In 1844, 33-year-old Samuel Wilson Collins partnered with Washington Vaughan to build a sawmill on the bank of the Caribou Stream in a small settlement in Aroostook County, Maine. The partners divided their interests in 1857, with Collins taking the sawmill and most of the land on the north side of the Caribou Stream.
Five generations later, the Collins family is still serving the Aroostook community, though the products and services offered by their business, now a full-service building materials and hardware supply center, have changed several times over the centuries. Each generation of the Collins family has been able to recognize opportunities and adjust the business accordingly.
Fifth-generation member Sam Collins, 55, is the president and the third Sam Collins to lead the business. Sam’s brother, Gregg Collins, 49, is vice president. Their father, Donald F. Collins, 87, retired in 1992 but maintains an office at the original site in Caribou, now one of three full-service S.W. Collins Company locations. (The family also operates a kitchen and bath store and a millwork shop.)
Don visits his office, adjacent to the bulk storage and special order building, twice a week to help older customers in particular, and to catch up with longtime friends. His voice is strong, but age has added a soft roughness, and he uses pauses to punctuate the words sandwiched in between. “I retired,” he says, “but I’m still here.”
“I think there’s a connection to every generation,” says Sam of the company’s long history. “My dad, my grandfather, my great-grandfather and my great-great-grandfather… sometimes you feel maybe they’re looking over your shoulder and helping to guide you, making sound decisions.”
The Collins family is well known in northern Maine, not only for the longevity of their business but also for their tradition of public service. Founder Sam Collins was elected to the Maine House of Representatives in 1856 and served two terms; he also served a term in the Maine Senate in 1870. His descendants continued the tradition of holding public office and serving on civic and charitable boards. Fifth-generation member Susan Collins—Sam and Don’s sister—has been a U.S. Senator (R-Maine) since 1996.
“I cannot imagine a better place to grow up than Aroostook County, Maine, because the sense of community is so strong,” Sen. Collins writes in an e-mail to Family Business. “Although unlike my brothers, I did not work in the family business, it was always a central part of our family. I was always proud that it was established way back in 1844, and that generation after generation of our family had kept it going, providing both jobs and building materials to the community. This heritage undoubtedly explains my professional passion for family-owned businesses, which are the heart and soul of many Maine communities.”
Evolving with the times
The Caribou store sits in a mixed-use area southwest of the town’s old economic center, on the banks of the Caribou Mill Pond, where previous generations of Collinses floated their raw timber until it was ready to be milled. The fresh-yet-homey hardware store features immaculate residential-style windows, white colonial trim, and Wedgwood-blue exterior; large, drive-through metal outbuildings provide weatherproof coverage.
“In the beginning, we were manufacturers of lumber,” Don Collins says. “We ran a sawmill and we sold to people that were in the area.” Pine trees were shipped to England by the ton, and founder Samuel Collins bought and sold shingles made by settlers from indigenous white cedar.
Irish immigrants, who had settled in the St. John Valley, introduced potato farming to the region. Once railroads came to northern Maine, farmers were able to ship their produce quickly to major population centers. By the 1940s, Maine topped the nation in potato production, and the Collins family began growing potatoes on 18 acres of Samuel’s original mill acreage using a one-row digger pulled by horses. It is estimated that the Collins family farm produced thousands of barrels of potatoes.
As railroad tracks were laid across the county, Samuel’s youngest son, Herschel D. Collins, began producing railroad ties at the mill. Herschel succeeded his father, who died in 1899. In addition to leading the business, Herschel served as Caribou’s representative to the state legislature in 1933.
In the 1900s, the family business began operating as a general store; oats were sold alongside barrels of nails.
Herschel’s son, the second Samuel Collins, began working in the family business after serving in World War I and took over the company upon his father’s death in 1936. Samuel Collins served two terms as a member of the Maine state legislature and four terms as a state senator. Samuel’s sister Mary, Herschel’s oldest child, also worked in the business, starting as her father’s bookkeeper in 1915 and later becoming treasurer of the Collins Lumber Company; she retired in 1949. Mary’s husband, Harry Lee Ahern, managed the planing mill for the S.W. Collins Company.
The Collins family continued to operate a lumbering operation until the 1950s, with mills in Caribou and Stockholm, Maine, about 18 miles away. After World War II, “we became more of a hardware store, and we had a general contracting business to meet the housing needs of the area,” says Sam.
In 1947, construction began on Loring Air Force Base, approximately eight miles east of Caribou. According to U.S. Census figures, the town’s population increased from 8,218 in 1940 to 12,464 in 1960. With the growth came a need for housing, and selling building materials and supplies grew in importance. The Collins family divided their farm into three housing developments. Samuel formed the Collins Construction Company to provide homes for veterans.
