From Family Members to Coworkers: Stories from Growing Up at Baird Brothers With Matt Baird
Steve Stack:
Brought to you direct from Studio 3B at Baird Brothers Fine Hardwoods, American Hardwood Advisor is your source for trends, tips, and insights into how the building industry has evolved.
Join me, Steve Stack, along with guest builders and industry leaders, as we talk shop and go in-depth on what it takes to be the best of the best.
Dive into topics like architecture, industry trends, project plans, historical tools, tricks of the trade, and life lessons from more than six decades of experience in the hardwood lumber business.
Growing Up as the Family Business Grows
Steve Stack:
Welcome, everybody, back here to Studio 3B at Baird Brothers Fine Hardwoods. I have a very special guest today. I have one of the second generation Bairds, Mr. Matthew Baird. How are you doing this morning, Matt?
Matt Baird:
Okay, Steve. How are you doing, buddy?
Steve Stack:
Hey, we’re hanging in there. We’re hanging in there. Thanks for stopping by, affording us some time.
Matt Baird:
Thank you.
Steve Stack:
I know you’ve got a lot of stuff going on this time of year, but just so that people know, and like a lot of us over here at the mill, we wear different hats, and you’ve got a different hat on today. What are your responsibilities today?
Matt Baird:
Well, this is my wintertime look here. I always wear a dress hat in the wintertime. My responsibilities here, well, I call myself general manager, plant manager, although there’s a lot of Bairds that work here. I handle a lot of the day-to-day things. Always my favorite spot to be is selling lumber, being in the lumber mill. Don’t always get there every day. As far as a lot of folks know, when you own a business, you wear a lot of different hats.
Steve Stack:
It’s always been that way around here.
Matt Baird:
Absolutely.
Steve Stack:
It’s always been that way around here.
Matt Baird:
Everybody covers everybody, and that’s why we’ve been such a success. Steve and I have been together since we were kids. We won’t tell you how old we are now, but we’re not 22 anymore. We’ve had some fantastic times here. We’ve had highs. We’ve had lows. Steve has done an excellent job here. We’ve all come up through the ranks from working in the old sawmill, to working in the finish mill, to working in sales, to our managerial positions that we have now within the company.
Steve Stack:
My mind is in overload right now, just listening to you speak. We had the fortune, the privilege of serving a tutelage underneath four very important people.
Matt Baird:
Yes.
Steve Stack:
And you know exactly who I’m referencing.
Matt Baird:
Well, I’m going to say five very important people, because Steve’s dad was our sawmill superintendent here.
Steve Stack:
Well, that’s…
Matt Baird:
Yeah. Charlie would come to work with us in 1971 or 1972, and was here a lifetime. He was like a brother to my dad. If we were working on Sunday, Charlie was working here on Sunday.
Steve Stack:
Yeah. Thanks for that mention, Felix would appreciate it.
Matt Baird:
Yeah, that was his nickname, Felix.
Steve Stack:
But we still have Hatch, Uncle Hatch (Paul Baird).
Matt Baird:
Yep.
Steve Stack:
We served underneath Howard, and sister Helen, and your father, Richard.
Matt Baird:
Yes.
Steve Stack:
Wow. What we were taught..
Matt Baird:
We were taught a lot. I think the most important thing is that we were taught responsibility and how to work, even as kids. How old were you when you started here, 16?
Steve Stack:
16.
Matt Baird:
I’ve been pounding this concrete since I was five, and I’m 56 now. Yeah.
It was hard work, and like I said about his dad, Charlie, I learned more off of Charlie Stack as a kid growing up than I could have possibly learned at any trade school anywhere in the country, from a quiet, patient, fantastic craftsman. I learned a lot off of him, as I learned off of my uncles and my aunt.
Steve Stack:
They weren’t afraid to share their knowledge.
Matt Baird:
No, no, no. Yeah.
Steve Stack:
You’ve known guys over the years. I’ve known guys over the years. They knew how to do something specific, and they wouldn’t share it.
Matt Baird:
Yeah. Not everybody is a team. No. Yeah.
Steve Stack:
We had that fortune.
Matt Baird:
Yes, we did.
Steve Stack:
I’m thinking they set a direction for this company.
