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Trends in Wood Manufacturing with Mike Lipke from TorZo Surfaces & Trillium Pacific
10 Plays1 year ago
Join Mike Lipke, president of Trillium Pacific Millwork, as he shares his 30-year journey in the forest products industry. Discover the importance of sustainability and certification in the wood manufacturing industry and learn about Trillium's diverse business operations, including contract manufacturing, private label manufacturing, and commercial casework.
More info:
https://www.trilliumpacific.com/
https://torzosurfaces.com/
Explore the innovative Torzo surfaces, made from recycled materials, and the future of the industry. With a focus on sequestering carbon and creating beautiful wood products, this episode is a must-listen for anyone interested in the world of wood manufacturing.
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Transcript
Environmental Benefits of Cutting Trees
00:00:00
Speaker
I think we still have people who have this vision in their mind that when a tree is cut down, it's a bad thing. But I think we're getting better. We're not just cutting down a tree and walking away. It's a good thing for the environment. It helps us with the climate change issue. It provides so many benefits.
Interview with Mike Lipke: Career Overview
00:00:23
Speaker
Today we sit down with Mike Lipke, the president of Trillium Pacific Millwork.
00:00:28
Speaker
as he shares his inspiring 30 year journey in the forest products industry. Mike's diverse career, both timber and software, reflects his commitment to innovation and maximizing business potential. Join us as we explore his business operations and insights into the ever evolving world of wood manufacturing.
00:00:48
Speaker
I know you guys have met before I met Mike. Mario, can you share a little bit? I know you mentioned something about an association meeting that you guys were both at, and maybe you guys know each other from before as well. Both we have been in the industry for many years, and recently we participated both at the Western Harvard Association Convention this summer.
Mike's Transition from Accounting to Wood Industry
00:01:10
Speaker
And that's when we had the opportunity to
00:01:13
Speaker
to just start talking again and connect, reconnect with Mike. Mike, I believe you, you worked for Upwork, you were a consultant for them. I also worked for Upwork for a little, a little bit there with Steven.
00:01:27
Speaker
Yeah, that may have been where we crossed paths in the past was some of that work for Optware, but really reconnected at the Hardwood Association meeting and you did a great presentation there and that was thinking, you know, kind of the thing that convinced me that we needed to explore things further and maybe start working together.
00:01:52
Speaker
Yeah, it was great to see you there and start talking and remembering many things. I don't know how many years have you been in this industry? What was your beginnings?
00:02:05
Speaker
Yeah, it's been almost 40 years, uh, came out of college and, uh, ended up going to work for a company in Eastern Oregon as a, as an accountant. That's where I started my career on the accounting side of life, but in wood products, uh, that was an easy way to get in, you know, to a company and that business made wood chips for the pulp and paper industry out of bug killed.
Entrepreneurial Journey in Wood Products
00:02:35
Speaker
lodgepole pine, which at that time they were trying to kind of clear the forest of dead lodgepole pine way back then and worked for them for a few years. And then I moved on to a small family owned, well, I would say a medium family owned sawmill company over here in the valley.
00:02:57
Speaker
again as an accountant and that was when I had my first time in a high production sawmill and kind of fell in love with making wood and I also knew I didn't really want to be an accountant all of my life so I looked for the opportunity to get out into the mill and one of the managers there gave me the chance to
00:03:22
Speaker
move out into the mill and run the shipping department, and I then got involved in capital projects, installing new technology, new scanners, optimizers, lots of new equipment, and became kind of a key member of the team that did all of the installations.
00:03:42
Speaker
new scanning equipment and optimizing equipment in addition to running the shipping department. I left that company, went to work for another family-owned medium-sized sawmill company, started out kind of doing the same thing for them, but then became manager of one of their sawmills.
00:04:03
Speaker
and did that for quite a number of years, helped set up a finger joint plant for them, kind of some new technology in the finger joint world. We were finger joining green lumber, which is unusual, and did that successfully.
00:04:21
Speaker
2006, I thought, you know, I always had the bug to be my own, to be a business owner, to be an entrepreneur. And so I left that company and started doing some consulting that probably is about the time we met because I did some work for Optware and had my own consulting business working
00:04:43
Speaker
on consulting in sawmills in the industry and so forth and then the big recession of 2007-2008 and nobody was hiring consultants so I looked around and
00:04:58
Speaker
Found this wood products business that was near where I lived that was for sale. And I thought, you know, what the heck, I'll check it out. Ended up purchasing the business and moving from the sawmill part of our industry to the finished product part of our industry. Uh, so very different from running sawmills.
