Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Speaker A: Foreign.
Welcome to Monument Matters, a podcast produced by the Monument Builders of North America for all things memorialization.
Each episode is an extension of our monthly magazine, MB News. Monument Matters invites everyone to listen and share. You'll find all of the episodes on Apple, Spotify and YouTube.
[00:00:25] Speaker B: I'm your host, Mike John C M A I C A from the Johns Carabelli Company Cimorano Monuments and Flowers in Cleveland, Ohio. I'm also a past president of the Monument Builders of North America.
Today's episode is titled Tradition Doesn't Mean Standing till Standing still and today's guests are Jill Campa and Dylan Gertkin. Jill Campa is president of Sunburst Memorials in St. Cloud, Minnesota where she has helped guide the company through one of the most significant transitions in its 108 year history, the move into a new state of the art headquarters and production facility.
Dylan Gertkin is Director of Operations for Sunburst Memorials where he plays a key role in modernizing production, improving workflow and supporting long term growth. Dylan and Jill, welcome to Monument Matters.
[00:01:20] Speaker A: Thank you Mike for having us.
[00:01:22] Speaker C: Thanks Mike.
[00:01:23] Speaker B: Happy to do so. Very interested in what you have to say and share with our listeners. So the July MB News article gives a great overview of Sunburst Memorial's move into a new headquarters and production facility.
But for listeners who are just hearing about it now, can you quickly summarize what this project involved and why it
[00:01:42] Speaker A: matters can start off so this project involves moving, as you said, Micah, 108-year-old facility that was in the same location for that amount of time.
[00:01:54] Speaker B: Wow.
[00:01:55] Speaker A: Our home office. So all of the office and our manufacturing facilities, both fabrication and sandblast, existed in that site for 108 years.
So this was a very large undertaking.
Project was about 18 months in the making from the time we purchased the building to the time we moved in in December of 2025.
So and we went from 16,000 square feet, production and office combined to a little over 40,000 square feet and we have 14 acres for future expansion as well.
[00:02:38] Speaker B: Wow, that's. That's impressive.
Dylan, anything you want to add there?
[00:02:44] Speaker C: I think Jill covered it well. Really it was, it was a big deal for us just to be in the industry as long as we were and just a good opportunity to adapt and take the next step into the future.
[00:02:55] Speaker B: Sure. Now did the 18 months, was there planning ahead of that 18 months or was was that it? I mean is that pretty accurate timeline?
[00:03:06] Speaker A: The, the, the team even prior to me coming had been looking at property and locations for about three years Right, Dylan? About three years or so.
[00:03:18] Speaker C: Yep, about three years.
[00:03:21] Speaker A: And really looking for the right size of space for an existing building. You know, we deal with heavy, heavy products. It's not light, so crane ways and, and ceiling heights and things like that were very important as we were looking at facility facilities and also the amount of space and land and proximity for our loads. We receive, you know, import and domestic freight multiple times a week. So we had to be accessible for logistics as well.
[00:03:53] Speaker B: So how big is Sunburst Memorials? How many employees are there and in how many locations?
[00:04:00] Speaker A: Dylan, I'll let you. I'll let you take this one and I'll jump in after.
[00:04:04] Speaker C: Yeah, Sunburst, we. We just hit our 100, 100th employee. So we have a hundred employees at Sunburst all across the Midwest where we have stores, retail stores that, that we own and operate and employ the team members at them all across the Midwest. So we're in Minnesota, South Dakota, Iowa, Nebraska, little bit in Wyoming, Wisconsin and Michigan. Yeah, so those are. That's predominantly where we operate. I lose track, but I think we're 20. How many stores now? 24 stores now. Okay. Yeah, so 24 stores that, that operate under the Sunburst name, as well as selling through a dealer network.
Funeral homes and cemeteries and that.
[00:04:48] Speaker A: So yeah, we have about 200 wholesale dealers who, like Dylan said, are mostly funeral homes, cemeteries, and then we have some independent reps, like our kitchen table type of reps, or some of them have storefronts of their own as well.
[00:05:03] Speaker B: All right, well, that puts, puts you in a little bit of perspective for, for our audience, for sure.
So what were the first signs that your old facility was limiting growth?
[00:05:14] Speaker A: I would say so. Our, our previous facility had the capacity of about 7,500 stones per year. And we were getting up around that 7,000 mark. And we knew with our, our long term plan, we have a. We obviously have one year, three year and 10 year plans where we wanted to go. We really needed to look for an additional, additional space. Cause we were landlocked. We had made the most of that building for an amount of time. Additionally, I'll let Dylan speak to just the efficiency and the operational opportunities that were kind of hindering us from a productivity and capacity.