Matt Baird:
Yes.
Quality Lumber for Every Homeowner
Steve Stack:
One of those things was having a second generation in place that understood the business, understood the hardwood lumber industry, and one of the first things that they did for you as a younger man was send you down to Memphis. Why’d you go to Memphis?
Matt Baird:
Well, as far as kids that are coming into the lumber business, I went to Memphis, Tennessee – I went to the National Lumber Inspection School down there. When I went, you were down there for about six, seven months. When you were done, you came home with a license, and it’s just not a basic knowledge.
I mean, we learned a rule book down there. The guy that taught me, it was word for word, and the lumber inspection rules were word for word. I was there with kids my age. I was 18. I was in there with kids that had just got out of college that were going to go into sales. I was in there with guys that were 60, that were pursuing a second career.
Steve Stack:
Yeah. And you know it, I know it, we both appreciate it. It’s not just lumber.
Matt Baird:
No.
Steve Stack:
Whether it be the walnut, the cherry, the maple, the hickory, I mean, we receive it. Back in the day, it came off of a stump to the mill that we used to have here, and then we took it through the manufacturing process.
Today, we buy the sawn lumber in and take it through manufacturing. But our product, your father said it and Hatch still says it, “Our product goes into our customer’s homes, and we have a certain criteria that we work hard at maintaining.”
Matt Baird:
Absolutely. Yes, we do. I tell people, and you might think this is boasting, this is bragging, but it’s not. I tell people, and I tell our folks that work here, “Whether you’re the last guy I hired catching mouldings on the back of a molder, you’re a set-up technician, you’re an engineer, we have got to be the best in the world at what we do.” And I honestly think that we are.
I always say, “When you come here, and you buy a product, I want you to be satisfied and come back the third and fourth time. I don’t want you to come here for one project and be done with us.”
Steve can tell you, through the years, our clients continually come back to me, or I’ll see people in town when I’m eating my lunch, or whatever, or out. And they’ll say, “I did my house with you back in 1976,” but they’re back in here. They put an addition on that house, and they’re back in here buying our products for the third and fourth time.
Steve Stack:
That’s a great representation of our product. I’ve heard you say it. We strive to get everything right the first time.
Matt Baird:
Yes, we do.
Steve Stack:
Sometimes something will slip through the crack.
Matt Baird:
Absolutely. And that’s life. I mean, you’re going to make mistakes, but the thing is with those mistakes we make, we’re here. You can talk to me. You can talk to him. We’ll fix it. We’ll make it right.
Steve Stack:
In what seems to be a previous life here at the mill (being an outside salesperson), that was like the best trump card. It was like diffusing a bomb. If you had a situation, you could look at our customer in the face and say, “Guess what? We’ve been at 7060 Crory Rd since 1960. We’re not picking up and moving. We’re going to be here until we get you fixed up.”
Matt Baird:
Yes. No. Absolutely. Yeah.
Steve Stack:
And we live by that.
Matt Baird:
Yeah. Another thing with the quality of our product, and this is my take, in my life, and what I do, we maintain custody of that product from the green lumber to the dry kilns, to the ripsaw building, in through our moulding plant. Our mouldings are all finished.
We try to finish from a 25 knife marks to the inch, so they don’t look like a corn cob when you stain them, and everything is heated. Everything is climate controlled, humidity controlled. We maintain custody of that product until it goes to your project.
Steve Stack:
So you talk about climate control, and I’m thinking back to two stories that pop out in my head. Number one: January in northeast, Ohio, back when we had the saw mill, guys would come into our little retail makeshift area that we had, and they’d want to load up four dozen 1×6 16 foot rough cut oak fence boards.
Matt Baird:
Absolutely.
Steve Stack:
And we’d go out there with them.
Matt Baird:
We handled a lot of that stuff, didn’t we?
Steve Stack:
With a sledgehammer, because the lumber was green. It was frozen, a dead stack bunk, and you’d tap them loose, and you’d load the guy. Why anybody would want to put a fence up in January, I don’t know, but they always did.
Matt Baird:
I don’t know, but, boy, we did a lot of that. Yes, we did.
Steve Stack:
They always did.
Matt Baird:
Yeah. Yeah.
