By Scott Dalton
Photos by Cindy Shaver
“We come in every Monday morning and ask how do we take care of our customers and how do we take care of our employees, and if you do that, lo and behold, you do make a profit.”– Dan Fite, vice president, Gobble-Fite Lumber Company
If you happen to wander into the Gobble-Fite Lumber Company in Decatur, AL, there’s a good chance you will run into one of the family members who helps manage the operation that handles upwards of 12 million board feet of lumber – primarily Pine and Spruce – annually.
That’s because Gobble-Fite has been a family-run institution since 1934. That’s when W.M. Gobble first started his lumber business. Over the next decade, three brothers – Roy, Jack and Jim Fite – joined him, giving the company its second family name. In fact, at one point, there were nine family members overseeing the day-to-day operations of the company, according to vice president Dan Fite, whose father Jim was one of the original owners.
“I have been in it all my life, straight out of school in 1988,” Dan recalled. “I’ve been mainly in sales and estimating and oversight here for the last 10 to 15 years, but we’re a worker bee company; basically everybody handles a little bit of everything.”
Dan noted that after W.M. Gobble sold the company to his father and his two uncles, they grew the business steadily over the ensuing decades, with various family members joining in the business as they came of age.
“At one time, we had about nine owners and now we have three, including my brother Pat, who is our president,” he said.
As to how Gobble-Fite has been able to remain an independent, family-owned business over the past nine decades, Dan laughed.
“It’s hard to say how we have remained family-owned, stubbornness has to be the main reason. We really have not had a time period in the last 89 years that we were in need of selling. It really worked out for a lot of industries to sell. Sometimes there is a gap with no one to take over the business, but even in the worst years of the housing downturn in 2008, we had enough of the next generation to keep going,” he said, before adding, “Nobody offered us the right price either.”
Dan also attributed the company’s success to focusing on doing what they do as best as they can, and to “rolling with the punches” when it comes to the changing tastes and demands associated with their customers.
“We’re what I would call a good, solid, medium-sized family business. About 80 percent of our business is supplying building materials to new construction projects. The remaining 20 percent is a combination of retail and industrial supplies,” he explained. “We do remanufacturing, sizing wood to specific lengths and widths, industrial lumber low-grade Pine, as well as standard building material, lumber, plywood, and columns.”
Gobble-Fite Lumber can also boast an employee retention rate that would be the envy of just about any industry these days. But as Dan noted, having a low turnover of key personnel has both its positives and negatives.
“We have so many good people, plus or minus 50 employees, and many have been with us for 10, 15, and even over 20 years. That is great for stability, but also a gut punch when somebody leaves,” he said.
He added that he has seen enormous changes in the industry as a whole over the past 35 years that he has been a part of it. For example, he said that for years, lumber yards like Gobble-Fite bought their lumber almost exclusively from local mills. Today, a lumber supplier likely gets lumber from a combination of mills, buyer groups and European suppliers. The customer base has changed as well over that same period of time.
“For a long time, the custom home builder that we would partner with were the 10 to 25 homes-a-year guys. When the housing crisis happened, less and less of those guys stayed in the market. Now, we’re working with the large scale tract builders,” he said. “That’s very different, and we have adjusted to the volume game and lower margin game. It’s really something that is for us interesting because it is a little different from what I’ve done all my life.”
Dan’s nephew, Davis Fite, who serves as operations manager, has also seen how those trends have impacted the family business.
“It can be a thankless business. You go from a buyer being your best friend when you are offering the best price to them not knowing you when you are half a percent high. We’ve seen some people leave the industry who appreciated good service and quality. But we have really hung our hats on product knowledge and custom homes over the years.”
Dan agreed.
“It’s still the bulk of our business. Today, we have one customer who used to be five customers. Instead of building 10 houses, they’re building 50. They are the ones we want to shine with because that is who we want to be our customer,” he said, adding that product lineups have changed as well. “What goes into a house has changed so much in the last 35 years. Then, I could tell you what would make up 80 percent of the products of their house. Now, there are so many choices, and customers see what they want on the internet. When I started, there were all of two or three door panels that they were using regularly. Now there are 20 or 30. This presents inventory challenges.”
Still, Gobble-Fite has been up to those challenges, in part thanks to its considerable facilities. With a 10,000 square foot showroom, one side of which features a large sales counter and a series of offices, as well as an adjacent 10,000 square foot warehouse filled with doors, windows and cabinets, plus another 45,000 square feet of outdoor storage, a milling operation and a couple of acres of industrial and low-grade lumber storage, the company is ready to meet the existing and emerging needs of its customers.
The company also has a long history of being thrifty to help keep costs and prices low. Davis recalled working during vacation from school, driving trucks and helping out.
“They were very smart and frugal,” he said of the family members who came before him. “They got every mile out of every piece of equipment they could. They had a mechanic who kept the vehicles taped up pretty much indefinitely. In the last 20 years or so, we have switched to buying new equipment relatively regularly, but we still get a lot out of it.”
That sort of can-do spirit truly came to the forefront during the Covid-19 pandemic, as employees stepped up and did what needed to be done to keep things moving.
“It was really a challenge, although looking back on it we did not have near as much trouble as most people did,” Dan said. “We were considered essential and were allowed to stay open, so we were doing our daily work as we usually do.”
The biggest issue, he added, was getting commodities in a timely manner. By way of example, he said when it came to things like windows, it sometimes took up to six months from order to delivery.
“The contractor all of a sudden had to plan for that. There were several products like that. Adding to the perfect storm, we had low interest rates. It made a boon like we have never seen; there’s never been a time when I have seen business as good as it was, but also as hard as it was. Still, we can’t complain; the money part was great, and our buying groups we were affiliated with did a great job. We did not have as much trouble as some people did, but I have never seen a more stressful time.”
As far as what the future holds for Gobble-Fite Lumber, both Dan and Davis said that the company’s employees will remain at the heart of its success.
“We are extremely employee-focused, and if we take that perspective, we will see more profit down the road. But we don’t focus on profit; we focus on getting good people,” Davis said.
Dan echoed those sentiments.
“That is literally how we are still here; we are coming in every Monday morning and asking how do we take care of our customers and how do we take care of our employees, and if you do that, lo and behold, you do make a profit,” he said, adding that he hopes to see the next generation of family members build on the traditions of the past 89 years.
“I have four children, and my youngest, who is a senior in high school, has an interest in being part of the business, and that will be interesting. If the good Lord blesses me, we are hoping to make systematic progress. Davis has done a great job working on that,” he said. “Decatur is a small town of about 50,000 and my dad and uncles were pretty well thought of. We are well thought of too, but a lot of that has to do with the folks that came before us. That is something we are trying to build on. From the outside looking in, people thought they were savvy business men, but what we are savvy about is working hard.”
For more information, visit www.gobble-fite.com.