Fourth-generation member Don—Samuel’s son—joined the firm in 1949 after serving in the infantry during World War II (he was wounded in the Battle of the Bulge) and later completing a degree in business administration. He was elected to the state legislature in 1971 and later served four terms in the state senate. Don and his wife, Patricia, both served as the mayor of Caribou.
During the 1960s, the Collins enterprise stopped manufacturing lumber. This facet of the enterprise had become unviable because of the growing distance to lumber sources and changes in manufacturing processes. “We got out of the milling of logs, and then we got our lumber rough and we planed it,” says Sam.
Fires had plagued the mill since the company’s earliest years, and the facility had been rebuilt several times. After one fire destroyed the now-idle sawmill and a second fire leveled the millwork shop, the S.W. Collins Company rebuilt the mill, erected a large storage building and remodeled the existing store to expand its retail space.
Caribou’s population began to decline sharply in the 1960s, and the construction division suffered. Don, whose father had retired in 1968, dissolved the Collins Construction Company in the early 1970s to focus on supplying building materials to other contractors. He characterizes this period as one of the most challenging in the company’s long history. “I was doing everything,” he says. “And then the masters came,” By “the masters,” he means his sons Sam and Gregg. “They said, ‘We’ll make it twice as big,’” Don recalls.
Embracing technology
Sam and Gregg joined the company in the 1980s, after earning degrees in economics and business administration, respectively. Both are well spoken, with a dry Mainer wit and a quick smile.
Both Sam and Gregg had worked at the store when they were growing up. Sam recalls driving a truck and helping in the yard, including measuring lumber at the mill. “You’d have one person pushing lumber through the planer—that was always the full-time person,” Sam remembers. “I’d be on the other end, pulling the lumber off and scaling it, which meant calculating the board footage in the piece.”
Gregg recalls that as a young teenager, he would be instructed to help in the yard when business was slow in the store. Once he got his driver’s license, he was thrilled at the opportunity to make deliveries. The best route, he says, was a trip to Madawaska Lake, “especially on a sunny afternoon day.”
The company ultimately transitioned out of planing unfinished lumber and began buying finished products. “When I became involved, we expanded the hardware side,” says Sam. The business continues to fill orders for custom millwork, including cabinetry and moldings, from the mill shop.
In the ’80s, S.W. Collins focused on the “home center” concept and tripled its business over the previous decade’s figures, family members say. Stock was expanded to include more plumbing, hardware and electrical supplies. The store layout and lighting were improved to enhance the experience for self-service customers. Inventory expanded to include doors, windows and cabinetry.
In 1984, Don and Sam introduced computers into the business to manage accounts receivable. They overhauled the system in 1988, adding terminals on the selling floor and offices and a central processor. The resulting improvements to central inventory control and pricing were a critical step toward future business growth.
To achieve more storage space, the Collinses razed the old store in 1992 and replaced it with a 7,000-square-foot warehouse. Gregg manages a second location, 20 minutes south in Presque Isle, Maine, which opened in 1993. The second full-service building supply center, with 6,500 feet of floor space, allowed for an expansion of some product lines. A third store in Houlton, Maine, was added in 2007.
Historic relics—a wooden barrel of galvanized nails, a salvaged piece of clapboard bearing the S.W. Collins maker’s mark, and aerial photographs of the property, taken over time depicting the business’s progression—are scattered around the offices on the second-floor loft of the Caribou store. Downstairs, the sales floor is spotless, modern and well lit. Aisles of paint, power tools and scouting supplies are organized around the central sales counters.
The fifth-generation members have embraced technology. Their father, gesturing around the Caribou office, observes that under their direction, “This area here became very sophisticated.”
“When people think lumber and hardware, they think it’s pretty simple and that you wouldn’t need all the technology that you see in some other businesses,” says Gregg. “It’s just the opposite. We use estimating tools that are software-based. Everything we do through the store is computerized, from checkout to back office.”
“The cost of new technology is an issue for small businesses but is essential to competing effectively for many companies,” Sen. Susan Collins writes in her e-mail to Family Business. From 1992 to 1993, she was New England Administrator of the U.S. Small Business Administration. She also was the founding executive director of the Center for Family Business at Husson College in Bangor, Maine, where she served from 1994 to 1996.
Diverse offerings
Diversification has helped S.W. Collins to navigate ebbs and flows in demand. In 2002 the company opened a 4,000-square-foot kitchen and bath home design center within walking distance of the Caribou headquarters on the first floor of the brick Masonic Hall. (The Masons continue to use the second floor for meetings, though S.W. Collins now owns the building.)
The center features displays in homey vignettes. Original store ledgers and historic photos decorate custom shelving flanking a fireplace; children’s crayon artwork covers a stainless steel refrigerator door. The business recently began carrying pellet fuel, an alternative heating source that is made primarily from byproducts of the paper and lumber industry and burned in high-efficiency pellet stoves. “We’re very dependent on oil heat up here in Aroostook County—and Maine, for the most part,” Sam explains. “We don’t have access to natural gas and propane is fairly expensive.”
