Forty years of stone, learned the slow way.

I started in Houston, setting stone on high-rise buildings, because a foreman looked at me and said to come back the next day wearing work boots. I joined the bricklayers’ union and learned the material the slow way — wet sanding everything, bringing up a shine with oxalic acid and a piece of burlap, years before anybody handed us diamond pads. That education never really ended. It just moved indoors.

Over four decades I have done nearly every job this trade has to offer. I have set cladding and pavers on commercial buildings, run fabrication and installation, templated kitchens, polished edges, rigged slabs, driven the truck, and gone back to a customer’s house on a Saturday to make something right.

And I owned the shop — more than twenty years of it. High-end residential work, ten people, roughly a kitchen a day, and every one of the problems that comes with meeting payroll in a business where the material is expensive, heavy, and unforgiving. Marble, granite, quartzite, quartz, sintered surfaces like Neolith and Lapitec, glass. If it can be cut, polished, and set, I have had my hands on it.

That shop earned Natural Stone Institute accreditation — one of roughly a hundred in the country to hold it. It is the achievement I am proudest of, because it was judged by the people who actually do this work.

Teaching, and the industry

I first got involved with the Marble Institute of America, now the Natural Stone Institute, for a plain reason: I knew how to cut stone and I did not know how to run a business. I went looking for an education and found a community instead.

That turned into the better part of fifteen years of teaching — trade shows, regional stone summits, fabricator forums, CEU sessions for architects and designers, and speaking engagements in China, Brazil, and Italy. Well over a hundred sessions. I served on the board, spent a term as president, and was named Person of the Year by my peers, which is not an award you can apply for.

Why safety

Engineered stone changed the math. It cuts beautifully, and it carries far more crystalline silica than granite ever did — and we had shops cutting it dry, because that is how they had always done it. Silicosis stopped being an old miner’s disease and started turning up in fabricators in their thirties.

I brought OSHA into my own shop three separate times on voluntary inspections, because I would rather find my own problems than have somebody else find them for me. Then I built and taught the Natural Stone Institute’s Silica and Slab Handling Safety Certificate, and more than 230 people have come out of that course certified.

Where I am now

Today I am an expert consultant to this industry, full time. The practice is one person — the man you speak with on the first call is the man doing the work — and I take a limited number of engagements at a time. After forty-plus years, I am less interested in volume and more interested in being useful.