Editor's Message: Do You Have an Entrepreneurial Spirit?

The attitudes of SBCA’s founders are still needed today

As SBCA’s 40th year draws to a close, it’s meaningful to reflect on the entrepreneurial spirit of the component manufacturers (CMs) who founded the organization. 

While the component manufacturing industry expanded quickly from its roots in Florida from the late 1950s until the early 1980s, the rapid proliferation of personal computers and truss design software offered a meaningful opportunity to surpass the capabilities of traditional stick framing, from both a material efficiency and structural performance standpoint. 

The successful CMs of the early 1980s seized this competitive advantage and grabbed market share as swiftly as their production capacity could manage. They also banded together through SBCA with like-minded companies and openly shared their manufacturing and design ideas, solutions to common challenges, and ideas for further innovation. Further, they leveraged their collective knowledge through the association to develop guidance and resources to help other CMs expand. The results of their efforts can’t be ignored. 

Home Innovation Research Labs conducts an annual survey with over 1200 residential builders across the U.S. that asks, among many things, how they construct their buildings. According to respondents, roof trusses (the primary product of those early entrepreneurs) now have a 68 percent market share across the U.S. If you factor in roofs that are constructed with both trusses and rafters, that market share expands to over 75 percent. 

The attitude of the association’s early pioneers is instructive because the industry finds itself with a similar opportunity in front of it. Coming out of the extended recession that ended a decade ago, significant investments in software and production automation again offer an amazing opportunity for CMs to outstrip the capabilities of any other structural framing methodology, from both a material and labor standpoint.

According to the same survey, floor trusses currently have a 15 percent market share, and wall panels have an 11 percent share. Seventy years from its inception, truss manufacturing is considered a mature industry, but the share percentages of its other products make it clear there remains a significant opportunity to grow. If our industry is going to take advantage of today’s competitive advantage, it’s going to take a similar entrepreneurial spirit. 

Sean D. Shields, Managing Editor