The money hides in three places: categories you buy somewhere else, programs nobody showed you, and a total nobody added up. Ask your rep for last year’s number and what the categories you source elsewhere would have added to it.
Do you know what your yard earned back from the co-op last year?
Not roughly. The actual number.
Most dealers can’t answer that. Not because they run sloppy businesses, but because nobody ever sat down and walked them through it. That’s a gap, and it belongs to us more than it belongs to you.
The Money Was Yours First
Start with what a co-op actually is, because the word gets thrown around loosely.
When you buy through Do it Best, you’re not a customer buying from a supplier. You’re an owner buying through a business you hold a piece of. More than 8,000 members pool their purchasing into $3 billion in LBM buying power. That scale gets turned into better pricing with vendors. What’s left over goes back to the people who created it.
That’s you.
That isn’t a Do it Best invention. It’s the definition of a cooperative business, where members are both the users and the owners, and surplus goes back in proportion to how much each member uses the business.
Here’s where dealers lose the thread. A rebate isn’t a discount somebody handed you for being a good customer. It’s your own money coming back after the co-op used your volume to go get a better deal on your behalf. So the question was never whether you’ve earned it. The question is whether you’re capturing all of it.
Where the Money Hides
Usually in one of three places.
The first is the categories you buy somewhere else. Plenty of members have trusted Do it Best with hardware for years while their millwork, doors, windows, and decking go out the door through someone else. Every one of those purchases is volume that never gets counted toward what comes back to you. You’re not being penalized. You’re just not being credited, because the purchase happened outside the building. This is the whole argument for running LBM and hardware through a single source. Not simpler paperwork. Volume that finally lands in one place where it can work for you.
The second is the programs nobody told you about. There are more than 400 vendor programs running across LBM categories. No dealer has time to read through 400 of anything. So a program that would fit your market and your customer sits there unused, not because you passed on it, but because you never saw it. That one is on us to fix.
The third is the simplest. Nobody added it up for you. The number exists. It’s just sitting in a report you’ve never thought to ask for, and your rep has never thought to bring, because you didn’t ask.
None of those three are complicated problems. They’re just quiet ones. They don’t set off any alarms; they don’t show up on a P&L as a line labeled “money you didn’t get,” and a yard can run profitably for years without anybody noticing.
Why This Is Worth an Afternoon
It’s easy to file rebates under paperwork. Something the office handles, something that shows up eventually, not something worth blocking out time for.
Ryan Cooley, Midwest regional sales manager for LBM, frames it differently:
“Just knowing that a sale for us means that we’re giving a solution to an independent business owner, and if they’re succeeding, that means food is on their family’s table.”
That’s what a rebate conversation actually is. Not an accounting exercise. Money that either lands in your business at the end of the year or doesn’t, and the difference between those two outcomes is usually one conversation nobody got around to having.
Independents don’t have a corporate parent absorbing thin margins. Your margin is the whole game. Money you already earned and didn’t collect is the most expensive kind of money to leave behind, because you did all the work to generate it and got none of the benefit.
What to Actually Do
Call your rep and ask for two things.
First, the total. What did your yard earn back over the last full year, across every category you buy through the co-op? A real number, not a range.
Second, the gap. Which LBM categories are you currently sourcing somewhere else, and what would those same purchases have looked like running through the co-op instead? Ask what programs exist in those categories that you’ve never been shown.
Then set the two side by side.
If the gap is small, you’re running tight, and you now have a number to prove it. If it’s large, you just found the cheapest growth available to you, because it doesn’t require a new customer, a new location, a new truck, or a single additional sale. It’s volume you’re already doing, routed differently.
Either way you’ll know. Which beats the alternative, which is guessing.
You’ve got 80-plus LBM experts and category specialists who can walk this with you. Ask one of them.
Reach out to your Do it Best LBM rep, or contact us at [email protected] to start the conversation.
