Matt’s Building Materials’ Journey from Ashes to Grand Opening

On January 1st, 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 left. I’ll never forget the sight of those black clouds on the horizon growing bigger as we drove back into town.

Matt’s “Cash & Carry” Building Materials in Pharr, Texas has always been my second home. The business was named after the original owner, Ira Matt, and my father worked for him 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 twenty years I’ve 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 family, friends, and employees who had gathered in the parking lot next door. The fire raged for nearly thirty hours, destroying the 120,000 sq/ft. 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

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. The first task we as a family and as a business 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 healthcare, 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, used office equipment, and quickly set up a“war room” where our sales team could field calls and make job 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.

Lots of Help Along theWay

As the weeks turned into months, we had a smooth operation going. Ourlumberyardand other stores were profitable enough to sustain us. The money from insurance wasn’t enough to cover our entire loss, but it made rebuilding possible. We owe a lot to our vendors and suppliers, and we are forever grateful for the assistance they provided us. In many cases, they extended our terms of credit and even replaced some of our lost goods at no charge. We owe an extra large thank you to Orgill, an international hardware distributor, who let us use one of their semi-trailers as storage, and offered to assist us in any way they could throughout the process.Abraham Villagran of Villagran Construction, who had helped us build our third location in 2015, immediately went to work designing and planning the new store. Abraham worked long, long hours overseeing the project, and as I am sure he would tell you, rebuilding is much harder than new construction

Practical Matters of Rebuilding

With new construction, you can plan most of the details well before you break ground. But when we were rebuilding, we faced many additional challenges. We had an active lumberyard just feet away from the construction site that had to be worked around, and any disruptions would cause a loss in revenue and potentially customers. Every day without our retail store was lost revenue, so we tried to balance speed with prudence. Within weeks of the fire, a basic plan for the new store was drawn up before the debris was cleared. Detailed blueprints and plans came next, but we were making changes and updates to them throughout the process. Rebuilding did come with a few advantages: we were able to start fresh and design the floorplan of our retail area as we saw fit, and a smaller more efficient building footprint would allow us to increase our parking lot without sacrificing retail space. It also gave us the chance to expand our offices to accommodate future growth,and we even included a conference room that we could use for training staff or letting our professional customers borrow for their own meetings.

Grand Re-Opening!

Exactly 833 days after the fire, on April 13th, 2024, Matt’s Building Materials in Pharr reopened for business. We celebrated all day and into the night, inviting friends, employees, customers, and vendors to join us. It was a monumental task, but we crossed the finish line. It has been the most challenging and rewarding experience of my career. I am forever thankful to our staff for their positivity and hard work, to our vendors for their flexibility, to our customers for their loyalty and patience, and to everyone else who helped us along the way. I am still sad that our old store is gone, that building and the memories we made there can never be replaced, but I am also deeply grateful for the experience.

Faced with tragedy, our company rose to the challenge and exceeded expectations. We overcame our trial by fire and are stronger and more resilient because of it. I may not know what the future will bring, but I am confident that my team can handle it. Through it all, we are blessed and we know that God’s timing is perfect. We didn’t understand the bigger plan back then, but we definitely do now. The plan going forward is to continue to be the best version of Matt’s that we can be: build positive relationships with those around us and continue to pass our God-given blessings onto others.

Now if you’ll excuse me, I owe my family a long overdue vacation.