Cabinet Genies boosts showroom sales with OKD design support

Showrooms feeling stuck in the balance between sales and design is way too common. It’s a double whammy of low profitability and an inability (or unwillingness!) to innovate that can make salespeople frustrated, customers running away, and profits dropping. Long term, this all adds up to difficulty recruiting and retaining designers, not to mention the expense and loss of sales.

This was the scenario facing Nate Gaubeart, owner of Cabinet Genies in Coral Gables, FL, who along with his brother took over the family-run business about 15 years ago. Their father founded the company more than 40 years ago. Their firm specializes in kitchen, bathroom, closet and outdoor living design, among other services.

And Nate was feeling stuck.

When scaling feels way too daunting

The team at Cabinet Genies had sales that were limited in the showroom. It’s a traditional business model that was a part of their roots. See, his father used to build every cabinet himself, which was not scalable for the long term success of the business.

“The cabinet maker of yesterday was dying off and everything was moving toward manufacturing. So, our business model with me and my brother was we wanted to work smarter not harder.”

They tried to turn things around on their own.

“We felt that if we could come up with a sound design and estimating process — and couple that with a nice design through 2020 Design — to put together a package that customers would want,” Nate says.

But doing this all on his own was way more stress than he thought. He wasn’t sleeping or eating much, and he felt the pressure of letting customers down, on top of watching his family business struggle.

“I was just miserable because I couldn’t keep up and I was getting so much pressure from our customers about why designs were taking four to six weeks [to complete].”

What Nate was looking for

Nate did what a lot of business owners do when their company goes through challenges: he stepped in to solve it himself. He taught himself 2020 Design software, and tried to fill the gap. Unfortunately, he would fall behind in getting design quotes, sales and producing finished rendering, and kept on feeling like he’d never be able to catch up.

So, he and his design assistant did a Google search and found OKD’s website. While he was impressed by OKD, Nate said he could not justify the cost and “didn’t understand the business model back then.” So, between his own frustration and the perceived cost expenditures he felt it wasn’t the right time for Cabinet Genies to work with OKD.

Time passed, and the problems kept compounding.

Cabinet Genies was growing fast, but his design capacity wasn’t keeping up. He had five CAD operators putting in long hours, yet projects still weren’t getting completed on the design side. The work was there, the team was working hard, and it still felt like the business was getting bottlenecked at the exact point it needed to scale.

On top of the volume problem, the tools were fighting them. 2020 kept crashing on large rendering files, which meant lost time, frustration, and stalled momentum. Even when the team was pushing around the clock, software instability made it harder to stay on schedule and protect turnaround times.
As the pressure mounted, quality started to slip.

Nate noticed the accuracy and consistency of designs trending downward, and he could see why: as he hired more designers, each person had their own way of designing and ordering. That inconsistency didn’t just create confusion internally; it showed up in the field, where installers were dealing with avoidable issues, especially on high-end, complex kitchens.

How did OKD help Cabinet Genies scale?

So, Nate came back to OKD, knowing that he needed the help.

OKD removed the design bottleneck that was holding Cabinet Genies back. Nate began sending OKD roughly 10–15 kitchen designs per month (plus other rooms), and quickly saw a shift: faster turnaround, clearer plans, and consistent documentation that supported every department—sales, purchasing, estimating, and installation.

“When I got the first email, I said, ‘I’m either going to open up this design and it’s going to be a complete miss, or it’s going to be what I’m hoping is the next generation of Cabinet Genies.’ I opened it and it was like the heavens opened. It was perfect. It had all the design notes, it was clear, it was concise. And OKD was able to do what I asked in three days! Everybody else is taking six to eight weeks to do 75% of the quality that OKD is doing and at a more affordable price,” he explains.

In fact, Nate said that OKD’s three-day turnaround time was a key to improved sales and competitive edge.With reliable outsourced design support behind him, Nate and his team could focus on selling and executing, instead of constantly scrambling to keep up with drafting.

The difference of working with OKD

The key to this successful partnership was how OKD delivered high-quality plans on a tight turnaround—often within three days—complete with clear design notes that made the work easier to price, order, and install.

However, that’s not the only way we helped. OKD also followed Cabinet Genies’ evolving design standards to keep outputs consistent across jobs, and handled revisions quickly when redlines came in, asking questions when something needed clarification. Through all this work, the relationship between OKD and Cabinet Genies became more than transactional.

“I feel like the bond, the partnership between our company and OKD is just top tier. They have the highest level of professionalism that I’ve ever really dealt with in a company. It’s just amazing. It truly is. I feel like I’m a business partner with them more than I am a customer,” he offers.
As needs expanded, Nate also began tapping OKD for more advanced CAD/custom drawing support so he could confidently take on more complex, higher-end work without adding expensive in-house roles.

Personal gains for Nate and his family

He also quickly states that his relationship with OKD has improved his personal life as well.

“Working with OKD has given me space to be more of a family man with my kids and my wife, and has really allowed me to enjoy this business again. That’s something that’s missed here. I hated this business. I came into it loving it and then I became an absolute hater of this business because of the stress that it brought to me. And through working with OKD I’m happy again and enjoying life. Plus, we’re making money. I’m down to two designers. So, there’s three of us all together now where I had double the staff and I’ve quadrupled our sales.”

Nothing but growth for Cabinet Genies

With design no longer limiting throughput, Nate gained a major competitive edge. He could move faster than competitors and win accounts by simply being able to deliver quality design work consistently.

“I think it’s really cool how I started with OKD to where I ended up and what they’ve done in our business to make us elite. We are better than, in my opinion, anybody in this industry in our area. For OKD to fulfill what they’ve done for us and built our design profiles and our plans the way they are today, I feel that when I go to the market with any of our competition, no one is even close to our drawing platform that we can produce.”

The relationship reduced overall design costs, improved efficiency and accuracy across the business, and helped eliminate installer issues tied to inconsistent plans. On the sales side, Nate credits the improved speed and quality with increasing his personal sales by roughly $3–4M per year and boosting overall company profitability. Internally, the team became leaner—fewer in-house designers, more output, better results—and Nate describes it as having an “army” of design support behind him so he can do what he does best: sell kitchens.

“The biggest competitor in our area has 60 salespeople and their best salesperson essentially sells about $2 million. This is a $30 million company I’m talking about. And they can’t do what I do. I can outsell every one of their top performers with ease. I can actually reach their sales goal with probably a fraction of those sales people.”

And their growth mindset doesn’t stop here. They plan to open up further Cabinet Genies satellite branches.

Work with OKD to unlock your showroom’s sales potential

If your showroom feels stuck between selling and designing, you’re not alone — and you don’t have to solve it by burning out your team or overhiring. OKD gives you the extra design bandwidth and consistency to move faster, quote more jobs, and protect quality as you scale.

Contact us to talk through your goals and see how OKD can help.