Being a third generation-owned and operated company is a point of pride for Huskey Building Supply, particularly owners—and brothers—Austin and Taylor Huskey. This lumber and building material company located in Tennessee has proudly served the area for more than 70 years, growing from a handful of employees in 1945 to more than 250 today by bringing decades of experience, knowledge, and education to each and every job. Founded and run on Christian principles, the company continually strives to “show love, joy, peace, strength, compassion, humility, and honesty” in everything it does.
“Our great uncle, Clay Huskey, was a builder in Nashville in the ’30s and ’40s, when there weren’t established lumber yards,” says Austin. “He had connections in North Alabama with sawmills and would go down there and bring back material for his builds. Like any good estimator, he’d bring back a few boards too many, and stored those on a lot in South Nashville.”
He started selling the extra boards and eventually realized it would make a better business than building houses. Taylor and Austin’s granddad Cecil was brought into the business and ended up buying it years later when Clay retired. After Cecil passed, it was run by their dad and brother for a number of years, growing it steadily until Austin and Taylor came on board. “Taylor and I grew up in the business, following dad’s footsteps and loving every minute of it,” Austin says.
Maintaining that Huskey family feel is very important, as well as being nimble, he adds. As the world is continually consolidating, the Huskeys feel they meet a need in the market—if a customer needs something, or if there’s a change happening in the market, they can make a decision and move on it without having to consult a committee.
“Being family-owned, we don’t want people to feel like a number,” says Austin. “Our dad always had a very open-door policy and was very well connected with everybody in the company and certainly operations, because he grew up doing it just like Taylor and I did.”
The business has always operated in the greater Nashville area, and takes pride in its products. “We’re not trying to provide the cheapest products necessarily, but from a purely hard dollar standpoint, we’re trying to provide quality products that are going to last because they’re going into our community,” he adds. “That’s a big deal to us as well. When my dad took over, it was seven people; it’s more than 300 families now, and supporting those families and creating more opportunities for those families is a service we take very seriously.”
The family’s Christian beliefs are also extremely important, Taylor adds. “We do a lot of giving, both here and around the world. Every single year, we sit down, and we take what we’ve made, and really try to do our best to tithe it wisely and well, investing in something beyond these walls. It’s important to us.”
On the business front, the company has recently forged a new partnership with Marvin Windows and Doors, considered an excellent fit for Huskey due to sharing similar values. “It’s a big deal to sell a quality product and brand you believe in,” says Taylor “We also felt we had a gap in our product offering. When our dad opened the truss plant and started working with more track-focused guys, bigger builders doing more homes per year, it was through that process we lost our focus on the custom home builder.”
As the team made the shift back toward a focus on the custom home builder, they realized they didn’t have a product that fit in the multi-million dollar home sector. “They’re not going to put a vinyl window in there; they need something nicer,” says Taylor.
That set the company’s sights on a partner that could offer that kind of product. After speaking to a number of different companies, Huskey landed on Marvin, another family-owned and operated business in its fifth generation. “They align with us value-wise really well and build such a quality product,” says Taylor. “It’s easy to sell that product, because it’s a product and company we believe in, so we feel really good about the partnership.”
Huskey is currently making a big investment in a specific Marvin showroom that will be “very unique,” he adds, and probably one of the few in the country boasting a showroom of this caliber to display product. “We’re excited for that and want to keep growing that product category in this market.”
Of course, none of this ongoing success would be possible without maintaining an exemplary company culture. “I can’t really talk about company culture without talking about lean thinking and lean manufacturing,” says Austin. “We’re big, lean thinkers. Sometimes that gets seen as simplifying everything and cutting out jobs, but really, nothing could be further from the truth. Lean is about growing people and engaging everybody in understanding the areas that can be a struggle in your job and your role.”
By fixing those struggles—or making them less complicated—the company ends up with a more engaged workforce, achieves more at the end of the day, and produces a quality product.