[00:05:55] Speaker C: Can you guys hear me as well?
[00:05:57] Speaker A: But really square footage and growth and also I will say supporting our culture. Culture is very important to us at Sunburst. And we were not able to all be under one roof. People were having to work remotely or share desks or hybrid or things like that. And our culture really is. Thrives when people are in the office together, working together and celebrating together.
So we, we were looking forward to a space that did that as well. To help support that, we had to store all of our stone outside.
So we had, we had stone everywhere inside the plant that we could. But storing stone outside in Minnesota means you have to shovel it out. You have to. Dylan's trying to call in here.
You have to shovel, you have to shovel the stone off. You have to let it thaw and warm up before you can even apply the stencil for it to go through sandblast. So it was really inhibiting what we could do from a production and capability standpoint. So.
[00:07:04] Speaker B: Right. I mean, it's problematic enough in the winter in Cleveland.
[00:07:10] Speaker A: Right.
[00:07:10] Speaker B: Only imagine Minnesota when winter is like 11 months long. Right.
All right, well, hopefully we're going to get Dylan back, but in the meantime, I hope that Joe, you're ready and able to answer the next question, which is to get a little bit of an explanation in terms of what lean manufacturing is and what it looks like in a monument shop.
[00:07:38] Speaker C: Sure.
[00:07:38] Speaker A: Dylan definitely is our subject matter expert on lean manufacturing, but lean manufacturing actually came from Toyota back in, I don't know if it was the 40s, 50s, I want to say in terms of how they went to market in their plants and facilities and looking for waste throughout in order to help productivity, help the quality of product, provide value to the customer.
And so when we had the opportunity to build our building, we really took that as the special cause to say, how should production be running? Are we doing it the best we can do it? And we had gone through with Lean. There are eight different ways. I won't name the eight ways in Lean. Everything from, you know, time downtime to duplication of work, repetitive work, things like that. But through that process we had what are called Kaizen events, which are a week long event in which we look at a specific cell in manufacturing, whether that's, let's say, stencil application at the beginning of the line or even in, in painting and litho. We will, we will take separate sections and we will do a Kaizen event which is a deep dive into that process to identify what the steps should be and what the waste opportunities are. And Dylan is back just in time to cover me.
[00:09:15] Speaker B: Jill's bacon.
[00:09:16] Speaker C: Okay, I'll, I'll try, yeah, doing a
[00:09:20] Speaker A: semi decent job of Lean. But the Lean expert is now back on the phone and I was just explaining the. It came from Toyota. There are eight different ways we, there are Kaizen events and we've done a number of them, but. Take it away, Dylan.
[00:09:35] Speaker C: Yeah, so I kind of really high level the way I explain Lean to people who are maybe have never heard of it. The purpose of it is maximizing the value to the customer by eliminating waste.
So right. What are the. What are customers willing to pay for and what are they not. And the things that they're not willing to pay for are the waste they're not willing to pay for you to, you know, the salary that you play employees to drive around searching for inventory. Customers don't want to pay for that. And all, you know, that gives you an idea. And so the pillars of Lean that support that whole premise is the respect for people and continuous improvement. So continuous improvement, constantly challenging the status quo, finding ways to make things better at all times and never really settling for the process as it is. And then the respect for people is really self explanatory but really empowering team members to be a part of that improvement. Working with our frontline team members and really leaning on them, no pun intended, to be a part of the process change and provide insight because they're the subject matter experts. So and really the first step for us because we, you know, we haven't done this forever. It was relatively new to us a few years ago is just starts with educating people, explaining what I just went over on a much deeper level and getting people trained up on what is Lean. Why does it matter?
Why does it matter to you as an employee, as an employee owner and what does it do for our families or customers? And so you know, how does that look for us and how do we utilize that?
We, we do a lot, a couple different things. There's, there's all kinds of tools within Lean.
A couple of them are Kaizen events value stream mapping 5s different ideologies within Kaizen that helped you sort of put that whole concept into action.
Monument shops are kind of a hard place to do lean or imagine doing lean because it, it's. We're not mass production, right? We're. Everybody in this industry knows we're not making tens of thousands of brake pads, you know, that are all the same. Every job is unique.
