How a Banker and Nurse Became Cedar Experts with Dale and Stephanie Hatfield

0:02Hi, and welcome to this week's episode of the Epic Entrepreneurs podcast where we are all about helping business owners just like you achieve success. So we don't do fancy smancy. We don't do flashing lights. We don't do a lot of things that a lot of podcasts will do. These are just real stories about real people and their entrepreneurial and business experiences. We go into their wins, their challenges, and their learnings. So we hope you enjoy it.

0:36hey there welcome to this week's episode of epic entrepreneurs i'm bill gilloland your host i am the principal at action coach business growth partners here in western north carolina and i'm also one of the co-founders of the asheville business summit now i'm excited today because we have dale and stephanie from cedar direct and i'll let them tell you what cedar direct is so Welcome to the podcast. What the heck is Cedar Direct? Well, thank you, Bill. Cedar Direct is a company. It's a specialty lumber yard. Our home base is in Wisconsin. We ended up a couple of years later putting a store up in Chapel Hill, Tennessee.

1:17Nobody wanted to drive over the Appalachians. So after some market studies on western red cedar and what's selling in the area, we ended up finding a spot over here in North Carolina. Yeah, well, that's awesome. So let's dig in a little bit on the business side of things. Let me just get your take on, I mean, how long have you been in business? The company as a whole has been around for 10 plus years. We just opened up, well, we searched all the last year from North Carolina all the way down to South Carolina. Found a great community up here near Forest City. It's called Spindale. Yep. And so we've been here since January was really when we kind of opened up and had all our remodel done.

2:02We purchased the building. Well, we had a funny story. We had our offer in and then Helene came and then we flew down to make sure our building was still standing before we closed it. And it was. And we got fortunate there. I know a lot of destruction down this way. Yeah. So how did you get into this business in the first place? Well, I was a banker. There's several other businesses tied in with the family that we were working with here, and I helped them get it started up. I got them on our board of directors, and we'd sit boards together. And he said, Dale, you know the numbers. You know how to manage people, but you don't know the number.

2:40But if you ever want, you and your wife get tired of your daytime jobs, let us know. And we're looking for people to open up locations and get things rocking and rolling for us. So that's kind of how it started. Wow, that's cool. That's exciting. So I know you're relatively new, but is there anything that, you know, you would do differently? The actual question is, if you had to start from square one, what would you do differently? The only thing I would do differently, I think, at this point, because we try to get involved in the communities. There's a lot of things with Helene coming through.

3:13We work for Rutherford Housing, where we help with grants and things like that for anybody that got hit or anybody that got hit. Really, they fill it out. They go through Habitat. We work in conjunction with them. Is getting the name out quicker? I would probably start more calling efforts a little quicker. We started a CRM system, which is a commercial or customer relationship manager system where we can track who we went out and talked with. We didn't start that probably until four months in, four or five months in. I would start that day one just to get the name out there. Yeah, I understand.

3:47So are you guys like a dealer for Cedar Direct? Are you an employee or how does it all work? Well, how it works with us, it's a specialty lumber yard. We're just part of their three location group right now. Their goal in the end is they asked me if we would do three of these stores. We turned 55 this year. She was a registered nurse, Steph was, and I was a chief credit officer at a local bank. And I said, hon, you want to try something crazy? And she's like, yep. I said, our kids are out doing their thing. We're sitting pretty good. Let's go try something and explore a little bit. So we're going to open this location, possibly another one in Idaho and another one in PA, and then one back home in Wisconsin, which is where we're from.

4:32Got it. Got it. Well, that's exciting. That's exciting. So your job is just to get it off the ground, get it going, and get employees and all that sort of stuff. Yeah, kind of get through all the opening up stuff, get the procedures, the processes in place, get the yard set up right. I worked a couple of years in Wisconsin before I came out here just to understand their operations. went to Tennessee, went to Canada for Cedar School to learn about. We consider ourselves the Cedar experts. You can go to a lumberyard and ask them about Cedar. They might know a little bit, but we know a lot. And we got over combined experience, well over probably a couple hundred years experience within all of the three locations.

