Old School, New Guy
- Company: Lloyd Lumber, Nampa, Idaho
- Age: 30
- Title: Operations Manager
- Tenure with company: 16 years
- 2006 gross sales: $38 million
Scott Jacobsen, operations manager at Lloyd Lumber in Nampa, Idaho, likes to say he started in the lumber business the old-fashioned way: He was born into it. As the third generation of his family to work at the single-yard, $38 million company, he’s pushed a broom, built loads, and delivered materials. Now, at 30, he’s starting to run more and more of the day-to-day operations at the company, as his father, Bob, 58, remains president. And while he’s armed with technology and feels he has the experience he’ll need to run the company in the future, he sees a fundamental difference between his generation and that of his father: namely, in his professional life, he’s never seen hard times.
“One thing that we’ve noticed is that guys in my age class haven’t really gone through an extended period of slow business,” Jacobsen says. “That’s what my dad and his leadership team have been trying to get us to understand and prepare us for.”
That means an attitude of constant vigilance and keeping tabs on what competition is doing in their area, while maintaining long-standing business relationships and prospecting for new ones. It’s little things that he’s learned from his father through the years, like following up on deliveries to make sure customers are satisfied, maintaining regular contact with accounts, even if it’s not to sell them anything, and looking for new, better ways to serve their needs. As president of the Young Westerners Club of the
Western Building Materials Association, he encourages his own employees to attend industry conferences and education seminars as much as possible. “You have got to be constantly trying to move forward, because if you’re not, your competition will,” Jacobsen says.
Yet as much as he respects the past, he knows he and his peers have strengths, too. “For one, I’m a child of the Internet and e-mail generation. The time it takes to get an order over e-mail versus driving out to a jobsite and taking it down with pencil and paper is huge,” Jacobsen says. “And then, the software packages that are available to optimize engineered wood usage, production scheduling, inventory control, delivery, and tracking make it a whole new world. There are just a lot more tools available to try and find ways to be more efficient and more profitable.”
Having grown up with technology, though, Jacobsen knows it isn’t a panacea, either. “It’s a different way of thinking. I don’t have to hold that piece of paper in my hand to know a purchase order is real, but I also know the computer is only as good as the information put into it.” In that sense, taking a real-world walk through the yard, just as past generations always have, can be a beneficial gut check to running the business.
By mixing the lessons of the past with an acceptance and anticipation of change in the future, Jacobsen hopes he can steer Lloyd to a fourth generation of ownership within his own family.
“Fewer and fewer family businesses are staying independent for the second and third generation, and I don’t want to become one of those statistics,” Jacobsen says. “Lloyd has benefited for a long time from good decision-making, and my intention is to maintain that tradition, while keeping the business moving forward.”
–Joe Bousquin
No Jacket Required
- Company: Contractor Express, Oceanside, N.Y.
- Age: 37
- Title: Vice President
- Tenure with company: 6 years
- 2006 gross sales: $16 million
For 10 years, Greg Failla dressed in a suit and tie each day before riding the subway to work at healthcare insurer Empire BlueCross BlueShield in New York City. With a degree in psychology from Queens College, he landed a job at the insurer out of school, and eventually rose through the ranks to vice president with 300 people working for him.
These days, though, the suit stays in the closet. As vice president of Contractor Express, a single-yard lumber and building material dealer on Long Island, 37-year-old Failla manages day-to-day operations at the $16 million firm and is tapped to lead the family-owned business into the future, even though he’s not a part of that family or backed by a lifetime of experience in the industry. “If you told me 10 years ago that I would be working at Contractor Express, I would have said you were crazy,” Failla says. “As it turned out, it’s one of the best things that ever happened to me.”
Though far from the stereotypical, multigenerational lumberman, Failla wasn’t totally without exposure to the business. As a teenager growing up on Long Island, he held a part-time job at the yard and returned for a few summers during college. He always stayed in touch with Contractor Express president and co-founder Bob Lucas, who started the business in 1981 with his two brothers, Jack and Jim. When the business grew to a point where it needed a systematic management approach to reach the next level, Lucas gave Failla a call.
“I’m sure that in much of the lumber industry, you see the opposite trend,” Failla says. “Typically, it’s a family business and the succession runs through the family from generation to generation. But I think now that the big boxes are knocking off the mom-and-pops, it’s a different mentality, and one that doesn’t automatically hand the business to the next son or daughter.”
Failla says his story points to a new reality in the lumber industry, one that’s often overlooked by young, career-oriented workers: There’s real opportunity, and real money, in the lumber business.
“I look at it like this: I’ve got a white-collar job in a blue-collar world,” Failla says. “You see kids coming out of college today, and everybody wants to be a lawyer or doctor, or go to work for American Express. They look at the lumber business and say, ‘I don’t want to go there, that’s a blue-collar job.’
But we work with recruiters on a regular basis to let people know this industry is just as good as, or better than, those, both financially and in terms of personal satisfaction and growth.”
With his perspective from outside the industry,
Failla has positioned Contractor Express as a tech-savvy, independent dealer. Not only does the firm run Activant’s ERP software, it offers contractors electronic invoices and statements, as well as the ability to build orders on its Web site or receive a quote electronically on a given materials list. “A lot of times, the lumber business is seen as not being particularly tech savvy,” Failla says. “But in the world I came from, that’s all anyone ever did. If you’re still doing everything on paper, it’s like being in the Stone Age. Time is money, and doing everything electronically has just been a huge savings for us.”
–Joe Bousquin
