Glass firm has clear view to successful future

As seen in Pacific Coast Business Times

By BetsyCrowfoot

One year after their acquisition of Bob’s Glass in Santa Barbara, two Ventura couples have demonstrated the path to success is crystal clear. 

Robert and Deanna Quintanilla Jr. and Enrique and Michele Padron acquired Bob’s Glass – a producer of high end custom glass doors, windows, skylights and mirrors – one year ago. By March 2004 the firm had cracked $300,000 in sales, “the biggest month ever in the history of the company,” said Mrs. Quintanilla, who attributed impeccable quality, customer service, and a sharp eye on the bottom line.

Bob’s Glass was founded 35 years ago and operated by John Rowbottam for the last quarter century. Quintanilla and Padron were the lead glaziers for the successful Gutierrez Street facility when Rowbottam sold the business to out-of-town management. “They didn’t have a handle on the level of quality and kind of custom work that was done in Santa Barbara,” explained Mrs. Quintanilla, and shortly the business was back on the block.

The Quintanillas and Padrons soon found themselves in the drivers seat. With the purchase of the company the men were suddenly employers, supervising people who had only recently been friends and co-workers. Their homes were leveraged. They spent nights cramming CAL/OSHA (Occupational Safety and Health Administration) laws and contractor licensing board requirements. 

 “Robert and Enrique were always perfectionists, but now they were financially motivated to be master craftsmen and master estimators,” said Mrs. Quintanilla. It was an obvious shift in dynamics, she added, but they both stepped up to the plate.

And in stepped Mrs. Quintanilla and Mrs. Padron, too. Mrs. Quintanilla had experience as a senior financial analyst and owned a Carpinteria-based eatery for four years. She joined Bob’s Glass as full-time chief financial officer.

Mrs. Padron had enjoyed a longstanding career in law and administration until 1997 when she became a bilingual educator. She was enlisted as corporate secretary.

 “We weren’t apprehensive about taking on the role as business owners because we were already in that mindset,” said Mrs. Quintanilla. Messrs. Padron and Quintanilla had been in the process of forming their own glassworks during the interim owner phase.

“This just jump-started us ten years.”

The quartet purchased Bob’s Glass though a buy-out of shares of the existing business, Mrs. Quintanilla noted, against the counsel of their legal and financial advisers. “It was risky, but strategic. We acquired all the assets of the corporation: a $60,000 Italian polishing machine; a fleet of trucks; all the inventory; a facility that was already set up for glass.”

They computerized operations, reducing estimating and production times. “Production is running at a higher level and a lot more efficiently,” said Quintanilla.

But it did take nearly one year for the company to recover from the “hiccup” which occurred when the previous short-term owner was in place; and get old contractors back on board and line up bigger volume and commercial projects.

Said Mrs. Quintanilla, “The contractors who knew Robert and Enrique as craftsmen already had respect for them and their reputation,” – a reputation built on nothing less than 100 percent perfection.  

Their typical installation is the Montecito home designed by a world-class architect, with glass windbreaks, sand-blasted artwork, all the bells and whistles. “It’s all custom, high end work. There’s nothing standard about it,” said Mrs. Quintanilla. “They’re not replacing a shower with a $300 door from Home Depot.”

But with that big ticket comes an expectation of impeccable quality and service.

“Glass has to be installed just right, or else you eat it,” Quintanilla added. “There’s no forgiveness in the material.” Once glass is tempered (a heat process) it cannot be cut or modified.

While Bob’s Glass established a quality reputation in the estates of Montecito, Mrs. Quintanilla said they don’t want to be thought of as “so high end we can’t service our friends next door.“

“We’ve added variety and branched out in numerous different fields,” Quintanilla said, eyeing a goal of $2-million in sales in 2004.

One thing you won’t see at Bob’s Glass though is automobile or stained glass. “We think it’s wise to stay focused, be good at what you’re doing,” said Mrs. Quintanilla, while her husband added the company may endeavor to expand geographically in to Ventura and northern Santa Barbara counties.

Additionally, the company hopes to gain further inroads with contractors: currently 70 percent of their business is to end users. But the large inventory of glass, custom capability, and possession of the only sand-blasting booth on premise at a glass company locally, make Bob’s Glass a unique and viable supplier for the building trade.

Bob’s Glass is a unique employer too. After the acquisition the entire staff chose to stay on board. Since then the company has more than doubled in size to embrace 11 full time employees, plus the four principals. “We are very concerned with our business atmosphere,” Mrs. Quintanilla said. “We treat our employees as very important assets of the business too.”

Bob’s Glass

Brief Desc:                   High end and custom glass and mirror designs and installation, including tempered, and annealed glass; plate glass, obscure glass, mirror and plexiglass; glass block and custom sandblasted designs, for windows, commercial storefronts, shower, tabletop, skylight, patio and other installations.

Headquarters:               717 East Gutierrez St., Santa Barbara, CA 93105

                                    (805) 966-4134 www.bobsglass.net

Annual Revenue:           $1.5-million sales in 2003

Employees:                  15 full time employees located at the company’s 4,500 sq ft facility

President:                     Robert Quintanilla Jr.

