COMPETITIVE Intelligence By Carla Waldemar
Buffalo stampede ou can take the kid out of Buffalo, but you can’t take Buffalo out of the kid. And that kid, Sam Olson, is the poster child for that town of 400, which barely merits a dot in the far (and empty) northwest corner of South Dakota. Sam was born there. He left just long enough to get a degree in business entrepreneurship from Black Hills State University, with which came the predictable Dad
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BUFFALO HARDWARE owner Sam Olson has overseen an ambitious expansion that has the business packed into four city blocks.
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question: Now what? “My dad was a contractor, so I always thought I’d end up working for him—no concrete plan,” Sam allows. Well, if the kid had no idea, his dad felt free to supply him with one. At 77, the owner of the town’s hardware store was ready to retire from the business that had hardly changed over his 47 years on the spot, other than ripping pages off the calendar. “It presented an opportunity. ‘Interested?’ asked my dad. ‘Want to help us take this on?’” Well, why not? “I had zero experience, knew nothing about a POS system (or anything else). I had no idea. But I learned real quick.” Dad put up the cash and Sam the labor. “I was basically an employee, but could build that into ownership. I’d always know that I’d never ‘leave’-leave Buffalo. So I came out, looked at the store, and thought, ‘Why not?’ I was young and bulletproof! And the town fostered a way of life he cherished. “I liked that a handshake really means something here; you own it, you need to stand behind it. That’s something my parents had instilled in me: Make it right. And people buy into that. Besides, when I agreed to take it on, my parents treated my kid’s dream seriously. They’d do the purchase, and I’d do all the work.” Work? What work? What drives business in the epicenter of nowhere? “Ag and cattle,” Sam explains, and just down the road (OK, an hour or two) the fabled South Dakota oil fields, which were bringing in workers: “Lots of young people moving back and businesses coming to town,” Sam noted. The first day on the job, while doing inventory, the temp grew more stifling by the hour. When Sam went to turn on the A/C, he discovered… there was none. So that became his first purchase, applauded by the retirement-age staffers who’d stayed on to get him started. Next: a computer system, which helped with inventory. “Previously, everything had been done by hand. But I’ll be honest: I didn’t have the resources and didn’t know where to look.” After installing a POS system, he turned his attention to a musty, overlooked storeroom. “I gutted it, opened it up from 2,000 sq. ft. to 3,500 sq. ft. to use as our paint room.” Finally, a reset—“a huge undertaking; we added lots of SKUs. New lighting, too. Resets are always extremely difficult, but extremely worth it,” he declares. Afterward, the town’s old-timers would come in and look around, with “I didn’t know you carried….’ We grew the hardware section, added power tools. We revamped the paint section, Building-Products.com