00:05:18
Speaker
There are a lot of things that are similar, but it's still a different kind of a business and been doing that now for almost 15 years. Next year will be 15 years.
Trillium Pacific Millwork Operations and Sustainability
00:05:28
Speaker
So getting pretty close to that.
00:05:31
Speaker
Could you share more about what you're doing today with Trillium? What's the current line of business? What are the services products you guys are providing today? We have three parts to our business. The first part is contract manufacturing where people bring us their wood and we do something with it. We mill it to pattern. We turn it into butcher block.
00:05:56
Speaker
countertops or tabletops, just lots of different things. We have a huge variety of capabilities in our shop from just basic milling all the way up to very technical CNC router work where we can cut
00:06:16
Speaker
very intricate shapes and or designs in wood and and do some some really cool things with it but we can do everything from ripping and molding to chopping and sanding and gluing and and CNC routing and so forth so we have a wide variety of services and that's why people like bringing their material here
00:06:39
Speaker
They can get a lot of things done all at one place. They don't have to haul it from place to place to place. They can get it done in our shop with one stop. The second part of our business is private label manufacturing, where somebody comes to us with the design for a product.
00:06:56
Speaker
and they ask us to manufacture it for us. So we make a lot of cutting boards, for instance, for one of our customers and they sell those cutting boards on Amazon and Pinterest and Etsy and things like that. And the third part of our business is commercial casework where we are making
00:07:16
Speaker
wall cladding primarily for architects and designers around the country. We're making that mostly from recycled materials where we are capturing waste material from new construction projects like oriented strand board and plywood primarily. We bring those scrap pieces to our shop and we remanufacture them and make them into
00:07:44
Speaker
wall cladding that then goes into commercial projects around the country. Right now we're marketing our wall cladding panels under the brand named Torzo Surfaces. People will see Torzo Surfaces out there and it's a brand of Trillium Pacific Millwork, one of our brands. Nice.
00:08:07
Speaker
With your experience in the forestry sector, how important is sustainability and certification? That's a topic that is always in people's mind and the general public. What's your opinion about that?
00:08:23
Speaker
Well, it's one of the key parts of the business that I knew I wanted to be a part of our business when we purchased this business back in 2009. I wanted to let the world know, I guess, that sustainability was important to me personally
00:08:43
Speaker
and that I wanted our products to exhibit those characteristics and so from the very first day we became FSC certified for chain opacity on our own certification as a way to just demonstrate to the world that we were committed to it and we were focused on making FSC products whenever we could, FSC certified.
00:09:08
Speaker
products whenever we could and I would say over the years there have been times when we've done a lot of FSC certified
Creating and Marketing Torzo Surfaces
00:09:17
Speaker
products and then times when we haven't done that many but it regardless of whether it's FSC certified we're always careful to make sure that we are paying attention to sourcing of the materials that come into our shop and if we ever feel like there's a risk that
00:09:35
Speaker
the material that comes in is maybe has not been legally harvested or that it comes from a place where People are not taking care of the forest then typically we we won't process that material we it hasn't really happened in any great detail, but we manufacture products for that go into or that have a background of
00:10:02
Speaker
sensitive material like for the guitar industry and so you know we're very mindful of the fact that it's important to have to know the source of the material to have an FSC certified if we can and to pay attention to those things but sustainability is very important that's why I love the panels that we're making because we're taking
00:10:27
Speaker
material that would normally be going to a landfill or might be ground up for hog fuel to go into a boiler somewhere, but we're taking that material and remanufacturing it and turning it into
00:10:42
Speaker
really beautiful decorative panels and giving it new life, extending the life cycle of that material. And so I think that's a great story. It's a feel good thing for us and for our employees too. They love the fact that we're taking this material that would normally get thrown away and turning it into beautiful panels that have a new life.
00:11:08
Speaker
I'm curious, like, so how does OSB and chunks of plywood scrap end up in a doodle panel like the one right behind you? How does that work? Do you get scraps? And where do you start? Where do you end? Yeah, we partner with a company here in the Portland area, and they are doing the actual collection of the material.
00:11:27
Speaker
Those wood streams of waste material have been in the system for a long time, since we've been building houses and since they've been available. Now we're looking for ways to capture them.
