For most companies and start-ups, there are several ways to grow your business:
– Create a proprietary product.
– Create a niche for your product or service.
– Do your homework. Know your market.
– Find a growth industry needing your services.
One Chula Vista company was able to do all of the above. Privately held Ecocrete, Inc. hit the jackpot in fiscal 1998 when it changed its strategy and began marketing its unique building products to schools and school districts.
In that year, sales grew 712 percent over the previous year. Sales doubled in 1999 and will probably double again this year, to roughly $21 million. Next year, the company expects to have about $35 million in revenue, said Keith Christian, president and founder of Ecocrete. Ecocrete tops this week’s San Diego Business Journal List of Fast-Growing Companies in the San Diego area, with a growth of 1,474 percent over the past three years.
– New Name Better Suited To Product
Ecocrete, founded in 1992 as Eco Building Systems, Inc., changed its name Aug. 1 to showcase its chief product. Its polymer-modified, glass-fiber-reinforced concrete is four times stronger than regular concrete, resistant to fire, insects, water damage and earthquakes, he said. With its patented technology, Ecocrete can design, engineer, manufacture and deliver a complete modular school at a lower cost than traditional building techniques for schools and commercial buildings. And they can do it much faster, Christian said. “We can manufacture 10 classrooms per day in our factory,” he said. But classroom construction wasn’t where Christian was initially thinking of taking his product. At the start, he was leaning more toward modular homes, he said. When Christian started Ecocrete, the company spent three years in research and development, looking for ways to make Ecocrete bind with steel for a building’s infrastructure. Then, in 1995, the firm started manufacturing three-bedroom, two-bathroom homes. Sales weren’t as grand as Christian would have had hoped, due to market resistance to modular homes.
– Home Buyers Consider Price
Christian said their homes were “way too strong,” meaning consumers were less interested in the home’s durability than they were in other factors , such as cost. “We found no interest in the housing business. We were selling the modular Ecocrete home as stronger, and (they) would last long. People didn’t care; they just wanted to know what the monthly payment was,” he said. “Especially first-time home buyers,” he said. Commercial buildings were a different story, however. People expect a commercial building to last for 100 years or more, Christian said. “We felt there was a higher, better use for Ecocrete, and that was for more commercial-type construction , schools, prisons, apartments,” Christian said. “And we started doing some research on the classroom business, and felt that it was a great market to get into.” In 1998, the company began manufacturing school classrooms exclusively. This was a niche where there was tremendous interest in modular building, and Ecocrete had a superior product, he said.
– State Mandates Boost Space Needs
The switch to classroom construction also positioned Ecocrete to take advantage of an important trend in school construction. When the state of California mandated class-size reductions, that reduced the number of students per class from 33 to about 20 , and created a huge need for additional classroom space, Christian said. That was on top of other trends. California’s population growth created additional need for new class space, while the booming economy created a demand for upgrading older buildings. Debbie Dawson agreed. As the marketing director for Ecocrete, she pointed out that thanks to expansion, class-size reduction and other trends, most school districts had “temporary” trailers on their campus , some of them for as long as 20 years, she said. School districts found that the cost of maintaining these trailers was very high, as they required constant painting and were susceptible to termites and wood rot, Dawson said. Schools quickly came to appreciate the virtues of a modular classroom designed to last, and sales took off, she said. Dawson credits Ecocrete’s success to what she calls a “remarkable product.” Combined with a direct marketing campaign to architects and school districts, that helped spur sales, she said.
– School District Offers Support
The company also got a boost with some early recognition on its home turf. Lowell Billings, assistant superintendent of the Chula Vista Elementary School District, recognized that Ecocrete was a good fit for his district, Dawson said. “Having that community endorsement really was helpful,” she said. Billings said he became excited about Ecocrete very early on. Since the company was situated on the former Rohr industrial site in Chula Vista, that made the company highly visible. Billings saw the early stages of development in the product, and with a rapidly growing school district, he was able to see its potential. Billings cited the durability and the cost as among the chief reasons for selecting Ecocrete. An Ecocrete building costs slightly more than half what traditional on-site construction costs, but it can be built much more quickly and is designed to last, he said. Ecocrete also has advantages over the trailers. Although an Ecocrete classroom costs twice as much as a trailer, the maintenance costs are considerably less. Also, an Ecocrete addition to a regular school building can be designed so it’s hard to tell where the original building ends and the modular addition begins. Now, 10 of the 37 school buildings in the district have several Ecocrete buildings on campus. Of the three schools currently being built, one is almost entirely Ecocrete, he said. Ecocrete has successfully marketed itself throughout the state of California, including the metropolitan areas of Los Angeles, San Francisco, Sacramento and San Luis Obispo. Over the summer, the company completed an entire school campus in the Fresno area, Dawson said. At this point, the company has not yet expanded into other states. Each state has its own building requirements, and Ecocrete builds exclusively to California codes. But the company is looking to market itself in other states in the future, she said.
