Buzz Fence
The team at Buzz Custom Fence in Fort Worth includes, from left, Jason Harris, Nicki Matranga, Ron Lewis, Collin Kelly, David Ball, Traci Miller, and Eric Schrader.
Entrepreneurs start their own businesses for a variety of reasons, all of them driven by unique motivations and aspirations.
Eric Schrader had as good of a reason to launch Buzz Custom Fence as any other risk-taker.
He wanted to stay married, he quips, a punchline he had almost certainly delivered before, along with the accompanying wry facial expression that characterizes a sense of amusement.
A conversation with Schrader, I quickly found out, is lively, if nothing else.
“That’s the truth,” he insists, telling me about three kids at the house and a missus unamused with a stunt he’d just pulled. Schrader had been in the pest control business for years, but new ownership had left him demoralized and doubtful about his future there.
So, he up and quit.
A bold maneuver for a guy with obligations, including a weighty grocery bill to feed his brood. He was a man who also liked to take a road trip every now and then to Lubbock to watch the alma mater, Texas Tech, play football. Moving wasn’t feasible. The family now had roots here.
A blueprint for staying in the service business, however, began to take shape. Its genesis was his own plans to build a fence at the family home. By his count, he found 10 companies he identified and not a one came out to make a bid.
“So, that was an underserved market,” he says.
Schrader says he also was seeking to identify a fractured industry, one “that didn’t have any kind of national regional players.”
“So, the idea was to open up a fence company, open up in different markets, try to regionalize it and then see where that took you,” Schrader says.
And here we sit 25 years later, the silver anniversary of Buzz Fence, the company founded by Schrader and his wife Denise. The company’s base of operations sits at 5104 W. Vickery.
In that time, the company has grown to five markets, including Austin, Dallas, Houston, and Phoenix. It also services roughly 150 stores across the southwest in the Home Depot domain. There are about 40 employees companywide, but with contractors, Schrader says the number is closer to 200 who “feed their families from this little ol’ company.”
“We dress differently. and we act differently and, and we really worked hard to have good customer service,” Schrader says. “We still answer the phone here. We actually answer the phone when you call. You get a real human. That human contact is important to us.”
Good fences make good neighbors but building fences doesn’t always make good neighbors.
It’s messy and inconvenient.
“We want to make the experience as painless as possible because, honestly, it's not a lot of fun. It's kind of like moving, right? Tear that whole thing out and, and all those leaves and all that trash and you can see in your neighbor's yards and the dog jumps in their pool.
“There’s nothing fun about it so we can at least answer the phone and, and tell you we'll be there or how we're gonna do it.”
A bumble bee was adopted as an eye-catching element of the logo as part of the “buzz” theme.
“Before Covid this place in the mornings was like bees to the hive and then they all bust out,” Schrader says. “This place is a ghost town and then in the afternoon and evening, everybody brings the honey back in and, and, and I know that sounds crazy, but it really was like a beehive. Bumble bees have just become our deal.”
The company has twice been awarded the Fort Worth Chamber’s small business of the year. Buzz was also recognized as a finalist for the Hankamer Business School at Baylor Family Business of the Year.
Buzz came out of the pandemic shutdowns healthy as a horse, albeit challenged, because the company never shut down. It couldn’t because the phones never stopped ringing.
“We never missed a day,” Schrader says.
History might eventually recall the pandemic as the Great Era of Home Projects, including yard and garden upgrades, which came with a need for new fencing.
“We were working like dogs,” Schrader says. “I mean dogs.”
That all resulted in the supply-chain crisis. Wood and nails, and everything else, were in short supply.
“Never again,” he says of dealing with that. “If that happened again, I think I would go home. Just quit.”
Traci Miller, general manager, who has been with the company for 15 years, laughs.
“The profitability and even loss became so realistic that, you know, we're working and not making any money. We’re breaking even and, and you're like, ‘Why are we even doing this?’
“It was a whole exercise of running in circles only because of the supply chain. We don't mind working like dogs. We're good dogs, but we want to make money, too. If I can't buy stuff or they're not gonna give me a price on it, would I do that again? Probably not.”
Schrader, originally from Edinburg in the Valley, studied finance and marketing at Texas Tech. Really marketing, he says; it’s more fun. He and Denise lived in San Antonio while she went to St. Mary’s law school and wound up in Corpus Christi.
That’s where he was introduced to the pest-control business. His father-in-law owned a franchise. The plan was for Schrader to take that over. He initially balked at working for his father-in-law, but his own father encouraged him to do it.
“I thought that's the craziest thing I've ever heard,” he says. “I mean, I'm an educated man; I ain't gonna crawl under a house and look for termites, right? I'll never forget talking to my father about it. He had a lot more wisdom than I did. And he said, ‘Well, you're a fool. You need to go do that. The dream of owning something of your own and not having to work for somebody is something I've always wanted to do. You need to take advantage of that.
“I don't think I've ever been more shocked in my entire life. Everything I trained and had gone to school for was now put on the shelf and I'm gonna go do this. But that was his dream for his son, to go do your own thing.”
It turned out to be wise advice and the foundation for something else.