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Scott Buckley loves his job. Ostensibly, his job title is general manager, but he enjoys sales, representing a 4-year-old San Diego company whose product often is not considered, or even envisioned, by prospective customers — until Buckley speaks with them. His main job is letting people know about the product. The sales follow. It’s the sales rep's dream: a product that sells itself.
"Sometimes the people I’m talking to say, 'Do you know what you have here?'" says Buckley. "It’s what gets you out of bed in the morning. It gets you going."
The company is Pacific Coast Foam, and it makes architectural foam products. Foam? Flimsy, flaking, fallible foam? The kind you used to make miniature mountains to accent your miniature train set?
Not according to McMillin Development, Kaufman & Broad, Presley Homes, Builders Showcase Interiors, Conwell Shonkwiler & Associates, or any other of a number of designers and developers that have used Pacific Coast Foam. The company’s handiwork can be seen across a broad range of commercial projects: Qualcomm, La Valencia Hotel, Target Stores, Planet Hollywood, and Barona, Sycuan and Viejas casinos and retail centers.
Indoors, Pacific Coast Foam is in residential fireplace surrounds, linear and circular crown moldings, arches and domes. In the great outdoors, through summer sun and winter rain, the company has crafted full-length moldings, window treatments, columns and other exterior accents. Then there's its monument signage, at Mission Ridge Apartments, Quail Ranch, Riverwalk, and Shadowridge Country Club. Even trade show displays and stage sets.
All foam — expanded polystyrene (EPS) in densities of one, two or three pounds per cubic foot — is cut, coated and finished by Pacific Coast Foam. "It’s half the cost, simple to put up and can be customized to any design," says Buckley. "You can get really creative." He says the product's other attributes include being resistant to moisture, ultraviolet light, mildew, fire and insects.
Because it’s lightweight, Buckley says the product presents zero liability concerns. One of Pacific Coast Foam's new projects involves architectural accents at an El Centro elementary school. Buckley says each 8-foot section of Pacific Coast Foam's coated EPS weighs just 10 pounds, compared to 40 pounds for a similar section if made of concrete.
Among the company’s largest installations of architectural foam are the Mission Bay Hilton Hotel ("gingerbreaded-out," Buckley says) and Pacific Coast Foam's own 15,000-square-foot facility on Miramar Place, which it bought in January for $1.1 million.
"In two months we outgrew it," says Buckley. "We’ve already started building sheds outside and a second-floor mezzanine inside." The company now runs two shifts with a work force of 25. The EPS shapes are bought from Los Angeles-area suppliers and shaped on five cutting machines, including lathe, hot-wire and three-dimensional cutters assisted by AUTO-CAD computers and finished in the company’s coating and painting facilities.
Pacific Coast Foam was founded in 1995 by owner Jerry Mooney, who gained his initial experience with architectural foam shapes working at Expo Builders Supply. Eventually, Mooney decided to pour himself into making shapes on his own, and his former employer is a good customer today.
Buckley joined the company a year ago. He had earned a degree in business at Cal Poly Pomona and began working in home improvement and real estate in San Diego before joining Toshiba where he became San Diego sales manager over a nine-year career. He got to know Mooney and the burgeoning company that was riding San Diego’s construction turnaround.
"We’ve doubled our sales over the last four years," Buckley says. Sales for 1999 were forecast to hit $1.7 million. Now Buckley expects to reach the $2 million mark. Next year’s projection is $3.5 million. To get there, Pacific Coast Foam will add installation services by early next year and is looking at opening offices in Arizona and Nevada where hotel and related construction is booming.
So what happened to the cement, wood and plaster architectural forms of decades past? Buckley points out that a traditional window treatment would involve strip-nailing 2-by-6-inch boards around the window, building up the profile by adding wrap and paper, then chicken wire and finally cement or more wood with multiple cuts.The process is laborious, and the nail holes make the product subject to moisture intrusion into the main structure, which leads to liability concerns.
But what about those wonderful but brittle plaster architectural elements of yore — the kind that once adorned the Spanish Revival public buildings on the Balboa Park Prado? Buckley says it would be cost-prohibitive now and the trade talent just is not there anymore. But Pacific Coast Foam is; its products adorn the architectural accents of the newly-restored House of Hospitality on the Prado.
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