Featuring a blast from the past, we catch up with Jake Latvala of Ol Loggin Sawmills and discuss the growth and changes he’s seen in the past three years in terms of business and mindset.
After twenty years with one company, Jake decided to take the leap and follow his woodworking passion. He would never have imagined this is where that passion would lead him.
“It’s such a scary thing to do, but it turned out the be the best decision I’ve ever made in my life.”
Jake details his decision to pursue self-employment and shares a lot of great advice about how he made the transition so smooth. First, he always is thinking two, if not three to four steps ahead. Before he quit his day job, he decided to buy all of his equipment and make sure it was paid off.
Even once he had the equipment, he was still patient, working evenings and weekends on his woodworking, but keeping his day job until he was confident and ready to try his hand at being a full-time woodpreneur.
Since his last time on the podcast in 2018, not only has the vision of the company changed, but his entire mindset has grown and evolved as well. The original bar Jake set for himself was to be making at least as much as he used to make at his 9-5. Now, he has increased his earnings by 300% in the last two years, and grown Ol Loggin into a full brand and scalable business. The business isn’t just a person anymore, it’s not just me, it’s a brand, Jake notes.
Initially, Jake recalls he didn’t want to be big, but now with thousands of active Facebook followers and nearly 13k followers on Instagram invested in his journey, he’s realized the passion isn’t just woodworking. It’s also teaching.
For Jake, pursuing his love of woodworking opened him up to new things that energize and excite him like teaching and marketing. The teaching came from creating content about his business and projects and, most importantly, a community mindset over a scarcity one. Jake teaches people to do exactly what he does and, in many cases, learns with his followers when it comes to new projects. When people ask if he’s worried about creating competition for himself, all he can do is laugh.
“I’m motivated to inspire people on how to do this stuff. I want to start doing a class where I teach people how to do it.”
There is more than enough prosperity in this industry to go around, and networking is one of the essential parts of being successful in this industry. Jake mentions as an example how reaching out to Steve for marketing advice helped him build his Instagram following, and how the next step is having his own platform of customers via his website, so he doesn’t have to rely on a third-party platform to connect him to his community.
It’s about building, connecting, and realizing just because you can do it all, doesn’t mean you necessarily should. Jake collaborates with local kiln owners and mills in his area and hopes to connect with more woodworkers and spread the wealth in terms of projects too. Other big plans include a bigger shop so that he can get his own vacuum kiln as well as more cinematic videos of his process and woodworking.
In this way, Jake has perfectly shown the power of diversified revenue streams and also the importance of outsourcing and networking. By being the lumber yard, epoxy distributor, and teacher, he knows that he offers value to his followers and customers. He also knows the importance of quality, both in terms of the physical products he offers and the content he creates.
This coming year will see some major power plays from Jake and Ol Loggin Sawmill as a whole. This new generation of woodworkers who make furniture from tree to table, who create content, who entertain and innovate – invigorates him, and he can’t wait to see where it all takes him and where the industry will go.
In terms of the next steps and advice, Steve says the number one thing is to get liability insurance. In fact, any business making some decent money should make sure they invest in that aspect. Steve elaborates that this kind of investment has significant returns not only for being insured in the event of something unexpected happening but also in terms of being able to bid on big jobs for corporations, universities, etc.,
With so much to look forward to, big exciting projects on the horizon, and now equipped with some excellent business advice, we can’t wait to see where Jake and Ol Loggin Sawmill is the next time we have them on the show.
Website: www.ollogginsawmill.net/
Instagram: @ollogginsawmill
Facebook: Ol Loggin Sawmill