COMPETITIVE INTELLIGENCE

RELATIONSHIPS AREN’T JUST TRANSACTIONAL

------------ BY SARA GRAVES

IT WAS THE SPRING of 2019 and the country was on the brink of a global pandemic when the Lumber Traders board approached Danny Steiger to ask him to step in as interim CEO. The existing CEO, who took over the reigns in 2014, announced that he was moving on. Steiger, a store manager who had been with the company just shy of three years, had some big shoes to fill.

And as it turned out, the board was correct to ask him. Steiger not long after became the official CEO/ president of Lumber Traders, Inc., parent company to Angeles Millwork & Lumber Co. and Hartnagel Building Supply, Port Angeles, Wa. “All the stars aligned with my past experiences and what I had learned and what I had been through.”

Ironically, he was able to draw upon his past experiences to be successful. He reflected on his time working at his parent’s pet and feed store, where he learned bookkeeping, customer service and basic business practices, and on his experience at Westside Building Supply, Lynden, Wa., where at 18, he began learning pro and contractor sales, and later cabinetry.

And although he originally had no intention of working in the industry out of college, he says it was the customers that caused him to fall in love with the industry. “It’s a relational industry. We’re seeing the same builders in here every single day. We’re getting to know them—working on their projects—really partnering in

EACH YEAR, Washington sister companies Angeles Millwork and Hartnagel Building Supply distribute new branded hats and hoodies to customers and contractors.

their success. It’s not just a transactional relationship.” He is still in love with the industry 21 years later.

He looked to customers like Scott Schwagler of J&J Construction, returning board member for the North Peninsula Building Association (NPBA), who supports many of the area’s youth programs, and Kevin Russell of Kevin Russell Construction, a builder who builds custom homes on the Olympic Peninsula, who remains very active in local politics and lobbying for the industry and community.

“These are the salt-of-the-earth people who really dig in and give back to their community and want to make it a better place,” Steiger says.

He adds although it was a weird time for the industry through the global pandemic, the company has, nevertheless, flourished. “We’re on target to be up, since 2019, 36% in our revenues.” And as an ESOP (Employee Stock Ownership Plan), the share value has increased 66% during the same time period. Through 2021, the ESOP value was nearly $6 million, and on target to grow as 2022 came to an end.

A big part of that success, he says, is being pragmatic and flexible. “The things that worked for us

CEO Danny Steiger stands in front of one of the two Hartnagel Glassworks trucks purchased last year.

PARTNERING with Do it Best, Hartnagel Building Supply has been extensively remodeled, adding $250,000 in additional in-store inventory and categories.

previously—some of those things worked great, and some things were completely turned on their head. We had to get flexible for where we were sourcing product, the supply chain being in a state of shambles, and trying to be proactive about those things.”

In addition, the company’s ability to retain longtime staff and acquire highly skilled staff from outside of the industry have helped the company grow in the years since the pandemic began.

Yet, finding new employees has been hard, Steiger acknowledges, so the company began looking outside of the industry to find potential employees who had the right talent and skills to learn the industry, but also had the right business fundamentals to expand on their knowledge and experience in other areas as well. “There’s not a lot of people coming into the industry, so we really need to look outside of the industry and find the people to bring in who have the skills who can grow the company.”

Thankfully, being an employee- owned company has aided in their search and has been highly attractive to the new talent the company has been looking to bring into the industry. For instance, one store manager hired by the company for his exceptional skills in managing operations, Steiger says, was previously a manager at a Big 5 Sporting Goods store who had no building industry experience. “He’s actually going to be promoted to our operations manager here very shortly (once a replacement is found for his position).”

“So, absolutely, we plan to keep recruiting from out of the industry and bring people who have these skills,” Steiger exclaims, so the company can capitalize on “great ideas that maybe didn’t come from our industry.”

Interestingly, the company has found employee recruiting success in having its employees hand out little cards to people in their community doing an exceptional job. The cards essentially say, “Hey you’re awesome,” and feature a QR code to the company website that asks the person if they would be interested in applying a job. So far, two employees have joined the company using this recruitment method once they learned more about the ESOP.

