In my previous article, “Making the Most of Mass Timber,” I discuss what mass timber entails and why it may not be a good add-on for your existing light-frame component business. Even so, component manufacturers (CMs) need not be completely shut out of the benefits of the burgeoning...

Millions of dollars are being lost by many companies that don’t recognize they have a problem — Does your LBM company have more than $50 million combined sales? Quantified as a ratio of sales, according to Six Sigma case studies, the cost of poor quality, defined as waste,...

What was widely expected has finally happened. Years of very profitable high sales led to vast increases in capacity to meet that demand, but now we have declining sales volume—the classic too much supply versus not enough demand to maintain margins. Some like to call this margin...

Undoubtedly you’ve seen many articles talking about mass timber, but you may not be very familiar with what products are included and some of their applications. In speaking with some light-frame component manufacturers over recent years, I have heard many of them mention that they are, or...

If you’re in the business of roof truss manufacturing and you’re looking at ways to increase your market share, it’s time to consider adding floor truss manufacturing to your operation. Recent research shows that the global floor truss market is anticipated to rise at a...

We can all learn from companies that have the best-in-class project management communication systems in the construction industry. Whether it is builders, LBMs, or component manufacturers, all have one thing in common regarding project information processing. There seem to be almost countless...

One constant thorn in the side of truss fabricators is the cost of preparing quotes, often multiple times for the same job through the life of a project. I find that this is especially true for custom homes, as they often go through numerous revisions for aesthetic, budget, zoning, and other...

After years in which dealers struggled from crisis to crisis, a slew of public reports and economic indicators suggest we can expect many more months of muddling along. Our surfing metaphor of two years ago has given way to the paddleboard, where the only way to speed up is to paddle...

You have to go back to the Great Recession 15 years ago to find as many LBM dealers reporting sales declines as we had in 2023. But the reasons are far different, and so are the consequences. Three-quarters of the companies constituting the 2024 Construction Supply 150 reported revenue drops...

In the busy world of prefabricated components, there are three conflicting metrics that owners and managers look at to determine operational performance – board feet of lumber, sales dollars, and margin dollars. I’ll start with what I believe is likely the most common but also the...