Carport Central: Poised for Great Things in 2020, & Beyond

The company was recently featured by both the Biltmore Center for Professional Development and the Triad Business Journal.

By all rights, 2019 was a banner year for Carport Central. The business continued to enjoy unprecedented growth, landing at No. 9 in the 2019 Triad Business Journal’s Fast 50 Awards rankings. As exciting as that was in itself, Carport Central also received what it saw to be an even more prestigious honor. BBB of Central and Northwest NC presented Carport Central with its highest award, the 2019 BBB Torch Award for Ethics!

So far, 2020 is starting out to be a pretty good year, too. We were thrilled to have the Biltmore Center for Professional Development choose to highlight us as their Client of the Quarter on January 15. Then just two days later, the Triad Business Journal chose to help relay the account of Carport Central’s remarkable development and growth as the Cover Story for its January 17 edition, in an article entitled “Building on Service, Culture Is ‘Central’ to Brothers’ Success.”;

Carport Central’s journey with Biltmore began in the fall of 2018. What do a metal buildings provider and one of America’s most iconic destinations have in common? As it turns out, more than you may think! Creating incredible guest experiences and providing legendary guest service are two pillars for which Biltmore has come to be known around the world. The Biltmore leadership saw an opportunity to help organizations beyond just the hospitality industry learn to apply these same successful principles. This vision led to the founding of the Biltmore Center for Professional Development (BCPD). So, what’s the Carport Central connection?

Carport Central was already recognized as being a premier provider of customer service in the metal buildings field, but we also knew that we still had room to grow. We sent Jeffrey Trenter (General Manager for Carport Central) and Scott Kyles (Senior Content Specialist and Trainer for Cibirix, Carport Central’s official digital marketing partner) to be part of BPCD’s The Art of Customer Service partnership program. These key leaders came back more motivated than ever to bring their takeaways to the Carport Central team. In fact, they developed their own comprehensive training program on customer service standards for Carport Central, based on the insights gained from Biltmore. Over the course of six weeks, the Carport Central management team and its entire sales team went through this training together.

We were so pleased with our Biltmore experience that we chose to send another group of folks to a second Biltmore partnership program around Strategic Storytelling one year later, in the fall of 2019. This time the team brought back takeaways about how to become a story-driven business, for the good of our customers, and for the good of our employees. We were already believers that stories help drive results, but this program gave us more insights into why that is true, and how to use stories more intentionally throughout our organization for greater benefit.

During our journey together, the Biltmore training team got the chance to get to know us a little better, too. They were impressed, not just in how our business has steadily grown, but in how intentional we are about wanting to keep learning and keep getting better. That’s why Biltmore chose Carport Central to be their first Client of the Quarter for 2020. You can read all about it on their blog here.

Our journey with the Triad Business Journal over the last year has also been pretty special. In our first year of being eligible for Fast 50 Awards consideration, Carport Central didn’t just make the list of the 50 fastest-growing businesses in the NC Piedmont Triad region – we actually made it into the Top 10! Going from unranked to #9 in 2019 felt pretty awesome! In fact, Carport Central was the only representative in our region’s crowded metal buildings industry to be ranked inside the top 50.

After the awards ceremony had come and gone, representatives from the Triad Business Journal came up to meet with several members of the Carport Central team in person. We had some great conversations, and they seemed to genuinely enjoy hearing the story of our founding and rapid growth ever since. In fact, they decided to document the account of how two brothers from Texas decided to start a new metal buildings business in the foothills of NC in 2014, and how that business grew in less than 5 years to become one of the nation’s largest online providers of custom steel structures.

The Lara brothers had a clear vision about wanting to really help people by doing business differently, but they never could’ve envisioned how far the business would come in such a relatively short amount of time. One thing is abundantly clear to co-owner Albert Lara, though: “It’s our people who have made us what we are.”; You can read the whole story as recorded in the Triad Business Journal here.

So, what’s in store for Carport Central in 2020? Our leaders don’t want to give away too much just yet, but plans are already underway for Carport Central to relocate to a larger facility just off of Main Street in Mount Airy later this year. We also plan to continue to step up the levels of our marketing, customer experience, and customer service efforts, and we’re working harder than ever to build in more training to keep growing our team’s skill sets.

At the end of the day, though, it all still comes back to a focus on striving to live out our company’s mission and vision. Carport Central’s mission is to provide the very best metal building solutions, and our driving vision is the same as it always has been. What we’re really all about is helping people – our customers, our employees, our manufacturers and other business partners, and our community. If you’re looking for your perfect metal building solution, we’d love to help you too! You can reach out to us anytime here, or you can always just pick up the phone and give us a call at (980) 321-9898.