Zachary Wicks: Wood By Wicks

Hey everyone! Welcome to a brand new episode of the Woodpreneur podcast. Today’s guest is Zach Wicks From Wood By Wicks, based in Edmond, Oklahoma. Zach has been working for himself for thirteen years, but he describes his business as truly being realized around eight years ago.

It started when Zach thought it was a great idea to harvest some cedar from his property. So he cut some cedar trees down and thought he was going to process them with a chainsaw. After one log, though, he knew the chainsaw wasn’t going to cut it.

“Handling the material is extremely hard, just getting it along from point A to B. That’s kind of why I was thinking, “Well, maybe I should take this wood to a sawmill.” So I took it to Woodmizer. As soon as I saw the Woodmizer process that log, I knew I needed to have one. 

It took a while to get my Woodmizer. I’ve been selling wood for eight years. And I was paying other sawmills to cut my wood and then taking that wood. But I was really good at selling beautiful pictures of wood that I salvaged.”

• Zachary Wicks

The Business Today

Today, Zach’s business is entirely based on mobility. He notes that the only reason he didn’t buy a sawmill until as late as he did was that he lives in a residential setting, and there was no place for it there. He would have loved to run a mill out of his backyard, but it was just not an option in his area.

“I literally keep my sawmill in a storage unit. If I need to use my sawmill, it’s 100% portable, so like I never cut here, I’m going to the logs 100% of the time. It takes a lot of preparation as it’s the same amount of prep work to cut for one hour as it is for 10 hours. 

I’ve cut for hundreds of people, but cutting for people has to make sense. It needs to be a minimum of half a day, including the cutting and a setup fee. I love cutting for people if they agree with the $100 an hour price and the setup fee. Then I primarily just cut for myself. All the wood I cut is pretty much for myself.”

• Zachary Wicks

Alongside his milling operation, the other half of Zach’s business is his lumber sales. He explains that he wouldn’t be where he is without the community and support around him.

One notable element of Zach’s business is that many of his buyers will buy wood from him within 12 hours of acquiring it. Since Zach’s goal is to save as many trees as possible, this quick turnover helps him enormously. Most of the time, he can sell all of his white woods quickly, and he stores his walnut pieces as they move much more slowly.

Building a Powerful Network

Competition is a necessary part of any industry, and Zach notes that he embraces it and enjoys it. He looks positively at competition within his industry because more trees are being saved. After all, he might not be able to mill and save them all himself.

Because Zach has been running a lean operation with little equipment for a long time, he has had to scale up his business over the years by networking with many people. He notes that since it takes around two and a half years for a lot of his wood to dry if he could get an IDRY kiln, that number would be cut down dramatically.

Despite Zach’s relative lack of equipment, he hasn’t let that slow him down at all. He has a buyer that visits him about four times per year and buys about a quarter of his green lumber as they have a solar kiln and can dry it themselves. However, for the rest of his product, Zach has established an effective network of people who ensure that he can scale his day to any situation.

“Contacts are key. I have hundreds of people that connect the dots for me. So much so that I can post a piece of wood in my stories, and it will sell. Let’s say there’s a walnut log coming down behind Panera Bread, and my buddy is in line at Starbucks, and he sees the line crews taking it down. He gives me a heads up, and I save it that day because this is all I do. 

If I need to scale up, I can scale at a moment’s notice because I have nothing holding me back. I have no commitments. I’m married, the wife’s the boss, obviously, but outside of that, this is all I do.”

• Zachary Wicks

Steve’s Advice Corner

“Doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different outcome is called insanity. Right? How do you get to that next level? I want to buy land, but land is really expensive. I don’t have any land in the family. Most people with a sawmill have somewhere to use it. I just want to acquire land the fastest way possible.”

• Zachary Wicks

The challenge facing Zach plagues many businesses and wood businesses more than most. This is because of the large amount of space that even the smallest sawmill operation requires to be effective.

Steve has been fascinated by land, especially recently, and believes that one of the first steps to solving the dilemma of not having any land is researching your local area. However, he believes that before making any purchase or business decision of that magnitude, it’s vital to understand what kind of leverage you have available to your business.

“Sometimes you have leverage by the equipment that you have because then you can turn that equipment into cash right away. So if you are sitting on a lot of green lumber, maybe investing in an IDRY can turn that lumber around. It could be something that can generate new cash faster, especially if you have the market there. So that’s one example. 

Another example is in terms of leverage is your geography. If you’re in a bustling location, which it sounds like Oklahoma City is, you naturally have the people around you, and you have the marketplace there that warrants that. 

You as your brand and your personality, you have the passion, you have a bustling location. That’s your competitive advantage. What you don’t have is the equipment or the land. So you can scale up and go to the next level even if you don’t have the cash on hand. One option is to save it, which would take forever. You could get a bank loan or a private loan, or like a couple of weeks ago, Josh from Full Circle explained how to get state or government grants.”

• Steve Larosiliere

Instagram: @woodbywicks