#MaconMaker Spotlight: Prodigy Woodworks LLC
Since it's the first #WoodworkWednesday, we are happy to present the first maker profile of the College Hill Tumblr Refresh:
Prodigy Woodworks LLC
Meet Brooks Patterson, owner and founder of Prodigy Woodworks LLC. Brooks is a maker at heart, and he has been one of the truly lucky ones who were able to make their lives around that passion. He has been tinkering and creating new projects out of old products since he was a kid. Now he has created a new home and life in Prodigy. Seriously, but we will get to that later.
Prodigy started out in 2005 when Brooks and the gang acquired the building at the corner of Terminal Avenue and Poplar Street in downtown Macon (that's 454 Terminal Avenue, to be exact). Brooks was already working for a cabinetmaker in Griffin at the time. "They weren't using any kind of technology. It was all regular saws and regular equipment" which wasn't working out for Brooks. "I just wanted to do something different, and so that's how we ended up starting this place."
Prodigy is definitely different from your average cabinetmaker.
We take on a lot of things because we got tired of subbing it out. We started doing our own countertops, got the machinery to do that, so we could keep it in house. We were subbing metalwork out; we got tired of doing that. Now we've got our own metalworking machines and tools. So we are able to do just about everything. People call us in for design work too, and we are able to design and build our own jobs.
When asked about what obstacles Prodigy faced, Brooks said it was the money at first. "Acquiring financing was a huge hurdle for us," at first. "That takes years. You don't start out with all the money you want, and you only get fifty percent of what you need. We had to make it work." Another was getting "a good set of people." Brooks says that's another one that took years. The Prodigy staff currently is a really good set of people who were "picked," and Brooks says he works with friends, people he knows work well together. The Prodigy staff now consists of two full-time staff members who work alongside Brooks "in the shop together or out on the property" when they have on-site fieldwork, remodeling, or contracting to do. Then Larry mans the office, quoting and configuring projects and ordering material. Brooks's wife, Leah, runs the books, taking care of auditing and invoicing.
The biggest, by far, was actually learning the technology which is now the backbone of the company. Prodigy started out without any new technology, but learning to use the new tech when they got it was the hardest. "You break a lot of things, you tear up a lot of stuff, and technology is not really easy to fix. I've had to learn that along the way. Adding machines, networking all these machines together--it really, literally, took years to do. [...] And then staying on top of it, because after you get it all done, you keep updating things. Technology changes, and there's always something coming along that's faster."
Prodigy has quite a bit of new technology and machinery in the shop, enough for a separate post! We will cover that exclusively next week on #TechTuesday! There's some really cool stuff they are working with, so be sure to check back then.
We bought up buildings to help the neighborhood around here. That's actually just...fun. It's a lot; we bit off a lot with that. But it's really fun work to me. We acquired this building, which is 454 Terminal, and 310 Sixth Street and 340 Sixth Street, which is right across the street from here. We acquired all of that from NewTown as a distressed property. They had it since 2002. I've rented here since 2005, but I only rented this one little section; the rest of the property was just in really bad disrepair. There were a lot of homeless people living in the buildings, a lot of drug activity down the south end of the street, just a really bad place.We saw that over the years, and I like fixing things, so we decided last year to buy it. It took us a couple of months to actually sit down with NewTown and UDC to actually get that deal rolling. In August of last year, I think, we acquired the buildings. We've had one year into this, and we've done a lot of work. You know, we've cleaned up the streets, cleaned out the buildings, renovating each one of them. We are currently working on two spots right now to lease them out. These are buildings that have been, pretty much, abandoned for fifteen years. [...] We lease to a gym now, which is Rush MMA. They have a lot of members, so the parking lots are full again. It's coming alive, the neighborhood is really coming back. We are renting out two more spaces next month to new tenants. It's actually worked,the hard work we've put in; it's making people come back to this area. [...] We want to build to lofts in the Sixth Street Project, and we want it to be part of downtown again even though it's right across the tracks from it.
Brooks and his team have taken it upon themselves to give back to their surrounding community, applying their skills to support the growth and development of the neighborhood. Brooks said it best when he described how he gets new machines that aren't always so new:
Sometimes we make the tools that make our products to help us make the neighborhood.
If that isn't the best definition of a true Macon Maker, we don't know what is.