“It is kind of the ethos of the company—being employee owned. It has changed how the employees view company profits, Steiger says. For instance, “if we wrecked a few boards in the yard, we start thinking, ‘Ok, these boards that we wrecked— let’s say $15,000 last year in damage—that’s half a penny on the share price.’ It doesn’t sound like much, but when you start multiplying that out by how many shares, that’s a lot of money.”

As the company grows its personnel, it also has been eying its expansion in the Port Angeles community.

CUSTOMER SERVICE is at the heart of Lumber Traders.

A GOOD OMEN ascends over the corner of Hartnagel Building Supply—as the company likes to say, “The sun is always shining in the Pacific Northwest, even if we can’t always see it.”

In fact, Angeles Millwork grew its rental department from $105,000 in revenue three years ago, to $250,000 in 2022. And, after looking at the needs of the local community, it closed on a new 11,000-sq. ft. location (in downtown Port Angeles in the Sears building) on December 13, 2022, that will house its rental center so the company can “get a lot more equipment and some different product lines,” Steiger adds. “We don’t have any other rental centers in Port Angeles. Everybody had to drive 20-30 minutes to Sequim (Washington), for those services.”

In addition, the company identified that the Port Angeles area lacked good sources of glass, namely window installation, mirrors, and shower doors. Stepping into that underserved market has proven highly successful for the company.

In fact, the demand on the Hartnagel Glassworks team has been so high that at the end of 2022, the company was booking out about three months just for a measurement and has hired another apprentice for the department.

As the company looks to expand its presence in Port Angeles and the Olympic Peninsula area in the future, Steiger says it is busy launching a new e-commerce platform so it can run its businesses as efficiently and nimbly as possible, and to “adjust and pivot as we need to in the face of changing market conditions. We can’t be stagnant.”

It’s this constant forward momentum that has enabled this company to grow, adapt and faithfully serve its customers and community for nearly 120 years. “The better the community does, the better the business does. And the better the business does, the more we can give back to the community so it can really keep building on each other,” Steiger concludes. BP

SARA GRAVES

Sara Graves, senior editor, is interested in your story. Contact her at sgraves@526mediagroup.com.

SALES EFFORT

------------ BY JAMES OLSEN

SALES IS AN “effort out—money back” business. Our industry is competitive and going to be more so in 2023.

I have worked with and trained salespeople in the lumber industry for 40 years. I have only seen one seller who worked hard enough not be able to make a career of sales. This person worked hard but just couldn’t connect with people on the phone. He was stiff and unnatural. Sales is a transfer of emotion, so if we cannot relax and act natural, customers will be uncomfortable and will want to get off the phone or out of the meeting as soon as possible and definitely will not be in a “buying” mood.

But the biggest reason people fail in sales is lack of effort. Sales, especially in the early stages of our career, takes a lot of work. We are often building our account base from scratch. Some are fortunate to be given accounts to work, but these are not usually strong accounts; they need to be worked and developed. These salespeople will also be expected to bring on new business.

Right Place(s) Right Time(s)

One of the ways we break into accounts is to be in the right place at the right time when our customer’s preferred supplier makes a mistake. Some sellers seem to have a knack for it. This “knack” comes from being in the right place at the right time with many accounts, not just a few. These sellers simply give themselves more opportunity for “luck” to come their way.

In sales, we only count the makes not the missus, so if we take more shots we have a better and faster chance to opening new accounts.

Minimum Effort

Our minimums when I traded were 50 outbound phone calls and 200 minutes a day. To be successful we must hit those numbers or very close. Several colleagues did more than that on a consistent basis and guess what? They made the most money. One call every 10 minutes is 48 outbound calls in an eighthour day.

I know and have trained many wildly successful salespeople. The grand majority work their tails off. Many of them make great incomes. But... the top producers don’t talk, think or, most importantly, work like the bottom 90%. The math just doesn’t work.

Two Most Important Hours

The two most important time and effort hours of the day are the last and the first.

