Home Team
Owners Ellen and Jim Boyle
Any customer who hires Kitchen Concepts for a home-improvement job is asked to sign a piece of paper. On it is a promise they won’t yell at the contractors.
“Because someone did that one day, and I had had enough,” said Ellen Boyle, who co-owns the business with her husband, Jim Boyle. “I told Jim, ‘we’re making some changes.’ It’s just a simple piece of paper with a general explanation that they have to sign, and it’s made such a huge difference in our work because nobody deserves to be talked to like that, and I don’t want to ever speak to somebody like that. But it also creates this kind of camaraderie.”
It’s also part of a general focus on strong communication, she told BusinessWest.
“If someone decides to move ahead with us, we detail their payment schedule, so there’s never an uncomfortable moment of saying, ‘by the way, I need a check today.’ It’s set up from the beginning. Before we even get started, we explain what their schedule is going to look like, so there’s no question of when we’re starting and what our anticipated finish is going to be.”
And then, of course, there’s that expectation of mutual respect, right up front.
“As we’re walking into someone’s home, everybody that works for us is respectful, but we expect the same thing in return,” Ellen said. “We don’t have anybody above us, so if someone has an issue, we’re the ones that take care of it, but it has to be on a very mature and adult level.”
Jim said clients chuckle a little bit about signing the paper, but they also understand it — and it makes a difference.
“I think sometimes people have this expectation of contractors being gruff and rough and disappointing in nature. But we have done an incredible job over the years without having that kind of demeanor.”
“It just ruins the relationship if people yell at somebody over a knob or coming at 8 o’clock instead of quarter of 8,” he noted. “So we have a conversation for five minutes about all the little things that can happen when you’re in the house. And now, when something happens, this is what we get: ‘Ellen, I know I promised not to yell, but I’m a little upset.’ And they tell you the thing, but they preface it with that, and they don’t yell. And we easily handle whatever problem has come up and kind of move on.”
The consistent growth of Kitchen Concepts over the past quarter-century, much of it driven by word of mouth and customer loyalty, has validated that unusual ‘contract,’ if one could call it that. It’s also an effective icebreaker, Ellen said.
“I think sometimes people have this expectation of contractors being gruff and rough and disappointing in nature. But we have done an incredible job over the years without having that kind of demeanor. It’s not necessary, you know?”
From Painting to Kitchens … and More
Before meeting Ellen, Jim started a business called ASAP Painting — by accident, sort of — in 1998.
“I had started kind of cutting grass and doing some other stuff. I left an ad for painting in the paper by mistake, and somebody called me on it. So I painted an exterior house with a buddy of mine. We bought a couple brushes and paint, and that’s how that was born.”
Ellen was an executive secretary at Holyoke Community College when they met, and she eventually began helping with Jim’s business in an administrative role, handling scheduling, estimates, and the like.
“It grew right away,” he said. “It kind of organized us, and it made me able to concentrate on the work itself. And we grew incredibly fast.”
Kitchen Concepts grew out of Jim Boyle learning cabinet installation, and has grown from there.
They moved to an office in Hadley in 2001. “It was a dilapidated building that we renovated, and we were able to buy work vehicles and improve our equipment and bring on guys; I think we had at least four full painting crews,” Ellen said.
In addition to those interior and exterior paint jobs, they also built about 20 houses during that decade, drawing on Jim’s background in construction; his father was a developer. And they quickly outgrew their space and moved, in 2011, to their current, larger space on Russell Street, which used to house the Hadley Post Office and, later, an insurance company.
But the Great Recession had begun to take a bite out of the home-construction business, so they pivoted to selling cabinets and countertops, and eventually to full kitchen and bath renovations.
“We went out and did some training on how to design,” Ellen said. “And we had to renovate this entire building. We’ve made a lot of changes over the years, and we renovated this whole space to make it the showroom that it is. And maybe seven or eight years ago, we decided to solely concentrate on kitchen and bath remodeling.”
More specifically, they ditched whole-home construction; ASAP Painting is still going strong, as is a third business, called Premier Self Storage, which currently has a facility open in Greenfield and one under development in Southwick.
Their business partnership works for multiple reasons, Jim said. One is that they get along well as co-workers; not every couple does. The other is that they excel at different things. Jim realized early on he was much better at managing work crews and projects in the field, while Ellen, besides her organizational and administrative prowess, was much more at ease talking at length to customers about what they were looking for in a renovation.
“We’ve made a lot of changes over the years, and we renovated this whole space to make it the showroom that it is. And maybe seven or eight years ago, we decided to solely concentrate on kitchen and bath remodeling.”
