The Woodpreneur Podcast

When Tony Welp lost his father unexpectedly, nothing was in writing. The sawmills, the tools and the log home they had built together out of an old one room schoolhouse were all headed to auction. Tony bought the equipment back piece by piece, hoping to build a business that could save the house.

In this episode of the Woodpreneur Podcast, host Jennifer Alger sits down with Tony Welp of Sandhill Sawmill, just outside Donahue, Iowa. Tony grew up sawmilling and woodworking alongside his father, who bought the schoolhouse in the early nineties and turned it into a log cabin. Tony calls losing him a burn the boats moment. It forced him to commit fully and take risks he says he never would have otherwise, and it turned a family hobby into an urban wood business.

You'll hear how he cuts big slabs on a custom sawmill that handles logs up to six feet wide, flattens them in the shop and has them vacuum kiln dried, with a kiln of his own on the way. His urban wood comes from local tree crews and arborists who call him before a big tree comes down. He talks about heritage trees people treat as landmarks, and mantels cut from a hand hewn 1800s log cabin that went to each buyer with a printed history. Most of his customers find him on Facebook Marketplace for now. Next, he wants to ship whole logs and truckloads to furniture makers and designers, and run a smaller mill for wall cladding and flooring.

Jennifer and Tony also get honest about running a one man urban wood business: the space he is short on, the business side he would rather hand off, and how close he came to burning out on the work that used to be his therapy. Tony closes on why he sees old trees as elders, and why giving them a second life matters to him.

Chapters

The Woodpreneur Podcast brings stories of woodworkers, makers, and entrepreneurs turning their passion for wood into successful businesses - from inspiration to education to actionable advice. Hosted by Steve Larosiliere and Jennifer Alger

For blog posts and updates: woodpreneur.com

See how we helped woodworkers, furniture-makers, millwork and lumber businesses grow to the next level: woodpreneurnetwork.com

Empowering woodpreneurs and building companies to grow and scale: buildergrowth.io

Connect with us at:

You can connect with Tony at:

https://www.instagram.com/sandhill_sawmill/

Jarvis May's first lumber was firewood. He took the cherry and red oak home from tree jobs, logs headed for the side of the road or the landfill, sawed them into slabs with a borrowed chainsaw mill, and sold them on Facebook Marketplace. Today his sawmill cuts timber frames for builders from New Hampshire down to Rhode Island.

In this episode of the Woodpreneur Podcast, host Jennifer Alger sits down with Jarvis May of JM Timber in New Hampshire. Jarvis came out of the service with some rigging training, became a tree climber, and started sawing on the side in 2018 before going full time in 2022. Early on he stopped sawing for inventory and switched to cutting to order, with a deposit that covers the logs and the labor before the job starts.

You'll hear how he runs three sawmills, one for timber frame packages, one built around timber mat production, and one that cuts timbers up to 40 feet. He plans to put the mat money into wide red and white oak for a hardwood line, and he is training two sawyers on a ladder where the guy pulling scrap can move up. Most of his customers came from cold calling, and the sawmill owners around him send each other work instead of competing for it.

The conversation closes on the forest. Jarvis explains why he logs his skid trails north to south, why a landowner should know how many board feet are standing on their property, and why a timber harvested at the right time can live another 150 years in someone's home.

Chapters

The Woodpreneur Podcast brings stories of woodworkers, makers, and entrepreneurs turning their passion for wood into successful businesses - from inspiration to education to actionable advice. Hosted by Steve Larosiliere and Jennifer Alger

For blog posts and updates: woodpreneur.com

See how we helped woodworkers, furniture-makers, millwork and lumber businesses grow to the next level: woodpreneurnetwork.com

Empowering woodpreneurs and building companies to grow and scale: buildergrowth.io

Connect with us at:

You can connect with Jarvis at:

Joey Cantrell bought a used multi-rip before he had a building to put it in or the three phase power to run it. He drove to Tennessee, hauled it home in a 12 foot dump trailer, and figured out the rest after.

In this episode of the Woodpreneur Podcast, host Jennifer Alger sits down with Joey Cantrell of Longshot Premium Hardwoods in Oklahoma. Joey spent his career in steel manufacturing until a divorce ended that job and he had to start over at 40. He started a tree service on a whim, told his crew he wanted a sawmill, and bought a kiln right after. Within a few years the small hydraulic mill gave way to a bigger diesel one, because the eastern red cedar around him is everywhere and only pays at volume.