00:11:45
Speaker
which is difficult, but once we get it captured then we can manufacture that product. We can rip it and glue it and resaw it and glue it again and so forth and change the look of it because most of the time we're not using
00:12:04
Speaker
the we're not using the panel the way it was intended to originally be made so if you look at our Pacifica panels which is made from OSB it doesn't look like OSB it doesn't have flakes and so forth it looks very different from OSB and that's because of the orientation of the fiber that we change
00:12:26
Speaker
And likewise, our Olympia product, which is plywood, it doesn't look like a sheet of plywood that you would normally see at Home Depot or someplace like that. It looks very different because we're changing the orientation of the fiber and turning it in a way to make it more decorative and give it characteristics that would cause people to look at that and go, wow, that would look really cool on a wall.
00:12:56
Speaker
in my building. And so I think that's the neat thing about all of the recycling and reclaiming that we do and all of the projects where we are capturing material that maybe had another use is that we change the look of it. We change the appearance so that people look at that and go, wow, that's really beautiful. What is that? And they say, well, that's OSB.
00:13:25
Speaker
Nah, that's not all. I mean, is that button looking like it was free? Yeah. It is. And that's great. That's awesome. That's the kind of reaction we want them to have.
00:13:36
Speaker
What if I may ask, so you make a panel and it's this beautiful thing. Where does it go? How do you see the finished result of your work? Have you been to buildings or you're walking into a bank and there's like this grand entrance or how does the panel get used so that it shows off the wood qualities that we're talking about here?
00:13:58
Speaker
Well, most of the time we're shipping these panels all over the United States. It makes more sense in most cases for somebody locally to do the fabrication and the installation of the panels in these buildings. And so a lot of times we're just shipping them panels. Then they do whatever needs to be done to turn it into a finished product.
00:14:21
Speaker
We do get photos after the installations, and we've used some of those on our website. You can see a few of those up there. The Pacifica and Olympia panels are pretty new to the market. It's only been in the last couple of years that we've introduced them to the market. So there are not a lot of installations of those panels yet. But we've sold several hundred panels
00:14:51
Speaker
since we launched them around the country. They're being installed now. There are just all kinds of installations around the United States.
Sustainability and Customization in Product Design
00:15:00
Speaker
Currently, we're shipping about 100 panels down to a casino in California, for instance, that we're really excited about getting some photos
00:15:12
Speaker
of those because they're kind of an emerald green color. And so we're excited about getting some photos from there. I think it was about 300 pounds to a high school back in Pennsylvania. And those around, those are, you can see photos of some of that on our website.
00:15:28
Speaker
So we're getting them out there, but we haven't developed all of the photo assets to follow up with them because they're very new. And, uh, so it takes a little while to get enough installations out there to where we can have those photos or to show people we're going to get them. So.
00:15:48
Speaker
Makes sense? No, that's really neat. I was just specifically curious, like you mentioned, the casino application, the high school application, that is super neat. I guess if you're not the ones to, you're just manufacturing these beautiful panels, what's the go to market? Like how do people find out about the Torzo, you said the Torzo brand of panels, you know, how do they get spec'd or, you know, tell me more about that. Like, I guess, who's buying from you? Is that the end customer or how does that part of the supply chain work?
00:16:17
Speaker
Yeah, it's typically the normal process for those kinds of projects is you have a building owner who either wants to build a new building or remodel an existing building and they hire an architect to design it. They can say, well, here are some ideas for the wall cladding, for
00:16:41
Speaker
the countertops for maybe even for the flooring. Here are some ideas of products. They show them to the owner and if the owner likes them then they become specified for the project. And then down the road when the building is actually being built
00:16:58
Speaker
the contractors that are doing the work, doing the installations, they look at the specification, they go, oh, I've got to go get some Torzo Olympia panels or some Torzo Pacifica panels. And that's when they contact us and tell us what they're doing. And we provide the panels or in some cases we provide a fabricated item for them or several items.
00:17:23
Speaker
where there is more demand for this type of material? Yeah, I think the fact that our Pacifica and Olympia panels, the OSB imply with our FSC certified recycled definitely gets their attention because of the move towards sustainably produced products.
00:17:44
Speaker
And the fact that we can do almost any color helps them to utilize that material in almost any kind of a color scheme or whatever it is that they're trying to create in their building. The other thing about our panels is that we make them in CLT fashion, cross-laminated timber fashion. So they are 3-ply. They've got a really cool edge detail on them.
00:18:13
Speaker
And they're very stable and sturdy. And especially if a building owner is building their building with CLT panels, we want them to be able to carry on that CLT story in the interior. And they can do that with FSC certified recycled panels that are made in CLT fashion. And we think that that gives us a nice niche in the market.
