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Business Center moves, celebrates 25 years
01/01/2008Catherine Austin
When Patrick and Karen Carter started the Business Center in Marble Falls in 1983, it was located at 700-A Fourth Street, in a 600 square-foot building that was "so small we checked in the freight in the parking lot," Karen Carter said.
The Carters have now moved the business to 3410 N. Hwy. 281 into a former appliance store and have been remodeling the building to suit the needs of the combined office supply and printing business. They will be celebrating their 25th anniversary of being in business with a party and ribbon cutting on Jan. 16 at 4 p.m.
This move marks the fourth time the Carters have relocated as their business expanded from the original tiny office space.
"We moved to Ave. J in about 1985 and stayed there a year before moving to Main Street, where we remained until 2004, when we moved to a location on Broadway," Carter noted, adding that they stayed there until this past December when they began the move to the current location.
"We wanted to wait until after the holidays, but we had a vendor who offered to move all our equipment, so we took advantage of the help, since printing equipment is large and hard to move," she said.
The couple, who met in high school in Houston, ventured into the business when they began to help Patrick's dad who had opened an office supply store in Wyoming after he retired from his coal mining career.
"But we got homesick for Texas and began looking at the Austin area," Carter said. "Our three daughters had always lived in tiny towns and Austin just seemed so huge."
They decided on Marble Falls and Patrick finally convinced an office supply store to hire him as a commission-only salesman. When the owners began talking about selling, the Carters expressed an interest and "the owners said, 'yeah, right' as we didn't have a dime," Karen laughed.
But through Patrick's Kiwanis connection with a local banker named Howard Counts, the couple soon realized the dream of owning a business.
"He said he had faith in us and gave us our first loan to get started," she said.
Since that time, the Carters and two daughters, Sarah and Jessica, and Sarah's husband, Dwight Batch, have worked to provide top quality office supplies at competitive prices, along with printing and excellent service to customers in a six-county area. A third daughter, Rachel, lives and works in Austin.
"Many people don't realize that we have a full-service printing shop here," Carter stated. "We got into printing because we had two really big customers who wanted fast turn around and we wanted to offer more service to them and all our customers. We even went to night school at Austin Community College to learn printing techniques."
After a quarter of a century in business, Carter said they still love the Marble Falls area and are looking forward to serving customers for many more years.
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