That is almost exactly what Hank Sterling said to her in the spring of 2010. Let me tell you about Hank Sterling because you need to understand him to understand what happened next. Hank Sterling was 58 years old in 2010 and had operated Sterling Home Solutions out of a showroom on Madison Street in Shelbyville for 19 years. He sold and installed closet systems, primarily the laminated particleboard variety, sourced from a regional distributor in Nashville. And he had built his business on relationships.
He knew every real estate agent in Bedford County. He knew the contractors who flipped houses in Murfreesboro and Smyrna. He had a sign on his showroom that said Bedford County's closet expert since 1991. And he had never in 19 years had a serious competitor operating out of the same town. Sterling held court every weekday morning at the counter of the co-op hardware store on Wartrace Pike, where he drank coffee and talked to contractors and real estate agents and anyone else who came through.
And he was the kind of man who made his opinions known without being asked for them. He had heard about Lana Dickstra through the contractor network before he had ever met her, and what he had heard had made him curious in the way that a large dog becomes curious about something small moving in the grass. He met her at a home and garden show at the Bedford County Fairgrounds in April of 2010, where Lana had rented a 10-foot booth with money she did not quite have and displayed photographs of her completed closets and a sample panel of the cedar slat assembly she had developed. Sterling walked past her booth twice before stopping.
He looked at the photographs. He looked at the sample panel. He looked at Lana, who was 23 years old and wearing a flannel shirt and had a notebook open on the table in front of her with measurements and cost calculations written in columns. He said, "This is cute. What do you charge?"
She told him. He made a sound that was somewhere between a laugh and a cough and said, "Honey, I've been doing closets in this county for 20 years. You know what people actually want? They want something that looks clean and goes in fast. You're selling them a craft project."
The silence lasted about 2 seconds. Then Sterling started laughing. And the two contractors standing with him laughed as well, and Lana wrote something in her notebook and did not look up. Let me tell you about that laugh because it tells you everything about what Hank Sterling was protecting. It was not the laugh of a man who had examined the evidence and found it wanting.
It was the laugh of a man who had built a comfortable position over 19 years and had learned to use laughter as a tool for keeping that position comfortable. When Sterling laughed at Lana's booth, he was not assessing her product. He was signaling to the contractors standing with him that her product did not need to be assessed. That is a different thing entirely. A man who laughs because something is genuinely inferior has done the work of evaluation.
A man who laughs to avoid doing the work of evaluation is a man who is on some level afraid of what the evaluation might find. Lana understood this. She wrote it in her notebook in slightly different words. She drove home and called her mother. Her mother said, "She's right," meaning herself, meaning the things she'd said at the kitchen table a year earlier.
Her father said nothing, but he was listening. Lana did not change what she was doing. She expanded it. In the summer of 2010, she approached Don Crowley at the Musgrave facility again and asked whether the arrangement could be formalized, a written agreement, regular delivery schedule, a small payment to the mill in exchange for a guaranteed supply. Crowley brought it to the main office.
The main office, which was spending $8,000 a year on disposal costs for material that Lana was now using productively, agreed within a week. The arrangement they reached was this: the mill would deliver scrap slats to Lana's property twice monthly. Lana would pay the mill $100 per delivery as a handling fee. The mill would save approximately $6,000 a year in net disposal costs. Lana would have a guaranteed supply of kiln-dried eastern red cedar at an effective cost of roughly 4 cents per board foot compared to the retail price of eastern red cedar lumber which in 2010 was running between $2 and $3 per board foot.
That is not a small advantage. That is the kind of cost structure that makes a business possible when nothing else about it is easy. Let me tell you about the year 2011 because that is when the numbers started to tell a story that was hard to argue with even if people were still trying. By the end of 2011, Lana had completed 47 closet installations across Bedford County and the adjacent counties, Rutherford, Coffee, Marshall, Lincoln. Her average job revenue was $1,850.
Her average material cost, including fasteners, adhesive, and the cedar supply fee, was $118. Her tool investment had grown from the original estate sale hand tools to include a table saw, a router, and a pneumatic nailer. Purchased used, those tools represented a total investment of $2,200. Her gross revenue for 2011 was $86,950. Her net, after materials, tools, fuel, and the booth rental at two home shows, was $61,400.
She was 24 years old and working alone out of a rented house with a cargo trailer she had bought for $800. Hank Sterling's showroom on Madison Street was still there. His sign still said Bedford County's closet experts since 1991. His laminated particleboard systems were still being installed in houses across the county. But three of the real estate agents who had been sending him referrals had started sending some of those referrals to Lana instead because their clients were asking specifically for cedar and Sterling didn't do cedar.
The community reaction to Lana's growing business was not hostility exactly. It was something more like persistent skepticism delivered in a tone of friendly concern. At the co-op hardware store where Lana now came regularly for fasteners and adhesive, she heard things like, "You know, cedar is going to be hard to keep consistent." And how are you going to scale that if you're doing everything by hand? And what happens when the mill changes its mind about the scrap deal?