Lee Valenzuela doesn’t mess around.
This holds true even when it comes to sports. He loves the Los Angeles Dodgers — so much so that, several times a year, he and his wife Tina drive 4 hours to L.A. to see them play.
For the most part, it’s about family: His love of the team springs largely from childhood memories of riding down to visit relatives in L.A.’s San Fernando Valley and going to Dodger Stadium.
His career also started with family, when he began working for his uncle’s plaster company in high school. He knew from the start that he wanted to move up. And he did, by joining with two coworkers to start New Image Pool Interiors in Clovis, Calif. In 12 years, it has become possibly the largest plastering firm in the state’s Central Valley.
And, as of February, Valenzuela takes the reins as chairman of the National Plasterers Council, just a few years after joining the board.
His ambition and vision helped propel a company that started out just before the Great Recession, when much more established firms were falling to the wayside.
Beginnings
When Lee Valenzuela began working for his uncle in high school, he set his sights high pretty quickly.
Mind you, he started in the trenches, both literal and figurative. At the time, he spent summers as a laborer for Oliver’s Concrete, a plastering company in Fresno, Calif.
“I was the grunt guy,” Valenzuela says. “I was just learning how to trowel, but I would be the one to kick out of the pool early and clean up all the tools.”
Before long, he found himself drawn to the idea of sales and management. “I knew [plastering] was something I wanted to do for a long time, but management was really where I wanted to be,” he says. “The money was better, and there’s the longevity of keeping my body from falling apart.”
After graduating from high school, he began working for one of the largest players in California at the time — Valley Pool Plastering, a firm in the Fresno area that has since closed. He started by prepping pools, then plastered for a while, then moved to repairs. But before long, he served as construction manager. “I kind of moved my way up and got out of the pool pretty quickly,” he says.
But sales and management really called out to the extrovert. “I just knew I could do it,” he says. “I knew that I was really good at talking with people, and it was just a way to get out of what we call the hole.”
So after more than 15 years, he left Valley to join the still-renowned company Adams Tile and Plaster (now Adams Pool Solutions), in the San Francisco Bay area.
The company had instituted something considered a little revolutionary for plaster companies at the time — a dedicated sales staff that followed a fleshed-out presentation regimen. They opened Valenzuela’s eyes to how sales could be done.
“In the 1980s when we first started, sales was all about writing a number on the back of a business card,” he says. “Contracts were not even a thing. It was ‘Here’s my business card, here’s a number, this is what we’ll plaster for.’
“At Adams, it was a sales presentation, where you would bring a lot of information to the customer and really educate them on why they should choose us. So the 15-minute sales call and the back of a business card turned into an hour sales presentation.”
The icing on the cake: His new coworkers were very generous with their expertise. “A lot of the guys there took me under their wing and really taught me the fine art of sales in the swimming pool industry,” Valenzuela says.
But his heart was still with his family and friends back in Fresno. After a couple years with Adams, he convinced Valley Pool Plastering to create a sales position for him. He even took a pay cut until he proved himself. He applied his new skills especially to remodeling. This, combined with a booming economy and surge of 20-something-year-old pools that needed updating, helped escalate the company from approximately 200 renovations per year to more than 1,000.
Eventually Valenzuela was given a sales staff, whom he organized and trained. At the end of his run with Valley, he served as its general manager.
Man with a Plan
By 2005, Valenzuela was feeling antsy again. He wanted to start his own company. He approached two coworkers — brothers Raul and Juan Serrato — and proposed they partner in a new venture.
At the time, Raul served as a plaster foreman, while Juan was a service and repair manager. “They were the two best and hardest workers at Valley,” Valenzuela says.
Valenzuela had a fairly specific vision of how the company would look. And he had faith it would succeed. But it can take time to transfer one’s vision from his own head into others’ and gain buy-in. “I said, ‘Look, we can do this. If we partner up and we all know what our roles are, we could do this really well.’”
Ultimately the Serratos came on board and agreed on the importance of establishing clearly delineated roles.
