The Morning Journal (Lorain, OH)
6 decades later...
Farm & Home Hardware going strong
Farm & Home Hardware is the place in Wellington where personal service meets 21st century business savvy amid thousands of supplies to maintain the house and the yard.
The store, 120 S. Main St., was started in 1960 by Raymond Jerousek, a Czechoslovakian immigrant who moved from Parma to the village to buy a farm.
Now Scott Jerousek has become the third-generation leader of the store, sharing chief executive officer duties with his wife, Cindy, who oversees their Ashland location.
In an age of online shopping and big box retail, they have lots of help.
Farm & Home Hardware has 90 full- and part-time employees.
The store’s rewards program has 13,000 members — more than double the population of Wellington.
There are numerous visitors who drop in looking for just the right something.
“My favorite part is watching our staff and the community succeed. Watching someone learn a new trade or learn how to repair something or feel like they’ve been treated fairly, you know, seeing that smile on their face,” Jerousek said.
“I preach to my staff, the quicker that we can get our customers to take ownership of our store or of our business, the better,” he said. “We have to give them a reason for it. It’s not, ‘oh,
we’re the local option,’ and trying to live off of that. It’s what are the reasons we can give them? And how do we earn their trust and their support for it? You have to earn it every day.”
Family, business history
Those lessons crossed generational lines when Raymond Jerousek’s sons, Raymond Jr. and James, eventually began working
with Farm & Home Hardware.
“It just kept going. The biggest thing they always did was, they had merchandise in stock, had the hours and they were there to help folks,” Scott Jerousek said.
The younger Raymond Jerousek was Scott’s father. Scott Jerousek said he has worked there “pretty much from birth,” more and more seriously as he grew older.
The family bought the current main building in
Wellington in about 1985. They bought the building behind that one in 1990.
Third generation
Scott Jerousek took over in 2007 — just before the
economic housing bubble burst, causing the Great Recession around the country.
The business survived as the family began bolstering the “pillar departments.”
“I looked at it and decided, what are some of the things that we can do and we can be better than anyone else at?” Jerousek said. “So we developed some pillar departments as we call them, basically departments that we can be as good or better than anyone else that we compete against.”
The greenhouse started in 2007 and has grown since then as a sector of the business.
The company unexpectedly found another niche with pool supplies, which has grown over the years.
But Jerousek isn’t shy about reducing certain segments if they don’t sell.
For example, Farm & Home Hardware sells bird
seed and feeders. But animal feed was never quite the right fit for the store, so the company leaves that business to other merchants, he said.
Power tools and more
Farm & Home Hardware sells items from ice melters to sun hats, grass seed to rakes, lawn tractors to water heaters to chainsaws.
But the store is not just about outdoor power equipment.
In 2017, Farm & Home Hardware expanded to Ashland, buying a hardware store developed there by Mike and Jane Ringler. The Ashland business includes an appliance and furniture line.
When summer turns to fall, shoppers can find gift ideas along with leaf-blowers.
The company has added Carhartt clothing and Yeti insulated travel mugs, customizable with engraving. The same service can create unique wood panel greeting cards.
The Wellington store carries cornhole boards
and beanbags, decorative drawer pulls, outerwear and boots. Its Facebook page teases new lines of shoes coming soon.
Paint Department Manager DeNita Tuttle can recommend gallon cans for whitewashing picket fences or painting a room. As the company’s craft guru, Tuttle also leads workshops for furniture refinishing and other household decor items.
Tuttle and Cindy Jerousek, who manages gift departments at both stores, have attended out-of-state workshops and trade shows for their respective product lines.
Many of the employees find their own favorite areas to work with.
“We’ve got a lot of really good folks that work for us, or work with us, I should say,” Jerousek said.
“I’ve always been a big one, you let them learn and make their mistakes and get better as they go and they take a lot more ownership. Then your staff takes ownership and your customers take ownership.”