Poma Marble/Stone Authority, Rosemont, Ill.

October 5, 2005

   Jim Kapcheck may end up at the same spot as his father – Joe Kapcheck, past president of the Marble Institute of America – but he’s taking a different route to get there. The senior Kapcheck’s J Kapcheck and Company is well known for its business contracting commercial installations, but Jim Kapcheck and partner Eric May are going the residential route in an equally big way.
   While doing some of what the younger Kapcheck characterizes as “light-commercial” work and a few modest kitchens and baths, the partners’ Rosemont, Ill.-based Poma Marble/Stone Authority has a customer list that includes many of the Chicago area’s wealthiest residents.
   At least part of the reason for their success, Jim Kapcheck believes, is the management experience the two gained working for Joe Kapcheck. Their ability to handle the intricacies of these larger jobs, plus work with designers and contractors, helps set them apart from their competition.

CHANGING WORLD
   Although Jim Kapcheck is taking a different path than his father, both he and May say Joe Kapcheck’s involvement in the industry definitely colors what they do today and how they do it.
   In fact, Poma Marble is a direct result of the senior Kapcheck’s long-time involvement in the industry. J Kapcheck generally imports fabricated stone directly from the source; when a bit of local fabrication was needed, he’d turn to a company called Granite Marble World Trade.
   When that company filed for bankruptcy in 1994, Joe Kapcheck, May and a third person purchased many of Granite Marble’s assets and reopened the doors as Poma Marble.
   “They bought a lot of used equipment from the bankrupt company, hired some of the same employees, and set up shop on a smaller scale,” says Jim Kapcheck, adding that Granite Marble had always done some fabrication because of pieces that might arrive broken or where a small area might have to be remade.
   May and the younger Kapcheck have been friends since grade school, and May began his working career with J. Kapcheck and Company before moving on to Poma. In the meantime, Jim Kapcheck was acquainting himself with the natural-stone business in other ways.
   “I lived in Europe for a couple years when I was 19 and 20 years old,” he says. “I lived in Italy and worked in Italian stone shops.”
   After returning to the United States, Jim Kapcheck settled in California, working with some former employees of his father’s in a stone company there. When the younger Kapcheck opted to return to the Chicago area in 1997, he bought out the third partner in Poma.
   Until last year, Poma continued to do some fabricating work for J Kapcheck and Company and Joe Kapcheck remains a silent partner in the business. However, the younger Kapcheck says some disagreement between the generations on the long-term future of Poma led him and May to take their company in a different direction,
   “We’re doing a lot of really exciting work in the shop right now,” says Jim Kapcheck. “We have a real niche in high-end residential work. We’re doing projects that are in the $50,000-$1 million range, with some of them going to as much as $1.5 million.”
   That’s why Kapcheck says he wasn’t surprised when the Chicago Tribune recently ran a list of the ten wealthiest people in the Chicago area, and Poma had done work for six of them.

EXPERIENCE IN DESIGN
   From the company’s inception, the emphasis has been on high-end stone. That remains true, whether the job is a residential project or one of the shop’s commercial jobs.
   A good example of the latter is a contract Poma recently signed to do countertops for a new Infinity dealership. Although the job had initially specified a natural-quartz product – and the partners do fabricate several brands of natural quartz – in bidding the job Poma convinced the owners to go with Absolute Black granite instead.
   That emphasis on higher-end stone is one reason why the company is Poma Marble. The company actually does more granite than marble, but marble is its specialty.
   “Granite is fairly consistent, and there are plenty of places in Chicago to pick out different granites,” says Kapcheck. “We hand-select our marbles, and a lot of times we have marble that you can’t get anywhere else. We probably do more marble than most shops in town.”
   When Kapcheck talks about hand-selecting marble, he isn’t talking about going to a local supplier, either. Part of the company’s reputation is built on its willingness to take clients directly to the sources for that just-right stone.
   “We take people directly to Europe – France, Italy or wherever – to pick out their stones with them,” he says. “It may be the client, or it may be the designer or the architect, but we travel and hand-select the stone.”
   While it sounds extravagant, Kapcheck says at the level of work Poma does, this service and expertise is expected. And, he adds, his stint in Italy as a young man has provided him with a lot of really good contacts.
   Not only does the company utilize marbles in its higher-end work, but Poma also offers other options such as limestone and onyx. Kapcheck says the company is always importing stone and not all of it goes to specific jobs.
   “If we have a job, we’ll fill the balance of the container with inventory so we have it here in what we call our conference room,” he says. “It can’t be considered a showroom because there are no vignettes or anything, but we show those samples in here and we have a yard full of slabs on display. We usually display 30-40 colors at a time, and have more in stock.”
   With so much effort going into selecting the best stone for a project, it’s not surprising that a great deal of custom detail is also expected in the finished project. Kapcheck sites such details as complex millwork edges and triple lamination as examples.
   “We’re talking about extreme amounts of custom work, such as custom-carved edges,” May explains. “We do a lot of book-matched marble with a lot of hand finishing. So we have employees who can do that, instead of pushing a machine and turning out so many feet of edge in an hour.”
   Another ingredient work of this nature requires, says Kapcheck, is experience in design, both on the aesthetic side and on the more-practical build side of the job. As he says, just because an architect can draw a finished project doesn’t mean it can be built.
   “We really cater to the architects,” he says. “We help them out when they need samples, and sometimes it seems like it’s really a waste of time, but in the long run it pays off because they’ll specify us for a certain material.”
   The ironic thing is that Poma really isn’t set up as a distributor and isn’t selling materials to other fabricators. Still, Kapcheck says such an approach can mean a big foot in the door when the company is competing with the four or five other stone fabricator/installers in the Chicago market who regularly do large residential jobs.