You'll hear why cedar became the surprise backbone of a business with hardwoods in its name: it sells green, so it turns over fast instead of sitting in stickered stacks. Joey still mills walnut, pecan and post oak, buying from loggers who call him when they have the right log. He talks about leaning on word of mouth until he was sure he could deliver, hiring a 21 year old to set up his CRM, and sending full kiln loads to a table builder nearby to sell on consignment. His bigger idea is a shared inventory network, so every sawmill owner in it knows what the others have in stock.

Rising costs are what keep him up at night, so the question is always how to produce more with what he already owns. A test run of 20 cedar logs took two hours on the sawmill, and he expects the multi-rip to handle the same cants in about eight minutes. Now the work is feeding it. The conversation closes on why he charges $250 an hour for custom milling and asks for photos first, and on the time he loses handling and rehandling heavy lumber.

Chapters

The Woodpreneur Podcast brings stories of woodworkers, makers, and entrepreneurs turning their passion for wood into successful businesses - from inspiration to education to actionable advice. Hosted by Steve Larosiliere and Jennifer Alger

For blog posts and updates: woodpreneur.com

See how we helped woodworkers, furniture-makers, millwork and lumber businesses grow to the next level: woodpreneurnetwork.com

Empowering woodpreneurs and building companies to grow and scale: buildergrowth.io

Connect with us at:

You can connect with Joey and Longshot Premium Hardwoods at:

Our most listened episode on Spotify in 2025 is back. Nick Mooers rode the pandemic boom in home renovation into real growth at Maverick Sawmill, built a reputation on oversized walnut, and split the business evenly between raw and finished products.

In this throwback episode of the Woodpreneur Podcast, hosts Steve Larosiliere and Jennifer Alger sit down with Nick Mooers of Maverick Sawmill, a sawmill that specializes in oversized walnut pieces. Nick walks through how demand surged as homeowners poured money into renovations, the projects that came with it, including a massive walnut table, and why he started building a new shop to run the operation more efficiently.

You'll hear how Nick thinks about leadership, team dynamics and building relationships, and how he keeps the 50/50 balance between raw material and finished pieces. He talks through the machinery he invested in to make the sawmill more efficient, the challenges of moving into the new shop, and the trends he was watching, from epoxy projects to home and garden shows.

The conversation closes on how a sawmill markets high-end builds, and why relationships carry so much weight when you sell into the luxury market.

Chapters

The Woodpreneur Podcast brings stories of woodworkers, makers, and entrepreneurs turning their passion for wood into successful businesses - from inspiration to education to actionable advice. Hosted by Steve Larosiliere and Jennifer Alger

For blog posts and updates: woodpreneur.com

See how we helped woodworkers, furniture-makers, millwork and lumber businesses grow to the next level: woodpreneurnetwork.com

Empowering woodpreneurs and building companies to grow and scale: buildergrowth.io

Connect with us at:

You can connect with Nick and Maverick Sawmill at:

One figured redwood log, six feet across and solid to the core, could pay for an entire sawmill. That math is why Steven Crowningshield bought a band mill that cuts six foot eight wide, after years of slabbing with a chainsaw mill that turned half an inch of every cut into sawdust.

In this episode of the Woodpreneur Podcast, host Jennifer Alger sits down with Steven Crowningshield of California Redwood Company, who has spent more than 30 years milling almost nothing but salvaged redwood on the California coast. His father ran the first Alaskan sawmill on that coast in 1972, and Steven learned the trade in the woods beside him. In the 1990s they pulled sinker logs off the river bottom with scuba gear, barges and winches, until a legal challenge to their permits shut it down. Today he salvages buckskins, the old growth cores loggers left behind on private land.

You'll hear why he moved his operation onto a shared compound where several sawmill operators, a planer molder and a wide belt sander sit on one property, and why he set his own mill to cut forty foot timbers. He also explains the niche he has worked for almost twenty years: sinker redwood tonewood, stained purple, yellow and pink by river minerals and, he says, better voiced for it. Now he wants his best pieces going to small guitar builders instead of mass production.

