Fabricator Focus
Santa Rosa Stone Inc. Indio, Calif.
"We’ll do whatever it takes to make them happy."
Photos courtesy Santa Rosa Stone Inc., unless noted
By K. Schipper
Only if you have been in the deepest valley can you ever know how magnificent it is to be on the highest mountain. – Richard Nixon INDIO, Calif. – Glenn Woods has known some real lows in his life. Topping the list: years of alcohol addiction, and the untimely purchase of a building right as the country fell into the Great Recession. However, the part-time musician and owner of Santa Rosa Stone Inc., says sobriety and some well-appreciated help from others has left him and his business in good shape. With 15 employees and a reputation for doing quality work for some of the Palm Springs area’s higher-end homes, Woods says he’s in a surprisingly good place.
Glenn Woods
Photo by Emerson Schwartzkopf
"My first trip out here was in 1987, I ended up moving here in 1990, and I’ve been here ever since."
Glenn Woods
Giving Countertops a Try
Like so many people, Woods came to the stone industry by accident. After finishing high school, he was living in San Antonio and working as a welder but, as he explains, “I was tired of getting burnt all the time.” His roommate worked for a company doing Corian® and needed a helper, so Woods decided to try countertops. “The owner of the company was just starting to get into doing marble and granite, and he saw that I had a knack for it,” he says. “He would send me to Austin to pick up slabs and tell me to hang around and watch what they were doing. So, I’d get the truck loaded up and then would watch how they polished and ask questions.” Eventually, Woods moved on to another employer more versed in marble and granite. In the late 1980s, the economy in Texas collapsed, so when his boss landed a job doing a custom home in Rancho Mirage, Calif., he was part of the crew that traveled to the desert to do the work. “We could see they were still building custom homes, so a coworker and I decided we were going to come out here and do freelance work because they needed installers so bad,” Woods says. “My first trip out here was in 1987, I ended up moving here in 1990, and I’ve been here ever since.” The move wasn’t entirely a success. As Woods says, “My disease of alcoholism took a turn for the worse. I slowly declined in my dependability and everything else that happens with somebody who’s taken by the disease of alcoholism and addiction.” At its worst, he admits to cutting countertops in his garage and working out of the back of his pickup. However, in 1999, he went into a recovery program and joined Alcoholics Anonymous, and his life took a turn for the better. Paul Klein of KDI Stoneworks (now KDI Elements), one of the Coachella Valley’s leading marble and granite companies, hired Woods. “This was the first time I really had a job where I was sober,” he says. “But he saw that I knew what I was doing, and the next thing I knew, I oversaw almost 80 guys. At the time we were running three shifts. The experience in management this gave me is immeasurable.” Woods spent almost six years with KDI before waking up one day and realizing he wanted to start working for himself. He handed in his resignation, and Klein even gave him a few customers who routinely dealt with him.
“I’m a go-getter, and I’ve always been able to find work and pay my employees.”
Glenn Woods
Keeping Going
Woods and a partner opened Santa Rosa Stone Inc., in 2006 in a rented building in Indio with a Park Industries® saw and a flatbed truck financed by the partner, who was in the restaurant business. “I also had a friend that was in the stone business,” Woods adds. “He had bought a building and was moving out, so he sold me the saw that was in the old shop, and I took over the lease on the building. It wasn’t that big, but we had the saw, and we were doing grinding by hand.” And, after less than a year in business, the company purchased a Park Industries PRO-EDGE® 3. Both 2006 and 2007 were good years for the young company. Then came 2008. Against his better instincts, Woods and his partner purchased a building in nearby Coachella, Calif., right at the peak of the real estate market for more than $1 million. When the value dropped by half, the partnership dissolved, and Woods – who had gotten sole title to the building – found himself working to pay his mortgage and his employees. “I’m a go-getter, and I’ve always been able to find work and pay my employees,” he says. “But I was about to lose the building. I started looking for a place that I could rent and keep going.” Still, Woods hung on, even after his payments ballooned to $10,000 a month. Ultimately, he was approached to sell the building to a couple from Arizona who wanted it for another purpose and he and the company were able to move on. “I never recovered what I put down, but it gave me enough equity to move my team, move the saw, move the PRO-EDGE, and the water system,” he says. “We moved back to Indio, and I started renting this space in 2015.” Today, Santa Rosa Stone operates from a 5,000 ft2 space in a light industrial area near Interstate 10. And much of the work is done the way Woods has always done it, with a bridge saw and the PRO-EDGE 3, although earlier this year he upgraded his saw to a Park Industries YUKON® II. “Of course, it has the hydraulic table, it takes up to an 18” blade and has variable RPMs, which you have to have to cut porcelain,” he says. “It can also cut quartzite, which is very hard to cut.” He estimates 90% of his work these days is done wet, although he has a Weha wall dust collection system in the grinding area. Woods equates porcelain to the early years of quartz. He admits to initially thinking quartz would go away. Today it’s 60% to 70% of all his work and the staple of his small showroom. “People see the porcelain and they love the colors” he says. “They’ve gotten really good at making it look like real marble, and if you’re looking for a gloss finish, it works well.”
