What boring problem could you solve locally?

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Most people think national chains start with big funding, polished branding, and detailed expansion plans. In reality, some of the strongest networks in America began as scrappy, local services run by people just trying to solve a simple problem in their own town.

Menards started as a tiny pole barn builder in rural Wisconsin. U-Haul began with one couple renting out a single trailer because no one would rent them a moving truck. Enterprise was a small St. Louis car rental shop that mainly served people whose cars were in the repair shop.

They did not start with logos, taglines, or national ambitions. They started with hammers, trailers, and beat-up cars. What turned them into giants was not fancy branding, but relentless reinvestment and an almost obsessive focus on customers.

Menards: Pole barns to home-improvement powerhouse

In the late 1950s, John Menard Jr. was a college student in Wisconsin building pole barns for local farmers to make extra cash. No grand retail plan. No national vision. Just a side hustle that solved a real problem: cheap, sturdy storage buildings for small towns and farms.

Menard quickly realized there was more money in materials than labor. Instead of just building barns, he began supplying lumber and hardware to other builders and do‑it‑yourself homeowners. One small yard turned into a modest local store. Profits did not go into lifestyle upgrades. They went back into inventory, land, and new locations.

Menards expanded slowly across the Midwest with a simple formula: big, no‑frills stores, aggressive pricing, and an almost fanatical focus on “save big money” for everyday customers. No elaborate ad campaigns, no celebrity endorsements, just thick weekly flyers and radio spots hammering home value.

Today, Menards has more than 340 stores across the Midwest and is one of the largest home improvement chains in the United States. It got there by stacking retained earnings into new buildings and better buying power, not by chasing trends or polishing image.

U‑Haul: One trailer and a desperate need

After World War II, Leonard and Anna Mary Shoen needed to move and discovered it was almost impossible to rent a trailer one way. Local rental outfits expected you to bring equipment back to the original location. Great for them, terrible for customers.

They scraped together a few thousand dollars, built a single trailer, and started renting it to people who needed cheap, practical moving help. They did not have a national brand. They had hand‑painted trailers and a phone number. The magic was in the model.

Instead of centralized growth, U‑Haul partnered with local gas stations and garages, paying them a cut to host and rent out U‑Haul trailers and trucks. This asset‑light, partnership‑heavy approach allowed them to spread across regions without buying property or building stores. Every dollar that came in went into building more trailers and trucks, not billboards or skyscraper offices.

By obsessing over being the lowest‑friction, lowest‑cost way for ordinary people to move their lives, U‑Haul quietly created a dense national network. Today, their orange‑and‑white trucks are almost everywhere in North America, and the brand is synonymous with DIY moving. The origin story is not marketing. It is ruthless reinvestment into more equipment and more locations whenever cash allowed.

Enterprise: “We’ll pick you up” before it was a slogan

Enterprise Rent‑A‑Car started in 1957 when Jack Taylor opened a small car rental business in St. Louis. Instead of competing head‑to‑head at airports with big national rental brands, he focused on a different customer: people whose cars were in the shop.

The idea was simple. When your car broke down, the repair shop would refer you to Taylor’s company, and they would bring a car to you. No fancy terminals, no big signs, just unmatched convenience. That customer obsession — bring the car to the customer instead of making the customer come to the car — became the backbone of the business.

Taylor’s philosophy was straightforward: take care of your customers and your employees, and growth will follow. Profits were poured back into buying more vehicles and opening local neighborhood branches, not into glitzy campaigns. For years, most people knew Enterprise only because their mechanic recommended them.

Eventually, “We’ll pick you up” became a famous tagline, but it started as a simple service promise practiced long before it was ever written in an ad. Today Enterprise is one of the largest car rental companies in the world, with thousands of locations, built primarily through relentless local execution and reinvestment.

The common pattern behind these “accidental” empires

What ties Menards, U‑Haul, and Enterprise together is not industry. It is philosophy.

They all started as humble, local services:

• Menards: barn building and lumber

• U‑Haul: one trailer for people who could not find one‑way rentals

• Enterprise: local car rentals through repair shops

They:

• Solved specific, unglamorous problems for ordinary people.

• Reinvested relentlessly instead of cashing out early.

• Focused on operations and service, not image or hype.

• Expanded outward from strong local roots instead of chasing national scale overnight.

Fancy branding came later. In most cases, it only codified what they had already been doing for years: help real people, in real places, with real problems, at reasonable prices.

How to apply the local‑first, reinvestment‑heavy approach

If you want to build something durable, their pattern gives a simple playbook:

Start with a boring, specific problem

They did not chase “disruption.” They picked straightforward needs: storage, moving belongings, temporary transportation. What is the unsexy pain point in your local market that nobody is proud to work on?

Obsess over doing it better than anyone else

Make it cheaper, more convenient, more reliable. Let your “brand” initially be the feeling customers have when they are done dealing with you.

Treat early profits like seed, not harvest

The magic in all three stories is reinvestment. Use cash flow to expand capacity, add locations, or improve systems instead of upgrading your lifestyle.

Grow outward from strength, not hype

Prove your model locally, then regionally, before thinking nationally. Let demand pull you outward instead of ego pushing you everywhere at once.

The biggest lesson from pole barns, moving trucks, and neighborhood rentals is simple: you do not need a clever slogan or viral campaign to build a national network. You need a useful service, long‑term thinking, and the discipline to treat people and reinvestment as your primary assets.

What small, “boring” problem could you start solving in your own backyard?

Emil | Founder of Income Ivy