Hurricane Andrew changed everything. It’s known for changing the way Florida thinks about building codes and storm protection certainly, but its effects have been much more far reaching than that—all the way to New Orleans, LA, and beyond.

Richard Maia, owner and president of LAS Enterprises in Metairie, says Florida’s response to Andrew has created an outline for other states to follow. “When you see what happened in Florida and if you have any kind of foresight, you know that when a hurricane hits here the insurance companies are going to drive [the industry].” Maia says. “The insurance companies basically told the legislature in Louisiana you better change your laws on construction.”

The state has since adopted the International Building Code (IBC), but Maia likens things in Louisiana today to the way they were in the early days in Florida: the infrastructure isn’t completely in place yet to ensure the codes are being met or how to verify if they are being met. With so many changes occurring in residential and commercial construction from foundations to roofs, Louisiana is at the point where many inspectors don’t know what to look for, he says. “It’ll probably take another two years before it’s all hammered out. We’re in a good position because we’ve been growing by leaps and bounds, and we provide a quality product and we manufacture it.”

“I could see the handwriting on the wall after Andrew changed the industry in Florida in 1992,” he continues. “So we started thinking it was going to happen here eventually, and we need to be in the right place at the right time.”

That foresight has taken LAS Enterprises, once the nation’s third largest retail home improvement company, to becoming a leader in the Gulf Coast storm protection industry. Partnering with Thermoplast Extrusions and Eastern Metal Supplies, LAS Enterprises manufactures impact-rated windows and colonial, Bahama, roll-down and accordion shutters. Today, Maia estimates 60 percent of business is driven by storm protection.

NO-BRAINER
A civil engineer, Richard Maia worked on designing offshore oil platforms for a consulting company operating with major oil companies before his entrepreneurial streak got the better of him. Offered an opportunity to purchase LAS in 1988 he took over with a partner in 1989 and became the sole owner in 1995.

Maia quickly realized two things: First, for some three decades LAS Enterprises had built its name recognition to the point that it was an asset. Second, the company needed to advertise. “We quickly found out that by spending money on advertising, we were able to spend less dollars to get leads than most companies spend to get leads from telemarketing—we had a much higher close ratio from anybody calling us than the close ratio on a telemarketing lead,” Maia adds.

Maia also started researching storm protection. He decided that the quickest way to get into the market without knowing too much about it was to get involved in a rolling shutter franchise—which he eventually bought in 1996 when it couldn’t keep up with his demand. His supplier was more in-tune with smaller dealers looking to buy 10 to 15 shutters a month when he was looking to buying hundreds a month. When the backlog became 15 weeks or more Maia started looking into manufacturing his own.

That story has been repeated time and again. Whenever the lead-time for product outpaced his source, Maia would begin looking into LAS doing the work itself. The same was true when it came to painting shutters and installing them. “We’ve been very lucky in that we inherited a very strong name. We’re very lucky in that we’ve been able to keep our profits and put them to good use and grow the business. Most people would pull it out and buy themselves a boat, I basically put it right back into the company and I’d buy equipment,” Maia says.
After getting his feet wet with rolling shutters, Maia and LAS moved to shutters. At the time Louisiana did not have any code requirements for storm protection, but the market was ready for it.

It took a few years to learn the trade, Maia admits, but he kept the company moving in the right direction. He moved LAS into colonial and Bahama shutters and that has made all the difference. “The architecture in this area is more conducive to colonials and Bahamas than it is to roll-downs,” says Maia. The French cottage look in homes is real big in the area. “They have the vinyl colonials on the outside that after a year or two years are all faded and people want to switch them out and make them look operable, and then when you tell them that, by the way, these will be hurricane-rate as well . . . it’s a no-brainer!”

The roll-down business has remained steady over the years, actually increasing slightly since Katrina, “but the colonial and the Bahama business has just gone crazy—probably because we build it, paint it, we can turn the product around relatively quick and because of the awareness that Katrina brought and the changes in the [building] codes.”