For Huskey, lean also includes morning meetings at every job site to keep the team engaged, on the same page, and learning together. “This way we don’t just do the job, we improve the job,” Austin says. “We give people time to make those improvements on ideas they’ve had in their particular station.”
There’s a methodology around that, he adds, but it’s really about how to get everybody engaged in making Huskey the best place to work while creating more throughput, more value to the customer, and a better product at the same time. In short, Huskey strives to ensure company culture and atmosphere remain positive and uplifting for everyone.
“We also invest in employees not only to improve jobs here, but also improve their life,” says Taylor. “We have a library of more than 30 books we want everybody to read. We have book clubs going on all the time covering chapters in these books, from Extreme Ownership by Jocko Willink to 2 Second Lean by Paul Akers. If people read and apply it—not just at work, but also at home—that’s something that’s our heart. It’s about improvement of the business to drive value for customers, but also becoming a better person outside of these walls.”
The only requirement Huskey asks is that the employee reads the book if they take one. “Even if this is just a stepping stone for somebody to get to where they really want to go, we want it to be a good experience for them and we want to support them in whatever else they want to do,” says Taylor. “If we can be that for somebody and they can learn something here that they can go on with to bigger and better things, that’s awesome. We love that.”
While the company has faced a few challenges over the years—including growing at a “breakneck pace” from 2021 to 2022—it has managed to maintain the right size for future success. As for milestones, while Huskey is growth-minded from both a business and people perspective, it’s not focused on chasing a number, Taylor explains.
“We want to grow for really two reasons. The first being that in this space there’s been so much consolidation over the past 10 to 15 years, and as that’s happened there’s a bit of fear that as the big get bigger, they get treated differently from vendors and manufacturers.”
Huskey doesn’t have to be the biggest, but it does need to be a good investment and a good bet for vendor partners. “We need to be buying more from them year in and year out, to be good customers and good bets long-term,” Taylor says. “We need to continue to get good service, good pricing, to be able to provide that and value to our customers.”
Coming out of COVID, the company learned that the relationships built with vendors and the investment they saw in their specific customers were very real, Austin adds. “There were multiple product categories that you had to pick and choose during that time, and certainly there will be material tightening again as market fluctuations happen, so we feel to stay relevant in the supply chain, we need to be somebody who’s going to do more next year than we did this year.”
Of course, the company’s focus never strays far from people, another reason why it remains growth-focused. “If we were just going to mail it in and be okay with doing what we did last year, year over year, the ability for us to grow leaders within this company would be limited,” says Taylor. “For people to grow within our company, to go from the shop floor to inside to sales or management, what have we got to do to keep growing?”
Huskey Building Supply is committed to promoting from within, and to do that, the company must keep creating as many possibilities as possible. This dedication, coupled with longstanding family involvement, speaks volumes to where the company is heading. As third-generation owners, the brothers aren’t beholden to Wall Street and can make long-term decisions themselves, says Austin.
“We don’t have to rely on the next quarterly earnings report, which creates a lot of ability to stay nimble and to support our customers. But again, it really comes back to our people. If we have an engaged team that cares about what they’re doing, operates with excellence, and understands we want to let value flow to the customer, it just creates a better experience.”
And the brothers are certainly doing something right. “On a personal note, the business is certainly a fun business, and I’ve grown to love it,” adds Taylor. “The thing that gets me up in the morning is that our name is on the sign, and we love that we’re standing on the shoulders of our grandfather and our father. That’s something we take great pride in,” he says.
“We’ve been a huge part of the growth over the years, and that’s been fun to take part in. It’s fun to wake up and realize this is something that, if our grandfather could look at it now, he would be shocked that it’s still in the family and we’re still doing it day in day out.”
“We’re very aware of the statistics of third generation, privately held, family-owned businesses, and I think less than seven percent make it to that fourth,” adds Austin. “But we love what we do. We love a challenge, so we’re trying to make long-term decisions every day.”
