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ENTREPRENEURS OF THE YEAR: 2016

“I looked at my wife and told her ‘our life’s going to change, starting today.’” Things moved fast from then on. “The other lumberyard in town shut down on November 1, 2013. We closed on an adjacent property on December 30 and put up a 9,000-square-foot drive-through lumberyard. We had it fully stocked by July 2014.”

Obermeier Hardware & Rental 2Obermeier hired three additional staff members to handle sales and yard management. His community soon saw that Obermeier Hardware and Rental could fill the market need left behind when the previous lumberyard closed.

The return on expansion was evident right away. Obermeier’s 2013 sales were just under $1 million. By the end of 2015, he’d have $1.8 million in sales, an increase of 80% in two years.

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“That kind of growth is sometimes hard to grasp,” Obermeier said. “But we’ve handled it well. We also positioned ourselves well to handle it through Blue Tarp Financial. They’ve helped us handle the cash flow piece.”

Obermeier said that perhaps the greatest success story in his business is seeing the impact that his family’s store has had on the community of just over 2,000 residents. “There’s not a lot of prosperity in my community,” he said. “We didn’t want to be another one of those businesses that sat by and watched things get worse and worse. We wanted to look back in 15 years and say that we did everything we could for our community.”

Obermeier Hardware & Rental 1As his business grows, so does his knowledge of running a lumberyard, Obermeier said. Since his expansion is still recent, he’s still building a daily operational infrastructure. Prior to November, 2013, Obermeier knew the hardware business like the back of his hand. For the LBM business, on the other hand, he is learning as he goes.

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