Increase production, forget overheads.
What do you do if your business revenue is limited by your team’s capacity to get the work done?
No-one wants to turn jobs away or put people on a waiting list and risk opening the door to competitors.
Alan Keenan, managing director of Keenan Interiors runs a business designing, manufacturing and installing high-end residential and commercial cabinetry — and he’s found a smart way to increase work rate while actually reducing his overheads.
At Keenan Interiors, skilled cabinet-makers produce hand-crafted furniture using beam saws and hand drills.
The investment required to buy a CNC machine represented too big a big step for the business, so Alan went looking for another solution to help boost production.
That’s where Cutshop came into the picture. The Cutshop® team offers a cut-to-size service for commercial customers offering the latest European cutting and edge-banding machinery.
“It took me a while to get my head around not doing everything ourselves. Eventually, though, I decided I wanted to put more work through the doors without raising overheads. By using Cutshop®, I’m able to put an extra kitchen through my business every week and actually reduce my overheads by two to three grand a month. It makes perfect sense!”
Recently, Cutshop® helped Keenan Interiors out by cutting cabinetry for North Shore dental clinic Icon Dental. The team worked hard to cut, edge band and drill all the components and then delivered them flat packed for installation within a week of plans being signed off.
Thanks to the laser-edge technology of Cutshop® recently acquired Holzher Lumina 1586 edge-banding machine, they supplied edged doors with invisible glue lines.
“It was quite a big job — about 60 sheets. We used white Melteca internal panels with oak veneer quarter-cut for all of the faces. We used our own hardware, including soft-close hinges, and just told Cutshop® what we were using. They drilled the panels to suit.”
Originally from a small town in Ireland, Alan has been in New Zealand now for nearly five years. Though the New Zealand industry is similar to Ireland’s, Alan says Kiwis are typically more conservative. “Kiwis often don’t want to spend time thinking about the kitchen — despite it being one of the most important rooms in a house, and there’s lots of white.”
Thankfully, says Alan, people are becoming more adventurous, with timber bench tops and woodgrain Melteca becoming more popular. “When I sell a kitchen, I try to get people to add some colour. We encourage people to spend a bit of time thinking about things.
“For example, we recently designed a Kauri veneer kitchen, and when you open up the cabinets, there is bright orange inside.”
When asked to sum up his relationship with Cutshop®, Alan’s answer is simple.
“It’s great, Cutshop® is just like an extension of our workshop.”
If you’d like to learn more about how Cutshop® add scale to your business, please get in touch.
