-
After years of striving to be both realistic and optimistic in the face of bad news, it's great to describe this year's ProSales 100 in happier terms.
-
Many of the stories in April's ProSales echo a similar theme: To succeed, you need to get close to your customers.
-
Dealers today are exhausted but optimistic about future prospects. That's good, editor Craig Webb says, so long as they seek to avoid being one of the housing crash's last victims.
-
Lots of now-old LBM operations started off as something else. Kuiken Brothers, our Dealer of the Year, began as a home builder. Other companies used to cut timber. Still others hauled coal. But all evolved in response to community needs and opportunities.
-
I like to joke that everything in life is tied to LBM. Now it has even changed how I view one of my favorite movies.
-
A voice from the past reached out and spoke to Chris Yenrick not long ago. Yenrick was going through an old filing cabinet in the Statesville, N.C., branch of Smith Phillips Building Supply when he came across a column clipped from the June 17, 1950, edition of the American Lumberman & Building...
-
Dealer executives often regard the companies they buy and sales reps they poach as opportunities to expand territories and grow market share. But they appear to think less about how those newcomers could poison what the acquirers already have by introducing bad, or at least contrary, ways of doing...
-
Housing economists are like weather forecasters: The more locally they focus, the more likely their predictions will be wrong.
-
Decades ago, soon after starting work at my local hardware store, the manager tipped me off to a vital skill: Learning to speed-read a label faster than the customer so you can sound like an expert on that product. In LBM, when you're dealing with pro contractors, you need far more expertise to...
-
Not long ago, I did two interviews on the same day and heard starkly different views on the best way to be a big dealer.
-
One of the sharpest lumberyard managers I ever met was a man in California's Central Valley who told me the only way to succeed in LBM is to grow up in the business. I disagree.
-
There's an old joke in the news business that describes a newspaper as a carefully crafted, multimillion-dollar product that is entrusted to a 12-year-old paperboy–who promptly tosses it into the bushes. Today, that joke might describe a manufacturer that spends millions on development and then...
-
Rarely have we entered a year in which perspective and attitude matter more in our industry. Most dealers I've met lately regard this slump glumly, as a famine to be endured. That's why it was such a head-turner to hear Peter Ganahl refer to our current malaise as "The Opportunity Zone."
-
There are times I've felt the judges of the 2010 ProSales Excellence Awards should give a prize to every LBM operation that survived this year. Considering the conditions we're in, one would think that simply being able to keep the doors open would be achievement enough. But once our panel of...
-
I believe it will be changes in the needs of dealers' customers–both the builders they sell to as well as the consumers who ultimately pay for the pros' work–that will be the primary drivers this decade in the evolution of the American home.
-
The nation's housing numbers remind me of the scene in the movie Das Boot in which the captain of a German submarine escapes certain death by ordering the boat to sink far below its rated depth limit.
-
Sir Clive Woodward was knighted at the start of 2004 in honor of having coached England's rugby team to the World Cup title.
-
You'll find an extra-large helping of product news in this issue of ProSales.
-
There was no mistaking the melancholy in the Missouri dealer's voice.
-
After going from bad to worse in 2009, there's comfort in forecasts that we'll go from bad to only slightly less bad in 2010.