QUALITY THROUGHOUT
   While a big part of Poma’s attraction to designers and architects is the company’s ability to find just the right stone for a job, Kapcheck says that’s only the start of a total quality experience the company provides its customers.
   To create those complex edges and fine finishes, Poma utilizes a mix of top-notch equipment and a skilled fabrication crew. The Poma facility is about 10,000 ft², with all but about 1,500 ft² devoted to a shop that includes a Sasso Meccanica edge machine, Gmm and Gregori bridge saws, an Intermac CNC machine and a Thibaut radial-arm machine.
   The company averages about 30 employees; 20 in the shop and office, plus its union installation crews.
   “It’s a good mix of machinery, and we have some really good craftsmen in the shop,” says Kapcheck. “We’ve had some turnover in the office recently, but we don’t have a lot of turnover in the back because we take good care of the fabricators; they’re really our lifeblood.”
   Kapcheck says his preference is to train people in-house, although it may take a couple years before someone new is doing anything more complicated than basic flat polishing.
   Kapcheck believes that Poma’s installation crews are also among the best available. He keeps an eye out for those that are particularly meticulous. And, while he doesn’t believe non-union installers can’t do excellent work, he says even on many of the residential jobs Poma is involved on, the contractors and developers ask for union labor.
   If a lot of Poma’s larger jobs sound similar to commercial projects, Kapcheck says they really are. Rather than just sending someone out to measure a given job, the staff includes draftsmen to create the shop drawings necessary for these larger jobs, which are overseen by project managers.
   Still, having that level of support is a main reason he believes the company really shines in its market niche.
   “These high-end residential jobs are really managed like commercial jobs,” he says. “Fortunately, Eric and I – both having worked for my dad – have done huge multi-year commercial projects. Understanding how commercial projects are structured has definitely helped us be very professional in dealing with our high-end clients.”
   Not that there isn’t a downside to that. Because of that union labor, the company has to charge a little more for its installations, which makes it a little harder to be competitive when it comes to more modest jobs on what Kapcheck refers to as, “the mid-level residential side of things.”
   “We probably do about a kitchen a day in addition to our higher-end residential and commercial work,” he says. “We don’t turn money away, but we’re certainly not the cheapest game in town. If we get a customer who’s really price-driven, we just can’t meet his needs.”
   In a way that’s unfortunate, Kapcheck acknowledges. At one point, he and May believed Poma also had a future doing more-modest kitchen and bath projects. The partners even trademarked a separate name to differentiate that part of the business from Poma’s higher-end work.
   “Instead, we’ve regrouped to get a better handle on our niche business,” he says. “We haven’t pulled the trademark or anything, but we haven’t focused on it as much as we might like. I can see that happening, though, especially if the kitchen market continues to boom.”
   Fortunately, the market Poma is serving is not only a good one, but Kapcheck says there’s a little more cushion built into it if the economy cools.
   “We’re dealing with such high-end customers who are always building or remodeling,” he says. “Even when the economy is a little tighter, they’re just shopping more.”
   For now, Kapcheck says he and May are committed to focusing on the higher-end residential projects they do so well, and perhaps beefing up the commercial side of their business a bit – without stepping on the toes of the senior Kapcheck and his business.
   “The main thing is we want to continue taking good care of our customers and being attentive to their needs,” Kapcheck concludes. “We’re confident that’s what will really help us grow.”