2008 Young Retailer of the Year Honoree
SHAWN ROEHR
Entrepreneurial Spirit
At
the time, dreaming up plans for a lumberyard may have just been a high-school
project for Shawn Roehr.
It seemed a good fit. With a part-time job at a
local Lumbermen’s store, Roehr knew a little about the business, and
one of the members of the lumberyard’s management team, Barney Wagner,
offered to help him with the plans. The project won him first place
in his school, second place in the state and took him all the way to
the national DECA finals.
After high school, Roehr worked as a salesman at the lumberyard.
But the thought of starting his own business was already growing in
his mind. Wanting to get a fresh start and put his own ideas to work,
he teamed up with Wagner and another local businessman Al Meier, who
at one time had operated a chain of building centers. Together, they
opened the first Arrow Lumber and Hardware store in Eatonville, Wash.
Roehr still had plenty to learn. Most of his experience was on the
salesfloor, so Wagner began teaching him the back office operations
of running a retail operation. In the meantime, they began planning
for a second location in Buckley, Wash. In Eatonville, they had acquired
an existing business. The new location would be a ground-up store and
Roehr’s charge was to design the retail space and product mix.
Finishing touches were still going on at Buckley when they found
another opportunity they couldn’t resist. A store was closing in Port
Orchard, Wash. Soon they were hanging the Arrow name on a third location.
Now, Roehr and Wagner had their hands full as they rushed to create
a business with an infrastructure to deal with multiple locations.
“With one store, it’s easy to control everything. For three, we didn’t
have the infrastructure set up,” he says. “One store had an old computer
system and another had a brand new one. We had to reinvent the wheel
to make it all work.”
But Shawn showed himself a quick study. He helped draft policies and
procedures for the three locations, and within a few years Wagner made
him the manager of all three stores. By the time the store had reached
its 10th anniversary in 2008, it had a fourth location in Randle, Wash.,
and a fifth in Orting, Wash.
Roehr’s goal is to add one new store every two years. He’s on target
with another ground-up location coming in Port Townsend, Wash., in
2009.
Adding new locations may be a good way to increase business, but
it comes with a strong necessity to be strong in a competitive market.
Roehr has made the process of opening and running new locations easier
by finding new ways to create efficiencies in the business. For example,
he tackled the arduous process of updating all the stores to a single
computer system so it was easier to track inventory and control operations.
He also looked for ways to build on the strengths of each particular
market. The Buckley store has always been strong in contractor sales,
but Roehr saw opportunities in the consumer market. He began selling
project packages aimed at the do-it-yourselfer. While the store had
always sold all the components for building a deck, shed or garage,
sales of those projects jumped 20 percent when he pre-packaged them.
While it may seem Roehr is driven to build a strong business, he’s
equally driven to build strong ties with the community. A favorite
community project comes each Thanksgiving when Roehr and his employees
donate more than 1,000 meals to local food banks. Around Christmas,
he’ll shut down the store for an evening while one of his employees
puts on a Santa outfit. Children from the community can come and have
their photo taken with Santa for free. And there are plenty of other
projects too, from helping an aspiring Eagle Scout work on their final
project to supporting scholarships in the local community.
“You get
back what you put into it,” says Roehr. “We support the community because
they support us. The money we get to buy the turkeys for the Thanksgiving
meals comes from them anyway. We feel it is very important to give
back.”