| Ted and Ron Hoover owe
a bit of gratitude to their family for providing the impetus to form what
is today a thriving "post-frame" construction business in Lexington,
South Carolina. Ted and Ron are the youngest of seven brothers. Although their father was a carpenter, and they had been around construction all of their lives, it was really due to an older brothers having settled in southern Wisconsin that the two brother's took up their present avocation. That was in the early 1970's. At that time post-frame construction was completely new to Ted and Ron, even though their older brother had actually begun erecting a few post-frame buildings. During visits up North, the two saw first hand the tremendous application possibilities of post-frame construction in the South.  As Ron explains, "It was in Wisconsin that we learned the basics of building post-frame structures." "We simply took the technology from there to our family home in South Carolina." There was a problem however. "In the early 1970's post-frame construction was almost unheard of in South Carolina. No one knew what we were talking about then, and that means there was absolutely no market for post-frame buildings. We had to go out and create one." |
Just how did the Hoover brothers do that? "Primarily
we just had a lot of blind faith, I guess," notes Ron. "We simply
knew that there was a need for this type of structure in our area. People
just had to be educated on the many benefits of a type of construction that
they didn't know anything about. We began by simply talking to people; both
potential customers and other construction people. We did some advertising
too, and finally sold our first building." The Hoover brothers co-founded Hoover Building Systems in 1972. While most post-frame contractors can trace their early beginnings to the agriculture marketplace, this isn't the case with Hoover. "Our first building was a golf course storage facility, for cars and maintenance equipment," says Ron. "One thing led to another after that, but surprisingly in our case , very little of our business has been agriculturally related, and yet today remains a small percentage of our market." Rather, the company has concentrated in the light commercial area, in addition to doing a substantial volume in backyard storage and hobby buildings. "We call them multipurpose buildings," notes Ron. "Agricultural buildings are only about 10% to 15% of our business." Over the years, as Hoover Building Systems' business expanded, there was a definite need for a steady source of trusses. To meet that need, in 1986 the company opened its own truss manufacturing plant to satisfy their own requirements. Today however, the truss retailing business has grown into an entirely separate division of the company. |