00:18:42
Speaker
and hopefully catches people's eye and convinces them to specify our products for their projects. And that's a long lead time to get a lot of time. So the other way that we get our products in buildings is somebody's building a building and
00:19:03
Speaker
they don't have anything specified or the product that they had specified is no longer available and they go looking for something else, they might contact us, see our products online, contact us and say, hey, you know, I need some panels for this project. What would you recommend? So that's another way we get in there.
00:19:25
Speaker
Mike, and when you mentioned CLT, that in my mind brings up the whole mass timber movement, but it's not necessarily the CLT that's used for building buildings from a structural perspective. You mentioned earlier that your panels are decorative. Is that right? Yes.
00:19:42
Speaker
Yeah, that's the big difference is ours are non-structural. They're intended to be decorative and compliment the structural members. Continue that CLT story, but the neat thing about our process is, you know, a lot of times the CLT factory that's making structural CLT only has one or two species, whereas we can make
00:20:11
Speaker
CLT panels out of any species. It can be hardwood, softwood, recycled wood like our Olympia and Pacifica panels. It doesn't really matter what the species is, we can make a CLT panel. So even if they are using Doug Fur CLT, say for the structural members, we can make CLT Doug Fur non-structural panels for that project, or we can make complementary
00:20:41
Speaker
species panels or colors or whatever for that project. So we have a lot of flexibility, a lot of options for the type of panel. What are we looking at? How is it cross laminated? And you also were talking about reorienting fibers in different directions. What are we actually looking at? What's the makeup of the panel if we were to zoom in or take a cross section of it?
00:21:05
Speaker
Well, what you would see is most of the time for our recycled panels, what you would be looking at is the edge of what the old panel was. So our OSB panels, instead of being the face where you see the flakes and so forth, you'd be looking at the edge, a bunch of edges of OSB panels that are glued together
00:21:28
Speaker
and then made into a face sheet for the CLT panel. The other layers of the CLT are made from the same material and the center layer is at 90 degrees perpendicular to the face and the back.
00:21:43
Speaker
And so the edge detail is usually really interesting. And that's one of the neat features of the panels is that you don't have to do anything special on the edge of the panel. It looks pretty cool just the way it is. So you don't have to put edge banding on it. You don't necessarily have to do a drop edge on it or anything like that.
00:22:05
Speaker
But you can if you want to. But it has a very cool look just the way it is. And that's another feature of CLT panels that I think makes them nice for fabricators to use because it doesn't take as much effort to turn it into a finished.
00:22:24
Speaker
product and most of the time if you're building with CLT you want to show CLT and our panels give them the ability to show that CLT edge and to talk about how those panels are made and showcase how the building is built.
Trillium's Diverse Manufacturing Capabilities
00:22:43
Speaker
While we've really zoomed into Torzo, CLT panels, and some of the ways that you apply them, I'd like to zoom out a little bit more. You said there's multiple business units or divisions of Trillium Pacific Millwork. I guess if you could share the others and the other applications, the final products, how do those other divisions, what's the final result of the divisions?
00:23:08
Speaker
Probably the biggest part of our business these days has been our private label manufacturing just because we have the ability to
00:23:18
Speaker
make a lot of product in a fairly short amount of time. We're considered high medium to a large woodworking facility in our part of the industry and we can crank out some pretty good volumes. So we make anywhere from 20 to 30,000 cutting boards a year for that part of our business. We also make home office products, wood products that people can use.
00:23:47
Speaker
In their home office some shelves and desktops and things like that for other people who are doing the marketing part of it but.
00:23:57
Speaker
They need a manufacturing plant because they don't have their own. They have the idea for this product and they typically they come to us and I think I've heard this from several people that we've done business with that they're one of the unusual things about coming and talking to us about, you know, can you make this for us? Is that most of the time we say yes. And they're not to that.
00:24:24
Speaker
Several of them have said to us, we went and talked to 20 different manufacturers about them, and everybody said no. But when we came to you, the first thing you said was yes, we can do that. I think that's a common trait for us because
00:24:44
Speaker
We're proud of the fact that we have such a diversity of equipment. We have diversity of skills in our team. And we have imagination and enjoyed doing different things. So we've made lots and lots of different items over the years, some very fun items to make. The cutting board business that we do, there's so many different versions of cutting boards that we can make.
00:25:13
Speaker
Our custom manufacturing business is a little bit more boring because it's closer to the saw metal industry that I used to work in because we're just running lineal stock through our molders or lineal stock through our rip saws or our sander or the chop line or something like that.
