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Brown's Glass Shop Celebrates 20 Years
Brown's Glass Shop Celebrates 20 YearsBy Bill Walsh
Times-Democrat Staff Writer
Mike Brown was getting antsy, growing tired of accepting so much responsibility for making sure glass installation jobs were done right, while most of the benefits of a job well done accruing to his employer.
Sure, he was drawing a paycheck, but the business he was helping build belonged to another. By mid 1988, he saw that there were opportunities, and he was ready to strike out on his own.
Not so fast, his wife Denise advised.
Pregnant with the couple's first child, she was, perhaps, a bit more enamored of a steady income.
Mike was right, there was plenty of business for a new company launched to help Fauquier residents with their auto, home and commercial glass needs.
Denise was right, too; expectant mothers usually are when it comes to keeping the nest unruffled.
Ceding to his wife's counsel, for a bit, Brown put off cutting ties to the glass company for which he worked, a once-local firm that had been bought out by a national chain.
But 20 years ago this month, the couple opened Brown's Glass Shop in the basement of a bank building then existent in Morrisville. The business was an immediate success.
Within two years, the Browns, now joined by Mike's brother James, moved the business to its current location, tucked in behind the Opal Mini Storage near the intersection of U.S. 29 and U.S.. 17.
The Browns offer expertise in auto glass, and residential and commercial flat-glass installations. About 25 percent of their business is on wheels, and another quarter is in the commercial sphere. The bulk of the business is residential, and glass installation, like almost everything else, is feeling the pinch of an economic downturn.
"We have been very fortunate to be busy up through the holidays," Mike said last week. "We have contracts with construction companies, and everything has slowed down.
"Five years ago," he mused, "you'd buy a house, keep it for a year, then sell it and make...$80,000. Now people are remodeling. We are not doing near the new houses' shower doors and mirrors that we were doing, but we are doing a lot of shower doors and mirrors for remodeling projects. Our new construction work is down, but we are up on the remodeling side, and that has helped out."
During the building boom, Brown's Glass Shop was installing shower doors and mirrors for one or two new houses every week. "Now, we do a new house every six months," Mike said.
Still, glass installation is somewhat recession-proof, depending on your contacts and contracts, and the Browns have good ones.
They work closely with a construction company that specializes in hospital construction, and those projects have not slowed significantly. They do glass work for the state's ABC board, and alcohol is demonstrably recession-resistant.
And, sad to say, break-ins take an upswing when the economy goes down, and burglaries often involve breaking glass.
The single entity that has done the most to keep the business afloat during difficult times, however, is the underpinning upon which the company was founded, Mike said.
"Service is the secret of our success," he said. "Service; that's the bottom line.
"That's why I started this business," he continued. "When we started, I knew that we maybe couldn't give the best price, but we could give the best service, the best value."
Part of that value, James added, is sending clients to another dependable firm if the Browns can't do the job. "If we can't do it, we'll find someone who can. In the country, that helps a lot," he said.
Providing service and value, Mike said, has paid off in loyal, long-term customers, including Fauquier County, with which the Browns have won a bid contract for some 15 years.
Dedication to service has also kept the business small. Mike and Denise's son Mitchell is now part of the team, but there are no expansion plans on the horizon.
For one, finding someone with experience in all three business endeavors — auto, residential and commercial — is no easy task, Denise said.
For another, finding that experienced person with the right mindset compounds the problem.
"Ninety-five percent of our work is for either someone I know or with someone who has been sent to me by someone I know," Mike said. "You want to do a good job. I hate to look someone in the face and say 'we did your windshield wrong, or we did this or that wrong.'"
Among too many in today's workforce, "there is no pride," he said, "and that simply aggravates me. The pride of the American worker, it seems like it has gone downhill."
Brown's Glass Shop, 10245 Fayettesville Road, Bealeton, is open from 8 a.m. to 4 p.m. Mondays through Fridays.
"A lot of people say we have bankers' hours," Denise said with a laugh. "But he's a farmer," she said of her husband, who raises livestock at the couple's farm in Sumerduck. "He gets up in the morning and checks his animals, comes here, then checks the animals again when he gets off at four."
The shop can be reached at (540) 439-1625.
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