Fabricator Focus
Standifer Stoneworks Soldotna, Alaska
"It’s given us the opportunity to stay where our roots are."
(Photo on previous page and above courtesy Standerfer Stoneworks)
By K. Schipper
SOLDOTNA, Alaska – Dave Standerfer appreciates automation. The owner, with wife Audrey, of Standerfer Stoneworks, spent the bulk of his working career as an engineer in the petroleum industry working on automating operations and systems. When he bought an existing business, its pride and joy – and subsequently his – was an almost new CNC router. Now, with the 2021 purchase of a Park Industries® VOYAGER™ XP CNC saw, Standerfer is faced with the reality that the router really can’t keep up with the new saw. Things might be a little easier if he felt he could add a second shift, or move his operation to a larger space, but in a community of fewer than 5,000 people, neither option seems like the right answer – at least for now. Standerfer readily admits his operation is a small shop in a service area that’s short on people, but large on territory. He serves customers within a 100-mile radius across the entire Kenai Peninsula about three hours south of Anchorage. “The business I bought [in July 2016] is basically the same as it is right now,” he says. “I’m in the same building, and it’s a small building. When I bought the business, it had an almost brand-new CMS Brembana Speed router – less than a year old – and a really old manual bridge saw.”
Dave and Audrey Standerfer. (Photo courtesy Park Industries)
"We took a chance and bought it, even though I had never even been in a granite countertop shop before coming by and looking at the place."
Dave Standerfer
When Standerfer entered the stone industry, he admits he was mostly looking to buy himself a job. After leaving British Petroleum in 2010, he worked as an independent consultant. Then, in 2015, that work dried up. Oil prices fell, and the jobs in his field were in places like Oklahoma and Texas. “At that point, I had two kids in high school and very close to graduating,” he explains. “And we love living here. Through a mutual friend, we found out about this place being for sale, and we took a chance and bought it, even though I had never even been in a granite countertop shop before coming by and looking at the place and meeting with the previous owner.” Standerfer describes the purchase as “a crazy risk,” especially since the seller trained him for about a month, then took off for his next career owning a charter fishing business before the sale had even closed – leaving Standerfer in charge of a business he didn’t own. “It was about a month that I worked for him like that,” Standerfer explains. “At that point, I was running the show – kind of – but still reliant on the guys who had been here prior to me arriving.” Even today, he admits he’s not as good as his employees when it comes to watching the machines, keeping them fed, and pulling the pieces off. In much the same way, he says Audrey is the chief numbers-cruncher for the operation, handling the accounting and analyzing data. “I’d be lost without her,” he says. However, given his background, it’s not surprising there were things going on in the shop that caught his eye. Among them was the manual bridge saw. For one thing, it required the attention of one employee every minute it was in operation, which is not a good situation in a shop with four workers. “It just didn’t pencil out,” Standerfer says. “Plus, it really couldn’t do miters. Or, rather, it could, but they weren’t accurate, and they didn’t look very good, so we tended to steer people away from doing miters.”
(Top photo courtesy Park Industries; bottom photo courtesy Standerfer Stoneworks)
“We’ve speeded up production 30% to 40% because of the saw. It could do more than that, but the router can’t keep up.”
Dave Standerfer
In a time when shopping for many items means going no farther than the computer, obviously stone fabrication equipment doesn’t come that way. Fortunately, Standerfer became acquainted with other shop owners in Alaska, and he started listening to what they were buying and what they were happy with. “That’s how Park ended up on the radar,” he explains. “Like I said, we have a CMS router, and it’s a good machine, but it’s sometimes difficult to get parts out of Italy; it’s a long way to Alaska. Everyone said Park’s service is just off the charts.” The Standerfers began seriously shopping for their saw in 2019, then delayed for a year because of COVID. When the VOYAGER XP finally arrived in 2021, they were more than pleased. “The machine installer provided loads of technical advice and took his time answering any questions we had,” Dave Standerfer says. “He shared tips on things I never would have thought of. We’re thankful for how willing each person from Park is to work with us, from beginning to end.” Standerfer also sent a couple of his crew to train at Park. Not that everything has gone smoothly. For one thing, he had to add a couple more employees – although not necessarily to run the equipment. “The main reason I’ve got more employees is to keep up with installs,” he says. “Obviously, you still have to pick these things up, get them in the house, get them placed and get the faucet holes and outlet holes cut and lined up properly. There’s no avoiding that.” However, if the install seems to call for a third person, he’ll send out one of his machine crew. And, on occasion, he’ll run a second crew headed by his templater and one of the shop team. “Then, I’ll stay here and watch the machines, but we try not to do that,” Standerfer says. “It definitely slows down what’s coming out of the shop.” And he’s noticed that that once almost-new router has become the shop’s bottleneck. “But that’s a good problem,” he says. “We’ve speeded up production 30% to 40% because of the saw. It could do more than that, but the router can’t keep up. The only way to get more out of the router would be to go to a second shift, and at this point I can’t justify that.” These days Standerfer’s biggest problem may be lack of space. The shop is in a 2,400 ft² building that he rents. A couple of years ago, a building came up for sale just down the road that would have given him quadruple the space. However, the seller pulled it off the market, and offered to rent it to him at $8,000 a month. Regretfully, Standerfer walked away, but he still hopes to be able to relocate into a space large enough to be able to stock some material and buy a backsplash machine. “That’s the next big thing that I fantasize about, but until I get into another building there’s no way I’m going to be able to pull that off,” he says.
