While there is often a fairly strict divide between the ceramic tile and stone sectors, the two disciplines naturally require much of the same skills and knowledge. Steve Bees’ niche business, Bespoke Masonry, is one example of this crossover, taking advantage of its founder’s expertise in the stone sector to carve out a specialised and highly successful position in the UK tiling industry.
This month, TSJ spoke with Bees to find out how he took his tile processing company from a one-man outfit, operating out of a shed in his back garden, to a thriving enterprise with a long list of sought-after clients.
Closing the gap
In 1992, Bees left school to join a stone and marble company in West London, before moving on to his second company two years later in 1994. He stayed at the Chiswick-based firm for 15 years, during which time he developed both a wealth of knowledge in the processing of stone, and an understanding of how to run a business. “Towards the end of my time there, I was the sort of day-to-day manager. I looked after the workshop and all the guys upstairs in the office as well. I was never a director or anything, it wasn’t my business, but I was considered the boss, if you like.”
While he was there, however, Bees noticed a gap in the market that the companies he’d worked for didn’t seem interested in taking advantage of. There was a growing demand for the processing, cutting and shaping of ceramic tiles. “The stone and marble companies, back then and still to this day, they don’t want that kind of work,” he explains. “Anything related to tiles is considered a bit disruptive, in that trade.” Bees was more than happy to pick up the slack.
Bespoke Masonry began life in a shed in its owner’s back garden, though the gamble clearly paid off, and it wasn’t long before the company needed to expand. Within a couple of years, Bees moved out of London to the Buckinghamshire area, where rents were cheaper and he was able to afford a shared workshop. At this stage, he explains, business really began to take off.
Two moves and more than ten years later, Bespoke Masonry now operates a large, modern workshop in Radnage, Buckinghamshire with two separate units housing some serious machinery. To operate all of that machinery to full capacity, Bees has three full time employees in the workshop in addition to two subcontractors he can call on when demand gets particularly heavy.
Survival of the fittest
That second move, into the company’s current premises, actually came at a rather inconvenient time – early 2020. “I picked up my keys on day one of the first lockdown. I thought: you are kidding me! Extra overheads, extra rents, bigger bills and the country’s gone down into lockdown.”
Worse still, up to this point, Bespoke Masonry had never needed to promote its services whatsoever. “I’ve never advertised in my life,” Bees says, “we’ve always just been a little too busy through word of mouth.” In fact, up until 2019 the company didn’t even have a website! Even when he eventually built a site, Bees didn’t see it as a tool to gain new work, rather as a way of streamlining conversations with existing customers and making his jobs more efficient.
In March of 2020, of course, everything changed. “I did panic a little bit, so for the first time ever, I did one of those mass emails you can put together.” Using information from the site, Bees built a template that explained the business’ capabilities, and rather than firing blindly, he selected potential customers he knew might be interested in those services. Quickly, his panic over having no work shifted to a new (albeit much more welcome) issue: he was flooded with responses!
“I was led to believe it was so hard to get work, that for every thousand emails I sent out I’d get one enquiry,” he says. “Well, I sent out about 300 emails and I was just overwhelmed with the response.” Most encouragingly of all, the enquiries represented genuine interest from landscapers, architects, retailers, builders, and even tilers, for whom Bees’ company could cut down on the laborious and intensive work of processing large amounts of tiles for bigger jobs.
Like many in the construction industry then, the pandemic period actually brought a period of unexpected prosperity for Bespoke Masonry – though unlike a lot of more unfortunate companies, that success has rarely faltered since. “I said to my guys, we’ve got so much work coming in, there was an element of: should we make some hay while the sun is shining? And the idea was that we’d make money while we could and then, when we were out of lockdown we could go and spend all this money we earned. But in reality, we never really slowed down.”
Ahead of the curve
Similar to the way Bespoke Masonry tapped into a market niche no one else had found back in the 2010s, the 2020s have seen the company go from strength to strength, riding one of the most popular post-pandemic trends.
Of course, it’s well established that during lockdown, many homeowners took the money they ordinarily would have spent on holidays or trips out, and invested instead in home improvements, often focusing on areas like the kitchen and bathroom. However, another area of the home that received particular attention during this period of enforced isolation was the garden, and it was here that Bees’ business strategy had once again been particularly prescient. “The 2cm thick exterior porcelain has been brilliant for our business, because we’ve got the tooling and facilities to process anything. We can do 10mm thick tiles, we can do 20mm thick tiles, it’s not a problem,” he explains.
Even better, these new jobs were much more lucrative than the traditional thinner tiles, since they typically involve much greater quantities of material to process. “Historically, we might cut up a decorative wall pattern for someone’s shower cubicle, or a bit of a floor pattern for a bathroom. Now we’re doing all the tiles around a swimming pool, a load of step treads and then maybe the wall cappings, all on the same project!”
For Bespoke Masonry, this trend has fundamentally shifted the business from one which nearly exclusively dealt with 10mm interior tiles, to one that now makes some three quarters of its total revenue from 20mm tile processing, by Bees’ estimate. Indeed, he has recently noticed an uptick in even thicker tiles, up to 30mm, which can only be a positive development for the company, particularly with its recent purchase of several high power and capacity machines from Italy.
Getting the help
Really, as Bees tells it, the only difficulty over the years for Bespoke Masonry has been the sheer quantity of work – and getting the staff to help him manage it! Training is an issue across construction generally which is even more acute in tiling, and the ancillary nature of Bees’ business means there is even less education available for prospective employees. “It’s a fight, really,” he says. “It’s only myself doing it and one other business up in Manchester, and I wouldn’t try to go and poach their staff.”
Bespoke Masonry has traditionally provided training to new employees, however even with that support it can be hard to find staff who are willing to stick it out through the tough first few months. “You try to get a young kid who you can train up, but of course the generation of today, they don’t want to get their hands dirty, they don’t want to lift anything heavy, they don’t want to get cold. And even if you pass all those obstacles, just getting them to turn up at eight o’clock in the morning is half the battle!”
Plain sailing
Fortunately, as of our conversation, Bees says he’s built his “best team of guys,” and with the company’s recently refreshed machinery, he hopes to maintain a steady pace of work rather than enter another period of rapid expansion. Perhaps demonstrating some of the qualities that have led him to this position however, he admits: “I’m a little bit institutionalised. I get a phone call and, even when I don’t want the job and I know it’s going to be a struggle, the very next words out of my mouth are always: Well, yeah, drop the tiles off tomorrow, of course we’ll do it.”
That mantra – “Of course we’ll do it” – seems to be at the root of Bespoke Masonry’s enduring success. While for many companies in the stone industry, ceramic tiles long lacked the prestige to justify working with them, Bees had no such qualms. And while many in his position would have used high demand as a justification to hike prices, Bespoke Masonry has “never ever” increased its rates, Bees says, “because we found ways of being more efficient, with better staff and better tooling”.
Indeed, while he doesn’t have any plans to expand right now, Bees ends our conversation with a laundry list of high-profile clients currently lining up for his services. Whether Bespoke Masonry grows from here or not, the company is in an enviable (and sadly rather rare) position right now of unassailable safety – and that’s more than enough reason to celebrate.
www.bespokemasonryltd.co.uk
