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Featured Customer
By Chad Spencer
It is with great pride that we feature Lumber Liquidators, one of UEI’s most valued customers, in the latest edition of Smoother Times. Lumber Liquidators is a success story illustrating the spirit of Tom Sullivan, a true American Entrepreneur. Giving new meaning to the old saying, “If you fail, try, try again,” Tom Sullivan had four less than stellar start-up attempts in various businesses and was still reeling from a $400,000 loss in a home refurbishing business when in 1992 he had an idea that gave birth to Lumber Liquidators, now a household name.
The grand opening of Lumber Liquidators consisted of Tom Sullivan going around to construction sites and buying up seemingly useless lumber. He stored it in a warehouse and had a Friday – Sunday sale. An idea that seemed crazy to many, made $20,000 the very first week! From that day forward his wood-selling venture was launched. It wasn’t easy as Tom had to find huge quantities of unwanted wood. Even though the unwanted wood was cheaper than new wood, it still wasn’t cheap. Tom would often spend more than $1000 on an enormous load of lumber that he would buy from a factory with dozens of such wood piles. Rarely having more than $5000 in his checking account in those days, Tom could never afford to buy all the lumber at once. He would pay for a pile of wood and would ask the factory owner to keep the old wood around until he could sell the first load to have enough money to pay for the second load. It was an endless cycle.
Unable to afford to hire an ad agency, Tom created handwritten ads. Although a cheap way to advertise, he noticed the ads really stuck out in the paper and seemed to be more effective than professionally printed ads. The ads were kept to a bare minimum to keep costs down, but they got the job done. The business kept Tom very busy. During the first year, he worked 12 hour or longer days and only took two days off that whole year, Thanksgiving and Christmas. After three years of toiling on a shoe string budget, Tom had put away enough money to start specializing in woods that were ideal for hardwood floors. The rest is history; Tom Sullivan and Lumber Liquidators have been doing that ever since with over 150 stores nationwide from coast to coast and employing over 500 people. Lumber Liquidators is headquartered in Toano, Virginia and can be found on the web at www.lumberliquidators.com.
Lumber Liquidators Headquarters 1992
Lumber Liquidators Headquarters 2009
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