00:25:34
Speaker
And so it's a little bit more boring than some of the other things that we do, but it's a vital service that those companies need here around the Portland metro area. And we do a lot of small batch work for them. So they have a customer who only wants a couple thousand lineal feet of a certain pattern.
00:25:57
Speaker
They can bring that material to us and we can run it through our boulder and turn it into a pattern. Or they've got somebody that wants one countertop, maybe an island top out of
00:26:10
Speaker
Madrone or Myrtlewood or Western Walnut or, you know, some exotic species that might be a Western US species only. And they can bring it to us and we can turn it into a beautiful countertop for that customer. And, you know, they'll put it in their home and have kind of an heirloom quality piece that will serve them for decades.
00:26:39
Speaker
Yeah, I have a question related to, you were talking about the capabilities and the flexibility of your manufacturing process, and you mentioned people there. How many employees do you have? Do you have skilled people? Do you require certain knowledge? Do you do training?
Workforce Development and Community Engagement
00:26:59
Speaker
You can elaborate a little bit about the people that work for your company.
00:27:04
Speaker
Yeah, we've, we've got about 36 people on our team right now. We work two shifts. Um, we've, uh, that's another thing that I brought from my sawmill world was, uh, having two shifts so that we have capacity and, um, we can, we have more flexibility and things like that. And we, we have a wide range of.
00:27:27
Speaker
people skill levels that work for us. We have people that are machine operators that understand how to set up a molder and run a molder. People that know how to operate some of our CNC routers and other machines like that. And we have woodworkers who understand how to
00:27:50
Speaker
craft wood into beautiful items and help us solve some of the issues that we run into now and then with manufacturing beautiful wood items. And then we have entry level folks who come to us. They don't have any skills. They don't maybe know anything about wood.
00:28:10
Speaker
We assume that most people don't know very much about our industry, so we plan to train them. We expect that we're going to have to do some training with them. What we tell them is that their opportunity for growth as a career with us and in our industry
00:28:32
Speaker
is really only limited by their desire to learn because we're willing to teach them anything and everything. We always need more equipment operators. We always need more woodworkers, people with technical skills to operate our computerized equipment.
00:28:54
Speaker
our routers, all of those things. So there's lots of opportunity for people to come to us, and they might start out as an entry-level person at one of our machines stacking and packaging and things like that. But if they see a machine that they think they would like to be an operator on, then we'll start training them that way. And eventually, they're probably going to get a chance to run that machine.
00:29:23
Speaker
And if they really like working with wood and want to become an experienced woodworker, someone with some really high skills, then we'd love to train more people with those skills. Because we need those kind of people. If we're going to grow our business, we have to have more of those people in our business to help us grow.
00:29:48
Speaker
And, uh, we definitely have a growth mindset and, uh, want to continue to, to find people, uh, to join our team and, um, and learn new things. And we are, we have partnered with some local, uh, companies to help us in that regard. Um, we work with the high school or local high school. They have a wood shop program, work with them. Uh, we've had their students over to tour our facility.
00:30:18
Speaker
and we encourage them to come in and come to work for us after they get done with their high school, or if they want to go to community college, that's fine. If they want to work for us and go to community college, we can accommodate that a lot of times too. And then we also have partnered with a company in a small furniture shop in Salem, south of here, and they
00:30:44
Speaker
They are also associated with a group that helps legal immigrants get settled in the United States and they teach them woodworking skills to help them
00:30:57
Speaker
get a job here in the United States and so we hire their graduates because they've got some woodworking capabilities and they've already been through some training so they can come to us with some skills right away. The tough thing about it is we started that program
00:31:16
Speaker
I think a year or so before COVID hit. And then during COVID, they weren't able to do anything. They weren't able to do any training and so forth. So now they're back at it and they have kind of a two-year program. So we're anticipating that in the next couple of years, we'll get some more graduates from them. And we've told them we'll hire them all, just send them our way.
00:31:42
Speaker
We're happy to partner with anybody that can send people to us that already have some woodworking skills. They've been great additions to our team too. They have a very strong desire to work and they love what they're doing. They're thankful for the opportunity to come to the United States. And so they're dependable. They want to learn. So it's been a good fit.
00:32:07
Speaker
Where are they mainly from? Most of them are from Africa. We've also had some people from Middle Eastern countries. But mostly that part of the world is very interesting. One of the guys that came to work for us was from Afghanistan. And he was a pilot in the Afghan Air Force and worked with US troops when we were in Afghanistan.
00:32:32
Speaker
and he got out when we pulled out of Afghanistan. He was part of that. He and his wife, they barely made it out. His story was just really amazing and inspirational. He was really quite a neat individual and of course, you know, very intelligent and I wish we could have convinced him to stay with us but
00:32:56
Speaker
Um, he felt like, well, he wants to be a pilot in the US. And so he, that's what he's doing. He's, uh, he's off, uh, trying to become a commercial pilot here in the US. He didn't want to be a woodworker, but we helped him get started. And so, uh, you know, we were thankful for all the time we had with them, but just really an amazing, amazing story that he had with his life.
00:33:22
Speaker
I think it's beautiful. Yeah, incredible. Mike, I was going to ask you, so did you actually anticipate being where you are today as a business owner, creating different businesses? If you looked from years ago, is this where you would have anticipated to see yourself and kind of curious about that? Yeah, no.
Reflections on Leadership and Business Challenges
00:33:43
Speaker
I would say definitely not. I really had no idea.
00:33:51
Speaker
what I was getting into other than I knew that it was wood and
00:33:56
Speaker
Um, at the time that we purchased the business, it was almost a hundred percent contract manufacturing. So that, that was somewhat familiar because it was very similar to saw mill, the saw mill side of life. Only much slower, you know, much lower volume and so forth, but it was, you know, taking in square stuff or rectangular stuff and turning it into a pattern or gluing it up or something like that. So it was pretty straightforward.
00:34:24
Speaker
And so, you know, fairly easy to wrap my head around and so forth. But I soon figured out that that's not where the money is made in this part of the business. The money is made in fabricating things like these wall panels and fabricating
00:34:44
Speaker
bar tops and table tops and countertops and all of the other stuff that goes into the interior. And so it wasn't long after we purchased the business that it became really obvious to me that we had to start moving it toward commercial casework type products, toward the private label stuff.
00:35:08
Speaker
We still wanted to do our contract manufacturing because very good business. The companies that utilize us for that business are very stable and very dependable.
00:35:21
Speaker
and they pay their bills. And in the early days of owning the business, cash was very tight. And that's where my financial background, I would say really benefited me because I understood cash flow and making the ends meet, so to speak. And I mean, the first few years of our business coming out of that recession,
00:35:48
Speaker
Banks weren't lending money to anybody. We were a new business and, and everybody knows that new businesses, a vast majority of them fail. And so we were a cashflow business in the early years for a long time.
00:36:03
Speaker
And being able to manage that was critical. We never would have made it if we wouldn't have been able to manage our cash flow very tightly. But I could see we needed to move toward more commercial casework products, more
00:36:21
Speaker
private label products where the margins were higher, where our skills and the skills of all of the people that work here could get paid better. And so that's what we've been doing is trying to grow those other parts of our business. And like I said, when we bought the business, we were probably 90 to 95% contract manufacturing.
00:36:48
Speaker
And now it's about 30% of our business. So the rest of our business is private label and commercial casework. And those are the areas that we're, we're still doing the contract manufacturing and it's kind of growing a little bit on its own, but we're really focusing on growing our commercial casework and private
00:37:11
Speaker
Are you on a daily day, on a day to day basis, are you at all able to enjoy any time in a shop with hands on with the wood or was that just in the early days? Tell me about what your day to day looks like. Well, I'm, I go out in the shop a lot, um, mainly because I want to see what's going on. I love looking at the wood going through the shop.
00:37:36
Speaker
I love interacting with our employees. They've always got questions, or they show me what they're doing, or we talk about the things that we're trying to do. I couldn't go through a day without spending quite a bit of time in the shop.
00:37:56
Speaker
I get focused on doing some things in my office. I always just kind of put the pencil down, so to speak, and head out into the shop. And even if it's just to walk around and get a little bit of exercise and kind of see what's going on. So I spend time out there every day.
00:38:19
Speaker
And I would say I'm able to spend a little bit more time these days than I was in the early days, just because in the early days I was so focused on keeping things afloat, looking for new customers, you know, on the phone talking to people, providing quotes for things, learning.
00:38:41
Speaker
the business, learning more about that part of our business because it is different from pet net blogs. And so the early days, it was actually a little tougher for me to be out of the shop. It's a little bit easier now. And I enjoy that. Going through the challenges, right? You were explaining that in the beginning. What did you do mentally? I believe our audience would like
00:39:08
Speaker
would love to learn from somebody that has been in so many different positions, doing many things. As a business owner, you have to go through those very challenging times. That's definitely been the toughest part because I don't have a board of directors. I would like to have some advisors. I always talk to people about our business.
00:39:34
Speaker
Um, we're very lean at the top of our business. Uh, we don't have, you know, a bunch of vice presidents and, uh, managers and things like that. It's just a few people in the office and then our supervisors on the floor and that's it. And so don't have a lot of people that I can confide in or talk to about what is going on. Thankfully I've had a very supportive wife, um, who.
00:40:04
Speaker
been amazing through all of this. And so, you know, I couldn't have made it without her. And just, you know, just feeling like she was behind me and, and
00:40:22
Speaker
I knew that whatever we were doing that she was going to, for the most part, she was going to support it. But it's been tough. And especially in the early years, because coming out of the recession, the business was in trouble when we founded. It was either going to go to auction or
00:40:45
Speaker
It needed somebody like myself to try and resuscitate it and bring it back from the break of failure. I thought at the time that things would turn around quickly.
00:41:03
Speaker
We could get back to business as usual, but that recession lasted a long time and it was a slow go. Uh, and there were a lot of years where, um, you know, it was, it was pretty tough. Um, but.
00:41:20
Speaker
We had great people working for us, and that was another reason why we decided to purchase the business. I met the guys on the floor, our manager, and some of the other guys. They're great people, and they were dedicated to what they were doing.
00:41:37
Speaker
I wouldn't have purchased the business. We wouldn't have purchased the business if not for those people and many of them are still with us today and and then we've added to the team over the years with some really good people and that's what makes it all work is having it having a good good group of people to
00:42:01
Speaker
make things happen. So I'm thankful that we've made it as far as we have. And I'm excited about the future because I think we have huge potential.
Future Vision and Industry Impact
00:42:12
Speaker
There's a lot of
00:42:14
Speaker
opportunities for growth and we've got a stronger team today than we did back then and so I'm very excited about the future going forward. That's actually really interesting. Could you share? I mean the wood industry has definitely evolved over the years. You're coming up with innovative products. Can you share some of that vision you have about the future?
00:42:37
Speaker
of your company about the future of the industry as a whole, maybe some of the friends you're seeing, technologies, practices, or just kind of your thoughts about where the future of the industry and your business is headed.
00:42:51
Speaker
Well, it's neat to watch the development of the CLT part of our business and the fact that people are now, I guess, getting better educated to the fact that when we make a wood product, we're sequestering carbon. It's a good thing for the environment. It helps us with the climate change issue. It provides so many benefits and it's beautiful. I mean,
00:43:19
Speaker
People love the look of wood and so all of those benefits I think people are finally
00:43:26
Speaker
maybe getting educated about. And so I think that's the future for us. That's the reason why I feel like wood may finally becoming the product of choice, the substance that people want to make things out of. And the fact that we have made so many different items, like our recycled panels,
00:43:52
Speaker
You know, taking something that was going to go to the landfill and giving it an extended life. And we do that with all kinds of different products, not just wall paneling. So I think that's going to be a, continue to be part of the future is.
00:44:08
Speaker
Not only is wood going to be preferred, but I think we're going to always have new ways to use wood to make new products and continue to tell the great story that is wood. And so I'm encouraged by it. I think we still still have people who have this vision in their mind that when a tree is cut down, it's a bad thing. But I think we're getting better.
00:44:37
Speaker
Maybe finally, I think we're getting better at educating them about all of the benefits that happen when we sequester that carbon, keep it in warm. And just the fact that we're not just cutting down a tree and walking away.
00:44:55
Speaker
When we cut that tree down, we plant four, five, six more trees in its place. And we'd been doing that for as long as I, longer than I've been in the industry. And so, you know, we've always been planting more trees than we've been harvesting.
00:45:12
Speaker
And most of the time, we're not even harvesting the trees that we could harvest. So we've been growing more trees than we've been harvesting for decades. And if you look around in the United States, North America, I can't speak so much for South America and some of the other parts of the world.
00:45:34
Speaker
In North America, Canada, the US, we've been growing far more trees than we've been harvesting. And our forests are in good shape except for the fact that we've stopped managing our federal forests primarily. And that's why we have the forest fires, because we're not managing that resource and taking care of it.
00:46:03
Speaker
uh, the way we, we should be. And, uh, and so we get overgrowth forest. Um, and when lightning strikes or something happens and we get, we get a fire started because of all of that overgrowth forest, it just becomes a, you know, a wildfire. And, um, you don't see those kinds of wildfires on private timberland because those timber land, that property is managed well.