Vice President:              Enrique Padron

CFO:                            Deanna Quintanilla

Secretary:                     Michele Padron

Tri-County ranchers have a beef with market closures

As seen in Pacific Coast Business Times

By Betsy Crowfoot 

Domestic sales of beef and cattle have withstood the aftermath of the December 2003 discovery of Mad Cow Disease within the U.S. border, but area cattle ranchers are still awaiting the re-opening of lucrative overseas markets – a closure which has driven prices down nearly 15 percent.

All told, recovery from the detection of Bovine Spongiform Encephalopathy (BSE) in a Washington state cow has been slow but, “not nearly as bad as what we might have anticipated,” said Roger Miller, a north San Luis Obispo County rancher who runs about 600 beef cows out of his Parkfield ranch.

Evidence of BSE was discovered in a cow harvested December 9, 2003, via government testing programs enacted in 1990. The U.S. has had a “triple firewall strategy” to prevent the spread of BSE according to Ben Higgins, Executive Director of the California Cattlemen’s Association, since the consumption of beef with BSE was linked to cases of Creutzfeldt-Jacob disease in Great Britain – a finding which turned British ranchers into paupers and outcasts.

Domestic restrictions began in 1989 and within a year the U.S. had begun a strict testing policy of any animal showing symptoms of neurological disorder. “We were the first country to have this in place, without actually having the disease within our borders,” Higgins said, noting that, “hundreds of thousands of samples have been taken and there has been just this one positive case.”

Higgins was quick to reveal the diseased cow had been born in Canada, and prior to 1997 restrictions prohibiting the feeding of ruminant animals (those with a four-chambered stomach: cattle, sheep, goats, buffalo, deer and elk) with proteins derived from other mammals (i.e. meat byproducts and bone meal). BSE is spread through contaminated feed, particularly that made with brain, spinal cord and other neural tissue.

Despite these measures, in December 2003, “we saw countries representing 95 to 100 percent of our beef export market shut down overnight. It had significant impact,” said Higgins. The U.S. exports $3-billion in beef and cattle annually; $170-million from California. Beef is one of State’s top ten agricultural exports and within the Tri-County area, nearly 4.4-million acres are grazed by roughly 165,000 head of cattle annually.

“There was some effect, right after it was discovered,” said Miller, who also serves as president of the San Luis Obispo chapter of the California Cattlemen’s Association. The discovery of BSE chopped 20 to 25 cents a pound off the price of cattle ready for harvest. Still, Miller credited industry-wide education programs with keeping consumer confidence high, saying, “It’s not nearly as bad as the European or Canadian market.” 

And he noted that prior to December’s Mad Cow Disease scare, the price of beef had been at record levels. “It was higher than it had been in a long time,” said Miller. The discovery of BSE, “knocked the market down some, but it’s still better than what we were used to for quite a few years.”

But Higgins pointed out that cattle ranching is a business where profit margins are typically, “slim to none.”

“This is just one more issue causing strain on the rancher’s bottom line,” said Higgins, adding that the lack of available grazing land is one of the primary issues affecting ranchers. “Competition for grazing leases can be cut-throat.

“The large tracts of land necessary to run a viable cattle operation are being bought up by private individuals or environmental groups that limit their viability for use for cattle.”

Recently California Department of Fish and Game acquired 13,000 acres of San Luis Obispo County property, Miller said, and is eyeing 13,000 more. “This limits the amount of grazing land … and whenever a State Agency purchases land it takes that property off the tax rolls and the county loses revenue. It is one of the worse things that hurts us, county-wide.”

“These are much greater issues for most of these guys, than BSE,” noted Higgins – issues which may drive ranchers out of the region.

Compounding these factors is the anticipation of a dry season, according to Richard Nock, another Tri-County rancher, who said, “We are looking into the barrel of a drought.”  Many regional ranchers are cow-calf operators, he noted, selling the calves to farms in the Midwest and elsewhere. If drought conditions persist, local ranches will be forced to move the cows sooner – reaping a much lower per-pound price for the younger, smaller cattle.

Although rainfall is out of anyone’s hands, some relief is in sight.

On March 3 the U.S. Meat Export Federation (USMEF) announced Mexico would start to allow imports of  boneless beef products from animals of less than 30 months of age, as a first step in new agreements with the U.S. 

Philip Seng, USMEF president and CEO, said, “The initial agreement allowing boneless beef covers an estimated 75 to 80 percent of what the U.S. exports to Mexico.”  While this represented a small margin for area ranchers, it offered a promise of things to come.

“The bulk of our exports go to Japan, South Korea and the Pacific Rim,” – roughly 10 to 15 percent of California’s beef production, according to Higgins. The reopening of the Mexican border has provided “optimism about the critically important Asian market.”

For Tri-county ranchers, those borders cannot open too soon. 

“We want to be selling our calves in May, June and July,” said Miller, “and I hope it will all have blown over by then.”