Nuts and Bolts
Kuiken also distinguishes itself with its specialized service teams that fix problems with doors and windows on behalf of the vendors. Those same service experts will go out to a job site and do a one-hour seminar on proper installation of the product just before the windows actually arrive, so installation techniques are fresh in the construction crews’ minds. Once the work is done, the service experts return to the job site to ensure that the windows were put in properly. Those extra touches–covered in the cost of the windows–mean fewer callbacks.
“They do things in a conservative way, but when they commit to it they commit to it,” says John Broomell, a senior vice president at LMC. “They’re very deliberate. …Focus is something that gives them category dominance.”
Kuiken’s fiscal conservatism means it can afford to get an edge over its more cash-poor rivals by buying in rail-car quantities. (Four of its yards have rail spurs.) It buys at least 80% of its commodities direct from the mill, and it also has direct-buy programs with Stanley, Bostitch, Simpson, and Schlage. Spot buying is, well, spotty.
“It’s all about blocking and tackling,” says Matt Kuiken, a member of the family’s fourth generation who runs the Midland Park lumberyard. “There are no tricks. Just get it right.”
Perhaps there are no tricks, but there is almost a magical balancing act that takes place at Kuiken Brothers. It’s specific about what it does, but it also repeatedly has been willing to enter new business lines. Outsiders talk of how long and hard Kuiken will examine a possibility, but Doug also notes he and Henry needed just five minutes to decide to buy a store. And while Kuiken Brothers honors and builds on the past, the past isn’t a barrier to present needs.
“Hey, I’m the guy who tore down grandma’s house,” Doug says.
Kuiken also isn’t shy about investing in technology. In 2008, it began using the ODT dispatch and fleet management system from DQ Technologies. Before, each yard’s dispatcher had only a scant idea of where another yard was sending one of the firm’s 80 vehicles.
“When I managed Emerson, trucks from Fair Lawn and Midland Park would go by and the drivers would honk their horns,” Henry says.
Now, with ODT, those dispatchers now can coordinate the 175 deliveries Kuiken averages daily. There still are problems–such as the tendency by dispatchers to ask the southernmost yard, in Roseland, to handle what could be lengthy deliveries to the Jersey Shore–but it saved Kuiken enough in efficiencies and costs to pay for itself in two years. Next up, Kuiken Brothers plans to increase its capabilities by adding GPS to all its vehicles.
As computers have improved, Doug has seen the company’s capabilities improve as well. (Its main software is Epicor’s Falcon system.) Decades ago, “It wasn’t about the year or month, but rather about the last five minutes,” he says. “We now can monitor how people buy, what products they buy.”
Lumber U
The Kuiken story starts with Nicholas A. Kuiken, who with brothers Dirk and Henry emigrated in 1890 to what is now Fair Lawn. Despite its English name, the borough was settled by Dutch; the area was called Slooterdam until 1791, and Fair Lawn Avenue was known as Dunkerhook Road. Depending on the dictionary, “Kuiken” translates to English as chicken, chick, or pullet. Various Kuiken men married women with family names like Sikkema and Rienstra.
“It’s in my DNA,” Doug says of the company’s Dutch forebears. “A culture of people working hard in an agrarian society, seeking to create something.” All eight men who collectively own the company are Kuikens.
In 1912, Nicholas A. Kuiken founded and registered the name The Kuiken Brothers Co. and got busy building homes and businesses. In 1921, the brothers began a lumberyard and millwork shop. That sideline became the family business once the Depression wiped out new home building. In the late 1930s, paint and hardware went up on store shelves.
After World War II, a second generation of Kuikens entered the scene, among them Evan–”an absolutely straight shooter,” Alampi recalls–who proved to be a transitional figure in Kuiken Brothers’ evolution, helping mentor Doug and the third generation.
Doug joined in 1969. He says he went to “Lumber U,” but his letter sweater should read LMC, as his service on various committees there gave him a wide and deep education. Doug became LMC’s chairman in 2000–one of the most tension-filled periods in its history because of the debate over whether to require members to drop their affiliations with other co-ops.
“I just think he did one hell of a job leading us through that,” Loran Hall says. “I think the dealers trusted him. He has a calming effect. … People look to him for leadership.”
That Lumber U education helped Doug, cousin Henry, and others from his generation to think differently than their conservative elders. One such change came in 1990 when the young turks proposed that Kuiken buy a lumberyard in Emerson, nine miles away. Their parents couldn’t see any benefits.
“It wasn’t a fight [over expansion],” recalls Henry. “They just told us, ‘You’re nuts.'”
Eventually the young group won out, and over the years Kuiken Brothers bought six more facilities: five lumberyards and a commercial building product distributor called Emerson Supply. Kuiken didn’t build its own facilities from scratch until 2004, when it acquired a site in Succasunna, N.J., that had been a Wickes Lumber yard before it burned 10 years previously.