Sales of pellet fuel, which the brothers thought would sustain them during the winter when sales of other products slow down, took off in the pre-season. “We had 50 trailer loads of pellets arrive here in the month of July, and [by mid-August] we sold 35 of them already,” says Sam. That equates to roughly 770 tons of fuel. The Collinses are considering using pellet stoves to heat their own stores and showrooms.
“If someone had said, ‘You’re going to be selling fuel in five years,’ I’d have said, ‘You’re crazy,’” Sam reflects. “But you never know what the opportunity will be.”
Family members note that their local economy remained relatively stable during the economic downturn. “Certainly we saw a retraction, probably, in 2008-9, like the rest of the country did,” says Gregg. “But we could be considered a little more fortunate that we’ve never really seen the peaks or the valleys in Aroostook County.”
S.W. Collins is affiliated with the ENAP lumber and building materials distribution co-op and with Do It Best Corp., a buying co-op in the hardware, lumber and building materials industry. Gregg notes that the market for many of the company’s products has changed over the years. For example, manufacturers are phasing out oil-based paints, once a staple of paint departments, in favor of more environmentally friendly formulations. Customers are demanding low- or no-maintenance exterior products such as windows, siding and decking. And engineered products are replacing traditional framing. “The most interesting part of the business is the constant change,” says Gregg.
The expansion of options comes at a price. “Our biggest challenge is [that] a lot of the products don’t go away,” says Sam. Boards, for example, were once the standard for enclosing walls and floors. Builders are increasingly requesting sheet goods, but a segment of the market still prefers to “board in.” So the business carries boards, plywood and oriented strand board, a competitor to plywood. “Our inventory offerings—our SKUs-—keep continuing to expand,” says Sam.
Like many others in their industry, the Collins family has felt some competition from big-box retailers. A Lowe’s opened in Presque Isle in 2006. Lowe’s target customers are do-it-yourselfers and homeowners, and S.W. Collins tries to appeal to that market segment, too, Sam says. But, he points out, “We probably capture most of the contractor business because of the level of service that we give.”
Sam notes that, like other hardware stores, S.W. Collins makes keys and cuts glass. But the company also has three salespeople calling on contractors and homeowners, and it offers architectural and interior design assistance.
“We’re very big on customer service and providing a good working relationship with the homeowner who’s just building a dog house to a contractor that has a very large contract,” Gregg says. “We try to get out and help every customer that comes into our store and give them that personalized service.”
“We can even help you with obtaining financing,” says Sam. “We’re trying to make the process easy for people because it can be overwhelming sometimes.”
Sam doubts a new big-box store will open in the area. “I don’t see another box coming to the county, simply because we’re 70,000 people and our land mass is greater than Rhode Island and Connecticut combined,” he says. “We don’t have the concentration of population to support too many boxes.”
S.W. Collins today employs about 65 people in its three full-service locations, the kitchen and bath center and the millwork shop. Many staff members are long-tenured. “I think they feel very attached to the company and recognize that it’s bigger than just the owners at the time,” Sam says.
Sam says he and his brother feel a responsibility not only to their family, but also to their employees and their community. “We feel fortunate that we’ve been able to live in Aroostook County and have a business that supports our families and a business that can employ people,” Sam says. “We strive to be better tomorrow than we were today. Every day we feel like it’s a race, and the race accelerates, and you have to do a better job everyday. It’s not just important to the continuity of the business. It’s also important to the community and to our employees, and we feel a responsibility to both. So we want to make sure it’s successful and can continue beyond us.”
Sam and Gregg have six children between them, ranging in age from teens to mid-20s. Several of them have worked part-time in the business. The fifth-generation brothers say they won’t pressure any of the sixth generation to take over. “If any of them desire to go into it, then we certainly encourage it,” Sam says. Adds Gregg, “Whatever they decide to do is fine.”
Sam notes that each generation of his family has strived to run the company in a responsible way. “We may own the stock in the company,” Sam says, “but it’s an organism by itself, and we need to put things in place to make sure it continues on beyond our lives. And I think each generation looks on it in that manner. We’re stewards of the business today, but it’s not our business.
“My intent is to pass it on, either to the next generation or to somebody else that will continue to be a placeholder to improve the business into the future.”
And, Gregg adds, “We don’t want to be known as the ones that screwed it up.”
Sally M. Snell is a writer based in Lawrence, Kan.
Copyright 2013 by Family Business Magazine. This article may not be posted online or reproduced in any form, including photocopy, without permssion from the publisher. For reprint information, contact bwenger@familybusinessmagazine.com.