He Can Only Get It For You Wholesale

By K. Schipper

VEAZIE, Maine – Matt Qualey says 2013 was such a busy year for Qualey Granite and Quartz Inc. that he hopes 2014 will be a time to “pound out some problems and make some money.”

Qualey can probably be forgiven for wanting to stop and wipe his brow. On the first day of 2013, the company went from selling in the retail market to a totally wholesale operation. As part of that, Qualey Granite also opened a design center and showroom in Maine’s largest city, Portland.

To top things off last April, the U.S. Small Business Administration (SBA) named Matt, the president of Qualey Granite, as Maine’s Small Business Person of the Year.

It’s a huge amount of success for a man who might not even be in the countertop business if he hadn’t been looking for a place to park his equipment for a different industry.

RAISING THE ROOF

A Maine native, Qualey explains that after graduating from college he was living in Boston and preparing for graduate school when he decided to take his life in a different direction and moved back to the Bangor, Maine, area.

“I thought, ‘I know how to mow lawns and I know how to drive truck; I’ll find something to do,’” he says.

That “something” ended up being a landscape and hardscape business. Looking for a place to park his equipment, he bought a small commercial building and acquired a tenant: a monument maker.

“He had also done like one granite countertop, but he was taking deposits and keeping the money,” Qualey says. “He left town leaving us with contracts for a few countertops, so I sold my landscaping equipment, went to Regent Stone Products, took their crash course on making countertops, and dove in.”

The tenant left Qualey with a Skilsaw® and a hose. The building, too, was the antithesis of a modern manufacturing plant; already 150 years old, it had no heat and dirt floors. Still, by the time the new countertop fabricator returned from his class with Regent, he’d acquired an AccuGlide rail saw and a Marmo Elettromeccanica router, as well as a couple electric polishers.

“It was myself, my brother and one other person, and we were doing about a job a week,” he says. “That was 10 years ago.”

Qualey quickly realized he needed more automation and decided to purchase a Park Industries® Yukon®. However, he had to raise the roof on the building to do so.

“We had to cut the roof off to get it in there and then make it a little taller,” Qualey says. “It fit by about 6”.”

Click photo for galleryThat was fine for awhile, but when Qualey wanted to add a CNC machine to his equipment mix, zoning wouldn’t allow him to enlarge the building. Instead he ended up leasing a 4,000 ft² space in nearby Brewer, Maine, leaving his wife, Laurie, to continue manning the old location, which didn’t have heat or running water. (She left the company in 2012 and, unlike that shop’s water supply, the marriage is still running fine).

“Our first CNC was a CMS/ Brembana Maxima, and once we put that in, we thought we’d hit the big time,” Qualey relates. “At that point, we were doing about three jobs a week.”

What really helped Qualey differentiate his business from all the other craft shops doing three kitchens a week, though, was the 2008 recession. He had been buying commercial real estate for awhile, and he says, “I thought it would be a great time to buy the biggest building I could find.”

In the case of Qualey Granite, a concrete plant, with a 50,000 ft² building on 30 acres in the Bangor suburb of Veazie, came on the market after the owners went bankrupt. Qualey says he put a bid in on the property in early 2009, and because of environmental and other issues, the process took almost a year-and-a-half to complete.

At that time, Qualey sold his original building and bought a Northwood Machine Mfg. Co. SawJET. A year later, the company added its second CNC machine, a 5-axis CMS/Brembana Maxima. However, he says for him the greatest benefit of the building was its 15,000 ft² area with 30’ ceilings and a 15-ton crane.

“We filled it with slabs,” he says. “What we were sending all our customers down to Boston to see was suddenly available here in Bangor. We had 1,000 slabs people could look at, and that’s what pulled us through the recession.”