By the time of the 2011 Natural Stone Show at ExCeL London, Steve Johnstone was ready to take the next step up with the business he established in 2002 and was looking to re-equip his workshop. NSS paid him a visit in Melksham, near Bath, to see how the investment he made has helped his business grow.
Steve Johnstone started his stone business in two containers he used as a workshop and office on a farm site he shared with 2,500 pigs – literally. “It wasn’t unusual to find a pig in the container when I arrived in the morning,” he says.
Just over a decade later the business is now on the site of what was formerly a garage, with waht was the lorry inspection pit making a handy reservoir for recycling water. It is only a few miles from the pig farm but Windsmere Stone & Granite has come a long way since those early days.
Today, Windsmere has high visibility to the traffic passing on the A365. Its premises now include a showroom showing off the kitchens and bathrooms that are the mainstay of the business, although outside there are also stone garden and hard landscaping products, including stone balls that always attract a lot of attention. There are plans this year to make more of the landscaping at the front of the building to promote this side of the business.
“I went over to the Xiamen stone exhibition,” says Steve – although before he went he had arranged through the Consulate meetings with a number of professional suppliers to make sure he made the most of his time there. “I bought a container load of troughs and balls. They have been a lovely talking point and the garden side has been very successful since we added that.”
As well as the granite balls and troughs from China, Windsmere now also sells sandstone balls from India, supplied by a UK agent.
Steve has delivered several of the balls as features and commemorative stones for schools, hospitals, town centre schemes, the Woodland Trust and even one with morse code running round it for the security surveillance centre, GCHQ.
Another memorial Windsmere produced, although not a ball, was in African Red granite. It was for the Brigade of Guards and was erected by Young Johnson Monumental Masons at the National Memorial Arboretum at Alrewas.
Last year Steve built a house next door to his business. He and his wife, Bridget, live there but with its large format marble and polished limestone floors, marble bathrooms, granite kitchen worktops, and feature walls, it is never too long before major customers are invited in for a coffee.
Steve’s background is in timber but he moved into stone because he could not afford to set up his own timber yard. The investment to start making and fitting kitchen worktops was not so great and the technology was, he says, “very, very similar – I just changed tools from high speed steel to diamond”.
He adds: “I set the business up knowing full well there was a market for worktops in the area. I have lived here all my life, so I know most of the kitchen manufacturers. I went cap in hand to them.”
There are stone companies in the region, of course, but there was no direct competition in Devizes and there were a lot of kitchen companies potentially to supply.
Not least among them were Smallbone and Mark Wilkinson Furniture. Steve had worked with Mark Wilkinson for 15 years, becoming good friends with him – Mark was Steve’s best man when Steve and Bridget were married. When Steve set up on his own, work from Smallbone and Mark Wilkinson helped establish Windsmere Stone & Granite.
Steve started working with a Denver saw (he still has a Denver SkemaTech in his workshop) and a Seelbach manual router. He and a man working with him would make a kitchen then go and fit it.
“The first job we did was for a local plumber. After we had fitted it we went and had a pint of beer and it was fantastic. We took some pictures and advertised in local church rags. This is a small area and it doesn’t take long for the jungle drums to get the message out.”
Shortly after they had started at the pig farm, Martin Walter walked in asking if they had any work. He is a time-served mason with experience of operating CNC machinery. He has been with Steve ever since and is now foreman. These days there is a contingent of eight people in the workshop, office and showroom, including three trained stonemasons.
The first CNC workcentre Steve bought was a Denver Quota, but by the time of the 2011 Stone Show, Windsmere was looking for something larger to give it the 3.5m machining length it needed to make the size of island sites customers want.
Steve spoke to a number of suppliers, including D Zambelis, the Essex-based agent for Gisbert machines that had supplied his tools and consumables since his early days in the stone business. “I have known Stella [Zambelis] since I started and you know if there’s a problem she will sort it out.”
Stella has always said that one of the advantages of Gisbert is that it makes machinery to order so customers can ask for bespoke alterations to the machines to suit themselves.
Steve: “I flew down to Alicante to see the Gisberts being used by a company there and decided on the one we would have – the MillStone FG3000. But the door opening on the standard model was quite small and I wanted it bigger.” True to form, Stella sorted it with Gisbert.
“We have been using that for 18 months now. It’s very good. There have been programming issues… nothing out of the ordinary, just things we needed the machine to do that we couldn’t make it do. It has been sorted out over the ’phone because they can communicate with the machine remotely. Even if they couldn’t have done it that way, you can fly from Alicante quicker than you can drive from Manchester.”
To operate alongside the workcentre, Windsmere also bought a Gisbert BC2000 edge polisher. At the same time as they were installed, so was dust extraction. Steve was mindful of the fact that computers and dust don’t go well together but also has a healthy respect for health & safety since he was crushed by a falling slab a few years ago. “I’m full of metal now,” he says. After the accident he replaced all his ‘A’ frames with letter rack storage.
Another new machine in the workshop is the Farness MitreForma sold in the UK by Waters Group. Steve praises its speed and accuracy, not to mention its affordability, and says it was one of his better investments.
Although the mainstay of the business is interiors, with 2.5-3m flooring slabs something of a speciality, Steve says the company can tackle most masonry jobs and that that level of flexibility has helped keep Windsmere busy while others are finding it hard to win work. “We don’t turn work away,” he says.
Windsmere also aims to respond quickly because customers do not like waiting. On worktops, the company usually achieves a seven-day turnround from template to installation. It makes full use of wholesalers, favouring the Marble & Granite Centre in Rickmansworth (there is more about the Marble & Granite Centre on page 28). It also buys from Italians Cereser Marmi, which it met at the Natural Stone Show in London, but with today’s exchange rates Steve says there is little advantage in buying from overseas.
With fewer people moving house, more of Windsmere’s work comes from improvements than new build and the largest new build scheme last year was 15 houses.
Steve: “Larger developments, 50 houses or more, they just aren’t moving, so the builders are trying to keep them as cheap as possible. They’re not using stone.”
Like a lot of companies within reasonable driving time of London, Windsmere is using the capital to top up its local work and Windsmere usually spends one day a week in London – using one of its newest vans for that run to avoid the £150 emission charge imposed on older vehicles.
Profits reinvested in the company have always been made with an eye on containing costs as well as improving quality and sales. Steve has even found a way of using waste stone: it is crushed and sold to a narrow boat builder to go in the bottom of the boats as ballast.
The sludge from the settlement tanks is also used. It is removed every two-to-four months and goes to local farmers to break down the clay in their fields. And all the gutters drain into the reservoir to keep it topped up to supply water to the machines. “It pays to be green when you see how much they are charging for clean water,” says Steve.