Signature Associates

Perrysburg countertop company expands to Columbus area

Cutting Edge Countertops, Inc., started 16 years ago this month in Perrysburg with three owners and just two employees — now it’s a multi-state operation that is expanding to the Columbus area for its sixth location.

“Columbus is great for us,” said Brian Burns, co-owner and founding partner of Cutting Edge. “They also service the Dayton market.”

The company bought Easyfit Products, Inc., a family-owned countertop and cabinetry business that has been operating in Delaware, Ohio, since 1989. The acquisition was announced April 1.

“We kept everyone, including the owners and all the employees on board,” Mr. Burns said. “The integration’s been going great.”

Jenna Chenault, now regional sales manager for the Delaware branch of Cutting Edge, said her parents started the EasyFit company more than 30 years ago in their barn. And she believes her family’s company could not be in better hands.

“We could not be better suited for this mesh of people to come together, honestly,” she said.

And while the former EasyFit company did offer cabinet services, Ms. Chenault said they had been moving away from cabinets and primarily focusing on countertops for the past several years.

“This was a natural progression to growing the business,” she said.

Cutting Edge, based at 1300 Flagship Dr., Perrysburg, makes custom countertops from natural stone, quartz, glass, solid surface, and laminate on three production shifts. They also use countertop materials for non-countertop products, such as shower walls, outdoor kitchens, fireplaces, and more.

But the vast majority of business is installing countertops, Mr. Burns said. They do 50 to 60 kitchens, or approximately 2,000 square feet of countertops, per day.

“We’re just a little piece of the kitchen,” he said.

During the pandemic, Cutting Edge was able to remain open as an essential business, Mr. Burns said, because its operations concerned kitchen construction. But the company scaled back for several months.

Then, in May, 2021, there was a resurgence of home construction and suddenly Cutting Edge found itself with almost too much business to handle.

In terms of growth and profitability, Mr. Burns said the boom was great. At the same time, the company struggled to get employees back to work and provide the level of service that customers had come to expect.

“It was probably the most stressful time that I’ve ever been part of in my business career,” he said. “Now we’re in a pretty good spot.”

Sixteen years ago, at the start of the business, Mr. Burns said reputation became the basis of what drove its growth, and that has remained one of its primary values.

The plan was never to grow bigger at all costs, he said, but to identify gaps in service that Cutting Edge could fill. Its other locations include Noblesville and south Indianapolis, Ind., and Wixom and Troy, Mich.

“We feel like we do a good job,” he said. “If we’re not in a market, we feel like there’s a void there we can fill.”

The company has been based at the same location in Perrysburg since 2006. In 2018, leadership added an expansion to the original 24,000-square-foot building to bring it to about 94,000 square feet.

“It was the perfect spot, the perfect building for us,” Mr. Burns said. “We thought we would never outgrow it.”

He and his brother Brad, another co-founder, are from Tiffin, and the business’s other founding partner, Jeff Erickson, is from Toledo. Throughout the years, Perrysburg has been a great fit for the company, Mr. Burns said.

“We love it,” he said. “It was one of the best decisions we made that we didn’t know we were making at the time to be here.”

Posted By:  The Toledo Blade on April 9, 2022.  For more information, please click here to read the source article.

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