off their MobileFab truck.
MobileFab
Owner: Paul Dubuc, president and CEO
Location: 339 Market St., Warren
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Type of Business: Kitchen and bathroom countertop fabrication and installation
Employees: 16
Annual Sales: Sold five MobileFab custom trucks in 2003 for $250,000
each; each truck generated $800,000 to $900,000 in retail and wholesale.
With 18 years of kitchen and bathroom countertop fabrication experience under
his tool belt, Paul Dubuc knows what his customers want, and has developed a
unique way to give it to them. Enter the MobileFab System, his own creation.
As president and CEO of MobileFab, as well as his fabricating company RISSCO,
Dubuc invented a system designed to make countertop installation more convenient
for both the customer and the fabricator. The MobileFab System is a self-contained
vehicle and installation system – the countertop is made in a truck, which travels
to the customer, turning a weeks-long process into one that takes just hours.
“I got tired of telling the homeowner that there was a problem and that I’d
have to go back to the shop, and I got tired of going back and forth and playing
catch-up,” Dubuc said. “This takes a lot of the risk out of the process.”
Seven years ago, Dubuc decided to try his idea, and began with a truck and
some equipment, a piecemeal operation, but a prototype nonetheless. Since then,
he’s been adjusting and tweaking the system and this year announced the MobileFab
System as a marketable product for other fabricators.
In fact, he’s sold five trucks to other companies in New Hampshire, Long Island
and Chicago. He has two of his own with his RISSCO logo on the back to service
his customers in Rhode Island and Massachusetts.
“I’ve been developing it for a while,” he said. “At first I didn’t think it
had a market value, but the homeowners enjoyed it. This way, we can do it all
in the truck – otherwise we do it outside, or if it’s raining do it in the garage
and make a mess, and hope that the homeowner doesn’t mind.”
All of the mess, noise and work involved in building a countertop is done
inside the 26-foot truck, which MobileFab makes with a complete workshop, including
saws, a task heating, ventilation, full hand tool, vacuum and electrical systems.
A two-person crew can fabricate the average countertop in four to eight hours
and in one or two pieces, instead of taking weeks to measure, make templates,
travel to and from the site and finally bring in multiple pieces of the finished
counter, assemble and install them.
“We did a 50th wedding anniversary (gift), and we watched the guy drive down
the street with his wife, and then we drove around the corner to the house”
to start working, Dubuc said.
The team installed new counters in a few hours, and even placed some flowers
on their finished product, as requested by the customer, who was surprising
his wife with the countertops.
“I felt like the stealth countertop man,” Dubuc said.
After arrival on-site, the team will take a piece of the countertop material
(acrylic or polyester and brand names like Corian, HI-MACS and Staron) and use
it as a template for the new countertop, which results in an exact measurement,
Dubuc said.
“You get an absolutely pre-fit piece of material here,” he said. “We start
at 7 and by 11 or 12 we’re out of here.”
With those measurements, the team begins working in the truck, and if adjustments
need to be made, or a fabricator forgets the dimensions, all it takes is a quick
walk down the ramp off the truck and into the person’s home – no back and forth
to the shop necessary. Convenience for the customer is the result, and the quick
fabrication time allows the crew to pick up more work and for Dubuc to expand
his customer base.
“Your countertop is probably fine, unless you can (replace) it today,” he
said. “It’s truly convenience.”
The price of having countertops made to order in your driveway is competitive
with other old-fashioned fabricators, Dubuc said. Countertop surfaces he uses
range in price from $45 to $150 per square foot, but the average is $60 to $70.
To have the average-sized countertop replaced by MobileFab, you’d spend about
$3,200, he said.
“You’re paying that money any way you go – this way you get it done right
away,” Dubuc said.
And he has 5,000 kitchens and baths with new countertops to prove his system’s
success, as well as a growing staff, which he trains. Dubuc also trains other
companies how to use the MobileFab System after they purchase his trucks.
“If you’ve ever fabricated the old way, it’s almost a no-brainer,” he said.
“This makes the business and the estimating so much easier. We make more counters
than anyone in the country.”
Bristol homeowners Bill and Leonora Delmage agree with the quality service
– they recently had Dubuc replace their kitchen countertops with Staron, one
of the acrylic brands Dubuc uses, which looks like stone or granite. Bill Delmage
actually heard of MobileFab through his son.
“We wanted to get something that looked like granite, but without the mess,”
he said. If the surface ever gets scratched, it is repairable, unlike granite
or other stone surfaces. As workers brought the finished countertop into the
house, Delmage said, “It looks like we’re going to be very happy.”
