After awhile he was hired by the corporate office of True Value as a paint consultant, traveling to stores to give paint seminars and to resolve customer issues.

After two years, he was promoted to district manager, first covering western Minnesota and northern Iowa and, in 2004, western Wisconsin.

His family moved to the west side of Eau Claire, and then in 2008 to Chippewa Falls.

“I’ve always lived in small towns . . . To me, this is the perfect sized town,” he said.

The next year the Schafer family decided to put its two hardware stores up for sale.

“I felt like Gordy’s had done a really good job in building these stores,” he said, adding he was concerned about the stores’ future.

So in November 2009, he bought them. And since then, he’s made plenty of changes. The most recent one was changing the name of the stores, dropping the “Gordy’s” title.

Rasmussen said he’s appreciative of the support he has received from the Schafer family since the sale. They have been good friends and neighbors, he said. But he said both he and Gordy’s wanted to have separate identities for their businesses.