Many of us started 2020 with resolutions/goals both for ourselves and our businesses, but then our year was turned upside down with the Covid worldwide pandemic and other issues such as lumber prices topping highs we thought we would never see. While many LBM/component businesses are working at...

Take it from me, being there is half of the battle, and Zoom meetings don’t count. This was true 50 years ago when I was working in our office, and it was true last week when I was in front of customers. There may be a price to pay, but the dividends will surely come back to you, as they...

Last month, Joe Kannapell took us on a terrific tour of BCMCs past in his column, The Last Word on 2020 BCMC – Virtually! Because we cannot attend an in-person BCMC show this fall, I’ve been thinking about ways to capture some of the spirit of BCMC. Step 1. See Products Without...

Let’s face it, when a supplier to the industry has been around for a long time, decades in our case, there are certain values that we live by. These values are the support structure on which we build our business. I believe it’s called “commitment to the cause,” or as...

I remember it clearly; I was in the Lounge at Portland International Airport when I got a call from Joe Kannapell. Joe was going to be sharing with the MiTek team in the next day that he would be officially retiring at the end of 2020; Joe has been a part of the industry for more than 46 years....

When you’re working on a jobsite, you never know what you might see or what might be coming next. As shown on this month’s cover, a recent project by Lowder Construction had us helping a neighborhood prepare for Oktoberfest (or at least I like to think of it that way). As you can see...

The other day, I heard an “expert” on the television say, people will do anything they possibly can to avoid change. Even though I was preoccupied with whatever-it-was I had been doing, that jumped out at me and I started listening to that yammering in the background. This person was...

Our roles as managers and owners sometimes feels as though we are constantly changing over the past several decades, but how we planned and strategized sped up dramatically after the 2008 global financial crisis. Managers who understood the need to be a strategic leader and a disruption...

We’ve dubbed the photo on this month’s cover “flying trusses,” because that’s how it can appear when you’re delivering an outstanding product in a limited space. But space concerns have never stopped our team at Lowder. [For all photos, See PDF or View in Full...

In place of this year’s BCMC, why not travel virtually to several Shows, beginning in Louisville in 1972… Arriving at the sprawling Fairgrounds from the Colonel Sanders Inn, I walked through a maze of modular home sections and finally found our 8x10 booth. All the...