Valerie Hansen
When Valerie Hansen was growing up, she was never considered management material for the family business, Racine, Wis.–based Big Buck Builders Supply, which her grandfather founded in 1929 and her father, Charles Veenstra, ran through the late-1970s. “I could be a candy striper or a baby sitter, but there were no plans for me to run the company,” she recalls sardonically. Besides, three younger brothers were waiting in the wings.
So Hansen pursued different careers, first as a reporter with the Wisconsin State Journal, and then in several administrative posts within the University of Wisconsin’s system. She had plans to earn her doctorate at Harvard University, but they got derailed in 1978 when she didn’t get a grant she had applied for. Around that time, her father, who was nearing retirement age, had fired his general manager and asked her to come into the business to help facilitate a smooth management transition. She had no burning desire to enter retailing—“I was building a house and running for the local school board, which I won”—but agreed to give her father a year.
Hansen wound up taking over the reins, and has held them as Big Buck’s president to this day. (As for her brothers, one stayed out of the business, another works in the yard, and the third is the yard’s safety director.) Big Buck has 105 employees, with women in several key positions, which Hansen explains can be seen as a “legacy” from her university days, where gender is less of an issue in filling positions.
Her first few years running Big Buck were rough, as the Midwest’s industrial sector was mired in its “Rust Belt” era. The dealer operated three “’60s-style” retail stores with a small truss operation attached to one of them. But what it was then is barely recognizable today. Over the past five years, Hansen has transformed the company into a manufacturing and distribution enterprise by consolidating its operations into one 20-acre facility where a truss and a millwork plant dominate. In the rear are the lumberyard (which was moved into this facility last summer), distribution center, and offices.
Big Buck doesn’t disclose financial data, but Hansen says the revamped operations have the capacity to triple the company’s business over the next five years. She also claims Big Buck is head and shoulders above other independent dealers in its use of technology, and points to her truss plant, which is a national beta-testing site for Alpine Engineering’s E-Shop production-flow management system, as just one example. Hansen’s inner geek extends beyond Big Buck, too: In 1995, she and her daughter and son-in-law launched a Seattle-based company called Pro-Build that provides back-office and supply-chain software to dealers.
Having nurtured Big Buck into a healthier state, Hansen—who says she’s “approaching 60”—now devotes more time to her aging parents, who recently entered Wisconsin’s largest nonprofit nursing home, on whose board Hansen sat in the 1980s. —J.C.
