A TRADITION IN THE MAKING

By Anthony Stoeckert

While a lot of billiard stores have been around for decades and have been passed down from family member to family member, Kevin Henderson takes special pride in the fact that he has built his business, Prestige Billiards, from scratch.

“I basically started it out of my garage,” Henderson says. “I was an installer-subcontractor, just doing pool table setups, and I sold used pool tables out of my garage.”

But the roots of Prestige Billiards date back to years before that, when Henderson was a kid playing pool on his fa- ther’s table. When he answered a Help Wanted ad for a local billiard store seeking someone to work on installations, he did not think he was embarking on a career. In fact, he was planning on going to college and becoming an architect. But he took the job out of curiosity.

“I wanted to see how pool tables were put together, I wasn’t thinking about doing it forever,” Henderson remembers. “That’s why I went to work for that company, and they taught me the trade. But if I didn’t grow up on a pool table, I probably wouldn’t have ended up in this industry.”

He started out doing installations, making $4.75 an hour working weekends and summers while he was in high school. That was around 1997. Then in around 1999, he started subcontracting.

“That’s when I started making money, my first year as a subcontractor,” Henderson says. “It wasn’t a bad gig for being right out of high school. That’s what kind of steered me away from becoming an architect. This job is more casual, it’s like a blue collar/ white collar mix, you get the best of both worlds.”

The company he was working for was called Wholesale Billiards, and he bought it in 2001. In 2006, he changed the business’ name to Prestige Billiards. Not too long after, the recession hit.

“We had three stores going and we had 22 employees, and the recession took us out,” Henderson says. “We closed all the stores and lost everything. But I kept with it, doing set-ups and stuff.”

Table sales started again in 2010, this time out of a storage unit because he didn’t have a storefront. To say Henderson was successful is a bit of an understatement because he started to draw the attention of people in the industry to the point that he once again was able to open a small store, a 1,100-squarefoot space. He later relocated that store to Scottsdale, Arizona, in a space of about 2,300 square feet, and then opened a second location, in Mesa.

“We started to make some noise in the industry as far as our sales,” Henderson says. “We were selling just Imperial pool tables and we ended up becoming their No. 1 West Coast dealer.”