And so we're more like a job shop, right? High mix, low volume. And so when we start to incorporate Lean into a monument shop, we start talking more about instead of how do we keep that machine from running to how do we keep that order moving like it's, it's less about just maxing out your runtime and making sure your automatics or your hire ins or whatever it is runs non stop. What matters is that the orders don't stop and we keep them moving. Reducing wip, the work in process, standardizing processes, building in quality from the start, you know, not catching those errors at the end, taking the time up front to make things right the first time. So sort of a long winded answer because lean is pretty, a pretty deep thing, but that's really how it gets folded into our business and our industry.
[00:12:48] Speaker B: Okay, so you mentioned redundancy. How do you determine whether the redundancy is an important safeguard to reduce error, for example, as opposed to just something, an obstacle.
[00:13:06] Speaker C: So are you talking about redundancy from a machinery standpoint?
[00:13:09] Speaker B: Well, I mean, you know, maybe in process now.
Record here, record there, double check that. You know, I, I don't know. There's, I feel like there's a lot of places, at least in our business where we may do something in three or four different places to make sure that if one area, there's a breakdown here, it's caught there.
[00:13:32] Speaker C: Yeah, no, yeah. So yeah. And I kind of refer to that as built in quality. And so every step of the process, team members are asked to look for certain things.
We have everybody initial off on our work order that's going to touch the work order and it may be in a traditional smaller scale monument shop, which most of our acquisitions come from. It's dad or a son or you know, somebody who's, who's working on an order from start to finish.
Well, when we try to scale up, instead of doing a couple hundred orders a year, do 7,000, 8,000, 10,000 orders a year, we have to start adding more people into that production process.
And some of them never thought about monuments before the day they worked here. Right. So you don't have that same visibility or control.
And so yes, redundancy. And everybody's checking for the same things or sometimes different things, but they're checking at every step of the process.
Just that way, as everybody knows, by the time it's carved, it's too late.
[00:14:38] Speaker B: Right.
[00:14:39] Speaker C: And that's where the money is lost.
[00:14:41] Speaker B: Sure.
All right, so that brings us to what I'm curious to find out about what led up to Sunburst becoming employee owned. How did that end?
[00:14:52] Speaker A: Sure. So Sunburst is actually also known as Monumental Sales or MSI in the industry. That's kind of our, we DBA and our consumer facing brand is Sunburst. But Monumental Sales is underneath Skippy Companies, which is our parent Company and think of that as the holding company, but it's not a holding company or private equity. It's owned by 300 individual employee owners. And Sunburst, or Skippy became employee owned in 1975. It was the second employee owned company within the state of Minnesota. And so we've been in ESOP since 1975. We be. We became 100% employee owned in 2000. So it's only been about 12 years that we've had full, full ownership by the, by the team members. Before that, there were some families and some majority share people who then back in 2014, sold all of their shares and made it 100% employee owned. And so that's, that's the history of kind of how we became an esop. And Sunburst before coming into the Skippy families was family owned up into the 90s, up until the 90s by the Schneider family, who then sold to the Skippy companies and folded into that family.
[00:16:24] Speaker B: Okay, so we know how long Sunburst has been employee owned, but how did the employee ownership change the planning process?
[00:16:34] Speaker A: And Dylan, you can please chime in too. But I think it makes our culture and our process very unique. And I'll even speak to the project of the building. Employee owners were involved probably more than what a typical building project would be in a small group of managers or project team working with a general contractor. Our employees were involved in critical points throughout, everything from machine selection, actually, to this building selection, to the site location, to the furniture we picked, to the layout and the plant Dylan and his team were working on, and the production team were working on laying out that plant months in advance to make sure that the team members had a voice at the table and that we were balancing cost. Being cost effective and cost conscious was providing the best product and providing the best experience to our team members internally when they came to work every day, that this is a place they want to come to and be at each day. And a culture fostered by employee ownership is very unique and, and very special. And we try to definitely protect that by making sure employee owners have a voice and a seat at the table whenever possible.
[00:17:57] Speaker B: Right.
It takes an awful lot of paper to put all those names on a product. Right. You know, say my name's on the building. Right.
I'm signing every job that goes out the door. It's a whole lot different when there's so many people signing the work. Right.
Very interesting.
So what feedback from employees has had the biggest impact on the final facility?
[00:18:23] Speaker C: Sure.