Steve Stack:
That is number one. Number two: prior to you going to Memphis and on your return back from Memphis, and correct me if I’m wrong on the timetable, but there’s a gentleman we used to call Barron, and that’s when we used to stick lumber outside.
Matt Baird:
Yes.
Steve Stack:
It was a 55 gallon fire pit drum.
Matt Baird:
Yeah, it sucked a lot of heat out of that baby. Yeah. The story with Barron was that his name was Richard Sisney with National Lumber Inspection. He went down there, and that guy knew that rule book like telling a story. He took great pride in what he did, and back in the Baird Brothers Sawmill Inc. days, we stuck all that lumber. That stick yard was either 10 below or 110. I did the same thing when I came home, because Richard, unfortunately, passed away. I was supposed to go to two more schools, but I ended up not going to those schools, and I stayed here. Yeah, like Steve is saying with the sledgehammer, beat the boards apart, flip them, measure them, grade them, and stick them.
Steve Stack:
Oh, yeah. It was…
Matt Baird:
It was all work. 100% work. Yeah.
Steve Stack:
It was a different time, but that’s what the three boys did breaking in, starting a new business back in the late fifties, 1960 incorporation, etc, and so forth. It gave you an appreciation.
Matt Baird:
Absolutely. At the end of the ball game, I knew from the time I was five years old that this was all I ever wanted to do. I wanted to be a better tree cutter, a better woodworker, a better businessman, not to be a big shot, but to make my people proud. And I did.
When I’d go to school, I’d say, “Hey, what’d you do this work weekend?” I thought everybody went to work with their dad. “Well, I watched cartoons,” they’d say. I was up here. We were building pallets from the time I could pick a 1×4 up and throw it up on the jig. Yeah. I’ve always loved this industry, always loved it.
Steve Stack:
We’ve seen at this facility in Canfield, Ohio, yearly, from the time we were in our late teens, and coming on board, and working here every day, we’ve seen significant growth.
Matt Baird:
Yes.
Steve Stack:
But that growth was doable because of something that we, still as a company, focus on today: reinvestment into our capital assets.
Matt Baird:
Oh, absolutely. Absolutely. Yeah. Myself, my cousins, my parents, my uncles, my aunt, we don’t have boats down in Florida. We don’t have big houses up on Erie. We have always taken our earnings and reinvested them back into our company and our community, and that’s very important to us.
Steve Stack:
Back in the day, I can remember we were 25 employees, 30 employees, and now we’re in excess of 100 employees, and there’s a lot of good that spins out of this nucleus that we call home.
Matt Baird:
Yes.
Steve Stack:
I know you’ve got stories. We had your father who had a big heart. There was another guy who used to float around here. His name was “Whitey,” Cleo, and if it was on his back, you were welcome to it.
Matt Baird:
Yeah. Salt of the earth. Yeah.
Steve Stack:
Right?
Matt Baird:
That was my Uncle Whitey. He was married to my Aunt Helen, and Aunt Helen worked here. He was a steel truck driver. Then when he retired, he came to work with us. He would run. He’d go to town and get parts, and that was his deal, in his station wagon. Salt of the earth guy. Yeah.
Steve Stack:
I don’t know how many times I heard, well, on Friday guys get their paychecks, open their paychecks, and they say, ‘Well, I got to go square up with Cleo. He lent me $20 on Tuesday.”
Matt Baird:
That’s the way he was, yeah.
Steve Stack:
Those are life’s lessons.
Matt Baird:
They are. And I learned a lot from him. I really did. I really did, just not about trucks. I learned a lot of lessons in life from him.
We’d be down at the farm down here eating lunch, and I’d tell him, “Hey, you know what?” He’d say, “No, you’re not going to do that. You’re going to do…” And he was right, and I didn’t need to do what I was going to do. Yeah. But he was a fantastic guy.
Becoming a Trusted Retailer of Fine Hardwoods
Steve Stack:
So we’ll fast forward a little bit, and we talk about when we put what I’ll call the actual first retail showroom in. It was all of about 200 square feet.
Matt Baird:
Yep. That was a big deal back then. Yeah.
Steve Stack:
It was a big deal. We went from a single walk-in door as the main entrance to a six foot double door as a main entrance.
