[Intro – Host: Team Jensen]
Host: teaching you the art of industrial real estate this is on air with Team Jensen all right listeners welcome to episode 12 of on air with Team Jensen today we have Doug Wilder with ckf on with us thanks for coming on Doug appreciate it.
Doug: yeah, thanks for having me.
Host: Doug is newer to the Kansas City Market… ckf is out of Omaha and Doug’s been up here for now how many years?
Doug: we came down in March of 2019… right before things got interesting in 2020.
[Doug’s Background and ckf History]
Doug: ckf is a 100-year-old company this year… I started my career as a carpenter building houses eventually started my own business in remodeling and building homes in Omaha… Sam [the owner] offered me a position in 2008 to upgrade their commercial and construction management.
Doug: the 100-year story is Sam started working for Consolidated Supply… worked his way up to outside sales and then Sam and his wife bought the company in 86… started with 13 people and worked it up to about 350. In 2019 he sold the company to us, so it’s now 100% employee-owned.
[Expansion into Kansas City]
Doug: Kansas City is huge, so much bigger than Omaha, there’s a lot of growth potential here for us.
Host: tell us about moving to Kansas City… you weren’t very familiar with it before you got here, right?
Doug: other than coming to Royals games… as I’ve been down here, I mean Omaha and Kansas City I think are very similar… the people and the culture and the businesses all marry each other pretty good.
Doug: when I first started coming down… I decided just to stay in Airbnbs throughout the city each week… each of those weeks I would pick a new region to stay in which really helped me learn the city pretty quickly… helped me learn the traffic and what it was like coming home to those places.
[CKF Products and Showroom]
Doug: we handle countertops and cabinetry… we run seven or eight different cabinet lines… they come to us pre-finished which is really nice.
Host: you guys are working on a big remodel yourselves for your showroom.
Doug: our showroom is in the middle of getting started on a remodel… we’d like to have some wine and cheese events with some realtors and then some landscapers.
Doug: our showroom in Lenexa we’re open 8 to 5 every day except Saturday and Sunday… we have a slab gallery of about 56 slabs that you can view and then we have probably 10 vignettes of our cabinetry.
[Service and Retention] Doug: we have company-wide probably 40 salespeople… we have project managers which I think is unique to ckf… they go out to the job site prior and make sure things are going to fit right.
Doug: level of service doesn’t stop once a homeowner moves in… we go back and service customers five, 10 years down the road… that level of service is pretty much how Sam built the business.
Host: that retention just speaks to ckf as a company… you take care of people and people are motivated.
[Market Outlook and Closing]
Host: 2023 was a great year for you guys in Kansas City, right?
Doug: our staff has grown to 32 people… I’ve had some goals for our sales staff to hit around 10 million and we’re going to do that this year.
Doug: hopefully as we keep growing, that’s the next goal right? Another place [facility].
Host: thanks again for coming on.
Doug: thanks for having me, it’s been fun.
