Tom McIntyre is celebrating 40 years of being in the furniture business. From relatively humble beginnings just selling product at Thorsness Hardware, he went on to buy the business from the Thorsness family, and now runs it with his son Mike, who spoke recently to The News Review about his father.
Mike notes that at the beginning Tom was making $325 a month, and the Saltcoats store was closed Mondays as well. The business didn't have a location in Yorkton then, but after expansion to new locations the Yorkton store opened later. Mike says that Tom originally bought the business with his uncle Dave, but the father and son team bought his uncle's share in 2005.
Mike himself is celebrating a milestone with the business, as he began working there 20 years ago delivering furniture before running the Yorkton location. He was put in charge of the store at 24 after five years of deliveries, and admits that it likely took a lot of trust on his father's part to let him take control. He says that Tom has taught him everything he knows about running a business, and he's glad that they're a pair that can get things done and have success in the furniture industry.
"You definitely have to have a special relationship, which he and I do. A lot of people don't have what it takes to make it work, but we have a lot of respect for each other and each other's ideas and after 20 years the relationship's getting stronger. We've never really butted heads about anything."
Mike says that in the years since he's started, the business is going well, with the highest numbers the pair has ever seen. He also says that part of the success is that they have full faith in each other, which makes it easy to get things done and make decisions that move the business in the right direction.
Having spent decades in the furniture industry, Mike says he didn't know if the family would see this day, but now they are looking towards the future. He hopes that his father will be a major part of the business for decades more to come.
"When I was starting and he was celebrating his twentieth anniversary, I wondered how long I would last. Twenty years is a long time, I never dreamt that he'd be finishing forty, I'd be at twenty, and we would really like how the business is going and looking forward to the next ten or twenty years."
Mike says that one of the important parts of those 40 years was his mother Gail, who married Tom in his first year of work. She was a silent partner when he and his father purchased his uncle's share of the business. Sadly, she passed away this summer, but Mike says that she was always had a central part of their lives.
