The Ann Arbor News,
5/14/2008
Chelsea Lumber has been rolling with the punches for 100
years and it's still going strong.
Excerpt:
When customers ask Bob Daniels how Chelsea Lumber Co. has
been able to stay in business for 100 years, he inevitably explains how the
shop has evolved.
It goes something like this:
The original version of what's now the Chelsea Lumber Co.
first opened on Main Street
in 1908. It sold lumber. Owners of the shop it later merged with sold
huckleberries and chickens.
When Daniels began working there for his father in the
1940s, he shoveled, sold and delivered coal. The store sold wheat, too. Today,
Chelsea Lumber sells wood and construction materials, finances new
single-family homes and builds hotels and other commercial buildings - among
various other services.
And that's how the company has survived for a century - by
adapting, reinventing and growing itself.
"We are not staying the same," said Daniels, 79,
the second-generation owner of Chelsea Lumber. "We are redirecting
ourselves in many ways. ... What I have been trying to do is to get a
combination of services that we can provide to the public, whether it's the
commercial public or a homeowner or whoever it is, to meet their needs. We are
constantly trying to adjust."
Read the rest of the story here.