How’s Business? Building Materials Demand Picks Up for Northern New York Dealer

Robert Ashley
Triple A Building Center
Massena, New York

Ashley discusses improving demand for building materials, employee autonomy and plans for 2027.

How are sales and customer counts? Sales are down a little bit. Overall, sales have been soft, but this fall looks very, very positive. On the building materials side, we’ve seen a lot more house packages coming our way, so the outlook looks very good. We’re in northern New York, two hours north of Syracuse near the Canadian border. I always tell everybody I’m from “southern Canada.” From my house, it’s about a 2½-mile swim to Canada.

St. Lawrence County is larger than some states, and our population is shrinking. It’s down to about 100,000 people, and we have more cattle than people. The population that is growing is the Amish community. We do quite a bit of business with them, although they also provide competition on the metal roofing side.

What’s unique about your business? We have three stores, but I allow my people to conduct business as though they’re the owner. I give them a lot of freedom to run the business. That might be a little different from how some owners operate.

Best niches? Building materials is the main thing. We’re especially big in gypsum and lumber.

What do you have planned for 2027? We’ve remodeled all three stores so they have the same look, and now we need to revamp the exterior of one of them. We just finished the new roof there. Our focus is on shoring up the three locations we have right now.

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