Breaking it, then making it

One night, Eric Edelson went to the store, bought a six-pack of beer, and carried it to the back of the Fireclay Tile factory in San Jose, California. He gathered his team and told them the company couldn’t make payroll that week.

It was 2009, a year into his effort to save the business, and it wasn’t going well. “Overnight I made everything worse,” says Edelson, now Fireclay’s CEO. “That was hard.”

Down and to the right

Eric had met Fireclay’s founder, Paul Burns, through a family friend in 2008. Paul spent nearly 25 years building the company, and the recession was setting in on a business already stretched thin, with about 30 employees, a small factory, and revenue sliding toward $1.5 million from $2.5 million the year before. Paul kept the books mostly in his head, tracking cash the way a person tracks a checkbook, doing his best without the systems a company that size really needed.

On paper, it was an easy business to overlook. Eric didn’t.

“I really liked Paul. I thought he was honest, I thought he was hardworking,” Eric says. “I also just felt really taken in by the rest of the team…they just welcomed me in and I felt needed and useful.” It felt, he says, like a calling.

But somebody’s gotta do it

The rebuild that followed was not glamorous. Eric and Paul reconnected with old wholesale dealers, relaunched the company’s website, and updated price guides that hadn’t changed in four years. They also put new tools in place, among them QuickBooks and Salesforce, to replace a system that relied more on instinct and habit than shared visibility. 

For Eric, QuickBooks became something closer to an education. “For the first five years here, I was accounting,” he says. “I entered every bill, I wrote every check, I entered every order in QuickBooks. So I got a very good understanding of how this business works.” Each entry was also a customer, a dealer waiting on a shipment, a homeowner picking out a backsplash, an order that needed to go out right. “It’s always about how do we make the customer experience the single best it can be,” Eric says of how Fireclay chooses its tools, then and now. Fourteen years later, he still reviews sales numbers daily and personally approves check runs, a habit that traces straight back to those early years spent inside the ledger.

One order, one chance to get it right

If Fireclay’s back office needed rebuilding, its factory floor needed something else entirely. It needed patience with a craft that doesn’t always cooperate. The company’s kiln, purchased years ago with help from a state recycling grant, is both its most valuable piece of equipment and its biggest bottleneck. When something goes wrong there, a load of tile, sometimes representing tens of thousands of dollars, comes out ruined.

“It’s soul-sucking,” Eric says of watching a batch fail after everything that goes into making one, from mixing the clay to extruding it, drying it, glazing it, and firing it. “You put so much time and effort into something and then it just comes out the other end and it doesn’t work.”

He draws the same lesson from equipment and software alike; the purchase price is never the real cost. “What I’ve found most challenging is the long-term maintenance, the ongoing repairs, the ongoing support and education,” he says. “The same thing applies with software … you get so much more if you give it the love and attention it deserves.”

That same standard, get it right the first time, applies to every customer relationship, not just every batch of tile. Fireclay makes each order to the customer’s exact specifications, whether it’s a small backsplash for someone’s first apartment or tile for a hotel lobby. “Their vision is what we bring to life,” Eric says. “They get this product and they feel a kinship to it because they were part of the process, they understand how it was made.” It’s what the company means when it says, “our story starts with yours.” The next order, whatever it is, gets made with the same care as the first.

The will to survive

Fireclay is now 30% employee-owned and a certified B Corporation, choices Eric traces back to his own instincts. “I always felt like, well, if I wanted to own something, then probably other people want to own something too,” he says.

The company calls its culture Ganas, Spanish for desire or will. Eric felt it from his very first days at Fireclay, in a group that was family-oriented, values-driven, the kind that welcomed a newcomer in and made him feel needed. “Whatever it is, we will figure it out,” Eric says.

That culture shows up in small, repeated gestures like Eric walking the factory floor in Aromas and Spokane, greeting people by name, asking about their kids, sending a text on someone’s birthday. It also shows up in something larger—real ownership and real opportunity, built in a manufacturing community Eric describes as a world away from the tech wealth just up the road in Silicon Valley.

The next thousand questions

After 14 years, Eric says he still feels like he’s “in fourth grade trying to get to fifth.” What he wants most is straightforward to describe and hard to get. Answers. He’d like to know, in a conversation rather than a report, whether spend with a given vendor is trending up or down, which machines are costing the most in upkeep versus new investment, and who he should be renegotiating payment terms with.

“There’s about a thousand questions I could ask right now that I would just love to have insight into,” he says.

That kind of curiosity, a business owner who suspects the answers already live somewhere in his own numbers and wants a more natural way to ask for them, is exactly what Intuit Intelligence is being built to meet. It’s a way to surface answers from a business’s connected data, with the business owner still firmly in charge of what happens next.

Fireclay did $1.5 million in sales in Eric’s first full year. Last year, it did $40 million, after 11 straight years of roughly 30% annual growth, and now operates out of California and Washington. But ask Eric to describe the company, and he doesn’t lead with the numbers. He leads with the same instinct he’s carried since his first day at Fireclay: keep walking the floor, keep asking questions, keep looking for what’s next.