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State your name, business, and how long you’ve been established.
Christopher DeFeo, DeFeo Materials, and we’ve been established as an LLC for since 2016.
What does DeFeo Materials do?
DeFeo Materials is a wholesale distributor of decorative stone products
Where is DeFeo Materials’ headquarters?
Bethany Connecticut, in my parent's house.
How many employees do you currently have at DeFeo materials and what are some of their positions?
Including myself, we have 5 employees and 3 part-time. We have an inhouse sales team, a full-time mechanic and operator.
What areas does DeFeo Materials Serve?
We serve primarily the east coast of the United States.
What are some other names DeFeo Materials is known as?
What types of services do you offer?
We offer material sale services, stone distribution, bulk transport, and bulk material supply.
What products are your main focus?
Bulk decorative stone products.
What are some of the things that set your business apart from the rest?
Something we find which really differentiates us from our competition is our advanced distribution network around the country. In addition to this, we use all the most up to date technologies on both the road and in the office.
What are some of the things that can be built with your stone?
Pathways, flowerbeds, driveways, rock walls, hardscape designs, veneers and much more. The extent of the usability of our products are really up to the imagination of our customers.
When starting out a project what are some things that you have in mind?
We outline our goals and then I take steps as to how to complete each of these goals.
When creating this pathway what are some things that you had going through your mind?
One of the goals of this project was to demonstrate a variety of stone, specifically flagstone. We are just breaking into the flagstone business and want to give our customers a bit of a base idea for its uses. When choosing the product to demonstrate, we first asked experienced masons what 3 varieties of flagstone they liked the most.
What sort of tools were required to make this possible?
Some of the equipment we used included, serious labor, connections, research on google. As for actual tools, a plate compactor, a diamond-tipped cutting saw, compacting mats and other various hand tools like shovels and hammers.
What do you think was the most challenging aspect?
Fixing the mistakes that we made learning along the way. These mistakes were things like not marking the width along the entire path. Leaving too large of space between each stone.
Now that you have just about finished, are you satisfied with what you’ve created?
No, because to be a demonstration it must be up to our elite standards of quality. If not what does that imply about our everyday work? We actually are planning on ripping up sections of the path so we can more properly install the flagstone now that we have learned from our mistakes.
What are the next steps you plan to take to grow your business?
Investing in more digital advertising as this is the future. We have rolled out a handful of pay-per-click campaigns to drive more traffic to our websites. In 2019 we spent over $15’000 dollars on travel expenses to add 12 clients. I decided rather than traveling to over 50 locations to show our product, it would be better to spend the money and draw customers that are actually interested in us. I was researching how to increase my online presence and I contacted some SEO teams this past fall to see how they could help bring customers to us. They told me it was a long term game but extremely beneficial. In 6 months we have gone from zero google standings to ranking for 136 organic keywords and gaining 73 referring domains to our website. I’ve also gotten over 20 messages from our website inquiring about decorative stone.
Are you helping any charitable organizations?
Yes, we are a proud supporter of The Children's Cardiomyopathy Foundation or CCF. CCF is a chronic disease where the heart muscle becomes enlarged or thickened as a result the heart can not contract to pump blood sufficiently. In a lot of cases, a heart transplant is required. One of my good friends' daughters is afflicted with hypertrophic cardiomyopathy and it breaks my heart to see her hooked up to all those wires. For every load of stone, we deliver we donate $1 to their cause. At the initial launch of our merchandise, we released a pink hoodie in support of breast cancer awareness wear all proceeds were donated directly to the organization.
