Linda Nussbaum
Linda Nussbaum’s career over two decades with Huntington, N.Y.–based Kleet Lumber can be tracked by its fortuitous and defining moments. While working at a woman-owned company called Mayflower Podiatry, Nussbaum was recommended by Kleet Lumber’s computer supplier to replace the dealer’s controller, who had resigned after a falling out with the owners, Howard and Warren Kleet. Being hired didn’t automatically impart respect from her coworkers; that is until she had to fire one of them for threatening a dispatcher. “That showed [that] what I said goes, and the buck stopped here,” she recalls. And in her early days, when being the only woman at industry events sometimes made her the butt of jokes, Nussbaum says Merrill Becker, then president of Kleet’s rival Riverhead Building Supply and chairman of the Northeast Retail Lumber Association, took her under his wing.
Nussbaum is now Kleet Lumber’s CFO, in charge of the dealer’s finances, insurance, human resources, the management of its truck fleet, and union negotiations. “Howard always told me to do anything I wanted in the company,” she says.
Her skills and judgment, though, were put to their ultimate test when a five-alarm fire on June 2, 2001, destroyed the company’s two main buildings and caused an estimated $10 million in damage. On the day of the blaze, Nussbaum and her family were on their way to Disney World in Florida when she got a call from the owners. “They didn’t even know who we had insurance with,” says Nussbaum. Two days later, the pro dealer was operating out of a trailer, and Nussbaum had set up delivery schedules for trucks that could still draw inventory from the outside yard, which wasn’t burned. She worked with Kleet’s computer company in Denver to retrieve records, so that by the end of that month Kleet was sending statements to its customers. Nussbaum also negotiated with Suffolk County’s Industrial Assurance Division for tax breaks and assistance for the reconstruction effort, which resulted in a new facility that opened in 2004 and includes Kleet’s offices, a two-story showroom, an expanded millwork shop, and a drive-through lumberyard.
During that three-year ordeal, Kleet Lumber held on to its customers and its employees. The Long Island Business News reported recently that Kleet’s annual revenue rose to $55 million in 2005, from $33 million annually in the years 2001 through 2003. Its employee count increased from 65 to 97. One of those associates is Nussbaum’s son, Spencer, an outside salesman. (Fourteen employees are women, nearly all of whom are in administrative positions.)
Nussbaum’s performance during Kleet Lumber’s recovery reinforced the owners’ confidence in her abilities. As they’ve eased out of the daily management of Kleet Lumber, they’ve placed Nussbaum at the head of a team that will run the company until the next generation of Kleets is ready to take over the business. Nussbaum says she’s putting in 55- to 60-hour workweeks, “but I like want I do, and I couldn’t imagine working anywhere else.”
