![]() If that’s all they took from us, then I knew they weren’t doing well.” With 35,000 square feet of selling space, Ambridge Do it Best Home Center can meet the needs of its diverse customer base.»Īs Frank recalls, “We did bang-up sales the first year, then sales dropped 5 percent the second year after Sears opened. In 1996, Sears opened three hardware stores in a small but more affluent town just two miles away on the same highway. ![]() The business thrived throughout the 1980s, but Frank knew the big boxes would arrive soon, so he made the proactive move to construct a 40,000-square-foot building featuring 25,000 square feet of retail space, moving to the new location in 1995. We started collecting data and knew what to buy.”įrank Strano is proud of the contributions his son David has made to improve the business with particular emphasis on social media.» Proactive Maneuvers Against Competition “He was right-it did pay for itself, and it was a major turning point in how we grew the business. ![]() “I had decided to go with another system, but the Epicor sales guy convinced me it would pay for itself in nine months,” Frank recalls. Investing in the Epicor point-of-sale system back in 1988 turned out to be one of the best decisions Frank ever made. In 1982, True Value convinced them to expand into hardware, so the combination hardware store and specialty building supply center became Ambridge True Value Home Center. They began selling roofing, siding and gutters to other contractors out the back, which is how Ambridge Building Center got its start in 1980. The family’s home remodeling business was growing throughout the 1970s and the Stranos needed a large warehouse to store materials, which they had been buying by the truckload. Later, they even convinced their dad to leave his steel mill job and join them in the business. So, Frank joined his brothers in a successful home remodeling business: F.D. “I knew that was not what I wanted to do with the rest of my life.”įrank Strano has worked hard to grow and improve Ambridge Do it Best Home Center since starting back in 1980.» “What I saw in the steel mills was a complete lack of investment in equipment-everything dated back to the 1940s,” he explains. Frank’s brief time after college in an office job at a steel mill convinced him to do something else. Growing up in western Pennsylvania, Frank Strano knew he didn’t want to follow his father into the steel mills.
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