C.H.

Private Lives

Microcomputers, welding equipment, wheelcharis, prefabricated churches, and five other businesses earned their companies a spot on this year's INC. 500.

 

#175Jewel Building Systems; manufacturer and fabricator of metal buildings and homes; Dallas, N.C. "The down economy has accrued to our benefit," says Everett Jewell, owner of Jewell Building Systems, a Dallas, N.C., manufacturer and fabricator of pre-engineered metal agricultural, industrial, and commercial buildings, houses, and churches. "In hard times, people are looking for alternatives."

Jewell has built his five-year-old business to more than $2 million in sales by continually looking for innovative alternatives himself. When he started, with $30 in his pocket and a part-time secretary, he advertised farm storage buildings. Rather than try to secure credit, he first made the sale, then had the product manufactured under his name and delivered. Today, although his company has grown to be a manufacturer with 30 full-time employees, he still does a strictly cash business, even though "our bankers tell us we can't do business that way."

His expansion into housing came about as an attempt to provide alternatives. "I had spent 10 years in the mobile-home business," he says,"and I discovered that a person who bought a mobile home would rather have had a conventional home if he could have afforded it." Estimating that some 80% of prospective buyers nationwide had been priced out of conventional houses, Jewell developed a vinyl-coated, woodgrain house that could be sold for $28,000. "Anytime you have an 80% market and an effective product, you might as well hitch up the locomotive and go," he says. Besides national sales, he is negotiating a deal for 20,000 steel homes in Colombia, South America, part of an overseas market whose potential he believes is enormous.

The latest alternative to engage Jewell's attention is the church market, where costs range from $42 to $105 a square foot for sanctuaries constructed by church contractors. "We applied our system to come up with a series of churches where you can turn the key and walk in for $26 a square foot, including furniture, pews, baptistry, steeple, and cross," he says. "The future market is unreal."