Milwaukeets finest

LTFFERT Luveen & Hardware, of Milwaukee. Wi.. dates backway back-to 1904, or even earlier, if you count the coal and ice company from which it sprang. "Sawdust and lumber go together," explains current c.e.o. Eli Bliffert, 66so my great-grandfather was smart enough to expand."

Actually, those early 1900s were less than stellar for the outfit. But then the founder's daughter married J.P. Bliffert, the fellow who added lumber to the mix and grew the company from one location in 1929 to six by 1955. When J.P. died, the six yards split into stand-alones, each operated by a different family member.

Fast forward to 2004, for if that year hadn't spawned a brawny new vision, you could turn the page right now; there wouldn't be a story. The year 2OO4 was when young (then 35) Eli Bliffert-clearly a chip off his great-grandfather's entrepreneurial block-had the smarts, and guts, to merge the six discrete, outlying sites back into one far-sounder corporation. "It made more sense to operate them together than apart," he explains. "The others [family members] were getting up in years, so it took someone younger, who wanted to pull the company back together."

He was. And he did. And since then, added a seventh site. Before that unification venture, he'd run two of those six yards with 20 employees. After. seven stores with staff number- ing 150. "ln 2001, I built an office and hardware store on the original site and in 2009 bought the yard in Waukesha. In 201l, I merged the last of the family yards, and in 2013,1 bought another existing yard an hour south of town in Racine County. I just did stuff that made sense. I expanded hard during the downturn, and that added size let me leverage better buying terms with vendors." It also opened avenues to add new products, like salt and ice melt.

Huh? Hold that snicker. "Salt had not been sold in lumberyards," he notes, "but it became a really strong category; we undersell the boxes by a good chunk of change," yet still maintain cozy margins here in the snow belt muscling onto Lake Michigan.

There's strength in numbers, sure, but also strength in diversity. No cookie cutters in the mix: "All my stores have different strengths and different demographics, so we handle a huge breadth of products, and we can move those products around [from store to storel to suit our customers." Those customers are'|OVo pro, with a healthy sprinkling of do-ityourselfers and commercial accounts as well. In fact, says Eli, "we do a lot of commercial-stuff the boxes don't want to play with, like concrete-forming products and fire-treated, flameresistant products. They're strong categories, and we do some of the largest business in the state."

Bliffert also serves those contractors building a house or two a year plus the larger builders developing tracts. "And our remodeling business is huge," he discloses. "One niche is our moulding profiles in hardwoods.

In these older German cities around here, houses were built over a hundred years ago, and we can still match that trim."

To glean new business, Bliffert takes out a few ads, attends trade shows, joins the local builders associations, and makes cold calls ("for sure!"), but mainly relies on the strength and expertise of his longtime inside and outside sales force. "We've been here so long-long-term family ownership and long-term employees with very little turnover. We tell them, 'We want your business not just today, but for the long haul.' As it is, today we're dealing with many of the kids of our former customers, who've stuck with us when their dads retired." To further aid these pros, Bliffert schedules breakfast seminars "so the smaller guy can earn the CEU credits they need to keep their licenses current" and to introduce new products.

Sure, the boxes are nipping at his heels, as they are everywhere, "but we try to do things differently than they can; they all look the same. It's to our advantage not to be a national chain, so folks can actually talk to the decisionmaker; they can always talk to me, and we'll be able to do something creative to secure their business. There's no other layer of management you have to go through."

Look at the website's map of locations, pinpointed evenly across the wider metro, and you think, "Smart!" But Eli only laughs. "Not! It's just the way my great-grandfather built them." But Eli, in turns, builds on that given: "Each has its own customer base, and that's really our strength."

That, and the courage (or whatever you choose to call it) to expand during the devastating downturn. "It was a miserable time," he concedes." We had to shrink employees, shrink vehicles, watch every single penny. But I hung in because there are no shareholders to answer to, just me. The long-term goal was to keep on selling and not give up, and I never lost sight of things-so you've got to have the courage to expand in a downturn. I bought one ongoing business and then another, in Racine County, that had been closed five years. (And the community really embraced us.)

"The good times of 2004-'05 may never come back, and we're still very vigilant with accounts receivable and margins," Eli declares. "But we got smarter during the downturn: You make do with less, tighten your belt, and also, know how to expand. Today, business has more than doubled what it was five years ago."

And market share has skyrocketed. "It's doing very well. But today," he concedes, "it's a smaller market than it was ten years ago. We grew, but as we grew, we also lost competition, which left us as the largest lumberyard (if not the only one) in Milwaukee. As others went out of business, we picked up their best people, their best customers, and their equipment."

Not bad for a fellow who might be titled The Accidental Entrepreneur. "I never grew up intending to join the family business. I got into it by accident. I was going to grad school in Milwaukee and needed a summer job. Uncle Fred hired me in 1993-and I never left."

Why? "Owning your own business is very hard, but it's also very rewarding. And building on the family history and tradition is something to be proud of. Milwaukee," he says, "is bouncing back. By its nature, it never had the high peaks and the low lows of other cities; we're behind the rest of the countrv. never had a jet set, but I'm okay with that. We're a family company, and that comes first."

What comes second? Remember the other local item those Germans love as much as their homes' historic mouldings? Eli does. He laughs, "We give away a lot of beer."

Carla Waldemar cwaldemar@comcast.net