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By Clara Helm
Stepping into Ganahl Lumber’s San Juan Capistrano location is akin to entering a contractor’s dream come alive. With piles of material being sorted into trucks with local companies’ names branded on the side, the lumber destination has a scope of operations rarely seen in Orange County.
After two years of construction, Ganahl Lumber’s new store at 25865 Stonehill Drive, just west of Camino Capistrano, opened on Aug. 7. It replaces the Capistrano Beach location, which was part of the community since 1995 and closed on Aug. 4.
“We have known about the demand in this area since 1995, but operating from a 1-acre facility in our business, with larger product links and stuff, has been really challenging,” said Ganahl Lumber CFO Dan Delaney.
In 2017, Ganahl was selected through a public process to exclusively negotiate with the City of San Juan Capistrano for the Lower Rosan Ranch property. Its purchase and sale agreement for the property was then approved in 2020 after a City Council vote.
With the land having no utilities and the construction starting from scratch, there was plenty of work to complete on the property to develop the large compound that stands there today.
“Over the past seven years, we have been working on all the processes from entitling, designing and constructing,” Ganahl Lumber CEO Peter Ganahl said in a press release. “It takes a lot of time and patience to bring a project like this to a successful conclusion.”
Upgrading in size, the facility is more than 10 acres and hosts a 50,000-square-foot main store, as well as an additional 100,000 square feet of drive-through materials storage, sheds and operations buildings.
The property also features 6,000 square feet for a future fast-casual restaurant space. Although the company is focusing its attention on its new store, Delaney expects it should have news on what will reside in the lot in the next year.
“We want to make sure that whatever goes there fits into the community,” said Delaney.
While Ganahl is a great resource for local homeowners with DIY projects, the company gears itself toward professional contractors. According to Delaney, 95% of its customer base is professional contractors despite being open to the general public.
Different from national chains such as Lowes or Home Depot, Ganahl lacks the typical garden sections and patio furniture selection. What it specializes in is stocking its store with materials that professional contractors might need to remodel a customer’s home or complete a commercial project.
“Our product mix is heavily skewed towards having contractor quantity and quality of product, so you won’t necessarily see the same saws that you’ll see in Home Depot,” said Delaney.
One of those contractor-oriented elements is its stock of specialized wood, such as slabs of walnut and purpleheart. The Ganahl executives emphasized that there is a wider depth and breadth of products they offer.
Ganahl’s new location not only offers hard-to-find materials, but also a convenience-focused sales process that contractors need.
Just outside its main store are storage buildings where customers can pick up the materials they need through an enhanced will-call system.
Customers can place an order with Ganahl’s sales staff over the phone or through email, and it will be ready for pick up in 90 minutes to two hours, a fast-paced process in the construction industry. This way, contractors can stop in, load up, and check out fast.
The new location was built with features lacking in the Capistrano Beach location, such as wide drive aisles to help customers navigate the yard, ample parking, and a larger sales staff.
With the busy customer in mind, the new store also offers a much larger capacity for same- and next-day deliveries.
As the oldest lumberyard in California, the company has an expansive network of 10 existing locations that stretches across Orange and Los Angeles County, allowing contractors to order materials for jobs in different locations.
The company is looking to possibly expand to San Diego in the future because of demand, but it would not expand out of state because of its emphasis on a local network system, something unique to Ganahl.
“We have people driving up from San Diego every day to visit (John Lopez’s) facility … this (new store) will be an attraction not just for South Orange County but North County San Diego,” Delaney said, referring to the store’s general manager.
The San Juan Capistrano store holds everything from framing lumber to finished lumber—essentially all types of wood used for construction. Additionally, its shelves are filled to the brim with tool selections, paint selections, decking products, molding, and other products.
Its product variety is so diverse that the new location was an essential stop for those preparing for the recent Tropical Storm Hilary.
“We were a big destination for business on Saturday before the storm. People were coming in to buy sandbags, plastic, generators, tarps, flashlights, batteries and cases of water,” said John Lopez, the general manager for the San Juan Capistrano location. “So, that’s just how diverse our product offerings are and some examples of what the community showed up to purchase on Saturday.”
The store also holds a doors and windows department, helping contractors order specialized features and giving customers a peek at a finished product.
“A lot of contractors like to bring the homeowners in to walk in and feel and touch the products, and that’s really a differentiator for us,” Delaney said. “The space enables us to operate a program to get our contractors, customers and really anybody who wants to use it in and out quickly.”
Along with the retained employees from the Capistrano Beach location, the new store is staffed by new hires and transferred employees from other Ganahl stores to accommodate the expanded facility. The new store has a staff of 75, what Ganahl calls, “employee-owners.”
This term is used because Ganahl employees are part owners of the company. Ganahl’s Employee Stock Ownership Plan (ESOP), an alternative retirement plan, allows employees to have what CEO Peter Ganahl refers to as “skin in the game.”
“It helps everyone to work together because we’re all focusing on the same purpose and the same end goal,” said Ganahl Lumber Executive Assistant Becky Acosta. “We all want to see (the company) succeed. And that comes in forms of excellent customer service, stocking the store with products that serve our clientele base, everything like that.”
The store has had an outpouring of support from the surrounding community, according to Lopez, as it has been long expected.
“The reaction that I hear over and over is ‘we’ve been waiting for this,’ ” said Lopez, who added, “The community has watched us build from the ground up, and they seem grateful that we brought this here; it’s definitely an improvement to the land and should be an improvement to their lifestyle.”
Customers also notice the store’s attention to detail with its design, something that Delaney says was crucial to their planning. According to the CFO, they hope customers will see features in the store that they want to use in their own projects, such as a mezzanine ceiling made of dowel laminated timber.
“We spent a lot of time making sure that we had the right plan before we went and executed it,” said Delaney. “This facility is going to be here for over 80 years, so we took an extra couple of months making sure we got those decisions right.”
The heart of the new store is showing Ganahl’s value to its current customer base and new customers in the community, which Lopez says has succeeded based on its increase in business already surpassing the old location.
The company’s priority over creating new amenities and services has only improved its ability to save customer time and money, said Lopez.
“We believe our first obligation is to look after the profits of our customers,” said Lopez. “So, we believe that we’ve built efficiencies into this facility that will help our customers be profitable.”
“We will save them time, because it’s easier to get in and out,” he continued. “We will save them time, because there’s more products here; we will save them time, because we can make deliveries with a very good accuracy rate.”