Others outside the trio didn’t seem as convinced. “A lot of partnerships don’t work out,” Valenzuela explains. “There’s always feuding, always something when you have a larger partnership. So maybe people thought there would be disagreements on how things should be run. We settled that at the beginning. We had huge conversations about what each of our roles would be, and we have not strayed from that. That’s really been our success.”
To this day, Juan Serrato serves as corporate secretary and runs the labor force, including the prep, tile crews and acid wash crews; Raul is treasurer and manages the four plaster crews; Valenzuela oversees the firm and managed sales until he passed that baton to his son, also named Lee.
Secret Sauce
In Valenzuela’s plan, the trio would play a long game. They weren’t in it for immediate gratification.
“At first, we didn’t want the whole pie,” he says. “We just wanted a piece.”
But eventually, he figured, market share would grow until New Image took over the town.
Keep in mind, the economy started going south less than a year after the company launched. But in Valenzuela’s vision, another rule would figure prominently. This secret sauce would carry them through the rough times: Within the construction industry, which was not exactly known for its refinement, New Image would not only make very polished sales presentations, but also offer concierge-level customer service supported by thoroughly drawn-out procedures.
“It is just constant communication with the customer — never leaving them wondering when we’re going to show up next, what is the next step,” he says. “We always stayed ahead of the customer.”
As part of this aim, New Image reaches out to each client at least once a day, to review the progress on their pools so far and tell them what to expect for the next day. During the call, customers also receive instructions on how to prepare for the next phase. This work is mostly performed by Valenzuela and the company’s scheduler. It’s no small task, given that the company services at least 30 customers at a time.
Another weapon in the team’s arsenal: Valenzuela’s mother, Karen. A retired certified public accountant who worked for one of the largest land developers in the area, she has served as New Image’s chief financial officer since the company’s inception, exercising her business acumen and maintaining financial discipline.
Positive Outcomes
This combination has served the company well. The company started out with a single truck and five employees in addition to the partners.
But growth came fast. Valenzuela leveraged his strong relationships with the industry, especially the pool-service sector, to gain plenty of references and word-of-mouth cred. So the replasters came in quickly.
On Day Two of the company’s existence, it was prepping a kiddie pool at a clubhouse in Pebble Beach, the California community that boasts one of the world’s top golf clubs. Another high-visibility project: the rhinoceros pool at the Fresno Chaffee Zoo.
In its first year, New Image cleared $1 million in sales, which doubled the following year. From 2008-2010 — the pit of the recession — it averaged $3 million a year. Now the company does about $10 million.
The firm now has more than 65 staffers who enjoy full medical benefits. Last year, it plastered 1,200 pools, about evenly split between new construction and renovations. It has replaced the used equipment it originally purchased with brand new. And, as of five years ago, it owns the land and facility that serves as its headquarters.
With New Image’s approach to customer service, it considers renovation its specialty, as it involves dealing with homeowners one-on-one. Here, the company will perform replasters, retiles, replacement of lights and equipment. It does not handle jobs that involve structural work. “It would cross a line with our builder [clients] if we started building,” Valenzuela says. “We’re not trying to become rich,” he adds. “We just want to live a nice life and take care of our employees.”
Looking forward
It appears that New Image is beginning to gear up for the next generation.
Several of the Serratos’ nephews, sons-in-law and cousins work for the company, and Karen Valenzuela is currently training a backup who may one day take over as CFO.
Additionally, Valenzuela’s son joined the company after four years in the Navy. Valenzuela first put his son on a tile crew. When the elder Lee had too many proposals to manage, he called in his son for help.
“I handed him a measuring wheel and said, ‘I need you to go measure this job and estimate it for me,’” Valenzuela says. “It was a commercial pool, an apartment complex. I kept giving him more, because he was bringing in signed contracts.”It appears the younger Lee Valenzuela has inherited some of his father’s natural abilities. So he now serves as sales manager.
“I let it all go to him, because he was just so good at it,” Valenzuela says. “He had that gift of talking. I hear from so many people who call me and say, ‘The only reason we went with your company was because of your son.’ He’s very patient, explains the process very thoroughly to customers, and so many customers just respect him.”
The future appears bright.