5:19Yeah, that's great. So what are some of the bigger learnings that you've had so far in all that journey of the last few years? um there's a lot you know as a banker i would tell people this is what you need to do until you get out here and do it um people getting good good help that you know because it's a different for me it's it's forklift driving we you know it's hard to find good yard people um and uh you know and i guess the biggest learning experience for me is just getting that netcast out there so people know we're here because we were i mean people would see us we've been advertising social media facebook all of that stuff radio ads we threw a billboard up near charlotte um so we were getting people in here but until we started really reaching out and going out and meet people and joining organizations like the builders association blue ridge mountains uh we weren't really reaching out to the right people that we wanted and we were getting business and it's been going good it's steadily growing going up uh we're pretty much meeting our projections, so kind of where we anticipated being, but the last month and a half, two months, we've really started to sprout, so we're excited.

6:27Yeah, well, I mean, yeah, it does take a little while. So, you know, moving from banking to this, what are some of the things that maybe you had misconceptions about, or you think that people have misconceptions about opening or running a new operation. There's a lot of little minutiae things that you don't think about. And it goes down to as low as who's cutting your lawn, who's doing the pest control, just all these little things. So that's why I brought Steph on. She's the office manager. She can handle paying the bills and all these things that just eat up your time. And it's better spent for me getting out there networking and just trying to meet people.

7:08Yeah, I understand. I understand. So what do you, what do you think you attribute the growth to? I think there's a demand for cedar in this market. There's a lot of nice places going up in Asheville, up in the mountains, Swannanoa, Black Mountain, all those areas. And it's really hard to get Western red cedar around here. People have been using a lot of other things. They'll use ash, oak, um, Atlantic white cedar and things like that. But, uh, Western reds, one of the more superior woods for longevity, bug resistant, you know, mold, all that stuff. And it's, it's been a welcoming experience. People are excited when they come in and see our store.

7:50We put a showroom up to show them what we have. Sure. Yeah. It's awesome. It's awesome. What, so, So how do you balance sort of the personal side of things and the demands of running the new operation? For anybody starting a new business, you don't have a personal life. We're working Saturdays, sometimes Sundays, you know, just to stay ahead of the game. But we do take some trips back to Wisconsin and up into the mountains. We've done that a few times now. Okay. Yeah. Steph, you got anything to say about that? Yeah. Our daughter just got married a couple of weeks ago. So we, we had two weeks off to go visit her and go to the wedding and everything.

8:40So that was a nice break, but now we're back at it. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I don't think people understand what it takes to open a operation until you've done it. It's, it's hard to, it's hard to really understand the, the, the demands and like you say, so what, what do you, you said you're having, you know, you're looking for employees, forklift drivers, that sort of thing. What qualities do you look for in, in team members? You know, when I started this out of, after getting out of banking and it's kind of a stressful job, I told Steph, I said, you know, the next job we do, I really got four things.

9:16One trust. That's my biggest thing. We're, it's a family owned company. We let family folks work here. Our sales guy who's going to become the manager, his daughter works here. We do that at all of our locations. No lying. Biggest thing for me is trust. With that, we need, you know, obviously, timeliness, some integrity there. My kind of my golden rules is just treat others like you want to be treated. We don't want the drama in the workplace. We want to make a good family work environment where people actually want to come to work. And I think we've accomplished that. We have five employees now and we go out, we do dinners, we try to do things together.

10:01And it's awesome. We've got a great spot. So I'm curious. I was involved in a business one time where a guy came into town, opened a new business. That was his job to get it going. He stayed, I don't know, nine months or a year. And then he went and opened up another one, another location. And so what is there a playbook for that or are y 'all figuring it out? We're kind of figuring it out. And part of it was, is we left for two weeks and we were going up to, we went up to Wisconsin and I actually married our kids. I got ordained and I married them, but it's, it worked out perfectly because these guys have been coming along great.

10:46And we just, we got lucky. We got some guys out here. Jason Harrell is going to be our manager. And by finding that guy early on, it allowed us to get away and we could kind of test them, see how they did. And they did amazing. The store's still standing when we got back. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, 100%. They were busy. So, yeah, I think, I don't know that we'll get that lucky every time, but we have a certain metric we'd like to get to in sales. And once we hit that, I'm going to start, you know, we're going to start looking for that next place. So that's kind of our plan. Yeah, well, that's exciting.

