Meeting community needs for half a century

WORLAND – For 50 years now HASCO (H.A. Smith Company), owned by Bill and Sandy Smith, has been meeting the community needs by providing requested services for the Big Horn Basin.

The H.A. Smith Company, before it became HASCO, was originally owned by Smith's father, H.A. Smith and was a salvage business. Smith's father sold the business to a large company out of Montana, which only wanted the site and the building but not the company name, Smith said. When the business out of Montana sold out, Smith adopted his father's company name for his business; selling used oil field supplies.

"When they sold out I decided that I would do something myself and started in the used oil field equipment business. Of course, I was 23 or 24 years old and had no real resumé or credit rating or anything. It was kind of difficult to start, then through my involvement with this oil company, I had realized the value people placed on what they referred to as a corporate shell and so H.A. Smith company was just there, so I took that identity and so I became a lot more credible. Kind of over the years we've moved kind of out of the used oil field equipment business and more into new oil field supplies," Smith said.

Smith stated that as the once booming economy started to back slide and other businesses closed their doors, HASCO expanded the merchandise offered to meet the needs of the community. "Eventually because of some turn downs, we've been through a lot of the oil field turn downs, the oil field started pulling back, we started to get more involved with industrial supplies that we could sell to contractors, manufacturers and things like that. Over the years the business has morphed in a lot of different directions. The community, our service area has had some changes in their requirements. We've had a couple of nice farm and ranch stores here that left the area and so we kind of tried fill back in there somewhat and that got us into the clothing and the footwear business, the shooting supplies and stuff. So a lot of it has been dictated by our need to move forward plus fill in where some of the communities needs dictated it," Smith stated.

Businesses in the community working together to keep customers shopping in the Big Horn Basin was at one time the key to success. Business owners would send community members to other businesses, even if they sold the same products, if a customer wasn't sure of what they needed exactly. Another key to success is service and knowledgeable employees

"We've got a great bunch of people and that's been, the root of our success. Having capable people in the right positions. A lot of the type of products we sell are not so much a hardware item where people just walk in and go to a shelf and pick it off and buy it. They come here to get information and suggestions and we have a lot of people here, whether they started here or whether they came here from a similar company, they are all seasoned people in this type of business. This is the type of business where you have to, we have to make recommendations. The customers come here to get assistance, not so much what shelf it's on but which of these do I buy, this is what I am trying to do, and what do I need? So a lot of ours is a more of an applied sales. It's kind of a different breed of cat, it's a little bit of oil field, a little bit of farm and ranch, a little bit of sporting goods and most all those area are covered by people that have some back ground in it, which it needs to be," Smith said.

Originally, the business was located on Pulliam Ave. but moved to its current location, 415 Big Horn Ave., Worland, around 1974. The building was quite small at the time but as the business' needs and the community's needs demanded Smith added on piece by piece, utilizing more space to provide more options for the consumer.

About seven years ago Smith officially retired and left the management of the business up to his wife Sandy. While retired, Smith still works for the company but on a volunteer basis. "When I turned 65 I quit drawing a paycheck. But I make a lot of the trips back and forth, we have a store in Riverton. A lot of it is just work that needs to be done, people are busy enough here and I'm not," Smith said. "She [Sandy] was in this business to a degree with her former employer, so she knows the business and she's very capable. So when I make my final exit, she will be very capable of taking it for quite a few more years," he added.