BUSINESS CALGARY

September 2004

STAIRMASTER

Spindle, Stairs & Railings

By Camie Leard

Five years ago, after a difference of opinion on how to run the family business rendered him jobless, Kevin Halliday found himself without an income, with a young family to support and a fast-approaching mortgage payment. Fortunately, he also had a firm grasp on the stair-building market in Calgary, a burning passion to succeed, a solid vision of an innovative company and a few people who believed in him. Today, Halliday’s company, Spindle, Stairs & Railings, has 35 employees, has developed a number of breakthrough manufacturing processes and is one of the fastest-growing companies in the province.

His strategy? Build your business one step at a time.

Step One: Demonstrate Resilience

“I started with zero,” Halliday says. “I had brought my parents’ company to Calgary (from Edmonton) and I had a different view as to how I wanted to approach the market place; so, I started out on my own.”

With no money, no bank loans and no support from his family Halliday was truly at the bottom. He and his wife decided he knew enough about the business and had the skills and passion to succeed on his own.

“I was trying to figure out how I would make the next mortgage payment,” Halliday explains. “My wife was very supportive and we decided to go for it and build this business from the ground up.”

Step Two: Use Your Imagination

With his livelihood and his young family’s well-being on the line, Halliday set out to conquer the spindle, stairs and railings market armed with a cell phone, some business cards and a lot of ingenuity.

“I would drive around to building sites and staple my cards to the unfinished stairs,” explains Halliday. “I’d take measurements, call the client from outside of their new home and offer to give them a quote. I was very successful with this technique. My closing rate was almost 90 per cent.”

Halliday was careful from the beginning to present the image of an established company.

“Those customers had no idea how big or how small we were. They only knew we did quality work at the right price,” he says.

Step Three: Build Relationships

Halliday has never underestimated the power of building solid relationships with clients, suppliers and employees.

“If Bill Gates came here and said, ‘Kevin, I’ll give you $10 million to start a company,’ it wouldn’t have worked,” explains Halliday. “I had to build the relationships one at a time.”

From the company’s inception, Halliday has been able to get by with a little help from his friends.

“I had suppliers that believed in my vision and in what I could do and they said as long as I paid my bills they’d support me. And they have,” he says.

A B Cushing Mills opened at bizarre hours so Halliday could fill his first order on short notice. Builders like Landmark Homes and Décor Construction gave him business and supported his vision from day one. Décor even offered him free office space as Spindle, Stairs & Railings began to outgrow Halliday’s home office.

During that first year, Halliday grew his business to the point he was able to hire some help. Gary Laird came on board as general manager and the two men began to see the potential that existed between them in their approach to business and their ideas.

“Gary and I have totally different personalities,” explains Halliday. “He looked after the installers and production and I looked after sales. With that combination, we thought we’d have nothing but success.”

Within six months, Spindle, Stairs & Railings had outgrown the space provided by Décor and the company, which now included Todd Klassen in production, moved into their own space in the Highfield Industrial Park. He added office manager Darcy Elder-Anguish to the team and from there the company took off.

“I always say, ‘Hire people who are better than you and smarter than you, they’ll only make you look good,’” laughs Halliday.

Step Four: Practice Innovation

While Halliday says it’s important to have a vision and stay focused on what you want, he has been equally clear on what he doesn’t want.

“There is a lot of what I call the Old Boys Club in this industry,” he explains. “And I don’t knock them. They’ve been doing their thing and doing it well forever. The money is coming in and they’re happy.”

But Halliday has never been one to settle for the status quo. He says he believes there’s always a way to improve. Part of this off-the-beaten-path approach has manifested itself in a new way to manufacture circular stairs.

“We are now able to manufacture a circular staircase in a 12 x 12 space instead of using the huge racks,” explains Halliday. “This enables us to bring the cost down and put the produce in more homes by making it more affordable.” The innovation won the company a Calgary Region Home Builders Association SAM Award for Best New Idea.

Spindle, Stairs & Railings has also developed innovations in spindles, providing customers an array of options in materials and designs ranging from the traditional wood spindle through to stainless steel designs and wrought iron.

Halliday says he encourages creativity and innovation in all of his employees.

“No matter what it is they do, I ask them to think outside the box,” he explains. “Take what you’ve learned in other places and improve on them. Try new things. If we fail? Big deal. We pick up and keep going. The philosophy has really worked for us.”

