monday morning quaterback

MAKERS
Paul Friant
Friant Acts its Age
Rob Kirkbride
Friant is a company built on hard work
and customer service. It certainly wasn’t
easy when Friant launched the company
with $1,500 in his pocket and a fierce
determination to succeed.
IN MANY WAYS, FRIANT & ASSOCIATES IS A COMPANY THAT ACTS ITS AGE. The company is celebrating its 25th anniversary this year by doing things a “mature” company would do. It is opening a new 360,000
square foot state of the art manufacturing facility in Virginia. It is refining and improving its production methods and product design. And it is redoubling its efforts to
provide customer service at the highest levels.
The company has gone through some growing pains,
but as it enters corporate “adulthood,” it is on a trajectory to continue its successful run in the industry. Indeed,
Friant has come a long way in the past 25 years. But what
makes the company one to watch is its strategic moves in
recent years (and its plans for the years to come).
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“A lot has changed for us over the last few years,” said
Paul Friant, the founder and chief executive of the company. “When you celebrate an anniversary like this, it
makes you consider who we were, who we are today and
who we will be tomorrow.”
Friant is a company built on hard work and customer
service. It certainly wasn’t easy when Friant launched
the company with $1,500 in his pocket and a fierce determination to succeed. He followed a simple rule for
himself in those early days: To never say “no” to a customer, no matter how difficult the task might be.
Friant remembers his first office in a rented house. He
was 22 years old and had a $1,500 loan to start his office
furniture installation company. Soon after starting the
business, his ambition got the best of him -- almost. Friant put in a bid on a service project for San Francisco’s
Red & White Fleet and won it, not realizing the company
expected Friant to do the work at his location, not at Red
& White Fleet’s.
He found himself with 700 chairs delivered to his front
lawn and due back within 72 hours, scrubbed to a new
finish and ready for re-installation on the fleets. Friant,
his brother and a small crew finished the project on time
and on budget, resulting in a 10-year relationship with
the customer.
Paul Friant’s roots are deeply embedded in the office
furniture industry. His father was an office furniture
dealer in the San Francisco area. Friant started at a dealership himself, but in 1990, started a company that serviced office furniture dealers with one- and two-man
jobs. His crews would install smaller items like visual
boards, cabinets and desks. He added remanufacturing,
refurbishing and cloning Herman Miller Action Office II
panels. Soon after, the company started making its own
worksurfaces and opened a manufacturing shop. That
grew into the company’s Oakland, Calif. plant, now complimented by two other facilities in California.
The company’s product lines include panel systems,
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wood and laminate casegoods, reception units, conference tables, seating and accessories. Friant competes in
the cost-conscious office furniture market, but its products are anything but cheap or cheap looking.
While some companies that compete at lower price
points make no effort to capture the attention of architecture and design firms, Friant makes a point of it. The
company hired Sarah Periera, business developer, A&D,
a few years ago to act as the face of Friant with the design community and dealers and deliver to them a simple message: If you are not going with one of the major
office furniture makers, go with Friant.
That sounds like it may be at odds with Friant’s drive
to make its business grow. Instead, it a shrewd understanding of the company’s place in the pecking order of
this cut-throat business. “Let’s look at the marketplace,”
said Friant. “Let’s say it is a $10 billion industry. The five
majors control 60 percent of that market. Other than the
part that we fit in, we really don’t want their business.
We do not want their aligned business. The other part
that doesn’t go to them, we want that. We can fulfill all
that business. We want to partner with those dealers
to become the best No. 2 solution for them if they are
aligned and if they are not aligned, we want to be in the
No. 1 position for them.”
Friant said it is very important for the company to fit in
properly. “We are not chasing business that doesn’t belong to us,” he said. “We do very well at what we do and it
is the perfect business for us. It is a good position for us.”
It might seem that Friant is ignoring half the market,
but the “leftovers” leave plenty of business for the company to chase. Friant believes his company is creating
advantages as it continues to improve its production
methods as well.
The new Virginia plant will double the company’s production footprint. It is a state-of-the-art facility, built
from the ground up for Friant. It will have the latest
manufacturing equipment, including robots and infra-
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red readers and barcode scanners. The company also has
plans to consolidate its Oakland operations, but hasn’t
started that work yet. Leading the effort in Virginia is
Scott Bloyd, vice president of operations, East Coast.
“The Virginia location is very strategic; within minutes
of the port,” he said. “We can get a ship, receive our shipment from the dock, have it unloaded and put it in process and probably shipped it the same day, if we need to.
There is tremendous opportunity for added capacity and
throughput.”
Friant has always been a West Coast company and
quick to ship, but adding the Virginia location will make
it much easier to serve its East Coast customers quickly
as well, said Dan Landman, executive vice president of
sales.
Logistically, serving the East Coast from California is
a lot harder than doing it from Virginia. Landman calls
the new facility a game changer for the company and its
customers. “When you look at all the business that hap-
pens from Miami to Boston, the area makes up a huge
percentage of the office furniture that is consumed in
the U.S. To be able to get to any of those points in 24-48
hours is a major, major step for us,” he said, adding that
the dealer community on the East Coast is thrilled with
Friant’s decision to build there as well.
In addition to the Virginia operations and the Oakland
consolidation, look for Friant to add a third location in
coming years, though the company is mum on where
that might be located. Friant said the company is adding
soft seating as well and he is spending a lot of time talking to designers.
“Being 25 years old, we are growing up and growing
older and creating certain milestones. We are coming
up with our own designs, improving our infrastructure,
adding to our research and development and enhancing
our customer service. It is like growing up as a kid almost. Now we have all the tools,” Friant said. Q
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