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COMPETITIVE Intelligence
By Carla Waldemar
Stick to your niche emember—of course you do— the day the distressed astronauts called out, “Houston, we’ve got a problem?” To translate to a different dilemma recently facing another city, Brent Emery, owner of E&E Lumber & Home Center, based in Marysville, Wa.—fast becoming a bedroom
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community of Seattle 35 miles distant along the main corridor—was perhaps tempted to believe that, there in the headquarters of firms like Boeing, Microsoft, Google and Amazon, a problem loomed. “Because we are situated with mountains to the east, the ocean to
the west, it’s a pocket of development here,” Brent explains—lots of industry coming in, and we’re right on the main drag.” Thus, E&E was supplying packages for 300-plus houses a year. Until. Until the bad years of 20112013. “It got to the point that banks weren’t loaning money, so we dialed back. I changed our format, limited our expenses. And now”—the good news—“we’re making way-better margins with less volume.” In the meantime, along came COVID with its unforeseen bonus: “We had a captive audience; everybody was working from home. We were deemed an essential business, so we had our biggest sales in 54 years in 2020.” Essential, for sure, but also crazy: How to handle the demand? “I decided to close for one week in March to assess the situation. Then in April we re-opened, under COVID, with hours from 7 to 3, Mondays through Fridays. But still, the amount of profit was absolutely insane, so we said, ‘Screw it! We’ve gotta go for it,’ and went back up to our normal, pre-COVID hours, and everybody stayed healthy. It was the best 18, 19 months in the history of the company, though it’s starting to drift back to normal now. Which,” he says, “is a good thing, because we couldn’t have survived. We’d been working six days a week, 14-hour days. We’d close at 8 or 9, then come in again at 5 a.m. to pull packages. We were pretty well burned. “Plus,” he view the insult heaped on injury, “The supply issues—which will take another couple of months to get back to normal—brought on extortion from the mills. We were also E&E LUMBER owner Brent Emery illustrates the advantages of exceling in—and sticking to—your niche.
Building-Products.com
November 2021
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The Merchant Magazine n
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