Mountain View Building Materials

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“We are relentless in our pursuit to become Calgary’s premiere deck, fence, and exterior building product supplier. Every day we continue to operate on the same four building blocks on which our company was founded,” he says. “We demonstrate integrity in each of our dealings, honesty in each of our interactions, we’re accountable to each individual client and team member, and we provide the highest quality customer service and materials.”

In order to provide that quality, Joel adds, Mountain View has built a team of in-house project experts, and a talented network of suppliers, and contractors – many of them locally-based.

“We carefully select all suppliers and manufacturers we work with to ensure the highest-quality products to meet the demands of Alberta’s unique climate,” he says. “Our products and designs always take our unique climate demands into consideration, and we believe every product we choose, and job should be done right.”

“As a family-owned and operated business, we do our very best to source our products as locally and sustainably as possible, and are committed to providing exceptional customer service from project planning to completion.”

Mountain View was first founded in 2006 by Doug and Tracy Seibert, who started the company with over 60 years of combined experience in the lumber industry. Doug was an experienced sales manager in the retail lumber industry, and Tracy had experience in wholesale lumber sales after working for one of Western Canada’s leading cedar distributors. Joel, for his part, joined Mountain View shortly after its formation, and together with Doug and Tracy he has seen the business grow by leaps and bounds in the years since. He credits that rapid growth to their emphasis on customer service, which he believes was lacking from the industry when they first got started:

“We started Mountain View Buildings Materials with a mission to bring back the customer service part of the lumber and building materials industry,” he recalls. “Back in the early 2000s, there was a big push into Calgary from all the big box stores, and we found that the customer service side of the industry started to wane. We wanted to bring that service back.”

“So we started a small niche lumberyard,” he continues. “We specialized in exterior building products, sidings, trims, natural wood, Canadian products, Canadian-made. We wanted to know everything about our products and where they came from, how they were milled, who was involved in the process, and we wanted to be able to share that with our customers. The big box stores couldn’t do that. That’s what set us apart.”

Since then, Mountain View has grown from one location – the Seiberts’ home in Bragg Creek – to three locations, including a headquarters just outside Calgary, an office and lumberyard in Kelowna, British Columbia, and an interior and cabinet-and-mill shop in Canmore, Alberta. They have also expanded from a team of three people to a team of over 30 during peak season. The most notable additions to the team include his partners in Mountain View Building Materials, Operations Manager Brad Pettafor, and Sales Manager Sheila Carr.

These days, Joel says that what sets that team apart is their collective experience and expertise. They take pride, he says, in being “not just product experts but project experts.”

“Customers come to us with their dreams and ideas for the projects they want to build, and what we want to do is make those dreams come true,” Joel explains. “We want to make sure their project is 100 per cent successful. We want to make sure they get everything they need to complete it in one visit. We don’t want them to have to return to the store multiple times because something was wrong or something didn’t work.”

In order to provide that kind of customer experience, Joel says that a company must have an intrinsic understanding of their products. They have to understand how their products are going to perform not just in general, but how they are going to perform specifically in their local environment – and he says the team at Mountain View does have that understanding. He believes that sets them apart from building suppliers based in Western Canada, or even building suppliers based elsewhere in Canada.

“In Alberta – and specifically here in Calgary – we have wicked weather swings in the winter, and we have Chinooks, and they wreak havoc on building materials,” Joel explains. “Just because something works down in the States or it works everywhere else in the world doesn’t necessarily mean it will work here. We are very aware of that.”

“We pride ourselves on being project experts and knowing everything about the products that work in our environment,” he continues. “We make value-added suggestions so people take home the products that will not only perform and look good the first year, but will look good for many years into the future.”

According to Joel, Mountain View earns their product/project knowledge proactively, by conducting “non-stop testing” and “non-stop product knowledge seminars,” Joel explains.

“We hang our shingle out there and we let manufacturers know that if they want to get a product tested or they want to try something new, we’re the ones to come to,” he says. “We’ll try it. We’ll put it up on display outside the shop. We’ll move it around to all the different areas where the sun hits. We’ll expose it to the snow and the wind.”

“We’ll try the product ourselves before we put it up for sale,” he adds, “because we want to be sure that we can sleep at night knowing we’ve given our customers the right suggestions.”