Steven is open about the hard years too, from paying an accountant thousands of dollars after 2008 to learn he had lost money, to a decade of furniture and a gallery that covered the rent but not his time. Marketing is the challenge now. He has old growth inventory most buyers don't know exists, and ad spend that brought him almost nothing. The conversation closes on what he calls red gold, and on his favorite part of running a sawmill: watching a client see the finished piece.

Chapters

The Woodpreneur Podcast brings stories of woodworkers, makers, and entrepreneurs turning their passion for wood into successful businesses - from inspiration to education to actionable advice. Hosted by Steve Larosiliere and Jennifer Alger

For blog posts and updates: woodpreneur.com

See how we helped woodworkers, furniture-makers, millwork and lumber businesses grow to the next level: woodpreneurnetwork.com

Empowering woodpreneurs and building companies to grow and scale: buildergrowth.io

Connect with us at:

You can connect with Steven and California Redwood Company at:

Most land clearing jobs end with a burn pile. Jason Evans gets paid to clear the ground, mills the good timber he pulls off it, and makes money on both ends.

In this episode of the Woodpreneur Podcast, host Jennifer Alger sits down with her younger brother, Jason Evans, owner of Rafter E Dirtwork and Land Clearing in northeast Oklahoma. They grew up in a forestry family, running chainsaws and heavy equipment around the family sawmill long before they could drive. Jason went on to work nearly every part of the family's California business, from logging and firewood to salvage and site work, and he is a California licensed timber operator. A few years after losing his home to a wildfire, he moved his family halfway across the country and started over. Rafter E takes its name from their late older brother's cattle brand.

You'll hear how Jason rebuilt a network from nothing, starting with the chamber of commerce and a local church, and how the skills he brought with him did the rest once word got around. He walks through the model at the center of Rafter E: land clearing and site prep that feed a sawmill, turning trees other contractors burn into custom milled walnut, cedar and trailer decking. He also explains why knowing how to service and line his own sawmill matters when the nearest parts shop is no longer down the road.

The two look back on the jobs that shaped them, from pulling giant sequoias out of steep country after a storm to doing storm cleanup out of state when the Great Recession left the family business unpaid on a major development. Jason closes with plain advice for anyone already taking trees down for a living: add a sawmill, because it will change your business.

Chapters

The Woodpreneur Podcast brings stories of woodworkers, makers, and entrepreneurs turning their passion for wood into successful businesses - from inspiration to education to actionable advice. Hosted by Steve Larosiliere and Jennifer Alger

For blog posts and updates: woodpreneur.com

See how we helped woodworkers, furniture-makers, millwork and lumber businesses grow to the next level: woodpreneurnetwork.com

Empowering woodpreneurs and building companies to grow and scale: buildergrowth.io

Connect with us at:

You can connect with Jason and Rafter E at:

Pablo Escutia wanted to be a psychologist. He ended up running KKC Development, a design build firm in the South Bay of Los Angeles that draws houses and then builds them, and arguing that the split between those two jobs was never real to begin with. A line from one of his professors stuck with him: everything works on paper. Finding out what happens when the paper meets the site is what moved him from architecture into custom home building, and it is the case he spends the rest of the conversation making.

He studied architecture, did internship work at the higher end of the profession, and found the corporate world too structured for the way he operates. Smaller firms in the beach cities suited him better, where the all hands approach meant the ceiling on what he learned was whatever he was willing to put in. After five years he crossed to the opposite side and went into construction, on the theory that there was more to learn where the two worlds meet than in either one alone. Understanding design is not enough on its own for custom home building. You also have to understand the materials, the structure, the geology of a site, how the sun crosses it and what the wind does to it.

Design build carries baggage in his industry, the assumption being that a firm is either good at drawing or good at building and cannot be both. His counter is that design build is a conversation where everyone involved speaks the same language, whether his team designs the house or works alongside one of the architects in town. In practice that means being brought in early, flagging the complicated detail during the design phase, and working out how a Spanish tail detail with bronze straps will weather in salt air before anyone commits to it. It is also why the firm takes on only a handful of custom home building projects a year and will sit through ten or twenty design meetings on each one. He is candid about the harder parts: inheriting the company after losing the previous owner to cancer, losing good employees before he learned to stop red lining their work, and keeping a business coach because nobody hands you a pamphlet when you open a company.