Gross sales have increased about six times since adding impact-rated products, Maia says, and more recently the company has added a line of vinyl impact-rated windows.

LAS aims its advertising at higher-end homeowners. “If you look at a house that costs $200,000 and up,” Maia says, “they will spend $7,000 or $8,000 to put colonials on their house.”

Advertising does mean product prices are a little higher than what others may ask, but LAS offers a higher quality product because it manufactures it. What the company spends on advertising it can make up in manufacturing.

“The beauty of [colonials] in our neck of the woods,” Maia says, “is every house has them. It’s just in the architecture. If you can close them and put a bar on them . . . you’re killing two birds with one stone. If you’re able to manufacture it and paint it in-house and install it, you’re able to compete with just about anybody out there.”

QUALITY WINS
Of course, Katrina had lots to do with where the storm protection industry stands today in New Orleans. The destruction left in its wake two years ago still is clearly visible today. Maia estimates 150,000 homes in New Orleans need to be completely rebuilt and in areas such as Orleans Parish, which was flooded with from five to 15 feet of water, only about 20 percent has recovered.

With the continuing controversies and media attention surrounding Katrina there is little chance of “hurricane amnesia” setting in among residents or legislators. “Look at Florida in 1993-94 and the legislative uproar and how we have to protect our buildings and we have to improve our codes . . . the same thing is going on here, except Florida has already created an outline on how to accomplish it,” says Maia. “Florida kind of led the way, and now we’re in the same ballpark in Louisiana and Mississippi.”

The difference is that New Orleans is a major U.S. city, the nation’s third largest port bringing in a third of the country’s oil, and Katrina was a large, slow moving storm. “What happened with Katrina is you had cities far away from the coast like Baton Rouge, which is about 90 miles form the coast, and Jackson, MS, that had hurricane-force winds of Category 1 for four, five hours, which is unheard of,” Maia says. “I’ve been through Camille, Betsy, and I’ve never seen a hurricane of that magnitude—I’ve seen strong ones, but I’ve never seen one that was as big in dimension.”

As an added difficulty, many areas around New Orleans are designated historic districts—all over, not just the French Quarter—which are tightly controlled when it comes to remodeling, rebuilding.

Still, New Orleans is a growing city with lots of new construction going on even before Katrina, Maia says. Prior to Katrina residential work figured to be 90 to 95 percent of LAS sales, now it’s about 80 percent partly because commercial work is just now starting. Large structures from banks to hospitals just can’t react as quickly as homeowners or restructure their budgets as quickly either. Maia has recently completed a bank with roll shutters that took 18 months to get where they want to be.

With business growing, LAS currently manufactures about 5,000 colonial shutters a year, but Maia anticipates “very quickly” going to 20,000 a year. To help, LAS has another 24,000-square-foot building going up that can double its manufacturing capacity and Maia has added a night shift. “It’s an industry that started after Andrew and has never stopped,” says Maia. “It’s been fun.”

Maia estimates that colonial and Bahama shutter business will take LAS Enterprises to over $20 million a year in sales over the next couple of years. “Quality will always win,” he says.

The Role of a Leader
Putting profits back into the business has put LAS Enterprises into its leadership role in Gulf Coast storm protection. While most of that has gone into adding manufacturing equipment, Maia also has spent some of it on providing laptops to all salespeople and on upgrading the company’s Web site.

“It’s a much more professional, clean looking site giving the customer information—especially in this area, in regard to hurricane protection, there’s so many different products out there,” Maia says.

“We’ve had inspectors actually tell customers that not only do they have to put impact windows in they have to put shutters on them, too! So what we’ve done is try to create a Web site for the architects to come to who are not familiar with this. That’s where we stand in Louisiana now. We’re the biggest player in this area, so it’s our responsibility to make sure when customers hear something they can go to our Web site and see what does the IBC code mean; what does impact-rated mean; what does large missile, small missile mean; what does this stuff look like on a house; how do you install it . . . We’re getting ready to put streaming videos online showing our guys putting in a colonial or our guys putting in a roll-down . . . all the different things people want to know.”