By K. Schipper
COLORADO SPRINGS, Colo. – Eighteen years ago, when Adam Bauer launched Planet Granite, he admits he thought he had a great polish and a great install.
These days, with 110 employees, he says, “I’m humbled because they’ve definitely out-talented me.”
Of course, his own concerns have grown with the size of his team. A big issue at present: how to expand from Planet Granite’s 36,000 ft2 on a 2.5-acre lot that includes storage for the slabs the company imports.
“Our biggest issue has always been space, space, space,” Bauer says. “We’re in the middle of three different deals for three buildings around us. We’re trying to find out which one fits best.”
He explains one building offers 48,000 ft2, while another would suffice to expand the company’s offices and parking lot. However, he doesn’t believe he’s alone.
“I talk to other business owners in the area, and I think everybody is in the middle of a lot of growth right now,” Bauer says. “This has been a common theme for us for a few years now.”
In the meantime, the company has increased the square footage of its production line by running 24-hour shifts.
It’s likely Bauer will recognize the right opportunity when it presents itself. Although he grew up in nearby Woodland Park, Colo., he started as a teenager working summers with his dad setting tile for Aspen Tile and Bath. Later, his father relocated to Telluride, Colo., and the two worked jobs there.
“At one point, my dad was working on Bill Gates’ home – this was the 1990s – and we were putting Blue Bahai in his kitchen,” he relates. “We were working on stone with all these high-end jobs, and from a young age I learned about quality.”
Back in Colorado Springs in his early 20s to attend college – and with his dad’s encouragement – the idea for Planet Granite evolved.
“Mike Hitchcock (who now is a partner in Denver-based The Stone Collection) knew my father, and he opened his door and said you can buy slabs from us,” Bauer says. “Since we’d worked in Aspen, we had friends who had fabrication shops, and they’d cut slabs for us.”
As much as Bauer’s early career was influenced by his dad, his mother also had a hand in building the business. Much of Planet Granite’s early work was doing remodels.
“My mom had a cleaning business,” he explains. “All her clients trusted me and they ended up using me for doing granite in their kitchens. That was really the start of the company.”
Even today, Bauer describes remodels as a lucrative part of the business. However, he’s quick to add that the builders’ side of the business has been a game-changer over the past eight years.
“We still have the custom side of the shop that will do a calacatta kitchen, but our bread-and-butter is the production side,” Bauer says. “And, since this is Colorado, people still want rock, they want granite.”
In the meantime, Bauer has moved on from the production side of things to the demands of running a successful business.
“In the beginning, it was all about the countertops,” he says. “Now, it’s so much about business that you’re not trained for: accounting, accounts payable, accounts receivable, human resources. We had to hire an attorney to become our HR guy because we needed the help.”
Even so, he says the problems he faced 10 and 15 years ago aren’t the same, in part because of the company’s experience, and in part because of its machinery – Bauer is an enthusiastic Park Industries customer.
“Today the struggle is how do we continue to grow, while keeping in mind that things could turn around at any moment,” he says. “What happened in 2008 was a bit of a harsh reality, letting that many employees go.
“I made it through 2008, and if we have another recession I’m ready for it, but the issue of growth is in front of us, and we have to capitalize on opportunity, which is right now.”
Perhaps because he started at the production level, Bauer says getting and keeping good people is the crux of the business, especially with today’s low unemployment.
“What you do, it’s like a football team: when you get an amazing wide receiver, you pay him to stay, and that’s the bottom line,” he says. “You have to pay your talent to stay.”
And, the rewards aren’t just monetary. The company offers a 401-k, vacations, health insurance, as well as clothing and gifts. Two other important things to Bauer: the company’s safety program and good communications.
“The first thing we do when we get new guys is run them through the safety program,” he says. “Slabs are dangerous and fatalities happen in this industry, so we focus big-time on safety first, and then we start training them.”
Planet Granite has a full-time director of safety, and Bauer says the pay-off – besides a safer workplace – has been things like lower workers’ comp rates. That growth has also inspired the company to work toward VPP (voluntary protection programs) status with OSHA.
Bauer feels bigger shops all need to be more responsible and invite safety programs and OSHA, including cost-containment and volunteer audits, because, “We all have to play our part in having a safe work environment for our employees.”
A better environment helps the company in other ways. For instance, Planet Granite recently built its own water-recycling system.
“It’s all part of our continued growth strategy,” he says. “We brought in a Swiss tank, engineering from Germany and water-treatment plant guys to find a way to get the pH level right because stone and quartz create such different and adverse chemicals in the water.”
However, it’s cut Planet Granite’s monthly water bill from around $11,000 a month to less than $3,000. In much the same way, finding an asphalt company to take the company’s waste stone ended up cutting the monthly trash bill by 80 percent.
Some things have remained constant during the company’s 18 years in business. One is Planet Granite’s approach to marketing. Bauer says the best tool remains word-of-mouth, even though social media is making it harder than ever to maintain a reputation.
“You have to have a marketing brand and a marketing strategy, but word-of-mouth is the overall champion,” he contends. “I cannot find a way to beat reputation, but to build that you have to take care of your clients.”
Another constant is Bauer’s commitment to good communications between people at all levels of the company. And, while some people see them as a business bugaboo, he believes in meetings.
“The more meetings you have, the more fluid the communication,” he says. “One of the bigger problems in many bigger companies is this department doesn’t know what that department is going to do. It also leads to better camaraderie among his team.”
And that team, Bauer believes, is his greatest success and gives him the most pleasure from the business.
“I feel like I’ve built this ship, and it’s gotten bigger over the years,” he concludes. “Sometimes I’ll walk in in the morning, and it’s a humbling experience to watch ever man and woman giving it their all. I think it’s the most gratifying thing watching this family grow and become stronger and more supportive each year.”