Joe Jeup's High Designs

Joe Jeup is, at heart, a designer.

Even when he became a business owner in 1997, he continued to think of himself as a designer who owns a business – and that may explain why Jeup Furniture is today expanding its capacity and preparing to join in the opening of showrooms in Paris, Riyadh and Moscow, where its unique furniture designs will be on display.

While serving in the mid-1990s as a top designer for Designers Workshop – a sister company of the now-defunct John Widdicomb Co. – Jeup was given the opportunity to buy the company. Although he had never run a business before, Jeup trusted his instincts, both in terms of furniture design and in terms of how to deal with people, and made the deal to acquire what was then a $1 million, 20-employee operation.

“I had very little business experience,” Jeup remembers. “But I had a whole heck of a lot of common sense.”

And while the application of his common-sense business principles kept the company’s revenue stable and its profit solid, Jeup recalls that some of the employees adjusted better than others to the change the saw him go from friend to boss. Some loved the change and embraced it. Others moved on. And Jeup found he could produce the same $1 million in annual revenue with 10 employees that he had produced with 20.

So the common-sense business instincts were off to a good start. But just as importantly, Jeup applies them to his design philosophy, which he categorizes loosely as a “classic timeless kind of urban chic,” with a commitment to setting trends instead of trying to follow them. The majority of his products are destined for the couture market, many of them one-of-a-kind. Its offerings are not currently found in any West Michigan showrooms.

“We get a lot of people who copy our product,” Jeup says. “We’re trying to define styles that will be the next hot style, so if there are trends, we like to think we create those trends. And it’s not only about form. It’s also about color and finishes. So when you see the shifting from dark colors to mid-range brown and gray colors, we’re pushing this.”

Setting trends, of course, requires the trend-setter to have a lot of confidence in his or her own design instincts. Jeup says he and his team are committed to understanding current trends and figuring out where design thinking should logically go next – and to having confidence in their instincts on that score.

“We watch what everyone else is doing and watch where things are headed,” Jeup says. “To me, design is all-encompassing. It’s not just about products. It’s about fashion. It’s about how people are thinking. You watch all the design trends and you pull them together. It’s also about confidence. If people had more confidence in themselves, they could push things forward, too.”

Jeup makes a key distinction between custom design for the architecture and design market, which basically involves taking an order and fulfilling it, and serving the market with original ideas.

“I like the concept of the A&D market, but I want to be able to dictate what we design,” Jeup says “We were basically a manufacturer. Today we are a design company, and I designed it to be a design company first and a manufacturer second. I look at creating our own product and shipping it all across the nation. It gives us an opportunity to weather storms, and we became less of a local company and more of an international company.”

The growing international focus has been achieved with the help of a distribution partner that is helping Jeup participate in multi-company showrooms in Europe, the Middle East and Russia. Jeup doesn’t own the showrooms, but they give the company the best opportunity yet to give their products visibility on a global scale.

With that, Jeup has been able to expand the company to 37 employees, while seeing revenue grow at a similar clip. The operation will move in December from a rented space in Jenison to a building near the Gerald R. Ford International Airport that offers four times the company’s existing space.

Today, Jeup generates $4.5 million in annual revenue, and is doing well enough that it can set a priority to look for better revenue as opposed to just more. That means choosing jobs that offer a better opportunity for a healthy profit margin.

“We ebb and flow as the business has continued to grow,” Jeup says. “When you’re doing custom designs, you never know where you’re going to be at (in terms of quoting the job). You’d just better hope you’ve quoted it right. We’re trying to diminish the variables so we have a better shot at being more profitable. In the last couple of years, we’ve had a tremendous influx of new product design. You’ve got new staff and new products, and you can’t be as profitable because you’re just engineering your way through it.”

Investments in the growth of capacity are necessary, Jeup says, but you have to pay them off by using the increased capacity to produce consistent profit, and that means knowing what kinds of jobs will give you that result.

“Some companies confuse revenue with profit,” Jeup says. “I’d rather do $1 million a year and make 20 percent than do $3 million and make 3 percent.”

Jeup believes he adds to the company’s profitability with a very proactive customer-service philosophy. It was one of the first things he dove into when he put on the CEO’s hat, and he found it very natural.

“The pro-activeness is essential,” he said. “We work with a clientele that is used to working with interior designers and architects, and a lot of the manufacturing firms are not good at planning and management. So if something shows up late, they figure that’s the industry. The attitude is, ‘We’ll be 14 or 16 days late and we’ll get it there when we get it there.’”

Jeup puts together a detailed action for every job to ensure it delivers product on time, including the sometimes touchy task of letting the customer know its own responsibilities if the deadline is to be met.

“It’s about executing a plan,” Jeup says.

The designer-turned-CEO has burnished his leadership credentials by reading the work of accomplished thought-leaders like John Maxwell and Jack Welsh, and is convinced that leadership above all else means convincing the team that you will have their back and will create the right circumstances to allow them to succeed at their jobs.

“The right question to ask an employee is not ‘Why didn’t you do this?’ but ‘What do you need to do your job effectively?’” Jeup says.