The Woodpreneur Podcast

We cover the business and marketing side of the woodworking, sawmill, tree service, furniture making, Urban Wood, and woodworking industry. If you're a woodworker, sawmill owner, or any other entrepreneur and/or business owner in the wood industry, you need to check out this podcast.Each week, we interview business owners, large-scale companies, entrepreneurs, makers, and designers while also offering marketing and business advice that will help you grow your business and increase your profits. Tune in every week!www.builldergrowth.iowww.woodpreneurlife.comJoin our free and private Facebook Group!https://www.facebook.com/groups/woodpreneurlife

The Woodpreneur Podcast is a business podcast hosted by Acres of Timber, with 100 episodes on record and a Required Pod Score of 80. PitchCentric scores this show on Booking Probability, Listen Score, and live audience signals refreshed every 24 hours.

Acres of Timber hosts The Woodpreneur Podcast, a business show with 100 episodes published.

Our AI reads these to draft pitches. Use them as grounding for a pitch that cites a real guest and a specific topic.

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  Episode #504

  Robert Cannon, Trestlewood

  Sep 17, 202636 minS4

  The sawmills did not want it. Thirty million board feet out of a railroad trestle, loaded with salt, grit and hidden metal, and nobody in the region was set up to cut reclaimed wood in that condition. So the family sitting on the pile bought a mill and taught themselves. In this episode of the Woodpreneur Podcast, host Jennifer Alger sits down with Robert Cannon, vice president of sales for Trestlewood in Blackfoot, Idaho. Trestlewood started in 1993, when Robert's grandfather, a heavy construction contractor, took the salvage rights to a twelve mile wood trestle crossing the Great Salt Lake. Part of the pay was the wood itself. The plan was to hand it off to sawmills, the plan failed on the first load, and the family ended up helping pioneer the reclaimed wood industry at scale instead. Taking the trestle down took them ten years. You'll hear how the company grew past its namesake. There are still ten to twelve million board feet in inventory, and they are still bringing in structures, including a World War Two dry dock out of Portland and a wartime supply depot from Southern California that ran to seventy five semi loads. Alongside the antique material sit the age lines, new wood processed to look old, and a pair of thermal modification kilns brought over from Europe. Robert explains why so many customers blend the two, and why the reclaimed wood story still does the selling even on the new product. He also gets specific about the operational cost of salty material, from blades that die in a hundred feet to why the job needs stainless fasteners, and how they learned to sell the salt as a feature of the reclaimed wood rather than a defect. The conversation closes on the third generation. Trestlewood is closing on a 135 acre hardwood sawmill in Burnside, Pennsylvania, near Pittsburgh, with one of Robert's brothers relocating to run it. He calls it their trestle moment, and he names the real risk plainly: making a new location contribute instead of drain. Chapters 00:00 Salvaging a Twelve Mile Trestle Across the Great Salt Lake 03:07 Buying a Sawmill Because No One Would Take Salty Reclaimed Wood 07:07 Growing Up in the Family Business 10:06 A 135 Acre Hardwood Sawmill in Pennsylvania 11:57 Quality Character Wood and Competing With Composites 22:37 Salt as the Feature, Not the Bug 27:24 The Third Generation's Biggest Challenge The Woodpreneur Podcast brings stories of woodworkers, makers, and entrepreneurs turning their passion for wood into successful businesses - from inspiration to education to actionable advice. Hosted by Steve Larosiliere and Jennifer Alger For blog posts and updates: woodpreneur.com See how we helped woodworkers, furniture-makers, millwork and lumber businesses grow to the next level: woodpreneurnetwork.com Empowering woodpreneurs and building companies to grow and scale: buildergrowth.io Connect with us at: Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/sawmillsnearme/ Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/woodpreneurnetwork/ Join Our Facebook Group! https://www.facebook.com/groups/woodpreneurnetwork Join our newsletter: https://substack.com/@woodpreneurnetwork You can connect with Robert and Trestlewood at: https://www.trestlewood.com/ https://www.instagram.com/trestlewoodofficial/ https://www.linkedin.com/in/robertkencannon

