Talking Shop with Fiber Glass Florida

Fiberglass Florida provides customers up and down the state’s east coast with fiberglass products, resins, supplies and materials for the manufacturing and repair of boats, surfboards, auto parts and composite airplanes. Spacefish had the pleasure of sitting down with Jay, an owner, and Mandy, the Operations Manager (otherwise known as the glue that holds it all together!), for an an interview to learn more about their business.

Thanks a ton for taking the time to sit down with us, Jay and Mandy! Let’s start by learning a little bit about your business. Tell us a little about the history.

The original owner started the business in 1990. Rick and I bought it in 2005. When we purchased the business, we only had the one warehouse. Shortly after we ended up adding the second warehouse. As our business grew, we decided to expand south and found a place down in Stuart. We purchased the building down south in 2008. The property we are in now doing this interview became available in 2015 so we decided to purchase it and turn it into our retail store.

Do you have employees? How many?
Yes, 15 or 16 between all of our locations.

What are your operating hours?
8-5 Monday through Friday and 8-11 on Saturday at out Stuart location.

What inspired you to start your own business?
I was working in a CPA firm at the time. One of our clients was Brent Williams who owned Fiberglass Florida. I had been his accountant for 10 years by then so I met with him every month so I was very familiar with the business. That’s also how I met Rick, my business partner. He was already working with Brent. One day Brent came in and said he was ready to retire. Rick and I talked about it and were able to pull off buying the business from Brent in 2005. I left the CPA firm and joined forces with Rick. I didn’t know anything about fiber glass. Rick had that knowledge and skill from working with the company and I handled the business stuff. It has really worked out well over the years. We dove in and figured it out. We have an incredible team.

Tell us about your business, including the type or products or services you offer?
The big part of our business is the wholesale part. We sell to other companies, business to business. That’s probably 60 to 65% of the total business. We deliver resin, fiberglass, epoxy, solvents, gelcoats, etc. We have trucks in both locations that go out every single day to deliver to the businesses we supply. The other side of the business is the retail part. If someone damages their boat and wants to fix it themselves or they want to beef up their transom to put on a bigger motor on their boat they will come and get the technical information they need from us and purchase the materials to do it themselves. We get kids that come over from UCF that want to build their first surf board and we show them what they need for that. We get sail boaters that come in all the time that are staying for the week or month that need something done on their boat. We added the awl grip lines over 10 years ago. It’s the yacht coating paint, it’s been a phenomenal partnership for us. We have a lot of great vendors like 3M too. We also have core materials. There is exotic stuff like honeycomb that people use now instead of plywood. It does a much better job on their boat. The urethane foams are just better overall. They offer less weight and more longevity, if it gets wet it doesn’t rot like the wood can. Table top epoxy is another great product we carry. Many different local bars and restaurants come to us when they are redoing their bars and tables. A lot of local business around here have used our products to redo restaurants. Grills & Backwater are just a couple to mention. There are some people that just like doing it on their own. They want to put nickels and dimes underneath resin on a table. It’s pretty cool.

Do you have tutorials for those kinds of projects?
We do, we have a YouTube channel that has some tutorials on it and you can always come in and ask and we will spend time helping you figure out the best way to do it. There is more than one way to do different projects. You might watch a tutorial on YouTube and see a way you think you want to do it but then you come in and we discuss different options and you decide to tackle it in a different manner. We always try to provide the best advice to our customers to make it as easy and streamlined for them as possible.

What makes your business unique, what is your specialty?
I think that first of all we have great people here that care about what we do and how we do it so it always starts with great people. Nobody minds answering the same questions over and over again and no one minds spending the time it takes to get a customer the right stuff they need for their project. For example, someone drives to us from Edgewater and just needs a quart of paint, then we will stop and make them a quart of paint so they don’t have to come back and we don’t have to ship it. We provide excellent customer service, we really take pride it that. It all starts with our people, they really care about what we do and care about the folks that come in here.