Matt Baird:
Double door, yeah.
Steve Stack:
And we actually had two little counters. Yourself, myself, Scotty, Howard, your dad on Saturdays, we’d jump in, and we’d work that little retail showroom.
Matt Baird:
And boy, weren’t our clients great? I mean, our clients are fantastic today, and thank you, but back then, you’d be out here. The only way you could buy lumber was through Steve on the road, or you come to this new retail location. We didn’t have online sales, but we would have cars from Pittsburgh, and Cuyahoga Falls, and Akron, and Cleveland. Yeah. It was just a fantastic time.
Steve Stack:
Yeah. That was, that was in-
Matt Baird:
I think that’s when it clicked for me that, hey, you know what? It always clicked for me, but you know what? We got something here.
Steve Stack:
That was in the late seventies, early eighties, and we saw growth in expansion. Then back in 1988, we experienced a devastating fire.
Matt Baird:
Oh my goodness. It sure was, yeah.
Steve Stack:
I’ve gone through some newspaper articles lately that we’re going to be sharing with the folks on our social and so forth, but I remember the night of the fire. It was a unified group of guys, ownership and employees. There was never a question. It was going to be rebuilt.
Matt Baird:
Yes.
Steve Stack:
That’s when we put the addition on the front of the moulding facility, the moulding plant, and we went a little bit bigger again.
Matt Baird:
Yes. Absolutely.
Steve Stack:
What a great time that was, because in 1989, we had our grand reopening. We worked out of a mobile trailer office out in front of the parking lot.
Matt Baird:
I remember Gerry Ricciutti was here. I was a fireman in two fire departments for 25 years, and I remember that night of the fire when my radio went off, and I thought, “Eh, must just be a hot fan or something.” So I piled in my truck. I come over the hill down here at Leffingwell Rd. at Red Gate Farm, and you could look down here. It was like daylight. That’s how involved it was.
Gerry Ricciutti from Channel 27 came out the next morning, and I interviewed with him, and he said, “Well, how long are you guys going to be shut down to rebuild?” I said, “We’ll be in business tomorrow morning.” And we were. We operated out of an old house trailer, and our showroom, we took an old loading dock in the front of this building over here, and we ran it out of there. We never missed a step.
Steve Stack:
No, no. That next morning, I think at that time it was still going by Ohio Bell. They came out, ran some new lines, we dropped the phone on a post, and we had a phone. I mean, so we’re talking 1989. The phone was our livelihood.
Matt Baird:
It was. Yeah, it was. It was the lifeline. Yeah.
Steve Stack:
The phone-in and walk-in… And I remember the day after the fire, we had folks coming in to pick up lumber.
Matt Baird:
Yeah, we did. Yeah, guys were coming in, folks were coming in, and we were selling lumber. Thank goodness for our main warehouse.
Steve Stack:
Right.
Matt Baird:
Yeah. If that wind would’ve been coming out of the south that night, we’d have lost everything. This building over here, the main warehouse, is like a box of matches.
Quality Craftsmanship Spans Generations
Steve Stack:
So at that point, that was a time in the company’s history that you and your cousins were coming of age, starting to fill positions, take on more responsibilities, and it wasn’t always the easiest ride.
Matt Baird:
No, no.
Steve Stack:
But we went from three principals, and now we have…. What do you have, six in your generation?
Matt Baird:
Yeah. Six.
Steve Stack:
Right. Six in your generation. Yourself, your sister (Lori Baird), Hatch’s Tim and Terry Baird, Scott Baird, and Mark Baird. And, dang if we don’t see history repeating itself again.
Matt Baird:
Yeah, absolutely.
Steve Stack:
How many of your children do you have at the facility now?
Matt Baird:
Three. I have five children. I have three of them that work here. I have Zachary, he’s a mechanical engineer. He came home from Goodyear. He’s my plant engineer now. Benny is my plant manager in the moulding plant. Then I have a daughter, Sarah, who was a state meat inspector. Her and her husband farmed 1200 acres. They wanted to have a baby. Well, you can’t be a state meat inspector and call a kid out of bed at 3:30 in the morning. So, now I’m lucky. She’s in my office, and she’s my head accountant here.
