New showroom, franchising mark Renovation Professionals? success

The house is nearly finished now, and Erich Weber, owner and president of Renovation Professionals, smiled as he surveyed the progress. "It's starting to get exciting," he said.

The project is exciting to Weber because the former residence his company is completely renovating isn't just any building. When completed, it will house the company's operations and also serve as a display model for clients to walk through and evaluate.

Weber will move Renovation Profes-sionals into the building at 3020 E. Battlefield on Oct. 1, he said. The company formerly was at 3534 E. Sunshine.

While undergoing the change from a residence into a place of business, the building is retaining the look of a home. In fact, the finished product will be set up as a mock house to give clients the opportunity to examine design options.

"We just took a very plain building and added a new roof, and we extended the garage and made it into a room," Weber said. "We've tried to take every aspect of remodeling and include it in the house." The kitchen, for example, will feature various types of cabinets; the walls will display a variety of textures; and different types of trim will be used throughout the house. "We want to use as many different kinds as possible while still keeping it tasteful."

Even the fireplace, accessible from both sides, will have two different styles of mantels, he said. "We're trying to include everything we can think of that people have requested or might request."

Weber started his company, then called Home Repair International, in December 1997. With a degree in finance he knew how to run a business, but needed to find qualified, experienced employees.

"The first guy I hired was a guy I grew up with," Weber said. "I told him, I'll run the business side, and you can be the brains of the operation.'" About five months later, the company added another employee, and the operation grew.

In May 1999 Weber changed the name to Renovation Professionals to reflect the company's focus on bigger projects. "We realized that there was a huge demand for large remodeling jobs and room additions," he said.

Weber said that when the business started, "People said, You guys will never make it; you don't know what you're doing.' But now we're going into our fifth year, so we're doing something right."

Within the first year, Weber said he knew the company could be a success. "I also knew that the business model had to be more in-depth than it was."

The number of employees now has grown to 11. "We have what we call two and a half crews," he said. "We have a framing crew and a finish crew. We typically have two big jobs going on at a time. When a smaller job comes up, we take whoever we need from the framing and finish crews to complete the small job."

About 30 percent of the company's work is in the commercial sector, but the bulk are residential jobs, he said.

Weber predicts that the demand for building and remodeling will continue to in-crease, but fewer people will be able to do the work. "A lot more people who would learn a trade are seeing that there is a lot of money in computer programming."

His plan, he said, is for Renovation Professionals to help meet the growing demand for building and remodeling, not just in Springfield, but across the country, and to do it through franchising.

"From the beginning, this company has been based on the premise that we're going to create a turnkey business model for a service-oriented business," Weber said. The only way to be successful in business, he added, is "to be able to duplicate what you're doing."

Renovation Professionals already has one franchise in Dallas. Established 15 months ago, the Dallas operation is run differently from the one in Springfield, he said. "It's all commercial work, and the guy who runs it has no employees." Instead, the manager-owner works as a general contractor. This provided a "test case" for the franchise, Weber said, showing that "you can run it and make it profitable with employees or without, and whether you are focusing on residential or commercial work."

The next step will be franchising on a larger scale, Weber said. "We've hired a company called Francorp to build on what we've already developed. At the end, we'll have a week-long sales training where they will walk us through the entire process of being able to franchise."

As more franchises are established, Weber will continue to run the Spring-field business, while others will oversee the new operations. According to Weber, too many small businesses are heavily dependent on one individual. "It shouldn't be dependent on a certain person," he said, adding that in a successful company, "any one person could step out of the picture and the business would keep going."

He also believes in empowering employees to make decisions. "You have to have enough confidence in the people you hire," he said. "Let them know that you trust their decisions."

"Renovation Professionals is not me," he added. "It's everybody that is around me. The guys working all day long getting tired and dirty they're the ones that make the company what it is."