“It has built a tremendous amount of customer loyalty for us,” President and CEO Peter Simonson said.
Peter Simonson says it’s just one of those things that he recalls was always done by lumberyards in his area. “At some point, somebody—maybe us, nobody remembers—started drawing up house plans and selling the lumber to go with it. Our builders have come to rely on this,” Peter said.
With a loyal builder following, Simonson Lumber, a family company now in its fifth generation, has kept on top of project design throughout the decades as regulations, plans and technology progressed rapidly. A few years ago, Peter decided that Simonson Lumber wasn’t keeping up the quality and turnaround time on home designs that he would have liked.
“This service that people had come to rely on had become poor, not because we were lazy or stupid, but because we were lean. Our builders were saying ‘let’s get this drafting problem taken care of or we’re going to have to go somewhere else.’”
Investing In Tech
At that point Peter and his team realized that keeping the building contractor customers who make up 85% of Simonson Lumber’s business, would require a major investment in technology.
“I said then that we’re going to have to hire the people we need and invest in the tech we need, and this will be our competitive advantage,” Peter said.
