNC with Z. Bavelloni S.p.a. equipment.
   “Nine years ago, CNC technology was just beginning to come onto the scene,” he continues. “We were one of the first in the western United States to own anything in CNC technology. That allowed us to do jobs that other fabricators simply couldn’t do. It established us as someone who could get unheard of things done—we were able to add edge details that were impossible to do by hand, for example. We could do three-dimensional carvings from some of the softer stones.
   “At that time, we kept gearing up machine-wise so we could meet customers’ demands better than anyone else, and that created our reputation.”
   Ahhhh … the reputation. Mario & Son Inc.’s business is built almost entirely on a reputation first established with the senior Mario, then cultivated, encouraged and otherwise nurtured and built by sons Joey and Mike.
    Though the senior Marcella stays current with today’s operation, he is, “mostly moving toward retirement,” according to Joey Marcella. Mario’s sons, however, learned the by-word-of-mouth lesson well, crediting their father’s reputation-building way back when with landing today’s Home Depot-sized accounts.
   “We have gone through quite a business transformation,” Joey Marcella says. “When we first began working with my father years ago, he had already established builder-contractor relationships. That was the sole source of our tiling business.
   “When we opened Mario & Son in the early ’90s, we just began adding to that referral list, but it didn’t happen on its own. We took a lot of time with our work, and offered great quality, excellent work. That reputation spreads – if you do quality work and operate as a company with integrity, good things happen.
   “That was our pace: Do excellent work, deliver wonderful quality.”
   At the dawn of the new millennium the Marcella brothers found themselves facing not one, but two major business opportunities. At the time, Home Depot’s fabricator was not working out, and the chain also needed a Silestone® distributor.
   “About three years ago, Home Depot approached,” says Joey Marcella. “Silestone needed a company in this half of the state to subcontract for them and we did. Since then, we’ve become the distributor on the Silestone account ourselves. So today we are Home Depot’s fabricator and the distributor for Silestone.”
   The idea that the only constant is change certainly rules at Mario & Son. With the addition of the Home Depot contract, Mario & Son is shifting its business model to now include commercial work – an evolution Joey Marcella is glad to see.
    “We are now involved in some large condominium complex projects that we’re looking forward to doing,” he says. “Historically, we have been doing about 80-percent residential work, but this year, we’re going to be closer to 50/50. We like that the commercial work is so evolving; that’s excellent for us. We’ve geared up with machinery and employee-wise, which makes us ready and able for production work.”  
   “We also have a warehouse in the tri-cities area, south of Spokane,” he adds. “We have that because we service a lot of Home Depots in outlying areas. That warehouse has three employees. The way it works is that we ship down about seven or eight kitchens a week to that facility and they install them and that cuts down on our travel.
   “About one-third of our staff are sales, one-third are fabricators and one-third do installation.”
   And though Joey Marcella is hesitant to pigeon-hole Mario & Son’s niche or specializations, he does admit to his company’s ability to handle high-end jobs and that that particular specialty is helping the family business plan for major future growth.
    “That niche is sort of driving our plans to build a 50,000 ft². facility soon,” he says. “That will help with the high-end work and with the goals to gear up for more production work.
   “We’re also working to ramp-up our customer service. That’s at the core of what we do. Today you simply cannot not do quality work. That’s the bare minimum. But you also have to be able to produce in large volume.”
   In the end, however, the Marcellas are driven to deliver the best products and services possible to their customers. This credo, insists Joey Marcella, is what helps the business continue to grow and is the reason for the much-needed, soon-to-be-added space.
   “We get a lot of walk-in traffic because we have a very good word- of-mouth following,” he says. “We also have a substantial stone yard, we have everything here. While we do sell the stone that most others sell and we fabricate like everyone else, we keep up with trends and we offer the exotic. This type of clientele wants to visit a nice place and be treated very well.
    “For example, we can’t keep Vulcan Gold in stock. Exotic stone is about one-fourth of what we sell. It’s this customer that fuels us to improve our customer service even more. We’re excited about our new facility—it’ll have a high-end showroom and a coffee bar.
   “And our good will,” he adds. “All of the rest of it, aside, that’s what works. It’s always been, and will continue to be, about how our customers are treated.”
   Cathie Beck is a Denver-based author and free-lance writer.

This article first appeared in the April 2006 print edition of Stone Business. ©2006 Western Business Media Inc.