He built Albuquerque’s Mountain West Sales one phone call at a time. Now, his son is taking the helm.

For decades, Mountain West Sales Inc. founder John Lyle wouldn’t let the phone ring more than once before he answered an incoming call to the company.

It didn’t matter whether it was a customer or a supplier on the other line or how quickly his employees would try to race to the phone to beat him to it — John Lyle would answer.

Today, not much has changed for the Albuquerque fireplace store. Mountain West Sales still answers the phone, but it’s not Lyle doing the answering — at least not as often. Instead, it’s his son, Jim Lyle, who took over as president of Mountain West Sales and acquired the business in August.

While part of the business includes selling building and construction products throughout the state, Mountain West Sales is primarily known as a retailer and installer of fireplaces, fireplace inserts, chimney products, and pellet, wood, gas and electric stoves.

The decision to sell was a simple one for John Lyle.

“I just turned 81, and that pretty much told me that I need to get out,” he said. “I get pretty tired during the day, so there was no way that I was going to be able to work full-time anymore.”

John Lyle semi-retired roughly 15 years ago, but with the recent birthday and the realization that his son could handle the operation by himself, he decided it was time to fully pass the reins. For Jim Lyle, 48, deciding to take the business on was an easy choice.

“I put in a lot of work here and helped develop the business over all those years, and it’s the way I earn a living,” said the son, who’s worked alongside his father for nearly 25 years. “I hope that we continue to be a local business that people can support because we do a good job.”

John Lyle founded Mountain West Sales after he acquired a local manufacturing rep firm called Mountain West in 1990, one year after he launched Lyle Building Supply. He decided to keep the name Mountain West, which had been in business longer, since roughly 1965.

Before Lyle Building Supply, the elder Lyle worked for a couple of different lumber companies but always wanted to start and run his own business — something he said he knew from a young age.

“He just had an entrepreneurial frame of mind,” Jim Lyle said of his father. “Everywhere he worked, he climbed the ladder quickly and got raise after raise because he was the kind of person they didn’t want to do without.”

Doing well in his previous jobs allowed John Lyle to make contacts and build a customer base for his own business, selling everything from lumber to wastewater treatment materials and eventually fireplaces, Jim Lyle said.

“He sold a lot of stuff to Kirtland (Air Force Base), to Sandia (National Laboratories), just finding contacts and sort of selling anything he could get his hands on,” Jim Lyle said.

Today, with a product showroom at 2718 University NE, the company sells fireplaces directly to homeowners, local homebuilders, apartment complexes and commercial buildings.

Seamless customer service is one of many business principles that Jim Lyle said he learned by working with his father and growing up with the business over the years.

Jim Lyle’s earliest memories of the business involved him and his brother pulling weeds around the building. As he got older, he started working summers at the store, and by the time he graduated from college in 2001, he was ready to dive in full-time.

“I needed a job because I was a philosophy major,” Jim Lyle said with a laugh.

Jim Lyle later returned to business school, where he realized that much of what he learned was what his father had already been doing for years.

“And he started with nothing, so it was pretty impressive to build this thing up the way that he did,” he said. “I’m just happy that I’ve been able to continue and help build it further.”

Jim Lyle said he aims to be a good steward of his father’s legacy, hoping to maybe one day pass the business down to one of his children. Ironically, there doesn’t seem to be as many weeds for his kids to pull around the property as he and his brother always had.

“We’ll find things for them to do,” Jim Lyle said.

John Lyle still plans to make the occasional store visit on Saturdays, especially now during the holiday season. Mountain West Sales is open on Saturdays only during the winter months, which are the company’s busiest time of year.

But the business is in capable hands, John Lyle said. He hopes his son enjoys owning the business as much as he did.

“Gosh, it gave me a lot of pleasure,” the elder Lyle said.