Current Strengths
What are the Current Strengths of Fireside Farm & Sawmill?
Capacity #1: Local Relationships
The single most valuable asset of Fireside Lumber Company is its long-standing relationship to local landowners, arborists, woodworkers, and builders. As much as search engines and social media want to supplant human networks of referrals, the real strength of a business lies in the hundreds of people who have had positive experiences with the company’s employees and services. Fireside Farm has been a steady fixture in the local agricultural community for fifteen year— and its sawmill has been churning out lumber for neighbors since 2011. The intangible benefits of being in service for over a decade are countless: the knowledge of shade-tree mechanics who can come out to make a quick engine, farmers who have 5/4 cherry in their barn, and who near a jobsite might want a load of free sawdust.
Capacity #2: Equipment, Land, and All the Things
One remarkable thing about a sawmill business is how the sawmill itself is only one small piece in a whole elaborate machine. So much other equipment and supports go into making that mill productive: log moving equipment, roller tables, blades, shelves of spare parts, chainsaws, trailers, kilns, and blades. If you’re generating 300-1000 board feet per hour, over 40 hours a week, all of that lumber needs to be stacked and stickered, preferably on pallets, and have places to dry for at least a year. If you’re running a business, you need licenses, insurance, web design, and marketing skills, tax help, and employees. And this list goes on. The second greatest asset of Fireside Lumber Company is that all of these hundreds of supporting elements are in place now.
Capacity #3: Knowledge of Wood and Wood Finances
The third asset of Fireside Lumber Company is its knowledge of wood and the wood business. After over a decade of running a mill, owner Randall Williams has an encyclopedic understanding of what logs are worth buying, milling, or passing on. Ask him about that 16” diameter 12’ long pine log in your yard and he will tell you it will yield a 12x12 cant, take 25 minutes to mill, yield $180 in lumber, or can be sold for $25.40. Without knots, it can be used for framing. With knots, go for siding. This kind of rapid understanding of wood use and math ensures that even though wood is a passion, the wood business lives and dies in numbers.
Capacity #4: Skilled and Dependable Team
As Fireside Farm and Sawmill has grown, it has required more staff. Fortunately, it has brought on an extremely talented young sawyer— Liam Searles-Bohs— who runs the LT-40 sawmill full-time. Liam is a world-class athlete in his spare time (he played on the national Ultimate frisbee team) and he brings an intensity, dauntlessness, and focus on excellence to his sawmill work. At the farm’s homebase, Danny Pesta runs the show and keeps lumber stacked and dried, equipment greased up, and coordinates with builders for pick-up. Owner Randall Williams is the swing man who runs the mill, cares for clients, operates the kiln, fixes machines, and coordinates the whole. Some people say they’ve seen him not working, but that could also be an urban legend.
Unlike a traditional start-up, Fireside Lumber Company is emerging from a successful portable sawmill business. In fact, it has been the excessive demand —for local lumber and portable sawmill services— that has necessitated this growth. Even though the owner, Randall Williams, has been running a sawmill for twelve years, it has been the last four that has seen the most growth. Since 2017, when he went full-time, he has seen near constant demand for sawmill services and has had a waitlist that has been four to eight weeks even though he cuts 40 or more hours per week. This demand has required rapid growth: from one sawmill to four; from one employee to three; from one tractor to a skid steer and track loader. Soon, the company will be able to offer log pick-up, kiln-drying, and finishing services. By the numbers, in 2022, the business cut over 400,000 board feet of local lumber. That’s enough to build 30 homes.
Because this site aims to give a window into Fireside Lumber Company, as an emerging business, the list below outlines the strategic assets that the company currently possesses. Beyond being a list of equipment, the list points out the key elements that ensures the business’s success as it scales up.