What has been your biggest success to date?
During Covid it was really hard to get stuff so we dug deep and worked hard on sourcing everything and staying open. We never closed for Covid. We did a great job getting ahead of some of the issues. Epoxy went on short supply for a long time. Mandy orders all that stuff and she did a great job staying out in front of it. We got ahead of it so we had material here when people needed it. When it was short everywhere else we were still shipping it. We don’t take easy no’s from people telling us we can’t get the stuff we need. We go out and find alternatives and just work hard to find what we need for our customers. When Covid was in full force, we had large companies want to buy all of the product that we had on the shelves but we couldn’t do that. Being able to supply these larger companies but also stay true to our loyal customers was paramount to us. If we would have done that, it may have put some of these smaller companies out of business and that’s just not how we treat our loyal customers. It was very difficult during Covid. Inflation had driven the price of everything up from solvents to epoxies, resin, you name it. Heck, resin doubled in price! You had a lot of guys that had a hard time raising their prices to keep up with their customers. Covid was tough but it was a boom for the boat business. One thing I think is pretty cool is that you will notice more older refinished boats on the water and those are people that were able to take on a project like that during Covid that might not have been able to with their previous schedules. What sets us apart from our competitors is just our customer service. Our team is made up of people that talk to our customers and enjoy what they are doing and I think that resonates with people. There was so much bad customer service during Covid I think we worked really hard and provided good customer service and a lot of our customers are loyal to us because of that. We know we are one bad service conversation away from losing people. And we really work hard on that.

What has been your biggest challenge?
Staying healthy, staffing, we’ve been short staffed for four years. I don’t think we have ever worked harder than we have in the last three or four years. Inflation has been really, really difficult. The price of everything has gone up. It’s hit this industry very hard. Sourcing materials has been a real challenge too. There are three or four different companies that make epoxy and resin and it was hard to go from one to the other but we did what we had to do to have the material in here. Our inventory probably went up 50% because we either had to get it or we knew we weren’t going to get it for a while. Mandy, how many times did we sell stuff to someone in Ohio or Michigan? We had a call today some guy is coming down from Indiana for two drums of resin to build an airboat hull. The flip side of the inventory is making sure you have enough and the space to store it. A lot of our products have a shelf life so let’s say you find twenty drums of a gelcoat but you have to make sure it’s gone in 90 days or it’s outside of spec. It’s a fine line, you want to buy it all up so you don’t run out but you don’t want it to go bad on you. You know another interesting thing we noticed during Covid is that all of the college kids got sent home. We ended up hiring a number of guys my boys went to school with that came in and worked for us for a while. Some are still here and others have moved on to the next step in their careers but Covid sent all those kids home and we were lucky to pick up some hard working smart kids to help with the business.

Can you describe your customers?
Our customers, particularly the wholesale guys, have all survived all these years and you didn’t survive 2008 & 2009 without having something special and a way that you did it. You had a patent or a process that kept you in business. So many people went out of business during that time. These guys survived and came back stronger. Guys that have been with us a long time and getting older like me, they know what they are doing and have a good product. They are all hard working no nonsense guys and we don’t play games with them, we try to give them the best prices we can. They trust us, we are dependable and they know that. Then we have a lot of fresh faces in here that are starting in the industry and will develop like that over time where they will learn to trust us. You are not in this industry if you don’t work hard and are passionate about what you do. Whatever niche’ they are in, boating, surfing, cars, etc. We have an aging group of surf guys we sell to, not that they are old but they have been around 30 years doing it and the industry has changed. As the years go on the materials have changed. Some people still do the older woven roven on boats but now a lot of things are being infused with vacuum bags. Techniques are changing making the boats lighter and stronger. People are using different types of carbons and some exotic materials in them. The core material that goes into boats has changed making them lighter and stronger. So, they have to keep up and we have to keep up with that. Our wholesale guys are all hard working knowledgeable guys. Our retail customers a lot of times come to us very green looking for advice and direction. The key is to help them successfully complete their project while not breaking the bank to do it. For example, maybe they only need a quart verse a gallon to complete their project but initially they wanted to buy a gallon of product. We explain that to them and offer advice like don’t buy all of the stuff you need for the project right now. Tackle it in stages to make sure everything is being done correctly and they are not spending money they don’t need to. Most of the retail guys are definitely at home DIY guys that we have to support through the project. Jacob and Matt are really good with that aspect of our business. Our Stuart guys are great at that too.

Does your business give back to your community?
We are constantly giving back to the community. I have kids, Jay has kids. Our kids’ have grown up in youth sports so we are sponsoring teams all of the time. We love that stuff, it all starts with our kids. We just did a fundraiser for the Air Force at Patrick AFB. We put together care packages for our men and women overseas. You would be surprised, a pack of tick tacks and some gummy bears is a nice taste of home. We believe in shopping local, people support us and have for years and we would not be in business if it were not for the local people so we believe in giving back. We have been fortunate the last few years to be able to do that. The Merritt Island football team, both of my boys went through that program so whatever they need they get. Mandy’s girls and softball, same thing there. As you know the local fishing tournaments are big for us. We really enjoy doing that. We do as much as we can to support our local community.

Thanks again for chatting with us, Jay and Mandy!