11:20They're lucky to have you all that are willing to do the traveling deal. So super cool. Well, let me – I have an acronym called BEPIC that's sort of my tagline. And so I'm going to give you what the letter stands for, and you just give me sort of a quickfire round. Just give me a couple of thoughts about what that means to you. So BE means bring the energy. You seem to have a lot of energy. What are your thoughts around energy? Got to have energy. Energy feeds everybody and positive energy specifically because negative, it'll spread like a virus in your shop. So that's one of the things is treat others like you want to be treated.

12:04Leave. We all got problems. We all have problems. Leave them at home. When you come to work, we're here to work. We're here to have some fun. And that's kind of my take on that. Yeah. Energy feeds everybody. I love that. I love that. Well, and obviously we want that to be positive. So the E stands for education. We send all of our employees to Cedar School because we want to be the Cedar experts. If you have a question, if we don't have it offhand, we want to be able to tell, you know, we have the knowledge in our company to get an answer for you probably within an hour or less. So that's great.

12:41We educate all of our people. Matter of fact, the first couple of weeks when we start, we put a showroom up every night, about 15, 20 minutes before the end of the day, I'd walk them around and say, this is a V-joint. This is a one by six. This is cedar. This is pine. This is a nickel gap. We'd go over all of the different aspects of all the lumber that we carry. So everybody is consistent and they understand it well. Yeah. And I love that. Yeah. Got to have education. How about P stands for planning? The P in EPIC is planning. we uh we did a lot of planning to come down here we put together a business plan we put together projections um and we're in the process of doing that for the next locations um along with just some market research to see you know does it do we need to be there you know and so yeah planning is a big part of it one of the owners um he's an account he's a numbers guy and then the other owner is our wood guy and uh things it just everybody ties in together and they throw in all their little bits that that help with the planning aspect of it yeah i love it i love it how about i inspiration um cedar itself is inspirational pine is fine but cedar is sweeter you know once you see the wood people love it um it's rich there's a i think the philatropic feel for it.

14:03They found that they're starting to put it in the hospitals because it just makes people's health better. It makes them just feel better being part of the nature. So inspiration is kind of all that. And then we just love, I love success and things are going really well. Good. And the C stands for commitment. You got to be committed and it's not an eight hour, it's not an eight to five job. Once you make that jump or leap, you're in it. And we're ready for that. So we're definitely committed and everybody here is, I mean, everybody, I don't ask them to do things. One of the employees that we hired, she grabbed books and she studied before she even started.

14:43So she knew a lot of the things that I was going to go over. So we have a very committed group. I love that. Yeah, I love that. So what words of advice would you offer to other business owners who are looking to grow? get out and network you got to meet the people people have to know you're there once you're there if you give them the best customer service that they can get treat them with the best honesty and integrity and have a good quality product it's hard to beat that and that's really hard it gets harder and harder these days to find that yeah yeah it's good uh get out and meet people You got to network.

15:22You got to network. Yeah, really. Well, I've been thinking about this for a while. It seems like almost all marketing really comes down to networking on some level. I mean, you might get a lead, but then you got to network to actually get it. So, yeah, it's great. It's great. So what's the next big thing? Well, I'd like to outgrow this yard before I leave and get a little bit bigger building so they can keep on trucking. but I just, you know, another thing back on your last question is getting involved with the community too, I believe is important. I'm now on the board of the Rutherford County Economic Development Corporation, try to help with, you know, from my prior knowledge of being a banker, I was on boards and we did an EDC group up north, but just get out there and help the community.

16:09If you help people and people see you helping, I think that's a big part of success as well. no 100 yeah i think uh and yeah and we're here in western north carolina we're really big on community so yeah absolutely absolutely so what's the best way for somebody to find y 'all well uh you can google search us uh we have a website out there called cedardirect.com that has all of our locations in there it has inspirational photos if you're looking for projects to do, but if you reach out to any of us or our sales staff, we have thousands of pictures we can send you so you can kind of get some great ideas, kind of like that Howls or Hughes app that people go to to get their ideas.

16:57So all the information is out there on cedardirect.com. We'll put that in those show notes. And really, yeah, that's awesome. Well, listen, fantastic. Thanks for being part of the community and being part of this, for part of our podcast, Epic Entrepreneurs. And thank you for all you're doing locally. And it sounds like it's going to end up being more nationally. And that's exciting for, I mean, I think that's good for everybody, right? The more economic impact we can make. So certainly wish y 'all continued success. And thanks for being on the program. Thank you, Bill. Thanks. And until next time, all the best.

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