If money talks, why don’t LBM people let it speak more when we look for workers? That question comes to me every time I hear an ad during my local baseball team’s broadcasts in which a steamfitters union touts how its journeymen can make more than $100,000 annually. And that’s with no student loans, the union stresses—twice, within 10 seconds—during the commercial.
However, LBM dealers can offer even better upward mobility than that, and could thus win a recruiting war for future talent if they were to point out the many people in our ranks who started working for beer money and now drive pickup trucks that cost more than their neighbor’s BMW.
I know this because you’ve told me so. Recently, I asked you to send me rags-to-riches stories of your colleagues. You sent me dozens:
• Alpine Lumber president Hamid Taha started in the company as a truck driver.
• Guy C. Lee Building Supply CEO Cory Jameson began as a part-time load-puller while studying at East Carolina University.
• Ashley Armstrong joined Curtis Lumber from a job at Best Buy and now runs the dealer’s biggest store, one that would qualify for the ProSales 100 all by itself.
It would be easy to keep going because the stories are so plentiful. What’s needed now is to share these tales with future leaders.
Employment experts often say that people are attracted to businesses where they can see themselves flourish and move up the corporate ladder. Construction supply offers those opportunities in spades, and you don’t need a college degree to get on the escalator.
Two years ago, Bloomberg Businessweek noted that general managers at 84 Lumber’s top-grossing stores could earn more than $200,000 a year. With bonuses, that pay could reach $1 million. It’s even better at the top: Chad Crow’s base salary as CEO of Builders FirstSource is $950,000 a year. Those numbers may be exceptional, but it’s common for general managers and executives across the country to command six-figure salaries. They achieve that at a time when the average salary in America doesn’t crack $60,000 a year.
Yes, an LBM career also can be turbulent; I was impressed at how many times people moved as they progressed from newbie to manager to executive. But millennials are more used to, and better prepared for, a life spent traversing from job to job. What they’ll see in construction supply won’t faze them. The bigger challenge is making millennials and members of Generation Z aware that we exist.
In 2009, ProSales profiled Rodney Potter, who went from earning 85 cents an hour in 1955 to co-owning a yard. Then 72, he frequently spoke at schools in Bradenton, Fla., telling the mainly minority student population about opportunities in LBM. Potter knew that if you want good workers, you have to go out and get them attracted to your business.
We have plenty of people in our industry who approximate what Rodney Potter achieved but very few who follow his example as a proselytizer. That’s a shame. I joke that not many people know about LBM because many of our operations are located by the railroad tracks in the bad part of town. TV shows and movies don’t help; about the only small business ever shown is Mr. Hooper’s store in Sesame Street. That makes it even more important that we broadcast our story, and include money in our message.
