“Each of the managers is heavily involved in his location and that’s the way I want it to be. We’re not out golfing at 3 in the afternoon. I want these people to be the face of the company at their location, says Mike Cumming. “I want us to be the face of the company with our employees too. I want employees to know who they’re working for and reporting too. With bigger companies you can lose some of that.”
The stripes can often seem brighter when parking lot marking contractors consider road marking as an expansion option, and it’s no wonder: The contracts are bigger, the lines are longer, the gallons put down are greater – and the profit potential can be seductive.
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But Mike Cumming, president of Marking Systems, Little Rock, AR, knows those stripes aren’t always as bright as they seem. The owner of a three-location pavement marking company headquartered in Little Rock, AR, has been there, done that – and it almost cost him his business. Since then he’s developed a model for opening additional pavement marking locations, and he is well on the way to growing his company within the parking lot striping niche he knows best and enjoys most.
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“We want to be recognized as the best or one of the best in striping, first and foremost, and that will always keep our doors open, ” Cumming says. “Then we can add other services once we reach that point.”
That’s the plan that got the company started in 1992 and the plan that pulled Marking Systems through ten years later after its brief but scary foray into the long-line striping business. It’s a plan that requires learning the business, hands-on management, a focus on pavement marking, and developing a reputation that makes current customers ask you to do more work for them.
“I think I’ve got a model that works on which to expand. I think I could take somebody with a very little bit of knowledge in parking lot work and train him and open up another office, ” Cumming says.
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And other than an ill-fated foray into road striping that almost destroyed the company, Cumming and Marking Systems are on a slow and steady path to growth. Today Marking Systems covers Arkansas, Oklahoma, Louisiana, Missouri, Tennessee, Mississippi, and parts of Texas from three locations: Little Rock, the first branch in Springdale, AR; and the most recent expansion, Dallas.
The headquarters in Little Rock was started in 1992 and currently employs 10 people doing work on parking lots, small highways, and intersections. Cumming says 60% of the work is pavement marking including thermoplastic, and 40% is pavement maintenance and repair including sealcoating, cracksealing, and pothole repair. “That 60 used to be 90, ” Cumming says.
“I focused only on striping from 1992 to 1998 and had great luck with it, ” Cumming says. “But I wanted to grow and pavement maintenance was a big growth area I saw. My commercial clients liked dealing with me and they called me and wanted me to do more work for them, they wanted me to take on more of their properties. Pavement maintenance work goes hand in hand with striping -- I even have two sweeper trucks – and I just continued to do more of that and transform the company.”
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Cumming says the company got a big boost in 1995 when he was awarded a contract to restripe a number of Wal-Mart properties throughout the south-central U.S., living in an RV and pulling a trailer with all equipment behind it. “We worked our tails off that summer but made good money – enough to buy new equipment and a new trailer, and that’s how we operated until 1999, ” he says.
Following the approach that was successful in Little Rock, Cumming in 2005 opened Marking Systems NW in Springdale, AR. “Everything we do in Little Rock they do in Springdale, ” Cumming says. Brad Cordell, Marking Systems vice president, manages the Springdale branch and its five employees. The branch started with almost 100% pavement marking work but following the Little Rock model that has now shifted to 70% pavement marking and 30% pavement maintenance.
“I trained Brad in-depth and I’m confident with what he can do, ” Cumming says. “Once we got to that point we opened Springdale. Then we trained Steve for a year and when I got to the same point with him we opened in Dallas.”
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Cumming says Dallas generates 95% of its sales from striping. Cumming decided to open in Dallas partly because the company wouldn’t have to invest a lot to get the operation up and running. They sent a machine and truck down from Little Rock, so the equipment investment was minimal, and Steve kept his regular job as the branch ramped up.
“It allowed us to expand into that area without a big financial risk, ” he says. “It was an easy transition and we were able to grow slowly. The economy forced that to some extent but that’s how we want to grow anyway. From my experience in road work I’m not going to jump into something again. The Dallas market offers great potential but we’re going to take it very slow.”
Looking back, Cumming says 1999 was the start of a period that almost destroyed the company he’d spent seven years building. He says he decided long-line road striping was the best approach to big growth, so he took on a partner to get the company Disadvantaged Business Enterprise (DBE) status and went after road and highway striping.
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He says he knew there was a lot of work available and he thought Marking Systems could get it. “But be careful what you wish for, ” Cumming says. “We had so much work from 1999 through 2001 that we couldn’t do it all.”
To get into the road marking business Marking Systems made “a massive investment in equipment” including a $200, 000 paint truck, a $350, 000 thermoplastic truck, all the support trucks and equipment needed to do long-line road striping, and they added sign installation to their services.
“Plus we had 38 employees at the time and I was tied to them. I thought I had to have them so I overlooked things like being late to work, repeated mistakes etc. We had some rough employees and my biggest problem was feeling like I had to have them -- and in a way I did need to have them because we had so much work to do and so many bills to pay, ” he says. “After a while it just took me to thinking ‘what am I doing here?’ I was miserable every day.”
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“I was young and thought I could take over the world in a painting sense, ” he says. “But running something that big and that complex you really need to have your head on straight, you need a good group of employees you can rely on, you need a production manager you can trust, and you need to be able to delegate.
“I didn’t feel comfortable delegating, and some of it was I just didn’t trust anyone to do what needed to be done, ” he says. “But part of it was I didn’t want any of those people being the face of my company. I just wanted them to do the work and go home.
“Today if an employee is my biggest problem then that employee will go, and I stick to it, ” he says, explaining he recently had to fire a 13-year employee that he didn’t want to let go. “It was a very, very difficult thing to do but I stuck with him for a year and he couldn’t turn things around so he had to go.”
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“I tried to run that bigger business, I micromanaged it and I didn’t have the experience, so a lot of what happened and the problems is on me, ” he says. “But at the same time I didn’t feel like I had anyone I could trust to assist me in running it. I feel like if I have good employees like we have now then we can be efficient. We didn’t have employees who could be on their own and the margins on that type of work were too tight to not be efficient.”
So by the end of 2001 he and his partner knew the time had come to end the road striping experiment, and the two partners parted ways amicably. “I was depositing a lot of money but it was all going right back out and it took me a year to figure out what was going on, ” he says. “We realized we gave it a good shot and it just didn’t work.
“We just couldn’t manage it all. It was too big too fast and I was too young and just couldn’t handle it. We nearly went into bankruptcy, ” he says. “Looking back I think those 2 ½ years probably set me back 10 years as far as growing the company is concerned.”
The Ultimate Guide To Parking Lot Line Striping
Cumming says he and his partner
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