Doweling for Dollars : O.C. Firm Markets Its Concrete System

By JOHN O’DELL

May 28, 1997 12 AM PT

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TIMES STAFF WRITER

COSTA MESA — The office is a converted garage in a nondescript industrial building far from the bright lights of Orange County’s high-tech centers. It is not the kind of place that shouts “innovation.”

But while Speed Dowel Inc. works with plastic and steel and concrete instead of silicon wafers and microchips, it is an innovator nonetheless.

The company makes and markets a system for installing thousands of steel “slip dowels”--strong steel rods--used to tie together concrete flooring slabs poured for virtually every large warehouse and industrial building being built today.

It might sound low-tech, but it’s a sophisticated, highly engineered method of locking the individual slabs so they remain level if the ground beneath them shifts, but can still move independently as the concrete contracts and expands with temperature changes.

The system is being used by a growing number of contractors who say it’s faster, more accurate and more economical. As an added bonus, discovered at dozens of job sites, the Speed Dowel system reduces on-the-job leg injuries that plague concrete slab workers and can cost big government contractors valuable contracts if the injury rate gets too high.

After a slow start, Speed Dowel’s sales are soaring, proof that building a better mousetrap still can start the world beating a path to your door.

“We prove that . . . you can make money with a simple idea if you see a need and address it,” said Lee Shaw, who developed the dowel system with his brother, Ron.

They own Speed Dowel and a sister company in Costa Mesa, Shaw & Sons Concrete Contractors. They developed the doweling process in an effort to lower the concrete company’s labor costs, figuring they would also have a commercially viable product that they could sell to other contractors.

But it takes a lot of work to break down resistance to a new product in the conservative construction industry, says Michael Davis, Speed Dowel’s vice president for marketing.

“Most contractors don’t want to talk about the labor savings and other benefits,” he said. Sometimes, it takes months of effort to make a sale, he says. “But if they try it, nine times out of 10 they love it.”

To get companies to try it, Speed Dowel regularly gives free samples to major concrete contractors across the country. The tactic has been successful. Sales have grown from 43,000 units in 1993 to an estimated 2 million this year.

While the company has patented its products and has no competitors, it still advertises in trade journals and puts on a display at the three concrete industry trade shows held in the United States every year. At one show, Davis said, they piqued the interest of an East Coast contractor who is bidding on the runway for a new airport in Borneo. He is specifying Speed Dowel in his bid and will be the company’s biggest single customer, ordering 80,000 units, if he gets the job.

In February, Davis launched the Speed Dowel home page on the Internet (https://www.speeddowel.com). As esoteric as the subject is, the elaborate Web site is averaging 200 visitors a month.

Speed Dowel has had a leg up on a lot of start-up businesses because it has been propped up by its successful sister, Shaw & Sons, and has been able to operate without a profit in its first four years.

But Davis says the company will be profitable this year, thanks both to sales growth and to a concerted effort to keep costs down.

The company saves by contracting with an outside supplier, Aztec Concrete Accessories Co., for its manufacturing and distribution work. The Fontana-based company keeps 20 employees working full-time making and shipping Speed Dowel products.

After developing the Speed Dowel system for their own business, which specializes in ornamental commercial slabs poured for plazas, walkways and concourses, the Shaws discovered that its best application--and biggest market--was in the heavyweight slabs poured for industrial and warehouse floors.

They originally used an outside company to market the product. But when sales failed to take off they started Speed Dowel in 1995. The brothers--recognizing that their strength was in developing ways to improve the concrete slab process, not in marketing the system--turned the new company over to Davis and their nephew, Scott Shaw, who is vice president for operations. The brothers refocused on their contracting business.

Davis and Scott Shaw are Speed Dowel’s only full-time employees. They share a receptionist with Shaw & Sons and have been leasing their garage-cum-office from the contractor, although they’re planning to move to move into a small, separate office now that profits are coming in. They have lined up a network of independent sales representatives who work on commission.

There are dozens of processes involved in pouring a concrete floor, all of them requiring a lot of labor. The Shaws concentrated on doweling because it was one of the most labor-intensive and least efficient processes.

“It was 1988 and we had a ton of work,” Shaw recalls. “The labor costs were killing us, so we decided there had to be a better way.”

The dowel rods don’t replace reinforcing steel in concrete slabs. They are used to lock the slab sections together--a typical floor might be made of three or four separate slabs, poured one at a time. Before the Shaws developed their system, installing dowels involved massive amounts of manual labor and a degree of precision that many concrete contractors--including the Shaws--say was difficult to attain.

If not aligned with precision, the 18- or 24-inch dowels won’t permit the slab sections to slip back and forth, and that results in cracking. As a result, Shaw said, contractors routinely returned to fix cracks and grind down high spots after the floor cured.

Speed Dowel’s system uses reinforced plastic sleeves that are easy to install and provide aligned receptacles for inserting dowels in the slabs. Although the sleeves are a new cost item to contractors, the system eliminates a lot of labor and expensive repair work. It also permits contractors to wait until the last minute to install the dowels--eliminating the long rows of spear-like dowel ends that protrude into work spaces and can slash workers’ feet and ankles.

That’s one reason construction and engineering services giant Fluor Corp. recommends Speed Dowel to clients. “It is a better, safer and less expensive way” to do the job, said Robert Bachman, head of engineering at the Irvine office of Fluor Daniel, Fluor’s construction arm.

One widely used method of computing job costs in the concrete industry puts the cost of doweling--including labor, materials and contractor profit--at $8.70 per dowel. Speed Dowel’s system, Scott Shaw says, cuts that by an average of 5%--to $8.29 a dowel.

It took two years and more than $200,000 to come up with a design that worked and could be produced inexpensively. “Our first prototype was too thin,” Shaw said. “It collapsed and folded over under the weight of the wet concrete.”

The final design, which looks like a bright red emergency flare, has an intricate pattern of external ridges to stiffen the plastic tube.

“This year, for the first time, we have contractors calling us to place orders,” Davis said. “It’s starting to happen.”

(BEGIN TEXT OF INFOBOX / INFOGRAPHIC)

Concrete Coming Together

Anyone with a concrete slab patio knows how much it can move. A new system developed by a Costa Mesa company has made the job of tying together adjoining slabs in heavy-duty installations like factory floors much easier. It also makes the slabs move together rather than independently, helping eliminate cracks and uneven surfaces. How it works:

1. Plastic dowel base nailed to form and tube attached to base

2. Concrete poured, hardens

3. Wooden form stripped off hardened concrete

4. Steel dowel slipped into tube and adjoining slab poured

****

Advantages

* No drilling into wooden forms or concrete

* Fast installation

* Less bending required; easier on workers’ backs

* Eliminates protruding steel dowels that cause injuries

* Base remains attached to wooden forms and is reusable

* Holds steel dowels in alignment