Over the years, that commitment to customer service has earned Mountain View Building Materials a lot of repeat business and a lot of referrals. Joel says that’s how the company has grown so steadily since 2006 – they have formed relationships with customers who care about quality, and those customers have kept coming back and have kept referring their friends and colleagues.

“We haven’t just attracted customers, we’ve attracted partners,” Joel says. “Our partners see the value that we add to their business, they want us to contribute to their success, and they want to in turn contribute to our success.”

Joel says that many of Mountain View’s partnerships with clients have lasted over a decade, with some going back all the way to the company’s first year in business. He also says that Mountain View has formed similarly loyal and longstanding relationships with their other stakeholders, including their employees and their suppliers. When it comes to employees, he says they have cultivated a team of “top performers,” and when it comes to suppliers, he says, “I couldn’t ask for better partners.”

“Those relationships are key,” he says. “We really choose our suppliers specifically and carefully, and we treat them as good as we possibly can because we know the relationship has to go both ways.”

Again, Joel says, many of those relationships go back to the start of Mountain View Building Materials:

“Some of them were our bank when we started,” he explains. “Starting a building and materials business is risky, but some of the suppliers we still deal with today we dealt with back in 2006, they believed in our vision, they believed in our mission, and they backed us – and it worked out. Over the past 17 years those relationships have only gotten more profitable. They’ve helped us grow our business and we’ve helped them grow their business. It’s been a two-way street, like it should be.”

Growing and getting better

Today, Mountain View Building Materials takes pride in providing exceptional customer service and quality building products to both contractor and retail customers – with retail customers compromising a growing percentage of their business. Right now, Joel estimates that roughly 70 per cent of their sales are to developers, builders, and subcontractors, and 30 per cent of their sales are to retail customers, but he says that balance is shifting:

“We want to attract more retail business by offering more retail friendly products,” he says. “Being that we’re located outside of Calgary city limits, that side of the business is naturally growing as communities get closer to us. It’s hard to attract retail traffic to come all the way out to us when they’re driving past a lot of our big box store competitors, but as communities spread further and further west and closer and closer to us, we’re noticing an uptick in retail traffic.”

“At the same time, we still want to primarily cater to our contractors, custom home builders, commercial builders, and our developers,” Joel adds. “Those customers are very fun to work with, because they have unique projects. They’ve been working with architects and designers and they have really individualized and stylized visions and plans – and then we get to help those plans come to fruition. That’s what we’re passionate about.”

Moving forward, Mountain View’s goal is to continue to grow and to continue to get better at what they do. On the ‘getting better’ side, that means carefully examining their standard operating processes and procedures to figure out how to increase efficiencies. To that end, the company recently conducted an “internal deep dive,” Joel explains. That involved identifying the areas where they could improve by writing and refining formal protocols, as well as the areas where they couldn’t do that – where things can’t always be done the same way, where autonomy and flexibility are required, because that’s also important to know.

On the ‘growing’ side, meanwhile, Joel says that though it may sound cliché, “there’s no limit.”

“We’re not afraid to grow, we just want to grow in the right way,” he says. “In the next five years, our real goal is to further cement ourselves as a valued partner to all the contractors, builders and developers that we’re currently working with. In the process, we want to expand all of our locations, and maybe add one or two more – but that all depends on if the right opportunity arises. We’re not going to grow just for the sake of growing. We want to grow to expand our brand and further cement our brand as the industry leader in customer service.”

“We’re also going to strive to be leaders in environmentally sustainable building products and best practices,” Joel says. “We want to make sure the mountains and forests that we live in and enjoy on the weekends are there for generations to come. So we’re going to keep looking for building products that have less of an environmental impact and we’re going to promote the heck out of those.”

Lastly, Joel concludes that Mountain View Building Materials will continue giving back to the communities in which they work, as that’s something that motivates and inspires their whole team:

“We’re all proud supporters of the communities we work in. We love to support local sports teams and the charitable events that our builders and developers put on. We love being involved in the community and we always will.”

For more on Mountain View Building Materials, their full range of products and services, to hear from their past clients, and for their latest news, events, and sales – and to get in touch with their expert team, including Joel – visit https://mountainviewbm.ca