Justin & Olga: Cowtown Wood Co.

September 15, 2022

Justin & Olga: Cowtown Wood Co.

“Justin needed to be to become the master sawyer, and I needed to be a hardcore woodworking networker, and a social media expert, basically. Adding a whole other thing was just going to bog us down.”

Olga

Welcome back to a brand new episode of the Woodpreneur Podcast. Today your host Steve Larosiliere sits down with Olga and Justin from Cowtown Wood Co. Justin and Olga are part of the newer wave of Woodpreneurs, as they started their business two and a half years ago doing small woodworking projects. Around that point they started listening to the podcast, which inspired the pair to invest in their own sawmill!

“It’s almost kind of like you start to become more serious. We got the sawmill and right off the bat, I’m gonna have to just get on this thing and just tear stuff up for a while. I’m gonna have to mess some stuff up, I’m gonna have to figure out what I’m doing.

I don’t come from a long line of sawyers or anything like that. I’m completely new. So that’s what I did for the first month. I was still working full time and in my spare time, I would just grab whatever I could and just put it on the mill and just see how it runs. Like ‘Okay, this is kind of how this pushes vs this pushes.’

After that, after I felt more experienced with it, we decided to start taking on customers and stuff like that. It was almost instantly that we went from hobbyist to me quitting my job. The week of us going live with it, it was appointment after appointment after appointment. It was also overwhelming. Honestly, I wasn’t ready for the full swing to happen that fast. But it was intentional, it was all planned. I mean, we put everything in place to make it happen that way.”

Justin

Applying the Lessons Learned

Justin and Olga were part of the six-month Woodpreneur Mentorship program, and they credit Steve for helping them get a lot of things right the first time. There is no single direct route for woodworkers, sawyers and other wood enthusiasts to make a career out of their passion, but with the right advice, anyone with the dedication can make a career out of this industry.

“Especially after talking to you, you said the same thing like, ‘Dude, once you get that sawmill, just practice and mess around with it. Start looking stuff up, make yourself into a master sawyer.’ I did, I just took your advice, took it slow. Did everything the wrong way so I can learn how to do it all the right way.

Then once we put everything out there on the internet, all of our ads, the Google Ads, putting up our website, as soon as it hit, it went 100 miles an hour. Once that happened, we kind of had to flip our on switch. Now I had already intended on quitting, but I just didn’t intend on it so quickly. But once we did, you know, we realized immediately that this is 100% real now, so we really had to start getting stuff together. Like you said, it was a very intentional switch that we flipped from going from hobbyist semi-professional to what we are now where we’re busy every day.”

Steve’s Advice Corner

“We have been growing a lot, and every month has been going really well. But there are a lot of things that we still need equipment-wise and because we started the mill this year, we can’t really go to a bank because the business credit hasn’t existed that long. What would be some other avenues that you would suggest for us to try to get equipment?”

Justin

One of the common pieces of advice provided on the Woodpreneur Podcast is the importance of only buying the equipment you need, as you need it. In the case of Justin and Olga, their business has expanded so rapidly that they need the equipment faster than they can get a bank to lend them the money to do so.

“80% of your time until you get to about a million is about perfecting your sales system. About 80% of your time should be spent on marketing. So for a skid steer, forklift, whatever, how much do you get one for, 15k-20k? I would equate that to lumber. How many stacks of lumber do I need to pre-sell in order to afford that?

I’d go to people and say, ‘Listen, I have all this lumber that’s gonna be air drying.’ And in your mind, you’re like, ‘This is my skid steer fund.’ Then go out and friggin sell lumber, sell logs, and then just start stashing that money away. You’ve got to make sure that your sales system is there, but you could put half down and put the other half on a credit card.

Get a business credit card. You can get one for 0% financing, 0% APR, get one of those. Then you can use the points from those credit cards and then pay it off later. There’s different ways that you can hack getting the equipment that you need, but look at it as a sales problem. Use the bank loan for something that you know that when you get it, you have money waiting for you. Don’t use it on these little things. Use it for the big stuff where it matters.”