Going that extra mile helped ATP Hotel Renovation in Tonka Bay to grow

Amy Palmer launched her entrepreneurial career as a scholarship student in business communications at St. Olaf College, cleaning homes and apartments in her spare time to earn spending money.

With that as a foundation following her graduation in 1996, she began to identify new markets and services that eventually added up to a business that grossed nearly $1 million in 2008 -- before the recession slashed her 2009 revenue more than 20 percent.

Despite last year's financial hammering, however, her five-year compound growth rate still ended 2009 at a creditable 21 percent.

Palmer, 36, is founder of ATP Hotel Renovation, a home-based Tonka Bay company that specializes in sheetrocking, painting and wallpapering at hotels, apartments and office buildings around the Upper Midwest, and in some cases as far away as Arizona and Florida.

She hasn't done it alone: Her husband, Thad Palmer, handles the financial management and supervises the company's various projects as ATP's only other employee. The work is handled by a roster of 30 independent contractors she has assembled over the years.

What's the secret?

ATP has "always provided the utmost in customer service, which is a rare commodity when working with companies that offer a variety of services," said Allison Guthrie, a veteran Twin Cities apartment complex manager. "Amy and Thad are always willing to go the extra mile to make certain their customers are satisfied."

Palmer has a simpler explanation for the company's success, however: "When you do good work, and treat your contractors right, that's the kind of thing that happens," she said.

ATP, short for Apartment Turnover Professionals, got its start in 1996, when one of her cleaning clients mentioned that a friend owned a fourplex and could use some help cleaning and painting vacated apartments for new renters.

There was no money for marketing, "but apartment managers talk to each other," Palmer said. Within two years she had contracts not only to renovate apartments, but also to clean the larger common areas of eight apartment buildings in the southwest suburbs.

That forced Palmer, who had been doing the work herself, to begin hiring independent contractors to handle the expanded business. But she continued to fill in on projects when her contractors were overloaded until 2002. With 30 contracts in hand by that time, she was forced to abandon the mops and paintbrushes and focus on managing the growing business.

From apartment to hotels

The impact of the new focus on hotels was impressive: As Palmer locked on to new opportunities in the hotel market, her revenue climbed in double-digit leaps from $261,000 in 2003 to a peak of $996,000 in 2008.

The financial collapse in 2009 cut the gross to $782.000. But contracts signed late last year and early in 2010 have ATP on track to approach $1.2 million in revenue this year, Palmer said.

As the hotel painting projects grew, Palmer saw other renovation opportunities. Soon, ATP was handling sheetrocking and wallpapering and, in some cases, moving outside to do exterior stuccoing and other repairs.

Very quickly the original cleaning service disappeared and in 2005, with hotels generating 75 percent of the gross, she changed the company's name to ATP Hotel Renovation. To date, ATP has finished more than 50 large hotel renovations and 50 smaller projects.

Perhaps the most visible assignment came in 2006, when ATP was tapped to assist CSM in converting and rebranding the Courtyard at the Depot hotel in downtown Minneapolis into an upscale Renaissance brand.

One of the latest additions: Aware that her clients were paying unnecessarily high prices for paint, wallpaper, fixtures and furniture for their renovations, Palmer began in 2007 offering a buying service that earned discounts and offered clients attractive pricing. Today that service is generating 22 percent of ATP's gross.

There have been a few other recent expansions to ATP's roster of services, including stone, tile and granite installations; carpet cleaning, removal and installation; and licensed lead, mold and smoke abatement.

Oh, yes, and an operation that buys used furniture from larger clients and resells it to smaller owners.

"Life never gets boring around here," Palmer said.