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SBC Magazine- Faces of the Industry

Faces of the Industry: Larry Dix

Owner  •  Apex Truss(link is external)  •  Warsaw, Virginia

How’d you get into this industry? 

Since I was 14 years old, I just wanted to own my own business. In 1986, I was selling lumber in Texas when the economy collapsed. With the market tanking, they laid off half of the employees. I was fortunate, I was pushed back down to retail sales but I wanted to get back into outside sales. The company’s truss plant began to struggle and I was asked to sell trusses. I said yes, despite not knowing what a truss was, and I have never looked back from there. 

Before selling them, I worked in the truss plant for 90 days and lost 20 pounds. By 1987, Dick Marriott and Bob Dayhoff hired me to work with them at Shelter Systems in St. Louis. Over the next year, I rode around with Dwight Hikel and Lenny Sylk, where I was highly influenced from some very powerful people at a very young age. 

In 1989, at 26 years old, I went back to Texas and ended up running the truss plant at Calcasieu Lumber because I was the only person at the company who had dealt with trusses before. 

I was hired in 1994 by Stripling-Blake Lumber Company to build a truss plant for them from the ground up. I eventually made my way to Virginia to build a plant for Trussway and chose to plant roots here. When the local truss plant closed in 2000, I bought it and began my company, Apex Truss. 

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