Last hour of the day: We make a call list of minimum 20 customers that we are going to contact with delivered prices worked up on multiple items before we go home. If we are going to send offerings to our customers by email, we send them night before and use the “delayed email” option in Outlook, so they arrive at our customers desk in the morning.

Many sellers spend the first hour of the day “getting ready.” They come in, fix themselves some breakfast (eat breakfast at home!), surf the net a bit, then start. That does not and never will work.

First hour of the day: When our behinds hit our chair our finger should hit the phone. I also encourage you to prospect the first hour of every day, unless the market is running.

Excuses

Excuse #1: “My customers all buy by email.” Okay, send out your offerings the night before. In addition, if this is true, you should be able to make more phone calls.

Excuse # 2: “I make and take a lot of calls on my cell phone.” Okay, document the number of these calls so your effort is recognized.

Ms. or Mrs. Charisma

If you have an established customer base or you are Mr. or Ms. “Charisma,” you can probably get away with less effort. I find charismatic sellers are about one in 50, so statistically speaking most of us are not that person. If you are new, the chances of you becoming top producer are infinitesimally small without effort. If you are Mr. or Ms. Charisma, it will happen bigger and faster with more work.

The Hard Way IS the Easy Way

“The hard way is the easy way; the easy way is the hard way.” It’s not about working more hours; it’s about the intensity of the hours we put in.

JAMES OLSEN

James Olsen is principal of Reality Sales Training, Portland, Or. Call him at (503) 544-3572 or email james@realitysalestraining.com.

DO UNTO OTHERS AS YOU WOULD HAVE THEM DO UNTO YOU

------------ BY DAVE KAHLE

ONE OF THE principles that I have discovered in my 35 years as a consultant and sales guru is this: Biblical business principles are also those principles that enable a company to achieve more of its potential. In other words, you can take the Biblical sourcing away from a business principle, and the principle still works.

I’ve stumbled across this truth as it specifically relates to B2B salespeople. Assemble a system and a set of practices that enable a salesperson to leap to the top of his/her profession, and, coincidentally, those principles arrived at through a study of the best practices of successful salespeople, are the very same principles discerned through a study of the Bible.

As a consultant, I’ve discovered the same truth applied to businesses and professional careers. Adhere to certain Biblical principles, whether or not you know they are Biblical, and your career will blossom, and your business will reach more of its potential. You don’t need to be a Bible student to discover the principles upon which you can build a successful career, you just need to study the best practices of the best in your business and the two will coincide.

In this article, I’m going to unpack one such principle: Do unto others as you would have them do unto you. Biblically, Jesus said this in Matthew 7:12. Practically, it’s incredibly good advice upon which you can build a personal character and a corporate culture.

You can apply it in multiple contexts and situations. • Think of prospecting for new customers, for example. If you were guided by this principle, you’ll sharpen your definition of who is a potential customer to a highly- refined set of specific criteria. You’d want to reach out to only that set of people/organizations that were most likely to have an interest or a need for your products/service. You wouldn’t want to solicit someone who was less likely to need what you offer. Why? Because you wouldn’t want to be approached by someone with a product or service that you were only marginally interested in. It would be a waste of your time. Do unto others…. • Your pricing would be fair and market based. Why? Because you want to have some trust in the fairness of the price you were quoted, if you were on the other side of that issue. • You’d treat all your customers with courtesy and respect, because that’s how you would want to be treated. You’d listen carefully to any complaints, and do your best to resolve them. • You’d strive to be a great customer to your vendors. Respect their time, listen to their conversations and presentations, and strive to pay all your bills within their terms. After all, that’s how you would want to be treated. • You’d pick up your messes and tidy up a bit before you left a hotel room. You’d tip generously. You’d praise and compliment regularly.

As a result of consistently applying this principle, your employees would enjoy working for you, your customers would grow in their loyalty to you, your vendors would favor you, and your community would respect and support you.

Not a bad outcome.

DAVE KAHLE

Dave Kahle is a leading sales authority, having written 12 books and presented in 47 states and 11 countries. For more information, visit davekahle.com.

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