Yeah. All along the whole process. As Jill mentioned, we tried to engage the team as much as possible through. And Lean was a good way to engage them because the premise of it is involving your team along the way. But there's just so many little things that you don't think about when, when you're designing a new facility that if you make those decisions in a vacuum and you don't bring them along, you'll end up creating something that everybody hates. And so just little, I mean, seemingly little things, but they're actually really big things for team members, like the workstation setup. Like what, what do you want your workbench to look like? And what are the ergonomics of your workstation? Do you have a lift table? There's. Is there a workbench there? You know what, what do you use to house your tools? Where, where should we have hoists? What should the conveyor height be?
Should we add a powered conveyor here? Just all types of things that the, the small details that make a big difference for an individual who's going to spend 8, 10 hours a day in that, in that area. And it's really easy for someone in management or a business owner just to do it the way they want versus maybe a frontline team member.
So we, we use them to reimagine the entire flow down to where we place machines and pallet racking, even.
[00:19:47] Speaker B: So. Okay, interesting. I think it gives you an opportunity, you know, as you said, one or two minds. Okay.
But all this input, I'm sure it was a challenge at sometimes to sift through, but at the end of the day, you know, you have the opportunity for somebody or many people to be thinking outside that traditional box. Right?
[00:20:13] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:20:13] Speaker C: And you can't. Right. You can't do it by consensus right there. You get so many opinions in a room, and half the guys want it this way and half the folks want it that way, but at least you asked them, you know, and, and whether or not it was something that we were able to, to make happen for them, at least they felt like they were a part of the process.
[00:20:33] Speaker A: And that process also when you have different opinions at the table, helps give perspective on. Like, this may be a value add to production, but how is it affecting design or how does it affect customer service? So they get different perspectives when multiple people come to the table with opinions. And they also understand sometimes a little bit better the position some maybe like Dylan or myself, are in, in trying to facilitate. Like, what should we do? Because we've got, we've got this opportunity from this Group. We've got this idea from this group. How do we bring this together in a harmonious, you know, cost conscious, culture centric type of way. So we have to consider all of those things. And sometimes they get a little sneak peek under the table of what those discussions look like.
[00:21:22] Speaker B: Sure.
When it reminds me of when I was first becoming production manager for our, our small company. And I would ask my dad's opinion, you know, how would you do this? Or how would you do that? And he would tell me and sometimes I would listen and sometimes I would do something different. And he would say to me, well, Mike, why did you ask me if you're not going to do what I told you? And I said, well, Dad, I just, I need some feedback so I can, you know, manage what I'm thinking based on your experience as well, you know, so maybe it's a blend of what I'm thinking and what you're thinking, or maybe I'm just going to defer to you. But it's not always just going to be blindly, this is the way you should do it. Okay, thank you. So that was a little bit of a challenge for him to understand for a while. But I think it really run out the best in some of the processes that we do because, you know, we had the opportunity to compare notes, let's say.
[00:22:23] Speaker C: Absolutely.
[00:22:26] Speaker B: So how does your new facility tell a different story about monument work?
[00:22:31] Speaker C: Yeah, it's quite a bit different if you've been in our old facility or been into some of the old sheds out in like Elberton or Barry, Vermont.
That's kind of what our old facility looked like. It was built in 1917.
We had cranes inside the building that predated World War II. The same timbers that were set in 1917 were still holding the roof.
And it was, we'll call it, charming.
It had that. But it fit the mold of what people think when they think of the monument industry or the granite industry, that it's antiquated and outdated and light shut off on me. But move around. That's the one drawback of ox sensors in a new building.
But really the new facility, it changes that whole perspective. We have a clean, organized, climate controlled facility that's full of CNC technology. And so when you get folks coming out of college or really anybody coming through for an interview or a tour, it looks like someplace they might want to work or someplace that they could see themselves being, as opposed to a dark and dingy dusty old granite plant, which I think is the kind of the perception and so it's fun to put that on its head and turn this into something that's new and interesting.
[00:24:03] Speaker B: Yeah. Did you have a dirt floor before?
[00:24:05] Speaker C: At one point we had, but, I mean, you could see that we poured concrete probably 20 times over the years. It was. You kind of got to watch where you step because it was pretty unlevel.
[00:24:17] Speaker B: Sure.
So looking back, what lessons did you learn through the process and what would be useful for other monument shops, whether they're planning a major expansion, rethinking their production flow, or simply trying to make their current space work better? Better.
[00:24:32] Speaker A: Say, one of the things that we learned that I. I've already touched on a bit is include. Include the team members that you can, you know, even if you can't include everyone, create small groups of committees and people, whether it be for the production staff or the office, and put. It's okay to put things in front of them and have them have a say, because then they will have ownership.
