Ron Dyrcz: Ronders 

“People will come to me and say, ‘Well, do you think you could like make a bowl out of that?’ We can make like 15 tables; we could make your entire hardwood flooring. Showing people how much wood is actually in a tree’s trunk is eye-opening for many people.”

• Ron Dyrcz

 

Welcome to a brand new episode of the Woodpreneur Podcast. Today your host Steve Larosiliere sits down with Ron Dyrcz from Ronders wood and metal works in Illinois. Ron is a rare type of Woodpreneur, A chainsaw miller. Steve is fascinated with chainsaw milling because it is a very accessible form of milling but requires a lot of hard work.

 

“It all started with being in the art world all my life, lots of family members, carpenters, trade people, you name it. So I’ve always been in the industry, but I never really saw the tree or the arborist industry. Then I got diagnosed with Crohn’s, got sick, and lost my way. I didn’t know where I would head or what job I would do.

 

I started taking down trees in my own yard because they were old and dead trees and garbage. So I started cutting that stuff down and realizing we could do something more with this. From there, it just snowballed, I kept going more and more with the arborists and realized that here in Chicagoland, there’s a crazy market for firewood and mulch, and that’s the only thing the arborists in the area can afford to do.

 

Since their overhead is so high, they can’t spend time wondering what they will do with these logs. They have to chip it, dump that truck, and get onto the next job. Suddenly, I realized there was a little market for someone to come take those logs from these arborists, and that’s when I started cutting my own lumber by just taking the logs from them. It’s now to the point where I have more logs than I have time to cut.”

• Ron Dyrcz

 

 

 

 

Steve’s Advice Corner

 

“Recently, I’ve been trying to figure out how to increase the visits to my listings. I think the answer is to get them listed on my own website, but I avoided that for a while because Etsy was bringing all the traffic to me, and I couldn’t compete with the traffic they were bringing. It’s getting to the point where I’m starting to get more hits on my website, and I think people are confident enough that, if I displayed correctly on my site, they would order straight from me versus having a middleman of Etsy.”

• Ron Dyrcz

 

The challenge facing Ron’s business faces many companies that start on Etsy or other 3rd party sales platforms. How to transition to making the majority of your sales through your own website. Fortunately, Steve has a lot of experience and understanding of companies’ methods to develop their online platforms, something he shares with Ron.

 

“I like that question a lot. Did you know Amazon blew up so much because of Google AdWords and Facebook? Amazon blew up on the back of other advertising platforms. So I think since you have over 650 sales on Etsy, take the most popular things you sell on Etsy and diversify the traffic source. Put just a little money behind those and list them on Facebook. Then you can market your reviews and take screenshots of the reviews, and market those on Facebook.

 

Then the next thing that I would do is build your own website. There are all these plugins that allow you to import your reviews from Etsy and put them onto your website as social proof. You want to start building up your own page, so you can use your Etsy to build up your Facebook page. I don’t think Etsy gives you the tools to build your own independent platform, so when you move from Etsy to Facebook, you can start your own website. From there, you can begin to go directly to the consumer, but it’s a phased approach.”

• Steve Larosiliere

 

Website: http://www.ronders.com

 

Instagram: @rondersdotcom