Repair firm builds business brick-by-brick

The health care industry may be going through turbulent times, but one local ‘doctor’ is seeing significant business growth and opportunities these days. But, his specialty happens to be bricks.

Euless-based Brick Doctor Corp. has seen an uptick in business in recent months and to top off a good run, the business and its President and Co-Founder James Jennings were recently named the winner of the 2009 Integrity Award by the Fort Worth Better Business Bureau.

“I guess you could say it’s been pretty good,” Jennings said of business as of late.

Brick Doctor Corp. was founded in 1986 by Jennings and his brother, Steve Jennings, as a spin-off of a commercial masonry company the Jennings brothers had founded. James Jennings said he and his brother got many calls from commercial owners in need of small repairs and frustrated at their options.

“They were frustrated that the only people doing that sort of thing were basically working out of their truck. They wanted someone they could rely on,” said Jennings, a Hurst native.

After the first few years, Steve Jennings returned to the commercial masonry business and James Jennings stuck to the brick repair business.

Today, Brick Doctor has 18 full-time staff members and an inventory of about 100,000 unique bricks stored at the company’s dual brick yard and office at 903 Cresthaven Drive in Euless.

The company has teams of masonry specialists that can repair anything from cracks and deteriorated bricks and arches, fireplaces or mailboxes. Brick Doctor also provides services for taking down a chimney that cannot be repaired.

The inventory of bricks the company carries is important, Jennings said, because if a client has a crack in a house built a few decades ago, any bricks added as part of the job must match the original bricks.

“If somebody has a crack on the side of their house, hopefully we’ll have their brick or be able to find their brick and match it so it looks like the original ones,” he said.

Ironically, the new wave of green building throughout the construction industry is causing a few hiccups when it comes to collecting older bricks, though.

In the past, Jennings said his company would look for local buildings being torn down to pick up old bricks that might match houses in need of repair that were built during the same time period. These days, however, more and more builders are re-claiming and reusing those bricks, leaving fewer for companies like Brick Doctor Corp.

“Demo companies used to just dump them at wrecking yards and it was easy for us to collect them that way, but it’s getting a little tricky,” he said.

Of the many repairs his company sees, Jennings said there are some common problems such as chimney repairs, repairs around outdoor faucets that have frozen during the winter or bricks on top of garage doors, but there is a new wave of brick repair problems quickly becoming the most common his company sees: repairing work that was done incorrectly in the first place.

During the past decade, a plethora of homebuilders added massive amounts of new homes to the local market.

But since the masonry industry has no licensing in place, it is commonplace for a developer to hire day or semi-skilled laborers to lay bricks for the new homes.

“So, unfortunately unlike in the ‘40s and ‘50s where you could find very comparable quality in houses built, now there’s a lot more disparity. It’s ironic because the very reason people want a brick house is because typically they think it will last forever and not require maintenance. I can’t put a percentage on it, but there is a very significant growth in the number of jobs we’re getting having to do with remedial work. We’re fixing things that were built wrong in the first place.”

Though it’s certainly good for business, Jennings described such jobs as ‘disheartening.’

“… Certainly our future is pretty secure, but the more fun kind of job is going in somebody’s back yard and building them a brick patio or a grill area,” Jennings said, describing other services the company provides. He prefers that to “telling them they have to spend a few thousand dollars on something that wasn’t done right in the first place.”

Jennings said his company sees a variety of repairs in a large coverage area – in both Tarrant and Dallas Counties, hence the company’s location in Euless. And though Brick Doctor has operated from the 1,000-square-foot industrial building (that was once a home before it was converted and re-zoned), the company’s success is forcing some changes. Jennings said he bought a quarter-acre lot with plans for a new, 5,000-square-foot building on West Parkway in Euless to accommodate the business’ growth.

Jennings attributes that growth, though, to a combination of demand and his company’s beliefs.

“We’re a Christian-based company. You don’t have to be a Christian to work here or anything, but you do have to buy into our principles,” he said. “… You can fool people in this business. Most people don’t understand masonry and a lot of what we do may be up on a roof, fixing a chimney for elderly people, so integrity is so important … We feel like that’s why we’ve been successful. We really do try to honor God and he blesses that and I think that’s what people are seeing.”

And though Jennings said his present day workload is great, he sees even bigger and better things in the future for Brick Doctor Corp. – including some franchise opportunities.

“We do think it’s a franchisable business,” he said. “… Houston would be our next market. We don’t have any specific plans to announce, as it remains to be seen whether we would do a franchise or a second location, but it would be a good marriage to have a venture with a commercial masonry company, for example, or commercial companies in other cities.”

In the mean time, Jennings is perfectly happy performing repairs for local customers, including some who are especially near and dear to him.

“If you look on our Web site, you’ll see [my parents’] pictures,” Jennings said. “We did some work for them and they said they wanted a senior citizen discount.”