And it has. In addition to the SAM Award, Spindle, Stairs & Railings was the 11 th fastest growing company in Alberta last year according to Venture Magazine, has been recognized by the Chamber of Commerce as a runner-up for small business of the year and Halliday’s been featured in Calgary Inc.’s 40 under 40. All of which has garnered the company a great deal of attention.

Step Five: Market and Promote

With a background in radio sales and a natural penchant for self-promotion, Halliday has built a solid, cohesive brand from the company’s inception.

“One of the biggest things in business is branding,” says Halliday. “Our logo and image is on all of the buys vans, is integrated into our website, is on our business cards and in all of our advertising.” The result is recognition, and hopefully top-of-mind awareness, when someone next needs a set of stairs.

The company also actively uses the Internet as part of its sales and marketing strategy. The website, www.greatstairs.com, is fully interactive and allows customers to mix and match styles to create a personalized look as well as enter specs and get a quote right then and there.

“Customers really appreciate that feature,” says Halliday. “They can put in their information and not have to wait three weeks for a quote.” He adds that he updates the website regularly.

“Every three months it’s different,” he says. “There’s something new and exciting going on all the time. And our customers demand that.”

Halliday also does a considerable amount of advertising, placing ads regularly in home and garden magazines. He says word of mouth has also been essential. “We are only as good as our last job.”

Step Six: Manage Your Growth

“They always say the grass is greener on the other side,” says Halliday. “But someone has to mow it.” He is referring to growing a business too quickly.

“It’s tempting to say, ‘Yeah, let’s go to Edmonton,’ or ‘Let’s go to the States,’ but we’d like to make sure we’ve got Calgary covered and we’re well-established here before we expand to other markets.”

While Halliday says he does plan to expand to centres throughout North America in the future, he is still highly focused on the booming renovations and new home markets in Calgary.

Since the company’s inception, Halliday says he’s reinvested profits into the company and has added to Spindle, Stairs & Railings one piece at a time. As the customer base grew, the need for more space became apparent. Halliday added one bay at a time, either adjacent to existing space or as close by as was available. It’s been the same with his staff.

“We adde4d installers and other production people as we needed them, one at a time,” he says.

While the step-by-step strategy allowed the company to grow aggressively but carefully, it also resulted in a somewhat fragmented real estate portfolio.

“We are spread out all over the city,” explains Halliday. “We have a sanding bay here, another bay where we do circular stairs, another bay where we do wrought iron.”

But the company is ready to consolidate as Halliday purchased a 20,000 sq. ft. facility in the Foothills Industrial Park to which the company will move in February.

“We had a game plan and we had our goals aligned with growth,” says Halliday. “But we managed the growth carefully so that we’re ready to go when we move.”

He explains that over the last five years, he’s been collecting assets, machinery in particular, as they’ve become available.

“I have a bay just for the storage of machinery,” he laughs. “We don’t need it right now, but we will and when we do, we’ll have it and it will be bought and paid for.”

He’s done the same with people.

“We’ve hired people for the estimating department,” he explains. We don’t need an estimating department at the moment, but we’re training them so they understand the business and are ready to go when we move.”

Halliday says that had he not managed his investment in the business and his growth strategy, this expansion could have cost him hundreds of thousands of dollars more.

Step Seven: Plan Ahead

As with a number of businesses within the building industry, Spindle, Stairs & Railings is beginning to see a shortage in tradespeople, specifically installers.

“The average age of our installation guys is over 50,” he explains. “It’s been really difficult to get the younger guys in … they don’t realize how lucrative it can be.” He explains the average installer makes between $10,000 and $15,000 per month.

“The boomers are going to retire, and we’re going to need people who are able to install our product,” Halliday says. “So, we’ve taken matters into our own hands and are launching a program at SAIT to teach young people how we do things.”

Halliday is currently working closely with SAIT to develop a curriculum that will train people in Spindle, Stairs and Railings’ unique systems and processes in the manufacture and installation of stairways. Halliday will provide the instructors and hands-on experience. The program is set to be available next year.

“We can only grow as fast as our installers,” he says. “We need to do something and be forward thinkers and create a solution for a problem we see in the future.”

With the company preparing for its February expansion, Spindle, Stairs & Railings is geared for more growth and success. Looking back over the last five years, Halliday is philosophical.

“If you have a vision and believe in something so strongly, it can’t fail,” he says. “People talk about drams and ambitions, but once you put it on paper and start doing it, your life will change.”