Matt Plaskoff Receives 2010 Fred Case Remodeling Entrepreneur of the Year Award

CONCEPTION TO REALITY

“Matt has never sacrificed the vision.” —Elizabeth Bryan, One Week Bath’s director of marketing and business development

One Week Bath began as an idea in 1999 and made its debut as OWB.com. “[Consumers] would go online and answer a few questions, look at three bath choices, say ‘I want this,’ put in their credit card number, a tech comes to the house and measures, and it costs you $7,999,” Plaskoff says. After two years it died on the vine. Plaskoff was too far ahead of the game. For one, “there was no real design-on-the-fly software available then,” he says, and this was before Extreme Makeover: Home Edition and America’s fascination with all things remodeled. Plus, he acknowledges that the model wasn’t quite right. Even though there are thousands of kinds of baths and people don’t really want to look at them all, they like the idea of all the choices. “They don’t want restrictions.”

By 2002, though, Plaskoff had refined his idea and held a meeting in Las Vegas for people he knew who were interested in pursuing the OWB concept. This was a time of great speculation in the remodeling industry, with rumors of consolidation just over the horizon. Plaskoff was concerned “there was no 800-pound gorilla in remodeling” — no one with enough buying power that manufacturers and consumers would pay attention to. He wanted to go big.

Jake Schloegel was one of the Vegas invitees. A fellow Remodelers Advantage colleague, Schloegel had known Plaskoff since 1995. “He was pretty impressive from day one, always ahead of the curve,” Schloegel says. “Matt was the first guy [in our Remodelers Advantage Roundtables group] to bring a laptop to a meeting, and one time he showed up with a handheld device that he [used] to make appointments and take notes that he was able to share with people who worked with him. We were awestruck by that.”

Schloegel and Plaskoff became close and stayed in touch even after Plaskoff moved into an RAR mentor group. As a testament to how much trust and confidence Plaskoff engenders, Schloegel was one of an early group of family, friends, and colleagues to invest in OWB as Plaskoff developed systems, processes, and software. “We made $2 million worth of mistakes as we figured everything out,” he says.

When OWB officially opened in 2004, Schloegel again invested, becoming one of the first of five investors, each of whom ponied up $25,000. Each has been promised that when OWB gets to their town, they will be the first to have the business.

Two years ago as the economy was taking a dive, Schloegel decided it was time to bring OWB to Kansas City. “Large projects and design were slowing down and I wanted to create another niche,” he says. “I couldn’t think of anyone I’d rather go into business with than Matt. He knows the business, has a no-nonsense approach, and he’s got a lot of skin in the game.”

ON TARGET

“The OWB process is the most amazing thing. I’m referring everybody I can to them.” —Bridget Fieber, One Week Bath client in Van Nuys, Calif.

Plaskoff’s approach to rolling out the business has been cautious and considered. “OWB is not a franchise and I don’t want it to be,” he says. “I want to partner with people who I know and trust and who know their market.” He went to Schloegel, he says, because “he was perfect: he had the infrastructure, the background, the skills, the ethics.”

Plaskoff is a minority owner, and Schloegel works under a license agreement to use the OWB brand, systems, and procedures as well as the company’s marketing people and accountant. All calls are handled — whether L.A.- or Kansas City-generated — through an 800-number and a “receptionist” in Oklahoma.

“The OWB business model as a satellite company is a $2 million company,” Plaskoff says. With Schloegel “we can see how much he had to spend and how long it took to get up and running.” Plaskoff is hoping to partner with 20 remodelers over the next three to five years.

Plaskoff’s passion and focus on the OWB concept is one of the things that tipped the scales with the Case Award judges. “We were impressed that [OWB] wasn’t just a stand-alone type of exercise. It has legs, and Matt already has a partner in another city and that [business] is taking off nicely,” notes Mark Richardson, co-chairman of Case Design/Remodeling, and one of the award judges [see “The Award” below and at left].

Those who know him see little reason why Plaskoff shouldn’t find success with OWB. “He has always had an emphasis in working on the business, looking at efficiencies and performance metrics and how he can improve the business by driving those levels,” says Victoria Downing, remodeling industry consultant and owner of the peer review company Remodelers Advantage, who has seen Plaskoff grow from a young remodeler who admittedly “didn’t know about the money part” and used his own credit card to make payroll. Bryan, his director of marketing, says, “He has the uncanny ability to strategize from 50,000 feet up about what the company will look like in 10 years, and at the same time he’s hands-on in business, selling baths, working with crews, training people.”

As with so many successful businesspeople, talking with Plaskoff is a bit like working through hyperlinks in an electronic document. Ask a question like “Did you start OWB because you saw what was happening in the economy?” and you get a brief, “I was tired of the inconsistency and having to reinvent the wheel every day.” But many miles of Pacific Coast Highway and a series of surfing stories and a discussion of the Greiner Study of growth later and more of the answer comes. “Getting back to your question, I don’t know if I had intuition or I just got lucky, but thank God.” Or standing in a Venice Beach coffee shop, a stack of Los Angeles Times catches his eye and here comes a data riff: “Thirty-percent of our work comes from ads. I’m nuts about data …. We [OWB] don’t run out of leads; when they slow down we do a half-page ad in the L.A. Times. Thirty to 40% is referral; 15% is Internet search; the rest is signage.” He rounds it off with a management tidbit: “You have to manage with data and with your gut. If you manage with just your gut, you’ll make a lot of mistakes. If you manage with just data, you’ll miss a lot of opportunities.” This was all said before his coffee got cold.

Yet distractions don’t take him away from the thing he’s doing right now or what he’s reaching for in the future. “It’s so natural for innovative people to be all over the board; they follow shiny objects,” Richardson says. “But Matt had one shiny object and he kept pushing it to the next level.”