Steve Stack:
And all along the way, I’ve had the privilege of witnessing it. Responsibilities are being passed on, number one. Number two, more importantly, values are being passed on.
Matt Baird:
Absolutely.
Steve Stack:
As with all the third generation, they’re a pretty solid group of kids.
Matt Baird:
Yes, they are.
Steve Stack:
And I’ll call them kids out of no disrespect, but they’re still kids.
Matt Baird:
No, no, no. Well, people still call you and I kids.
Steve Stack:
Yeah, yeah, yeah. Those days are gone.
Matt Baird:
Yeah.
Steve Stack:
But it’s good to see. You and I are from a similar generation. Would you have ever thought that you would carry an iPhone around in your pocket, and be able to do the business that we’ve done?
Matt Baird:
No. Absolutely not.
Steve Stack:
We came from a time where we wrote orders out.
Matt Baird:
All hand orders. Yeah.
Steve Stack:
We did that other thing called what? Math.
Matt Baird:
Yeah. Yeah.
Steve Stack:
We had to do math.
Matt Baird:
With the add machine. Yeah. Yeah.
Steve Stack:
Would you have ever thought?
Matt Baird:
No. No. I’d have never thought that when we were kids. I always knew that as long as we worked hard, and we tried to be as good a business people as we were and leaders, and I always say in the other half of that equation, okay, I laid down in bed one night and told my wife. I said, “Man, I’ve been in the lumber business for over 40 years, legally.” And it’s the people that are along the way. I could sit here, and we could do a whole segment on people from when we started to present day. We’re only as good as our people, and we have a fantastic staff.
Steve Stack:
We really do.
Matt Baird:
Yes, we’ve always had a fantastic staff.
Steve Stack:
You talk about our staff, our workforce. As a country, we’re still trying to come through this pandemic scenario. We had a two week shutdown back in late March, over a year and a half ago now, the last week of March, first week of April, out of concern for everybody’s safety. The family decided that we’re going to shut it down. Through that first week, we would be getting some phone calls, and we’d sneak in, and we’d get a contractor this or that, or we had customers driving down from Cleveland, “Hey, I need this stuff.” When we partially reopened, the showroom didn’t open, but the manufacturing did. We figured we had about 85% of our workforce come back voluntarily.
Matt Baird:
Yes, absolutely. Yeah.
Steve Stack:
It wasn’t too long after that that everybody started to trickle back in. So that speaks volumes.
Matt Baird:
Oh, it does. It does. Yeah, I never had one person tell me, “I’m not coming back to work yet.”
Steve Stack:
Yeah.
Matt Baird:
They were like, “Hey, what do you want me to do?,” And I’m like, “Hey, I want you to come in.” And they were here, and that’s the way it’s always been with our people.
Steve Stack:
Well, there’s five offices upstairs on that balcony, and those doors are always open.
Matt Baird:
Absolutely.
Steve Stack:
I think that is a reflection of the response we saw from my coworkers, your employees, on the return from being shut down for a couple weeks. I can’t go any further without saying to our customers in the Mahoning Valley, to our customers regionally in Cleveland, and in Pittsburgh, and across the United States for that matter, what a response they had during this whole episode.
Matt Baird:
Oh. Yeah. They were rock stars. Yeah. It was phenomenal that we were going through all that, and that those folks come in here, because we shut… I actually, myself, went to the front gate for how long?
Steve Stack:
Oh, yeah.
Matt Baird:
Where are you going? What do you need? Yes, sir. No, ma’am. And it worked. When we started that, I thought, “This is going to be a nightmare.” It worked. And I just have to tell our clients, “thank you.” We did business, and it worked.
Steve Stack:
Because of our customers. There was a need, and we were able to… That’s when we instituted pretty much a no contact, call your order in, place your order online.
Matt Baird:
Pull your truck in, back in. You’re loaded. You’re gone. Yeah.
Steve Stack:
We had that tent set up down at the gate, and you would receive them, or I would receive them, or, “Okay. Yeah. I’m here to pick up order so and so.” Direct them to a building. They pulled up. They got loaded. They got down the road, and then a month or so into that, then we were able to open the showroom by appointment only.
