Inside Dovetail

Transcript

My name is Isaac Alexander. I grew up here in Del Valle, Texas. I was raised on a farm, one of eight kids. Some of my earliest memories were doing woodworking.

This one is us building our first chicken coop, a good way to learn how to do woodworking. When I was five, six, seven years old, I started making wooden spoons. I took woodworking classes. Growing up on a farm taught me to always think outside the box.

Never accept what the reality you're faced with. Just because someone says you can't do it, doesn't mean you can't. A lot of challenges that our customers have is who do they go to? Most people in our industry only do the woodworking aspect, and they're going to outsource the rest.

Dovetail started out as a high-end commercial woodworking shop. As we began to grow, we started having to outsource the metalwork and the stone, and I reached a point of frustration where it would always come to a friction point where I'm waiting on someone else outside of my control, and I'm looking at the contractor, I'm looking at the customer, I'm saying, I'm sorry, but so-and-so, who I'm responsible for, even though they don't work for me, is holding me up. So we got to the point where we brought in the metal and the stone in house so that we could control our own destiny. People choose Dovetail because they trust us.

They trust us to do their complicated projects. They trust us to be able to coordinate wood, metal, and stone across very, very complex projects, well-known museums, football stadiums, high-end offices. A lot of people come to us early on, a lot of the firms do, to help them design and to flesh out the details that are usually lacking. Sometimes a design can last a year of coordination, long before saw blades cut into wood.

They know that we are going to be that company, that I can literally walk to the other shop and say, here's where your metal is, here's where your stone is, here's how it's all going to come together. I'm crazy about technology. I love it. I have spent a lot of time learning about different types of machines and bringing robotics into every one of our departments.

Because of automation, work orders fly through here. We are able on a regular shift to produce more than what we can sell. I think that anybody can have great equipment. I think anybody can have a sign outside, build a building, and say it's a company.

But what brings value to any company is the people. We have engineers, we have drafters, we have estimators, we have project managers, we have foremen and superintendents that live all over. That really has put us on a map in a way where people know that when they come to us, they're going to get top-notch service, they're going to get their problem solved because we have the staff to do it and the equipment to back that up. If you're a design team, if you're a contractor, if you're an ownership group, and you are trying to find that company that can do it all, that's what we do.

That's where we fit in. If you're looking for a company that can solve your problems, that's us. That's Dovetail.