Fabricator Focus
AMC Countertops Fond du Lac, Wis.
"I enjoy learning something new every day."
Previous page: Onyx bartop. Above: Fantasy Brown marble. All photos courtesy AMC Countertops
By K. Schipper
FOND DU LAC, Wisconsin – Entrepreneurs are the backbone of the world’s economy; Axel Mendez is one of them.
What sets him apart from many of his fellow travelers on the road to success and personal satisfaction is that he’s built two different businesses in diverse locations in two different countries.
After making a success of a car-parts business in North America’s largest metropolitan area of Mexico City, he pulled up stakes more than 25 years ago and relocated – first to Minneapolis, and then to this more bucolic community of fewer than 50,000 residents, all based on the then-new product of Silestone®.
And his secret for success in both locations and both industries? He enjoys working with and selling brands that aren’t necessarily at the top of buyers’ lists.
“I have always been an entrepreneur,” says Mendez. “I started my business in Mexico City from scratch and I liked working with good brands that were so new to the market that nobody was buying them. It’s inside of me to try and sell those things that nobody else is selling.”
However, as time went by, he and wife Carmina decided they were ready to leave Mexico City. He had an opportunity to relocate to León, a city of less than two million people northwest of Mexico’s capital. A brother-in-law who’s an architect made an alternate suggestion.
Axel and Carmina Mendez
“He was telling me, ‘I know that you’re planning to move. Why don’t you move a little further north?’”
Axel Mendez
“He was telling me, ‘I know that you’re planning to move. Why don’t you move a little further north?’” Mendez relates. “At that point, I needed to check the map to see where Minnesota was. But, he said, ’Why don’t you come and see what we’re doing?’ Three or four months later I was in Minnesota.”
Cosentino, the manufacturer of Silestone, had unveiled the manmade quartz product in Europe in 1990 with six colors. It arrived in the U.S. in 1997, and in those days, people who sold or fabricated it worked directly for the company.
“It was the only product that we had,” he says. “We would receive containers and we had about 12 colors in short slabs. We received the container, and we unloaded the container.”
At that point, the Mendezes had to have it fabricated, which meant their emphasis was sales and installation. Still, Axel Mendez says the fabricator he worked with had Breton machinery, “so I was learning the industry from really good machines.”
In 2002, the couple was offered a fabrication distributorship in Wisconsin, and Axel Mendez was tasked with finding a good location for his new operation.
“I wanted to get something close to Milwaukee, but I also wanted to target Madison, so I ended up talking to the people in Fond du Lac,” he explains. “It’s one hour away from Milwaukee, one hour away from Madison and one hour away from Green Bay. And they were aggressive; they gave me a good deal to come here.”
The company started small. Mendez found a single space in a light industrial area and moved in, along with a Breton COMBI bridge saw and waterjet combination sold by Intermac and a Marmo Meccanica LCV 711 flat polishing machine.
“I still have the LCV 711 and we love it,” he says. “It was brand new equipment, which was a plus. We weren’t starting out on the cheap.”
Today, the shop has expanded to almost 14,000 ft², and includes a Park Industries TITAN® CNC, a larger Marmo Meccanica polisher, and – a 2022 purchase – a Donatoni Macchine bridge saw. He says he’s looking at options for a new CNC and sawjet now.
Upper left: Quartz kitchen; Upper right: Silestone® Statuario. Above: Macaubus quartzite.
“It was the only product that we had. We would receive containers and we had about 12 colors in short slabs.”
Axel Mendez
To staff the new operation, Mendez says he had another brother-in-law who was looking to head north, and he started working in the business, along with some people from Minnesota who knew fabrication.
Still, it took close to seven months of commuting between Minnesota and Fond du Lac before the Mendezes made the move, mainly because a new school year was starting, and they have three daughters.
“And Carmina was asking, ‘Where’s the nearest Starbucks?’” he says. “At that time, it was in Milwaukee, about 40 minutes away, so she wasn’t too happy, but it’s what it is.”
After starting with a crew of six, Mendez has grown the business to 23 employees – and numerous subcontractors.
“I have five teams of installers – ten people – plus two measure tech subcontractors and two plumbers,” he explains “And my estimating team is remote. I have one person in Houston, one person in Waveland, Miss., and two in Columbia.”
Relying on subcontactors, even those based away from Fond du Lac, was Mendez’s creative way of solving his employee issues, which pretty much grew out of the COVID epidemic.
“I started getting people who would get trained, and in a couple months would say, ‘Well, I have another job,’” Mendez says. “A lot of the problem fell on Carmina because she’s doing sales and project managing to cover the staff shortage – the administrative part.”
Things came to a head when one of the company’s project managers took a scheduled vacation, and the other two quit. At that point, Mendez says he decided things had to change, so he found a company in Colombia, and it’s gone on from there.
“These are part of our project management team,” he says. “They’re taking care of our customers and helping them with their jobs with great customer service. Of course, you must train them exactly as any other employees and treat them as part of your team. Our team in the shop helps our remote staff and there is great communication between them. Plus, we use Moraware software, and it’s just wonderful. We put everything in Moraware, and everybody knows what’s going on.”
He’s also investigated hiring an outside company to program his CNC machines, “but I have people right now that can take care of the programming, but we have the option to do it remotely.”
Employees in the shop are a little more stable with some of them being with the company for a dozen years or more.
Upper left: Quartz kitchen; Upper right: Silestone® Statuario. Above: Macaubus quartzite.
"We like them to see the full slab. You never know if it’s going to flow or how it’s going to look in a larger piece..”
Axel Mendez
Mendez is content to let others do the work in other ways, too. Today, the shop is still selling 80% quartz surfaces, 15% Dekton® and porcelain, and the remainder in natural stone, and it works closely with Home Depot, kitchen-and-bath shops, and custom builders on a lot of those sales.
However, AMC Countertops also has an approximately 6,000 ft² showroom.
“We have a display slab gallery of about 60 quartz slabs and that’s our core,” Mendez says. “Instead of taking people to see a 12 X 12 sample, we like them to see the full slab. The thing is, we want our customers to know what the design looks like and how it flows on the larger piece.”
Today, the shop also offers all the major quartz lines, although until the Great Recession it was the only shop in eastern Wisconsin to fabricate Silestone.
Still, that association with Cosentino and Silestone enabled AMC Countertops to build its customer base as it was starting out. Today, the company markets itself in several ways, with a lot of emphasis on Instagram, Facebook, and its own website.
Mendez says he’s also benefitted from an early association with the Rockhead Group.
“I started getting together with the Rockheads founders in 2010, and AMC became the first member,” he says. “I learned that here in the Midwest we were kind of a different market because we worked through with kitchen centers only. At that point, I didn’t even have a showroom. But it helped me see trends that were coming, and that we needed to start promoting ourselves and not leaving the market to someone else.”
Today, the company’s market is mostly residential, about equally divided between new builds and remodels.
“It’s about 50-50,” Mendez says. “Sometimes it will go to one side, and sometimes it goes to the other side, but it’s mainly residential, although I have a couple millwork places that I do some commercial fabrication for. And, in the past I did several Holiday Inn Express®, Fairfield Inn and Holiday Inn® projects, too.”
And true to his commitment to products not everyone will take on, the company also offers the Invisacook induction cooktops.
“It’s an enhancement for Dekton and porcelain,” Mendez says. “As I said, I want to work with brands that nobody else wants to work with. I started making Dekton and it’s hard to cut, but we learned and learned to do it right, and now we’re offering Invisacook, which works well with that kind of material.”
"Making new customers can be easy. Keeping that customer may be hard."
Axel Mendez
Perhaps his greatest marketing success is that depending on the time of year – think winter – the shop will fabricate and install a complete kitchen in as little as a week. However, before the market started to return to pre-COVID levels, Mendez says at times orders were backed up enough to require a five- or six-week turnaround.
Mendez says he takes great pleasure in several aspects of his business. He appreciates the opportunities the industry has given him to travel, whether it’s to tradeshows around the U.S. and overseas, or to Cosentino and Rockheads events, which provide other ways to expand his horizons.
“I enjoy learning something new every day,” Mendez says.
His greatest lesson, and his greatest success, he adds, is keeping customers returning again and again to AMC Countertops.
“Making new customers can be easy,” Mendez concludes. “Keeping that customer can be hard. We make them happy and give them good service, and that has been the core of our business.”
MSI Q Calacatta Laza Quartz.