Former golf pro Ben Duncan holds his own amid the big boxes in Simpsonville
After 10 years on the PGA circuit, Ben Duncan walked away from golf to sell hammers and nails.
It’s not like he’s giving up tough competition on the links for an easy ride in hardware.
In July, Duncan opened Greenville County’s first new locally owned hardware store in years – an Ace Hardware along Simpsonville’s fast-growing and traffic-heavy commercial strip on Fairview Road off I-385.
And he did it two-tenths of a mile from Home Depot and five-tenths of a mile from Lowe’s, two national box stores with a history of driving out local retailers.
If that’s not enough competition, Duncan’s store is a long stone’s throw from a Wal-Mart. Duncan is unfazed.
“Yeah, there is an extreme amount of competition from the box stores, but at the same time we offer something they don’t,” he said. “When you walk through the front door, you can get somebody who can help you. You can get in, get what you need and, more importantly, have a pleasant shopping experience, and get back to your life, get back to your project, your office, whatever.”
Living Off Disgruntled Box Store Customers
Box store customers complain they often wander aisles to find help – someone, for example, who can explain the dizzying array of energy-efficient light blubs.
“I can live on the people they piss off,” said Duncan. “Customer service, customer service, customer service. That’s the bottom line.”
He is confident, too, of disabusing customers of the perception that “because we are smaller, we’re more expensive. That is just not the case. I am right in line pricing-wise.”
Further, he said, he has products and brands such as Craftsman and Stihl not available at Lowe’s or Home Depot, which “a lot of times send people to me. They don’t have what the people need, so they tell them, ‘Try the new Ace.’”
Duncan is counting, too, on people who see the civic benefit of buying local even if they may have to pay a bit more on occasion.
“I’m a believer in people supporting their own. I am hiring local people. I am supporting the local economy. I’m putting money back into our tax system here.”
To strengthen local ties, Duncan and his wife, Christy, a fifth-grade teacher at Thomas Kerns Elementary, will move “very soon” from Greenville, Duncan’s hometown, to Simpsonville.
Weary of the PGA Tour, Duncan Puts Clubs Away
In startup mode, he is running “extremely lean right now” with four full-time employees, including him, and three part-time.
While Home Depot and Lowe’s offer a host of ordinary hardware and household items, Duncan said, “they make their living off the guy who is coming in and buying lumber for five houses.”
According to SEC filings reported by Reuters, professional contractors account for 35 percent of sales at Home Depot and 25 percent at Lowe’s.
There was nothing casual about Duncan’s decisions to leave the pro golf circuit, open a hardware store, join the Ace brand and put the store where he did in the Simpsonville ZIP code.
Duncan turned professional after a successful run as a member of Clemson’s 2003 NCAA golf championship team. He gave himself 10 years but “never made it where I wanted to make it.”
Tired of the travel, at age 32, Duncan quit the tour last November “to get into something else.” He hasn’t picked up a golf club since.
He considered farming and real estate but what got “the wheels turning” was fascination with hardware stores. As a kid, he loved walking the aisles of a nearby Ace Hardware and on the golf tour would seek one out “and kind of walk around and check them out.” That decided, he went to work.
Picking a Store Location in County’s ‘Next Hotbed’
“When I sat down about a year and a half ago and really started looking at it, I had a pretty good grasp of Greenville, its growth, where it is growing. After studying the demographics of this area, even though you already have two boxes, you are sitting on the next hotbed of commercial and residential growth.”
He found a population of 75,000 within three to five miles, major homebuilders buying up large parcels of undeveloped acreage and “rooftop after rooftop being built here every day.”
With 26,000 cars traveling Fairview Road daily, pulling “a couple of hundred a day from that is not asking for a whole lot of the pie.”
In January, after months of research, Duncan approached Ace, a wholesale buying cooperative with 4,700 independently owned stores, the largest in the hardware trade. Things went quickly from there.
He was “about three steps ahead of where normally people are.” Ace agreed the area could support a store and worked up a 10-year business plan.
Duncan signed a lease for a 10,000-square-foot vacant building in May and did a lot of the refitting and remodeling himself to prepare for Ace’s set-up team around July 1. “In about 15 days, the store went from empty to cash registers ready for the first customer.”
What attracted Duncan to Ace was an incentive that let him stock the store “basically for free. You pay for it upfront, and they reimburse you up to $330,000” – $200,000 after six months, $100,000 the next year and $30,000 in the third.
“I don’t see how anybody could make the numbers work if they didn’t offer the incentives they do,” Duncan said.
Duncan has “a lot on the line” and figures he’ll have to go through about four spring seasons – “our big time” – to see where things stand, access market demand and make changes “to make things really take off.”
Once Found, Customers Give Store Thumbs Up
For now, though, the challenge is to get found. Because his store is set back from Fairview Road, it lacks clear street-front visibility, and the county’s signage ordinance prevented as dominant of a sign as he would have liked.
But once they get in the door, he said, customers give him positive encouragement. He’s “yet to hear one negative feedback.”
One such first-time customer was Gary Konczal of Simpsonville, who found a 15-watt incandescent light bulb he could not find at Home Depot. “It was my first visit,” Konczal said. “The clerk was helpful. I was pleasantly surprised to learn that for a small store their prices are competitive with those of Home Depot.”
On the way out, Konczal “even purchased a couple of $1 items, which were priced no higher than at a dollar store.”
Ace Hardware has ranked No. 1 in consumer satisfaction among home improvement stores by J.D. Powers for seven consecutive years.
It was founded in 1927 and purchased by its retailers in 1973 as a wholesale buying cooperative. With 4,700 individually owned stores, it is the largest hardware co-op. True Value and Do it Best follow close behind.
Note: The similarity in name with Duncan Home Center, also an Ace store, on Augusta Road in Greenville, is coincidental. There is no relationship.