(Photos courtesy Park Industries)
"We’re not getting rich, but we’re paying our bills, and I enjoy running my own business – most of the time.”
Dave Standerfer
Even if he were in a more-temperate climate, storing a lot of slabs would be a problem for Standerfer, who also employs two part-time salespeople. As it is, the shop relies on lots and lots of samples, and the websites of its Seattle-area suppliers. “We work with probably a half-dozen different suppliers, both for quartz and granite,” he says. “Everything I have here is pre-sold. Between my samples and the suppliers’ websites, we can usually find a stone the client will be happy with. If they find something on a website that I don’t have a sample of, I’ll get the supplier to send some. Occasionally a client will fly down to Seattle to visit my suppliers and pick a slab.” And that’s when the real work begins. Once Standerfer has the deposit and orders the material, it gets put on a barge and sent to Anchorage, then put on a truck for the final leg of the journey, which he says normally takes about three weeks. Perhaps not surprisingly, he adds, “I do a pretty big business in remnants.” Only after the material is on hand does he send an employee out to do the templates using the shop’s Laser Products LT-2D3D Laser Templator. The job is then fabricated and installed two to three weeks later – typically in a home. “We do a little bit of commercial work,” Standerfer says. “But there really isn’t much in the way of commercial work around here. We’ll do an occasional lodge or sometimes a restaurant, but 98% of what we do is new homes and remodels.” Like much of the rest of his operation, Standerfer’s marketing efforts are modest. His main expense is his website, and while he used to pay to boost his Facebook presence, he says more recently that’s become self-sustaining. “The guy who manages my webpage also has a local app that you can put on a smartphone, and it’s designed for local people shopping local businesses,” he adds. “It’s called the Peninsula Coupon Club, and I pay him to put me on that app and I run specials on it for specific stretches of time, such as buy a kitchen and get a free kitchen sink. There’s networking around that.” Still, for somebody living in a tough climate and doing business in a smaller market, Standerfer says his biggest challenge is one he shares with other shops all over: finding good employees that are motivated and then keeping them motivated. Occasionally he will get applicants with some background in the stone-fabrication industry, but recently he’s found some success advertising his openings on the Indeed search engine. “I was really happy with it,” he says. “They weren’t stone people, but they were carpenters, pipefitters, whatever that were looking to have a stable job and be able to stay in town. I offer them the chance to be at home every night and, while they might not make a killing in a month like a lot of other jobs here, the other 11 months they’re with me they still get paid.” Standerfer takes a couple different approaches to keeping his employees. One is by working four ten-hour days each week – at least unofficially. “I think I’d have a mutiny if I tried to take that away,” he says. “They don’t always get that Friday off, but probably 80% to 90% of the time they do.” He also encourages them to get training in computer programming. Currently, most of the shop’s programming is done by a couple of freelancers on the East Coast. They pop on their machines about the same time Standerfer Stoneworks is shutting down for the day. “We’ve set up a VPN (virtual private network) for them so they can access all my computers and do the programming,” he says. “They do most of it, but I have a couple guys who are starting to get better at that. Maybe at some point I’ll do it all locally, but for now this works for us.” The same could be said for the Standerfers’ purchase of a small stone shop in a small community in Alaska. “It’s allowed my wife and I to stay here with our family,” Dave Standerfer concludes. “We’re not getting rich, but we’re paying our bills, and I enjoy running my own business – most of the time. There are bad days. There are tough clients. There are times when I’ve got to let people go for whatever reason, but that’s rare. “It’s given us the opportunity to stay where our roots are.”
(Above and below photos courtesy Standerfer Stoneworks)
(Photo courtesy Park Industries)