Change the only constant for 100-year-old Chelsea Lumber

Chelsea Lumber has been rolling with the punches for 100 years and it’s still going strong.

 

Excerpt:

 

When customers ask Bob Daniels how Chelsea Lumber Co. has been able to stay in business for 100 years, he inevitably explains how the shop has evolved.

 

It goes something like this:

 

The original version of what’s now the Chelsea Lumber Co. first opened on Main Street in 1908. It sold lumber. Owners of the shop it later merged with sold huckleberries and chickens.

 

When Daniels began working there for his father in the 1940s, he shoveled, sold and delivered coal. The store sold wheat, too. Today, Chelsea Lumber sells wood and construction materials, finances new single-family homes, and builds hotels and other commercial buildings – among various other services.

 

And that’s how the company has survived for a century – by adapting, reinventing and growing itself.

 

“We are not staying the same,” said Daniels, 79, the second-generation owner of Chelsea Lumber. “We are redirecting ourselves in many ways. … What I have been trying to do is to get a combination of services that we can provide to the public, whether it’s the commercial public or a homeowner or whoever it is, to meet their needs. We are constantly trying to adjust.”

 

Read the rest of the story here.