Three Sons Hardware Eyes Growth

As you look to grow, start with the needs of your customers and your local market. Seek out opportunities to provide something others currently don’t offer. Rely on what you know and build on past successes in growth, no matter how small.

For Dave Ables—who owns Three Sons Hardware in Big Lake, Minnesota, with his wife Lori—the path of growth took on a decidedly nonlinear path, from Ohio to Minnesota, from selling only hardware to operating a store with hardware plus a lumberyard.

For the majority of his career, Dave was a corporate executive in transportation and moved the family frequently for jobs. By 2012, when the Ables’ sons were in grade school, they were looking for something to ground their family, so they purchased a hardware store in Minerva, Ohio.

Not long after, Dave was once again promoted and transferred to Arkansas. The family kept the store for a year after moving, but it ultimately became too much traveling back and forth, and they sold it to Busy Beaver Home Improvement Centers in 2019.

After selling the Ohio store, Dave and the family made another move, this time to Minneapolis. After the move, Lori was itching to get back into the hardware business, leading the couple to purchase a hardware store in 2022 in Big Lake, which became Three Sons Hardware. The couple immediately began looking for opportunities to buy more stores to expand their operation. Dave found Tri-County Lumber and saw a lucrative opportunity. It offered the Ables a chance to scale their business in a new way, provide products and offerings not currently available to their audience and bring in new customers.

“We sold our store in Ohio to Busy Beaver, which operates stores with a small hardware store footprint and building centers that have both hardware and lumber,” Dave says. “That concept intrigued me, and I thought it would be one we could make successful.”

Bringing a hardware and a lumber operation together has benefited both sides, Dave says. The Ables are working on adding a kiosk to the Three Sons Hardware location where customers will be able to see the lumber and building products and services available through Tri-County Lumber. Customers will be able to place orders through the kiosk and have everything directly shipped to their homes or to Three Sons Hardware from Tri-County Lumber.

For the Tri-County Lumber location, having access to hardware and home improvement products and services that lumberyards don’t typically carry helps the operation’s contractor customers. Dave says Tri-County Lumber has over 200 pro customers who can now shop on the Three Brothers Hardware e-commerce website and have products transferred to Tri-County for them to pick up there. This location also has a small section in the store stocked with power tools and other hardware items.

In terms of revenue and deliveries, Dave says the lumberyard does the same amount of sales in a week that the hardware store does in a quarter, but he appreciates the challenge.

“Having the partnership between the two stores is going to be an additional revenue stream for both operations,” Dave says. “We see good synergy there, and it will also give us a platform that as we grow and scale more smaller hardware stores, we can also provide building products and services.”

The Ables’ five-year goal is to operate 10 hardware stores that are 8,000 to 10,000 square feet and several 30,000 to 40,000-square-foot building centers to complement the hardware stores.

“We’re not going to play in the cities where there are big boxes but rather want to target those markets underserved by the big-box retailers,” Dave says. “When it comes to growth, we’re going to do it in a way that benefits our customers.”

A major contributor to the success of your growth strategy is building a team to support your goals. The Ables named their hardware operation Three Sons Hardware for their three sons, David, Sam and Nicholas, who they hope will one day take over the company. Currently, David works as a store manager at the Big Lake store, Sam is taking industry-related classes and working at Tri-County Lumber and Nicholas just graduated from high school.

Dave says he has identified several key players from Tri-County Lumber who he wants to tap into for leadership roles, and he will continue building his bench. Also key will be uniformity across all locations in terms of processes, employee compensation and benefits.

“Throughout my corporate career, I led teams at multiple facilities in varying regions of the country and have learned that communication and visibility are critical to ensuring team members working at off-site locations feel valued, informed and a critical part of the organization,” Dave says. “We’ll be sure our communication across all locations is the best it can be and we have leadership visibility across the board.”