For designers, builders and entrepreneurs, this is a clear account of what changes when the person who used to do the work starts managing the people doing it. Pablo is specific about delegation, that if someone cleared a multi stage interview then the trust decision was already made at hiring, and that the best compliment he can imagine is an employee leaving to start their own firm. He is just as specific about where custom home building is heading, toward coalitions with architects who want a builder in the room early rather than a set of plans thrown over the wall. His closing advice is to decide which kind of builder or architect you actually want to be, then stay selfless about it, because a finished project belongs to the laborers and the subcontractors as much as to whoever signed the contract.

Chapters

The Designers and Builders Podcast shares stories from industry leaders transforming the world of design and construction: covering behind-the-scenes insights, real-world strategies, and the trends shaping the future of the industry.

Empowering design/build professionals to grow and scale

Connect with us at:

You can connect with Pablo at:

The sawmills did not want it. Thirty million board feet out of a railroad trestle, loaded with salt, grit and hidden metal, and nobody in the region was set up to cut reclaimed wood in that condition. So the family sitting on the pile bought a mill and taught themselves.

In this episode of the Woodpreneur Podcast, host Jennifer Alger sits down with Robert Cannon, vice president of sales for Trestlewood in Blackfoot, Idaho. Trestlewood started in 1993, when Robert's grandfather, a heavy construction contractor, took the salvage rights to a twelve mile wood trestle crossing the Great Salt Lake. Part of the pay was the wood itself. The plan was to hand it off to sawmills, the plan failed on the first load, and the family ended up helping pioneer the reclaimed wood industry at scale instead. Taking the trestle down took them ten years.

You'll hear how the company grew past its namesake. There are still ten to twelve million board feet in inventory, and they are still bringing in structures, including a World War Two dry dock out of Portland and a wartime supply depot from Southern California that ran to seventy five semi loads. Alongside the antique material sit the age lines, new wood processed to look old, and a pair of thermal modification kilns brought over from Europe. Robert explains why so many customers blend the two, and why the reclaimed wood story still does the selling even on the new product.

He also gets specific about the operational cost of salty material, from blades that die in a hundred feet to why the job needs stainless fasteners, and how they learned to sell the salt as a feature of the reclaimed wood rather than a defect. The conversation closes on the third generation. Trestlewood is closing on a 135 acre hardwood sawmill in Burnside, Pennsylvania, near Pittsburgh, with one of Robert's brothers relocating to run it. He calls it their trestle moment, and he names the real risk plainly: making a new location contribute instead of drain.

Chapters

The Woodpreneur Podcast brings stories of woodworkers, makers, and entrepreneurs turning their passion for wood into successful businesses - from inspiration to education to actionable advice. Hosted by Steve Larosiliere and Jennifer Alger

For blog posts and updates: woodpreneur.com

See how we helped woodworkers, furniture-makers, millwork and lumber businesses grow to the next level: woodpreneurnetwork.com

Empowering woodpreneurs and building companies to grow and scale: buildergrowth.io

Connect with us at:

You can connect with Robert at:

Darci Shannon walked into her first hardwood convention determined to spend as little as possible. She had talked her boss into joining the association, negotiated the booth cost down, and told them she would bring her own trash can rather than pay for one. Fifteen minutes onto the show floor, the small saw shop she worked for closed the biggest sale in its history. 

In this episode of the Woodpreneur Podcast, host Jennifer Alger sits down with Darci Shannon, membership services advisor for the National Hardwood Lumber Association, to talk about what an association actually does for a hardwood lumber business and why the smallest members get most of her attention. Darci trained as a teacher, walked away from teaching and coaching during COVID, and took a job running the office and the sales desk at a small saw shop in rural Missouri, handling band and circle blades for mills. She pushed her employer to join the NHLA before she fully understood what it was. A few years later the association wanted her, had no open role, and made one.

You'll hear how membership actually breaks down, from the mills and cabinet makers through to the sustaining members who serve the industry rather than produce hardwood lumber. Saw blades, lubricants, even the trash bags every sawmill goes through. Without those services, as Darci puts it, nobody produces anything. She describes the part of the job she cares about most, which is being the person someone calls when they do not know who to call. One member, a small distributor hunting for walnut who had never been to a convention, got pointed toward a source in Missouri and is still buying from them. She also covers the saw filing classes she set up, the scholarships attached to them, and the thermally modified wood session drawing the most interest at this year's show in Cleveland.