Matt Baird:
Yes.
Steve Stack:
But it did. It changed the buying profile.
Matt Baird:
Yes.
Always Available at 7060 Crory Road
Steve Stack:
And it’s important for folks to know that we have the retail facility, the retail showroom. We have a great staff of phone salesmen. Our counter sales guys are there. The phone sales guys are there. We have our outside sales staff, and we leapfrogged to a new era of, “wow, this will call is pretty nice.”
Matt Baird:
Yes, we did.
Steve Stack:
If I’m a contractor, I can place my order at 6:00 in the evening, before I have dinner at home, and I can have one of my guys come in at 8:30 the next morning, pick it up, be in and out of here, be at the job site by 9:00 and working. It’s important for them to take advantage of that.
Matt Baird:
Yeah.
Steve Stack:
But the old (330) 533-3122 phone number, that’s still a lifeline to us.
Matt Baird:
It is. It is.
Steve Stack:
We have always been that hands on. We want to talk to you. We want to talk to you.
Matt Baird:
Yeah. You call in here, you’re going to talk to somebody that’s knowledgeable about what they’re talking about.
Steve Stack:
Yeah. And along the way, we’ve experienced a ton of great things.
Matt Baird:
Yes, we have.
Steve Stack:
We’ve had some hard times. Your father, Richard, one of many quotes that I can recite from him, he’d say, “You know what?” We’d be going through a hard time, and he’d say, “You know what’s the only thing we can do, Hood? Get up in the morning, put our work boots on, and try to make something good.”
Matt Baird:
Yep. Yep. And we did. We did.
Steve Stack:
It was that philosophy. And that has allowed us as a company, and us as individuals, grow. Three and a half years ago, we hosted a group, a national television show, here on the property, and that was in the form of This Old House. I remember, we had quite a crowd that day, and it was a fun day. But I remember Scotty, your cousin, saying, “Dad would never believe this.”
Matt Baird:
No, they would’ve never believed that. No, no.
Steve Stack:
And that was a milestone.
Matt Baird:
Yes.
Expanding – Youngstown and Beyond
Steve Stack:
Prior to that, I look back to it as a milestone, when we decided we weren’t going to be able to survive off of a fantastic market, but a smaller market, the Mahoning Valley, and we started into Cleveland and Pittsburgh with regional home shows. That was another first for us.
Matt Baird:
Absolutely. Yeah. Yeah.
Steve Stack:
You really recognize an appreciation for our customer and vice versa, our customer appreciating us, when you go. I know you go, and you wander around, and you talk to people, and as do I, and we have relationships in excess of 35 years with customers.
Matt Baird:
Absolutely. Yes, we do. Yes, we do.
Steve Stack:
That’s another appreciation. It’s not the fact that I want to sell you lumber.
Matt Baird:
No, no. No, it’s about… At the end of the day, business is about relationships. I can sell you lumber, or whatever business transaction we’re doing. You need to trust me, and I need to be able to trust in you, and I think we’ve done it. We’ve always tried to do a good job at that.
Steve Stack:
Yeah. Our feet were held to the fire to do it.
Matt Baird:
Oh, Absolutely. Yeah.
Steve Stack:
It’s been an amazing (in excess of) 40 years for me.
Matt Baird:
Yes.
Steve Stack:
And I wonder about our little Studio 3B here.
Matt Baird:
Yeah. Who’d ever thought we’d have our own TV studio? Thank you to you. You’ve driven this project.
Steve Stack:
It’s been fun, and we’re attempting to go to another level.
Matt Baird:
Yes.
Steve Stack:
We’re going to use this studio just like for today, having discussion with ownership, coworkers, customer contractors. We’re going to have everybody in here and out of here, but it’s another avenue, another venue for people to go to our content studio that houses all of our profiles, our Build it with Baird and our American Hardwood Advisor, and our plan room, and there’s a couple others, but if you want to learn about Baird Brothers Fine Hardwoods, and the Baird Brothers family, the Baird Brothers employees, that’s where you want to land, contentstudio.bairdbrothers.com.
Matt Baird:
Oh, what a Fantastic thing. It tells a story.
Steve Stack:
Exactly. And it goes back to what you were alluding to earlier, that trust.