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  Episode #503

  Darci Shannon, National Hardwood Lumber Association

  Sep 10, 202630 minS4

  Darci Shannon walked into her first hardwood convention determined to spend as little as possible. She had talked her boss into joining the association, negotiated the booth cost down, and told them she would bring her own trash can rather than pay for one. Fifteen minutes onto the show floor, the small saw shop she worked for closed the biggest sale in its history. In this episode of the Woodpreneur Podcast, host Jennifer Alger sits down with Darci Shannon, membership services advisor for the National Hardwood Lumber Association, to talk about what an association actually does for a hardwood lumber business and why the smallest members get most of her attention. Darci trained as a teacher, walked away from teaching and coaching during COVID, and took a job running the office and the sales desk at a small saw shop in rural Missouri, handling band and circle blades for mills. She pushed her employer to join the NHLA before she fully understood what it was. A few years later the association wanted her, had no open role, and made one. You'll hear how membership actually breaks down, from the mills and cabinet makers through to the sustaining members who serve the industry rather than produce hardwood lumber. Saw blades, lubricants, even the trash bags every sawmill goes through. Without those services, as Darci puts it, nobody produces anything. She describes the part of the job she cares about most, which is being the person someone calls when they do not know who to call. One member, a small distributor hunting for walnut who had never been to a convention, got pointed toward a source in Missouri and is still buying from them. She also covers the saw filing classes she set up, the scholarships attached to them, and the thermally modified wood session drawing the most interest at this year's show in Cleveland. The conversation gets honest about the mood in hardwood lumber right now. Darci names the doomsday mentality as her biggest obstacle and lays out what the association is doing about it: new publications aimed at architects and designers, a push to get wood specified before the job goes to an alternative product that costs less and gets replaced sooner, and the federal advocacy work she has joined in Washington the last few years. Jennifer, who was born into a forestry family and works in urban salvaged and reclaimed wood, makes the case for wood as a future antique, the one material you can keep reusing while the carbon stays locked inside it. Darci can be reached at d.shannon@nhla.com , and the association is at nhla.com. Chapters 00:00 What the NHLA Does for the Hardwood Lumber Industry 01:13 From Teaching to a Saw Shop to a Job They Created 03:55 Membership Levels and the Services Behind Hardwood Lumber 05:38 The Job Is Connecting People 10:45 The Walnut Buyer Who Found a Source at Convention 12:31 Saw Filing Classes and Thermally Modified Wood 22:14 Fighting the Doomsday Mentality in Hardwood Lumber The Woodpreneur Podcast brings stories of woodworkers, makers, and entrepreneurs turning their passion for wood into successful businesses - from inspiration to education to actionable advice. Hosted by Steve Larosiliere and Jennifer Alger For blog posts and updates: woodpreneur.com See how we helped woodworkers, furniture-makers, millwork and lumber businesses grow to the next level: woodpreneurnetwork.com Empowering woodpreneurs and building companies to grow and scale: buildergrowth.io Connect with us at: Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/sawmillsnearme/ Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/woodpreneurnetwork/ Join Our Facebook Group! https://www.facebook.com/groups/woodpreneurnetwork Join our newsletter: https://substack.com/@woodpreneurnetwork You can connect with Darci at: https://www.linkedin.com/in/darci-shannon-9054222a5/

