4 | Orgill Case Study That’s when Jim and Dana became more aggressive in searching for a hardware business to purchase. They looked at several options in nearby communities, but none of them were an ideal fit. But Jim finally got the call he’d been hoping to receive. A business broker Jim had been in contact with reached out to him with information about a store in Blanco, Texas, called K&C Supply. The business was being run by Kirk Felps, who was looking to transition into retirement. “When I first met with Kirk, the store had been more of a feed store and trailer supply type business, and they had started bringing in more hardware because there was really no other place in the community for the folks to get it,” Jim says. “I really saw the potential in it and the potential in the community. The community really needed a business that could provide it with better options.” Excited by this new opportunity, Jim began working in earnest with Felps to come up with a financial scenario that would allow him to take over the business and invest in getting the store up to what he envisioned. “Kirk [Felps] was very flexible working with us, and we developed a plan that made sense,” Jim says. Once the financing was secured, the couple began making their dream of hardware-store ownership a reality. Prior to acquiring K&C Supply, Jim and Dana had already laid the other necessary groundwork required to open their own business. In 2019, Jim had created and registered a limited liability corporation (LLC) with the state of Texas under the business name of Outlaw Lumber. “Yes, we created an LLC without actually having a physical location because we really knew what we wanted to do,” Jim says. “There were certain tax benefits offered by Texas for veterans who opened small businesses, and we wanted to be able to take advantage of those.” With the store purchase complete, Jim and Dana had a business name, inventory and a lot of ideas about what they wanted the business to become. In fact, Jim and Dana had inventory and fixtures in storage to integrate into their new venture. “We knew we wanted to run our own store, and about a year before we bought K&C, we had the opportunity to buy the inventory and fixtures from another local store that was going out of business,” Jim says. “Our daughter was driving and saw a sign that another local store was closing up, and we went in and made a deal to buy them out. We just stuck everything in storage until we found a location where we could actually use what we bought.”
RkJQdWJsaXNoZXIy MjkzMjMw