Matt Baird:
Yes.
Steve Stack:
I’m sitting in the middle of Texas, and I want to place a nice hardwood lumber order. I have it on my screen ready to push that button and put my credit card in. I’m ordering lumber from a guy in a cornfield in Canfield, Ohio.
Matt Baird:
Yes, correct. Yeah.
Steve Stack:
So you have to get over that reservation of, “Well, do I want to? Don’t I want to?” So now, you want to know something about us? Visit the website, visit the content studio, and listen to some of the podcasts.
Matt Baird:
Absolutely.
Steve Stack:
Sitting around the house at night, go see some of the projects that we’re doing with folks, and some of the interviews we’re doing with folks, and get a little better understanding, and hopefully it’s going to be enough to push them to, “Hey, these guys are okay.”
Matt Baird:
At the end of the day, I think something that we offer that maybe a lot of our competitors don’t, with all the electronics, and the social media, and everything, hey, if you got to pick the phone up, pick the phone up. We’ll talk to you. I’m in the office every day. You can pick that phone up and call me. If I’m not here, I’ll call you back.
Steve Stack:
Yeah. Yeah.
Matt Baird:
It’s the same with Steve. Yeah. Yeah. If you just want to talk about, “Hey, I got a kitchen floor. I need crown moulding…” Or our sales representatives, every one of those guys are very, very well versed in what we do.
Steve Stack:
So the big question: where do we go from here? I’m of a mindset where I never thought I would be learning some of this stuff today that it takes to do business, and I’m referring to our third generation fill-in slots.
Matt Baird:
Yes.
Steve Stack:
On the electronic side, the device side, the digital era, the streaming era. We still want to be in front of our customers. We still want to offer that high quality product at somewhat of a value. So, here we go again. We’re doing as much business in the clouds as we are out of our storefront.
Matt Baird:
Absolutely. For me, myself, I think it’s a real privilege for me to be part of that. I mean, Steve is talking about the high tech, the streaming, the internet, social media. On the other side of the coin is when we get right down to it, and we are old fashioned quality. We’re going to be here to make the best products that we can make, and we’re always available. So we have the best of two worlds. We have the high tech, but yet we have the one-on-one.
Steve Stack:
And I’ll throw it out there. You and I were just discussing this a couple weeks ago: big isn’t always better.
Matt Baird:
Absolutely not. That’s correct.
Steve Stack:
We’ve got an attitude that was passed down to us. That guy that you called your father, he told me one time when we were driving home from Cleveland. He’d always go out for me on a ride and see what was going on. He always kept his hand on the pulse of what was going on and his customers.
So, we’re coming home from Cleveland one day, and he says, “Hood.” He says, “There’s a lot of opportunity out here.” He said, “However big of a piece of that pie we can get,” he says, “We never want to lose sight that that is going to be the best piece of pie that person has ever ate, and they’ll come back for that piece of pie again.”
Matt Baird:
Yes.
Steve Stack:
Like you say, we work hard at getting things right. When we don’t get things right, we want to minimize the inconvenience, and we’re going to be here to get it hashed out.
Matt Baird:
Absolutely. Yeah. When you buy products from us, when you buy our product, and it’s in your home, I will give you a personal guarantee that it’ll be right. And if it isn’t when it ships out of here, or you get it installed in your home, it’s coming back out and you’re getting a new shipment. You’ll never be disgusted with our company. I promise.
Steve Stack:
That sums it up, Matthew. Hey, appreciate reflecting.
Matt Baird:
Absolutely. Man, we could sit here and talk all day, Steve. Yeah. Yeah.
Steve Stack:
Yeah. Yeah. And thanks for allotting some time for us this morning.
Matt Baird:
Well, thank you for having me.
Steve Stack:
Hey, folks, stay tuned, more to come from Studio 3B in Canfield, Ohio, Baird Brothers Fine Hardwoods.
For all you folks listening, thanks for talking shop with Baird Brothers Fine Hardwoods. If you enjoyed this episode and want to stay up-to-date with our American Hardwood Advisor series, give us a like and subscribe. For more tips, projects and inspiration, check us out on Facebook, Instagram or at www.bairdbrothers.com. Until next time!
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