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  Episode #502

  Jennifer Flynn, SEEDS EcoCorps

  Sep 3, 202632 minS4

  There are trees sitting in woodlots right now, rotting, and others headed for the chipper, and every one of them is releasing methane and losing the carbon it spent decades collecting. Jennifer Flynn built a workforce program around that problem, and the people she trains learn to run a chainsaw, a portable sawmill, and a GIS mapping tool in the same season. In this episode of the Woodpreneur Podcast, host Jennifer Alger sits down with Jennifer Flynn, the EcoCorps program director at SEEDS EcoCorps in northwestern lower Michigan and a fellow board member at the Urban Wood Network. Jennifer is an eco psychologist by training, and she runs what she calls a green collar career exploration program for anyone 16 and older, with no upper age cap. Her staff have included high schoolers, career changers coming out of desk jobs, and people referred through the state workforce development agency. The program is modeled on the Civilian Conservation Corps of the New Deal era, which both of her grandfathers served in, back when only young men were allowed. The urban wood work started in 2019, before the Urban Wood Network was even a formal organization, when a city planner brought in speakers and the team was asked to rescue community trees felled for a trail project. That one job turned into a systems change model. Jennifer's organization now convenes agencies across a ten county region to divert organic waste from landfills, while the hands on urban wood recovery stays local to the Traverse City area. You'll hear how the value chain actually works: arborists fell the trees, a portable sawmill operator trains the crew on the mill, and the material goes out to contractors, sign makers, furniture makers, and the National Park Service. In one case her team sold rescued wood to the park service, then came back two or three years later to build the public structures out of the same material they had milled. The full circle piece is what makes this one worth your time. Crews plant and maintain trees, mill the ones that come down to disease or development, then sweep the sawdust into a composting system that produces soil for food pantry gardens. Jennifer is candid about what her region is missing: the nearest kiln operation is an hour and a half away, the major industry operators will not take a log or two at a time, and she would love to see a former staff member open a sawmill and kiln closer to home. She calls that a five year goal. Her most rewarding urban wood memory is a newly hired naturalist who learned to run a portable sawmill on her first day on the job, milling logs that had come down that same week. Chapters: 00:00 What a Green Collar Career Actually Means 05:01 The Wood Rescue That Started It All 11:06 Modeled on a Depression Era Conservation Corps 16:29 Rebuilding the Urban Wood Value Chain 19:48 Who Buys Rescued Wood, and Where It Goes 23:29 A First Day on a Portable Sawmill 27:36 The Missing Links, a Local Sawmill and Kiln The Woodpreneur Podcast brings stories of woodworkers, makers, and entrepreneurs turning their passion for wood into successful businesses - from inspiration to education to actionable advice. Hosted by Steve Larosiliere and Jennifer Alger For blog posts and updates: woodpreneur.com See how we helped woodworkers, furniture-makers, millwork and lumber businesses grow to the next level: woodpreneurnetwork.com Empowering woodpreneurs and building companies to grow and scale: buildergrowth.io Connect with us at: Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/sawmillsnearme/ Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/woodpreneurnetwork/ Join Our Facebook Group! https://www.facebook.com/groups/woodpreneurnetwork Join our newsletter: https://substack.com/@woodpreneurnetwork You can connect to Jennifer at: https://urbanwoodnetwork.org/ https://ecoseeds.org/

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  Episode #501

  Ian Funk, American Barnwood

  Aug 27, 202637 minS4

  The wood in Ian Funk's house came from the business he now owns. He did not know that when he bought either one. In this episode of the Woodpreneur Podcast, host Jennifer Alger sits down with Ian Funk of American Barnwood, a reclaimed wood yard on California's central coast that he acquired at the end of last year after twenty five years in medical device marketing. His job there was translating between surgeons and engineers, and he is candid that a reclaimed barnwood lumber yard was not the obvious next step. What made it click was a coincidence. The house he had bought in Paso Robles came with barnwood beams, doors and shelving, and a sheet of paper explaining that the wood had come from barns in Indiana. When he went looking for a small business in recycling and repurposing, he found the reclaimed wood shop that had supplied it. He says it sounds like a Hallmark movie, and it does. You will hear what actually transferred with the business and what did not. It came with twelve years of local reputation, a single reliable supplier in the Midwest, and a physical system for handling the wood that the previous owner, an engineer, had worked out and passed on. It did not come with systems or customer records, and the previous owners were straightforward that they had run it to the level they needed on the way to retirement. Ian talks about the discipline of provenance, which is the part that separates a reclaimed wood yard from a lumber pile: because the material is effectively single sourced, they can trace a board to a named barn in Indiana, and an academic historian reads construction methods to date the building and reconstruct who built it, what crops they raised, and what the structure meant to its community. That research gets condensed onto a sheet that travels with every piece of wood. For anyone weighing a late career pivot or buying rather than building, this is an unusually honest account of being a novice on purpose in the reclaimed wood trade. Ian's answer to not knowing the trade is simply to say so and then go find out, and his read on the market is equally plain: he is not right for every project, but there is nothing between the Bay Area and Los Angeles offering what he offers, so the job is making sure local contractors, designers and architects know the resource exists. You will also hear why Craigslist still works for his customers, why shipping is the real constraint on growth, and the line that sums up his change of career better than anything else, which is that there are no barnwood emergencies. Chapters: 00:00 From 25 Years in Medical Device to a Barnwood Yard 05:58 The House That Led Him to the Business 12:34 There Are No Barnwood Emergencies 13:57 What Came With the Business, and What Did Not 18:18 Becoming the Reclaimed Wood Resource on the Central Coast 24:04 Tracing the Provenance of Every Board 31:29 The Pergola That Became a Community Space The Woodpreneur Podcast brings stories of woodworkers, makers, and entrepreneurs turning their passion for wood into successful businesses - from inspiration to education to actionable advice. Hosted by Steve Larosiliere and Jennifer Alger For blog posts and updates: woodpreneur.com See how we helped woodworkers, furniture-makers, millwork and lumber businesses grow to the next level: woodpreneurnetwork.com Empowering woodpreneurs and building companies to grow and scale: buildergrowth.io Connect with us at: Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/sawmillsnearme/ Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/woodpreneurnetwork/ Join Our Facebook Group! https://www.facebook.com/groups/woodpreneurnetwork Join our newsletter: https://substack.com/@woodpreneurnetwork You can connect with Ian at: https://americanbarnwood.co/ https://www.instagram.com/americanbarnwood.co/

