Carol Schary wasn't supposed to run Schary Supply. In 1996, when her father Dore Kimmel decided to step back from the construction supply company he'd built over seven decades, he passed the keys to her brother instead. Carol was capable. Carol was willing. Carol was also a woman in an industry that had never quite figured out what to do with them.
She didn't fight the decision. She didn't storm out. Instead, she waited. Within months, her brother realized he didn't want the job. The company—which had been moving boxes and supplying materials to Los Angeles builders since 1926—landed back in the family's hands, and this time, there was nowhere else to turn.
What happened next is the kind of story that makes you believe in second chances, though Carol would probably call it something simpler: work.
She took over a 70-year-old business operating on fumes and margins that were barely breathable. The construction supply world was dominated by massive national chains. Schary Supply was small, local, and running on the kind of infrastructure that belonged in the 1980s. Carol modernized everything—the systems, the service model, the relationships. She earned her place in the industry not because she inherited it, but because she refused to let it die.
By 2012, she became the first woman president of the Foundation of Wall and Ceiling Industries, a distinction that mattered less for what it said about her and more for what it said about how long the industry had waited. Under her leadership, Schary Supply grew into a national women-owned enterprise (WBE), landing contracts at SoFi Stadium, LAX, and the World Trade Center. Her company went from survival mode to significance.
But 2025 threw everything into question. The Los Angeles wildfires that devastated her neighborhood didn't just threaten her home—they threatened her supply chains, her infrastructure, her community. For the first time in nearly three decades of running this company, Carol faced a crisis she couldn't simply manage her way through.
Except that's not quite true. In the wreckage, there's also opportunity. Reconstruction always needs materials. LA will rebuild. And Schary Supply, already positioned as a trusted supplier with national reach and local roots, is suddenly positioned to be part of that rebuild in a way few other companies can be.
This is who Carol Schary is: someone who doesn't wait for permission and doesn't panic when the ground shifts. She took over a company she wasn't supposed to run and built it into something that matters. Now she's facing the hardest test yet—not whether she can survive a crisis, but whether she can help her city do the same.
"I've never been afraid of hard work," Carol says. "I've only been afraid of wasting time."
In this moment, with LA rebuilding and Schary Supply ready to help, she's doing neither.
