Trial By Fire: One Store’s Resilient Return
The strength and support from the community and our employees motivated our family to rebuild Matt’s Building Materials in Pharr, Texas, even better than before the fire.
On January 1, 2022, I was on vacation with my family when a long-time customer of ours called me. “There is smoke coming from your store” were the first words he said after I answered. At first, I dismissed it, but when the calls kept coming, I knew something was very wrong. Within an hour, we had packed our bags and headed back home. I’ll never forget the sight of those black clouds on the horizon growing bigger as we drove back into Pharr, Texas.
Matt’s “Cash & Carry” Building Materials has always been my second home. The business was named after the original owner, Ira Matt. My father worked for Ira for over 40 years before taking over as owner. Some of my earliest and fondest memories are playing in the store. Throughout my high school and college years, I worked in the lumberyard, and for nearly 20 years, I managed the store alongside my mother, father, and two brothers.
By the time I arrived at the store that day, there were already five fire trucks on the scene, with more on the way. The firemen told us that they would do what they could to save the store, but their priority was to keep the fire from spreading to the nearby businesses and homes. With nothing else I could do, I prayed with the family, friends, and employees who had gathered in the parking lot next door. The fire raged for nearly 30 hours, destroying the 120,000-square-foot timber-framed store, warehouse, and door shop. Despite the pain, we were fortunate that no one was hurt, and the lumberyard was spared.
Getting Operational in the Interim
The next few days were a blur of activity. Thoughts of what had happened and what needed to be done kept me up all night. Unable to sleep, I threw myself into my work. As a family and as a business, the first task we focused on was to get operational. The lumberyard and our delivery fleet were largely untouched, and less than 24 hours after the fire, our trucks were out making deliveries.
But the lumberyard was only a portion of our business. We had two other stores that still needed to be managed, and more than 40 retail and administrative staff that had been displaced. Everyone was worried about what was going to happen to the business, their jobs, their health care, and their future. We addressed our staff and let them know we were committed to staying open, and while changes would need to be made, no one was going to lose their job overnight. We made road signs, used social media, and interviewed with the local news stations to spread the message that we were still open, and we would be rebuilding.
The amount of support we received from friends and strangers in those first few weeks was humbling. People dropped off lunches, someone launched a GoFundMe campaign to raise money for our staff, a local dealership let us borrow forklifts so we could keep operating our lumberyard, the neighboring strip mall leased an office to us at no charge, and thousands of messages of support were sent to us on Facebook. I can’t begin to describe how much those messages of support helped me get through those first few days.
By the third day, we were moving into the offices our neighbor had offered us. We bought folding tables and used office equipment and quickly set up a “war room” where our sales team could field calls and make tickets. The office breakroom became the shared office for the ownership team. Every task that we could think of was printed on a sheet of paper along with the person or team responsible for it. We lined the wall of our office with them so we could refer to them during our meetings.