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  Episode #500

  Jake Power, PowerWood

  Aug 20, 202638 minS4

  The duty at the border went from 15 percent to 45 percent in two months, and their sales volume went up anyway. In this episode of the Woodpreneur Podcast, host Jennifer Alger sits down with Jake Power, managing director of PowerWood in Agassiz, British Columbia. His father started the company out of the family basement in 1995, brokering kiln dried red cedar into a California market that needed it, and Jake was the first employee, cleaning the office once a week for a dollar at twelve years old. He came into the business full time around 2005 with a wood products processing degree, came back from his honeymoon into the 2008 collapse, and in 2011 he and a colleague loaded up on personal debt and bought the lumber business from his parents. What happened next is the part most owners will recognize. Cheap equipment after the crash got them their first molder and dust collection system, fully installed, for under $20,000, and taking the single piece orders nobody else would run turned a distributor into a manufacturer. Then in 2017 the softwood lumber agreement expired and a 20 percent duty landed on a lumber business that sends 50 to 75 percent of its product into the United States. The duty is charged on value, so every hour of labor they added made the bill bigger, and the equipment they had spent a decade buying became a liability instead of an asset. Jake is blunt about the three years after that. The market was telling them how to run the company, and they had never written down who they were trying to be. The turn came from a seven year plan they wrote themselves, no consultants, and finished just as the pandemic hit. They thought they had wasted the effort. Instead it told them exactly what to buy when money got cheap: twelve acres, a hundred thousand square feet of warehouse, four kilns. They took ownership of the new site on April 1, moved the entire company on July 1, were running three molder lines by September, lost three people out of twenty something in a move an hour east, and hit every goal in the plan by November 2025. You'll also hear how they buy from British Columbia sawmills, including taking 80 percent of a custom cut and giving small portable mill operators a way to turn a mixed truckload into cash, how the same lumber business serves wholesale distributors in California and architects directly at home, why Hawaii works differently, the tariff math as it stands today, the one number he wishes he could get out of his customers and into a spreadsheet, why they rebranded their core values as rules, and what shed the bark means to a lumber business crowd that would rather not talk about feelings. Chapters: 00:00 Thirty years from a family basement to a twelve acre yard 03:07 Buying the business in the middle of the 2008 collapse 06:03 A $20,000 molder, one piece orders, and learning what not to chase 11:55 When duties turned a value added business into a liability 14:44 The seven year plan, and moving the whole company in one summer 19:51 How PowerWood buys, sorts and specs cedar for architects 25:40 A 45 percent duty, the K shaped market, and rules instead of values 27:52 The K shaped market, and the next growth ring 29:46 The number he cannot get, and rules instead of core values The Woodpreneur Podcast brings stories of woodworkers, makers, and entrepreneurs turning their passion for wood into successful businesses - from inspiration to education to actionable advice. Hosted by Steve Larosiliere and Jennifer Alger For blog posts and updates: woodpreneur.com See how we helped woodworkers, furniture-makers, millwork and lumber businesses grow to the next level: woodpreneurnetwork.com Empowering woodpreneurs and building companies to grow and scale: buildergrowth.io Connect with us at: Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/sawmillsnearme/ Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/woodpreneurnetwork/ Join Our Facebook Group! https://www.facebook.com/groups/woodpreneurnetwork Join our newsletter: https://substack.com/@woodpreneurnetwork You can connect with Jake at: https://www.powerwood.com/ https://www.instagram.com/customcedar/

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