Drew Marcotte and Bill Marcotte (Photo Courtesy of Granite State Glass)
When Bill Marcotte took over his first glass shop, he saw a stack of around 40 work orders, all small jobs. He asked his foreman why they hadn’t been done, and the foreman answered, “I’ve got bigger things to do.”
“That was the first thing I changed,” Marcotte says. It was 1982 and the economy was in the ditch, yet he felt the company couldn’t afford to chase only the big jobs. To put it another way, he felt every job was a big job. After all, the person who needs a window screen repaired one day might need a new shower door the next and those transactions will inform them when they want to replace the windows in their home.
That first shop was in Laconia, and Marcotte was hired to manage it. He became part-owner in 1983 and full owner of Granite State Glass five years later. Their second store was in Conway, which opened in 1985. “After that we just continued to add shops once we found a good location and a good manager. It just kind of grew,” Marcotte says. “We built the business on service and quality. We do what we say we’re going to do.”
Granite State Glass, which provides automotive, residential and commercial glass repair and replacement, has grown to 16 locations in NH, Vermont and Massachusetts and has 250 employees.
That includes four members of the Marcotte family who now help to run Granite State Glass, including Drew, Bill’s son. But when asked about being a family business, Bill was proud to point out that there are many more surname groupings on the payroll. Employees tend to not only stick around, they refer relatives when there’s an open position.
“We have a lot of fathers and sons, mothers and daughters, brothers. About 21% of the company has family in the business,” Marcotte says.
Drew says Granite State Glass’s advantage is its standard of customer service. The challenge for him leading the company into the next generation will be to maintain that standard in a changing world. “I’m excited, I’m certainly proud. One of the things I know is I can’t do it without the team we already have in place,” Drew says. “Being able to grow up with them, know them on a personal level, to be able to build those relationships over the years, I know we can be successful with that team.”