You would be surprised on the ownership and the training and the sense of pride that they take that then they will pass on and be the ambassadors for the rest of the employees in the organization.
So. So don't be afraid to have more voices at the table even in the very early. In the very early onset of your project.
Um, the other thing that I think we learned and we. We said to ourselves, 18 months probably wasn't enough. From the time we signed the purchase agreement, we're like, we wish we would have known about this a year in advance and been planning, planning our production layout and planning, you know, what type of machine and capital investments we were going to be making even before that.
So it's.
I would say even if you're not ready right now, it's never too early to start dreaming and looking at what the possibilities could be for when that day comes. Because that day kind of snuck up on us and we were.
We did it. And we. We feel like we did it well, but we probably would have changed some things.
And, oh, the last thing is don't beat yourself up. One thing we learned through Lean, too, is you will get it wrong about 20% of the time. And there's things. When we walk around the building, we love this building and we're very proud of it. However, we're like, ooh, we got that wrong. And, and, and just be prepared for that. Perfection is not achievable, so don't hold yourself to that standard.
[00:26:42] Speaker B: Yes, Aspire is one thing, but you may not get there. Sure.
[00:26:47] Speaker A: Right.
[00:26:47] Speaker B: And I think that you Know, maybe for folks that are, you know, kind of stuck in the my way or the highway kind of thinking. Right. And not wanting to let go of the control, maybe it's. To me, there may be a little bit of a difference, and you can tell me if you agree or disagree.
There's a difference between giving employees a voice in what's done as opposed to a say in what's done. Right. And by that, I mean, you know, I want to hear your thoughts, I want to hear your opinions. But again, that doesn't necessarily mean we're going to do exactly what you recommend or suggest. Right.
[00:27:32] Speaker A: That's a very good way to differentiate that. Mike, on having a voice versus having a say, which is sometimes something we have to explain internally when we have projects or even as an employee owner. Like, as an employee owner, you can definitely voice your concerns positive, positively, and negatively. However, you might not always have a say in specific things. So that's a very good distinction.
[00:27:58] Speaker B: Okay, thanks. I appreciate that.
Jill, is there anything else that you want to share, you want to say in closing to our audience?
[00:28:08] Speaker C: You know, one thing I'll say from a manufacturing or production standpoint is if you're reevaluating how you do things and you're toying with the idea of expanding or redesigning or any of that, don't just assume that new equipment or more equipment is the answer.
Typically, lasting improvements start with the process, and people are what solves processes.
So hadn't we drew this facility many times, and every layout, there was less conveyor, there was fewer machines, and we figured out through some studying and Kaizen events that we didn't maybe need as many machines. We just had to solve the process problems first. So don't get the cart ahead of the horse and go spend $180,000 on a new automatic blaster. Maybe solve the problems that you can solve with just your mines first.
[00:29:09] Speaker B: Right. Okay, Jill, any closing thoughts?
[00:29:15] Speaker A: I would say just kind of going back to having. Having a plan and a vision. And it may not. It may not involve a new facility or, to Dylan's point, a new piece of equipment.
But I think our industry is. Is hungry to continue to. To innovate and rethink what.
What an end monument to a family looks like, what the process looks like, even what the customer experience looks like. And so I would just, in the spirit of continuous improvement, continue to dream and challenge the status quo to bring innovation to our industry.
[00:29:59] Speaker B: Okay.
All right. Well, with that, I'd like to thank our guests from today, Jill Campa and Dylan Gertkin from Sunburst Memorials. The July issue of NB News is the issue, which features an article about their new facility.
The July issue also has information about the 2027 Monument Industry show in Mobile, Alabama, including details of exhibiting. Exhibitor registration is open.
I encourage you to read this issue, and if you have a topic you'd like to have covered in a future podcast, please leave a comment on the site here. So thank you for listening to today's installment of Monument Matters. Again, MBNA invites you to stay connected through Facebook and LinkedIn, or visit us at www.monimalbuilders.
for upcoming events and webinars for MBNA and Monument Matters. I'm Michael Johns. Thank you for taking time out of your day to listen in. If you found today's content worthwhile, please share the link with a friend for comments and feedback. We'd love to hear from you, so please drop a note to infoonumentbuilders.org that's all for now. Thanks and have a great day.
[00:31:07] Speaker C: Thanks Mike.
[00:31:07] Speaker A: Thank you.
[00:31:13] Speaker B: It.