The conversation gets honest about the mood in hardwood lumber right now. Darci names the doomsday mentality as her biggest obstacle and lays out what the association is doing about it: new publications aimed at architects and designers, a push to get wood specified before the job goes to an alternative product that costs less and gets replaced sooner, and the federal advocacy work she has joined in Washington the last few years. Jennifer, who was born into a forestry family and works in urban salvaged and reclaimed wood, makes the case for wood as a future antique, the one material you can keep reusing while the carbon stays locked inside it. Darci can be reached at [email protected], and the association is at nhla.com.

Chapters

The Woodpreneur Podcast brings stories of woodworkers, makers, and entrepreneurs turning their passion for wood into successful businesses - from inspiration to education to actionable advice. Hosted by Steve Larosiliere and Jennifer Alger

For blog posts and updates: woodpreneur.com

See how we helped woodworkers, furniture-makers, millwork and lumber businesses grow to the next level: woodpreneurnetwork.com

Empowering woodpreneurs and building companies to grow and scale: buildergrowth.io

Connect with us at:

You can connect with Darci at:

There are trees sitting in woodlots right now, rotting, and others headed for the chipper, and every one of them is releasing methane and losing the carbon it spent decades collecting. Jennifer Flynn built a workforce program around that problem, and the people she trains learn to run a chainsaw, a portable sawmill, and a GIS mapping tool in the same season.

In this episode of the Woodpreneur Podcast, host Jennifer Alger sits down with Jennifer Flynn, the EcoCorps program director at SEEDS EcoCorps in northwestern lower Michigan and a fellow board member at the Urban Wood Network. Jennifer is an eco psychologist by training, and she runs what she calls a green collar career exploration program for anyone 16 and older, with no upper age cap. Her staff have included high schoolers, career changers coming out of desk jobs, and people referred through the state workforce development agency. The program is modeled on the Civilian Conservation Corps of the New Deal era, which both of her grandfathers served in, back when only young men were allowed.

The urban wood work started in 2019, before the Urban Wood Network was even a formal organization, when a city planner brought in speakers and the team was asked to rescue community trees felled for a trail project. That one job turned into a systems change model. Jennifer's organization now convenes agencies across a ten county region to divert organic waste from landfills, while the hands on urban wood recovery stays local to the Traverse City area. You'll hear how the value chain actually works: arborists fell the trees, a portable sawmill operator trains the crew on the mill, and the material goes out to contractors, sign makers, furniture makers, and the National Park Service. In one case her team sold rescued wood to the park service, then came back two or three years later to build the public structures out of the same material they had milled.

The full circle piece is what makes this one worth your time. Crews plant and maintain trees, mill the ones that come down to disease or development, then sweep the sawdust into a composting system that produces soil for food pantry gardens. Jennifer is candid about what her region is missing: the nearest kiln operation is an hour and a half away, the major industry operators will not take a log or two at a time, and she would love to see a former staff member open a sawmill and kiln closer to home. She calls that a five year goal. Her most rewarding urban wood memory is a newly hired naturalist who learned to run a portable sawmill on her first day on the job, milling logs that had come down that same week.

Chapters:

00:00 What a Green Collar Career Actually Means

05:01 The Wood Rescue That Started It All

11:06 Modeled on a Depression Era Conservation Corps

16:29 Rebuilding the Urban Wood Value Chain

19:48 Who Buys Rescued Wood, and Where It Goes

23:29 A First Day on a Portable Sawmill

27:36 The Missing Links, a Local Sawmill and Kiln

The Woodpreneur Podcast brings stories of woodworkers, makers, and entrepreneurs turning their passion for wood into successful businesses - from inspiration to education to actionable advice. Hosted by Steve Larosiliere and Jennifer Alger

For blog posts and updates: woodpreneur.com

See how we helped woodworkers, furniture-makers, millwork and lumber businesses grow to the next level: woodpreneurnetwork.com

Empowering woodpreneurs and building companies to grow and scale: buildergrowth.io

Connect with us at:

You can connect to Jennifer at: