SPOTLIGHT ON BUSINESS MAGAZINE AUGUST 2016
KODIAK MOUNTAIN STONE
Six years ago when Kodiak Mountain Stone was a growing five-year-old business venture, Jeff Heggie, President and CEO, was using some rare down-time for reading. The Innovation Secrets of Steve Jobs by Carmine Gallo was his selection. It was 2010 and it felt like the first time in a year he had a moment to sit back and think about his business in tranquility. As he pensively read-on, Heggie imagined the ways in which Kodiak Mountain Stone could benefit from Jobs’ brand of creative thinking when he had a sudden realization: “We finish the dream.” This has since become the company’s motto. “Whether it is a new home or a renovation,” Heggie explains, “the owners see the final product in their minds long before they begin. There are so many vital elements to building a home - the electrical, the plumbing, all those things – but they are not part of the final picture, the dream. It’s our products that they see: our stone, our brick, our stucco – or often a combo of them all.”
By David MacDonald T he year before, the U.S. recession was forcing Heggie’s hand – but not in the way you may think. At the time, the team at Kodiak Mountain Stone had to “really take a look at how we were running the business as strictly manufacturers,” he explains. “When things slow down with housing, we typically see more renova- tions.” As Heggie anticipated at the time, the American housing market correction and subprime mortgage crisis of ’07 to ’09 made competition amongst manufacturers fiercer rather than tamer. Only a year earlier Heggie and his team decided to close their manufacturing operation in Cardston, Alberta – which had been on the decline
2
SPOTLIGHT ON BUSINESS • AUGUST 2016
3
AUGUST 2016 • SPOTLIGHT ON BUSINESS
because of a scanty local workforce – in order to focus their attention to their mostly automated production facility in Springville, Utah. Their eggs were, for a brief moment, sitting mostly in an already full American basket. With a weak Canadian dollar to start the year, the supply trail, as it were, between Utah and Western Canada seemed to be getting longer and colder with each passing day. For- tunately for Heggie and his team, the home front began to thaw. With the Loonie surging toward parity with the U.S. dollar in the spring of 2009 and average home resale prices up 5.0 percent and the volume of resales up 7.7 percent in The Great White North from the previous year, “It was a better opportunity to be looking into Canadian sales,” Heggie explains. “That’s when we changed and we put our focus more in the Canadian market than in the U.S.” The change he’s referring to wasn’t just a geograph- ic one; it was also opening two retail showrooms – a first for Kodiak Mountain Stone at the time – in Calgary and Lethbridge respectively. “Our communication within our company is great. We’re always talking back-and-forth and that goes a long way when you’re in sales – being able to call the factory and get ETAs and make specific inquiries to particular people about our products. That’s huge.” In order to convey to customers that Kodiak Mountain Stone and their retail representatives grasp the gravity of their motto, Heggie and CFO, Dave Olsen adopted one of Jobs’ most fundamental methods for growing a product and its presentation: continuing and mandated education with the aim of inspiring innovation. “We want our team to have the opportunity to continue to learn,” Heggie explains. “We have what we call our “Education Plan,” which we’ve modeled on the Google 20 percent rule – their engineers are encouraged to use 20 percent of the traditional workday to pursue pet projects. Our philosophy is our employees spend 20 percent of their time – outside of peak seasons, of course – reading or studying relevant materials to their particular position at Kodiak Mountain Stone.” This has been “a really good fit,” Heggie boasts. “For example, one of our sales represen- tatives spent a number of years in the stucco business. In fact, he owned a hardware store where he sold stucco, mixed paints, and interacted with his customers. Now we’re working with acrylic stucco and we need to match colours to match the dream. He knows the products and the distributors in the industry inside out and now our “Education Plan” gives him that much more time to master his craft. He’s used his 20 percent and found ways This is where Steve Jobs comes back into play.
4
SPOTLIGHT ON BUSINESS • AUGUST 2016
“Selling rock over the internet is quite an innovative thing.”
to make things easier, improve quality, and experiment before bringing what he’s learned into the showroom – so it’s just a really good fit for us that way.” There are other ways in which Kodiak Mountain Stone’s Education Plan fits the family and community culture of the business. “There are several books,” Heggie explains, “that we ask the whole team to read. Books like Good to Great by Jim Collins and How to Make Friends and Influ- ence People by Dale Carnegie are, we feel, universally beneficial. We recommend books like these to the whole team – to the folks in the Corporate Office in Cardston, to our sales reps in the two Alberta showrooms, to the factory workers in Utah – and then follow up with what we call our “Education Meetings” via conference call. It’s great to hear how these authors have had an impact and to get to know our employees as community members, wherever they call home. We’re a relatively small company so we know
5
AUGUST 2016 • SPOTLIGHT ON BUSINESS
each other really well by now. Our Maintenance Manager down in Utah, for instance, performs magic shows with his son.” Heggie himself walks the talk and talks the walk with his employees. He volunteers as a basketball and football coach in his kids’ youth leagues in his hometown of Cardston. “Our communication within our company is great. We’re always talking back-and-forth and that goes a long way when you’re in sales – being able to call the factory and get ETAs and make specific inquiries to partic- ular people about our products. That’s huge.” This is a huge payoff in an industry that is expected to provide a practically limitless line of products and cus- tomizations. “You know, things change, trends come and go and we’re always adapting to that. I think our educa- tive stance and open lines of communication help us do that,” Heggie says. “We also put a lot of effort into social media and we work with a local marketing company and it does pay off. We’re always looking for new reasons for people to come to our showrooms and our website.” As a company that Heggie describes as “still in a building stage,” Kodiak Mountain Stone is not wasting time coming from the ground up in their effort to stay ahead of local and regional competitors. “Selling rock over the internet – and not just manufactured stone, bricks, and acrylics; the natural stuff too – I think is quite an innovative thing,” he explains. “We’ve been able to implement on our website www.kodiakmountain.com something that I’ve dreamt of from day one. We call it the Kodiak Mountain Stone Visualizer. It allows the customer to upload a picture of their project – whether it’s a fireplace or an entire home – and with the click of a button change the stucco, paint, roof, or whatever they’d like. More importantly for us, it allows the customer to see what their project would look like with the addition of our stone in a variety of colours and styles. Helping the tech-driven client through personal service on our website has been big for us and will be a big part of our future because we don’t have national distributers yet.” While this may be true, Kodiak Mountain Stone is not without its clients beyond the reach of its Alberta showrooms. “In the last two months,” Heggie proudly summarizes, “we’ve shipped product to Hawaii, Ohio, Georgia, Texas, California, Mississippi, Oklahoma, Minnesota, Alabama, Massachusetts, and in recent memory, to a customer in Guam. Guam is probably my most memorable online success. We’re very proud of our online presence.” Continuous growth, like continuing education, is always on Heggie’s mind: “We’re definitely in the growth phase again and we’re starting to see growth in the U.S. again.” A new showroom in Springville, Utah has sparked a flame at Kodiak Mountain Stone not seen since the recession and Heggie’s team is doing everything they can to fan the flame.
“We’ve shipped product to Hawaii, Ohio, Georgia, Texas, California, Mississippi, Oklahoma, Minnesota, Alabama, Massachusetts, and in recent memory, to a customer in Guam. Guam is probably my most memorable online success. We’re very proud of our online presence.”
KODIAK MOUNTAIN STONE
P.O. Box 118 Cardston, Alberta T0K 0K0 877-563-4252 • info@kodiakmountain.com
www.kodiakmountain.com
as spotlighted in the AUGUST 2016 issue of SPOTLIGHT ON BUSINESS MAGAZINE
www.spotlightonbusinessmagazine.com
Page 1 Page 2 Page 3 Page 4 Page 5 Page 6 Page 7 Page 8Made with FlippingBook HTML5