00:46:31
Speaker
And, um, it's not overgrown. They're growing lots of trees. They're growing more trees than on federal timber, on federal land.
00:46:39
Speaker
But they don't have the overgrowth. It's done in a fashion that is intelligent. And they're growing lots and lots of trees. So that would be the thing. We need to manage all of our forests. If we got back to the point where we were doing that, we'd have far fewer forest fires. We'd have beautiful spaces for people to recreate in a camp and
00:47:07
Speaker
you know, hike and all of those things. And we'd have a very vibrant forest industry. So I think maybe with all of the talk about wildfire and now the good name that wood is getting, people understanding how good it is to sequester that carbon in wood and turn it into a countertop or a table or
00:47:36
Speaker
uh, you know, a cutting board or whatever it is that people are finally maybe going to understand how beneficial it is to do all of those things. And, uh, and that maybe that will translate into our ability to manage all of the forests, uh, for the good of our society.
Industry Involvement and Advice for Young Professionals
00:47:56
Speaker
Mike, you have a very strong message there. Are you part of directories for associations, for groups in the industry or not?
00:48:06
Speaker
Well, I've been part of the Western Hardwood Association since we, uh, since we purchased the business, um, as a way to be involved in hardwoods in the West. Um, I didn't know when, uh, when we purchased the business that there aren't hardly any hardwoods grown in the West. Uh, most of the hardwood are grown in the Eastern US, but, uh, it's been a great organization to be a part of.
00:48:35
Speaker
and I enjoy all of the things that we do there. I still stay in contact with a lot of the softwood people that I worked with early in my career and go to industry events whenever we can and next year we're going to be participating in the Mass Timber Conference as part of the CLT movement and all of that part of our industry because it's a
00:49:02
Speaker
It's an exciting, I think a very exciting part of our industry and the future of our industry. So we're excited about participating in the conference. Are you going to bring some of your material so people can come and if they hear you on our podcast, where can they come find you? Maybe a place to meet you or shake your hand. Yeah. Yeah. We're going to, we definitely are going to, uh, we're going to have a booth at the show. We'll have a.
00:49:28
Speaker
lots of examples of our products there. We also just found out that we are going to be a tour site for the conference, so we're going to have a bunch of people in our shop. There's going to be a lot of opportunity for people to see what we do if they come to the conference. That's to see you in person. How about if they wanted to just find you and the business online, where can they go to find you?
00:49:50
Speaker
So they can go to torsosurfaces.com. And then Trillium has its own website, trilliumpacific.com, and they can see all of the services that we provide and some of the other products. We're currently working with COBOL to improve our websites because we have a little bit of work to do there to make them look better and
00:50:20
Speaker
operate better and tell our story a little bit better. So they're going to be changing and getting better in the next few months, but they can still find us and definitely find out how to contact us and get in touch and get samples of our products and things like that.
00:50:39
Speaker
I guess for me as a young person, what's one piece of advice that, again, through your career, your experience, that you could have wished that you would have known as a young person or wished that you could give the advice to your younger self? I guess to believe that I controlled my destiny in terms of what I wanted my career to be, what I wanted my work life to be. I guess I kind of felt like, you know, you go to work for somebody and
00:51:07
Speaker
Yeah, you do your best and that you're probably going to get some opportunities for advancement and so forth. But as I got further into it, it really became obvious to me that.
00:51:20
Speaker
I controlled that a lot more than I thought I did. And I wish someone would have helped me understand that earlier on in life because even people that come to work for us, they control their future more than they may think they do.
00:51:39
Speaker
If they work hard and if they have a thirst for knowledge and learning and see a path, something that they would like to do differently and so forth, then they'd let us know. You know, we're happy to help them achieve that path. But if they don't, if they don't let us know, or if they don't have that vision themselves personally, then it's pretty easy for them to just kind of bump along and come to work every day and do their job.
00:52:09
Speaker
you know, maybe really well, but not have a path set forth. So I wish I had known that a little bit earlier.
00:52:18
Speaker
in my career, I might've left to start my own business sooner if I'd have known that better. But I think it's a hard thing to teach people, but that's what I try to teach our people is that if they have a path that they want in their life, that we need to talk about it because I want to help them achieve that.
00:52:44
Speaker
whether it's with us or without us. But I think having that mindset where you know you control your destiny. Thank you so much for tuning in to the Wood World podcast today. And as we say, now go out there, embrace the grain and make your mark on the world of what