Jim tells the story of spending two hours with a client early in the kitchen business and becoming frustrated.
“I’m a contractor-type person, so I care about being on budget, making sure the tiles and materials are there, making sure the guys are doing everything like they’re supposed to. I don’t necessarily care about colors and shades and things like that. When I buy cabinets, it takes me five minutes: ‘what are my colors? What’s my shape? OK, that’ll be good. Can you send me the price?’ And I’m done. And I thought that’s what everybody did.
“What we found was that she cares about all that stuff. So now, I have very little to do with scheduling or meeting with the customers. From that day, she started dealing with the clients, and I would get tied up with the guys, making sure they’re on budget, that they’re there on time. And she actually built the company to kind of a powerhouse, where we’re doing 15 to 25 kitchens a year, and maybe 25 to 30 bathrooms a year. It works really well.”
Time Management
The Boyles’ operation employs between nine and 15 employees, depending on the season, while the subcontractors that do plumbing, electrical work, and cabinet installation tend to be the same from project to project.
“Many of our people have been with us for a long time,” Jim said. “I have one guy that started with me since day one. Our assistant’s been with us 12 years. Two other guys have been here 17, 18 years. Everybody’s been around for a long time.”
Speaking of a long time, most remodels are completed in three weeks, though some larger, more complex jobs may go four or five. The three-week goal is out of respect for customers, he noted.
“If I build a garage for you at your house, if I take too much time, you could care less. I’m outside every day, and you might come say ‘hi’ to me when you leave for work and when you get back. But if I’m in your kitchen, when you get into a third week and everything’s still going on, it can be difficult for your wife or your partner, and if you get into a fourth week, they don’t want you there anymore; they need their stuff back.”
That consideration was even more acute during the pandemic — a time when home-improvement businesses everywhere reported soaring demand as people stayed home, stopped investing in vacations, and ramped up household projects.
“We were working at least 50, 60 hours a week. There was zero downtime,” Ellen said. “I had my two best years for kitchen consultancy. But yes, there was definitely a learning curve with how to interact with homeowners.
The bathroom and kitchen renovation business surged during the pandemic and has stayed relatively robust.
“Social distancing was new to everybody. But, again, we had honest conversations with homeowners, like, ‘this is how we will come into your house, this is how we will meet to do an estimate and a design, and this is how we will work to get the job done.’ And things took a little bit longer because we couldn’t really pile a lot of people into someone’s home, but the customers would just come in later in the day after we took off.”
Whatever the circumstance, Ellen said most clients have specific ideas in mind when they enlist Kitchen Concepts for a project.
“There’s a lot of information out there, and what makes us unique is having the construction background — so there’s what you see in a magazine or online, or what you’ve seen on TV, and then there’s the reality of what can be done,” she explained. “If someone has a certain dollar amount that they can spend, that definitely directs us where we need to go to. I never want to show somebody something that is three times the amount of money they’d actually be able to spend. So we do have discussions on what their total budget is going to get them and what we can do.”
How a customer intends to use the property makes a difference as well, she added. “Is someone renovating to sell their house? Are they renovating, but they’re only going to be there for five years? Or are they renovating because this is it — this is where they’re going to be for the rest of their lives?
“There are people who walk in and say, ‘I need a new kitchen, and I have no idea what’s out there.’ But I always encourage people to do all of the hard stuff first,” she went on. “I never want someone to come in here and feel like they have to pick their cabinets and pick their countertops. The hard stuff is understanding what design change would make it more efficient for you, and especially working in someone’s budget.”
Premier Self Storage, including this facility in Greenfield, is a successful side business for the Boyles.
Because budget is key, Ellen said, no matter the customer.
“One of our countertop companies, Cambria, has beautiful quartz countertops. But a lot of their designs are geared more toward, say, Boston-area homeowners, where it’s a very different demographic, a very different type of budget. Here in the college towns, some of the more expensive materials don’t fit into what their budget is going to be. So we have that conversation very openly with our Cambria reps, that we love these contemporary materials that they offer, and they’re big sellers in one area, but we say, ‘that’s never going to sell here.’
“But those products are out there, and you never know what someone will walk in and say they want,” she added. “Our cabinets are well-priced cabinets, so we have everything from standard SKU models up to full custom cabinetry.”
Another New Day
Jim called his partnership with Ellen — in life and in business — a good one, saying his day begins with a morning goodbye kiss, but they often see each other soon after — unless he’s on a job site.
“We’ve been working together since the beginning,” Ellen added. “We take separate cars to and from work, which gives us flexibility if he’s out on the road and I’m here, or vice versa. It’s good. It works.”