Photo by Emerson Schwartzkopf
Photo by Emerson Schwartzkopf
"I love when I’m able to teach an employee how to feed their family for the rest of their life.”
Glenn Woods
Whatever it Takes
A big part of Woods’ business philosophy is being honest with clients and laying out all their options. Or, as he says, “We’ll do whatever it takes to make them happy. That counts the most, and it’s easier to make friends than to lose them.” Not surprisingly, he says the most-valuable tool in his operation is its commitment to integrity, followed by quality and punctuality. Good word-of-mouth has always been a key marketing tool for Santa Rosa Stone. Another key asset when it comes to marketing is its ability to repair granite and quartz. It’s stressed on the company’s website, and it’s also turned into a good sales tool. “It’s not something I make money on,” says Woods. “I do it as a service to people who have no other choice, but a lot of times it leads to bigger fish to fry. I have so many people call me up and say, ‘You fixed a crack or a chip for us two years ago. Now, we’ve bought another house and we want to redo the kitchen.’” The repair market has been good enough that by the end of the year Woods plans to add repairing and resurfacing floors to the company’s repertoire. Other marketing approaches Woods uses include wrapping his trucks, his presence on the internet, and listings in directories put out by some homeowners’ associations and other groups. While homeowners wanting to redo a kitchen or bathroom is part of his business mix, the other part is working with contractors who are either building or extensively remodeling higher-end homes in some of the area’s choicest developments and have worked with Woods for years. “Even if it’s not new construction, they’ll go in and redo the whole house,” he explains. “We’ll do all the guest bathrooms, the master suite, and kitchen and even the outdoor barbecue. If you have two or three of those going on at one time, you’re well-consumed.” Although he’ll do some commercial work – professional offices, for instance – Woods adds that a larger commercial job can be very demanding and it’s easy to become over-booked. For his loyal contractors and designers, though, Woods is more than willing to work well beyond the region – even as far as the British Virgin Islands. In that case, he explains, a designer who likes his work was building a home there, only to learn there aren’t any granite shops on the islands. “He sent the dimensions, we prefabricated everything and put it in a container,” Woods says. “I shipped most of my tools in the container and took some hand tools in my carry-on luggage.” Not surprisingly, his biggest challenge these days is turnaround time. Not only is demand from his contractors high, but being one of the last things to be installed, by the time the countertops are ready to install, people are anxious to move in. “We get the brunt of it,” Woods says. “Right now, we’re at about four-to-five weeks. I used to be at two weeks, and a lot of my contractors expect that.” Even so, Woods is enormously proud of his employees, who are split almost equally between the shop and the installation crews, many of whom he has trained. “We use Indeed.com, and I’ve taken some people that I know from Alcoholics Anonymous and given them a chance,” Woods says. “That can be very challenging, but I’ve trained many people who have stuck with it. They don’t know marble and granite when they start working for me, but they learn it inside and out.” His biggest piece of advice on being a boss: Be patient. That has fueled one of his greatest pleasures. “I love when I’m able to teach an employee how to feed their family for the rest of their life,” Woods says. “Somebody comes here looking for a job and doesn’t know anything, but they want to work. I show him the trade, he ends up picking it up, and has a knack for it, like I did. “Like me, they get a second chance, and they’re able to buy a car, a home, feed their family, maybe send their kids to college. That’s the greatest feeling I can get.”
