Not many people get an A in a college course the way Vance Barrett did.
A professor told Barrett that he needed to know two things to be a successful businessman: one, start your own business; and two, always ask for more than you think you deserve.
Barrett left the class and started a fence installation company, which became Best Vinyl, an American Fork-based maker and installer of vinyl fences. At the end of that semester, he returned to the professor and asked for an A.
Barrett got the A — and he learned that the business model that works best for him is to take a good idea and simply do it.
Take the company's approach to digging postholes for fences. In the early days of Best Vinyl, Barrett realized that he hated digging postholes. To make the process faster and less strenuous, he tried putting an auger on the end of an excavator.
This simple idea has since changed the entire process of installing a fence, because the excavator can dig postholes quickly and does it from the sidewalk, leaving the customer's yard intact. This innovation alone helped Best Vinyl install a fence in a quarter of the time it took any other company.
Barrett also wanted to make his product stronger, so he began instructing his crews to mix cement on-site and set the posts before they left, rather than the old method of dumping dry concrete powder into the posthole and relying on ground water to set the cement.