getting rich with a sawmill

[moodnacreek]

Bought a Bell Saw late in 1979 and slowly learned to saw part time. In 1994 bought 3 old mills and put 1 together on concrete footings this time and put a building over it. Built it up every year: edger, slabwood saw, mud saw, conveyers, flippers, sweeps, green chain, etc. By 1999 my wife got a job at the college and I closed my little body shop and went full time . It was almost worth being broke and off concrete. Made enough for fuel and logs. I don't think any young man could raise a family and buy a small home on a sawmill alone. Today I am still building up my sawmill because I can. With the high lumber prices and no real competition and no pressure I can't just quit. This is the cleanest work I have ever done and I like it.

[YellowHammer]

I'm not sure how to answer the question without sounding like bragging.  What's the definition of rich?  Making enough money to retire early from two high paying full time engineering jobs and make more money than the paychecks from both combined?  

I know more than several of the guys on this Forum have made millions in the business, and so have I.  Just this year, we are ranked the highest grade producer of hardwood lumber in the state of Alabama.  We sell to people from all over the country.  We are listed in Dunn and Bradstreet, and well known lumber companies, like Woodcraft, have asked us to be their supplier.

I started with a chainsaw mill, sawing until lunchtime, until I would throw up.  I called the chainsaw mill the "Puker".  Even though we had two jobs while we built this one, it always had to stand in its own, it had to be a legitimate, healthy business, not a hobby supplemented with our personal income.  I used to have to hustle to make a hundred bucks a week.  I remember my wife asking me when I said I was going to make money doing this "Who in the heck is going to drive all the way out here just to buy wood?" We actually nicknamed our business "The Lemonade Stand" and but eventually called it an equally downplayed name of "Hobby Hardwood."

The sawmill doesn't make the money, the guy or gal running it does. 

The sawmill is a tool, nothing more, nothing less.  No more than saying "buy a basketball, and you'll be rich and play in the pros, or buy a fast car and you'll be a winner at NASCAR, or buy a table saw and get rich making furniture" or anything like that.  

I actually get asked this question fairly often by people who just bought a new mill, especially since the Youtubers have found me.  I always try to encourage people.   

"Can you make millions and get rich with a sawmill?" Sure, yep, definitely.  

"Will you make millions and get rich with a sawmill?" That's up to you. 

[moodnacreek]

Those who have become well off often did not make the money with what they started with. When you are self employed you get exposed to many opertunities.  Many small sawmills wound up being mulch or building supply operators . Loggers can become some kind of land company . The economy , your health, your ambition and luck are very important.

[stavebuyer]

A huge factor is the amount of support you get or need to provide for family. If you are living in your parents basement, have a wife with good a job and family health insurance, or early retired with a pension so that you can re-invest your profits you can indeed prosper. If the money your making with a manual mill needs to buy shoes for the young'ins, and put tires on the wife's mini-van instead of going towards an edger you will work yourself to death and never get anywhere.

[Cedarman]

My business is predicated on 3 things.  Log supply.  Production ability.  Markets.  I spend my time balancing those 3. Right now log supply is a problem.  Production is second and the phone rings off the hook for sales. Production means having the right equipment.  You multiply your efforts by having employees which has included wife and kids at times.  Yes employees are headaches, but you cannot run a sawmill, resaw, edger and stack lumber at the same time with just yourself.
Stress is high, but the monetary rewards have been great.
We closed our Alabama mill about 15 years ago and started a mulch operation in Oklahoma.  It has taken off beyond our wildest expectations.  We now have many thousands of acres of trees to grind.  We changed our focus from mulch to animal bedding and cannot keep up.
Having an entrepreneurial son made it happen.  Some of you have met OKmulch.
All because I made a hasty decision in 1983 to buy an LT30 manual (no hydraulic mills at the time). Little did I know that mill would control my life.

[YellowHammer]

Cedarman know his stuff, early on he visited me, and I learned a lot from him.  When he talks, I listen!  He probably still remembers me selling wood from a couple home made racks under the wing in my barn, standing in mud, thinking I was over my head. 

We built business in a phased appoarch, so that it didn't get investment from other incomes, and limited capital investment until we had enough money to pay for it.  It had to support itself from day one.  We would work full time jobs, with kids, then come home and work the other full time job, 7 days a week.  More than once the guys at work would say I was "rolling in the dough" as they talked about going fishing that afternoon and with me going home to work another shift.  I told them to come home with me to find out "what it takes to run a home business, and it doesn't include going fishing..."

So work ethic is important, family support is important, but it's equally important that a business needs to be run like a business, hard decision must be made, and most people have no training or experience to run a business.  I have learned some hard lessons, and one of the most important ones was what an old timer mill operator told, me "more money was lost with a sloppy tape measure than made with a high end sawmill."  Meaning, it's the little things that add up and cost money.    

Unless a person is very experienced, in BOTH business and sawing or lumber production, I stand by statements I've made in the past, do not quit your day job, and don't expect a sawmill startup business to pay all the bills, unless there is absolutly no other choice.  The term "starving artist" is real, and so is the term "Starving Sawyer."

Around here, you can't throw a rock without hitting someone with a sawmill, either portable band mill or mega mill.  Some folks do incredibly well, some folks go under, and some tread water.  All in the same locale, same markets, same labor pool, same everything.  I know one sawmill startup, not more than a quarter mile from me, on my road, who told me, to my face, "he'd cut my customers off before they got to me."  He's also gone, and sold his property.

I spent many thousands of painful dollars a couple years ago to get a business analysis company to come in and see what I'm missing.  After going through everything, doing analysis after analysis, the next day the analysis guy, in his suit, told me he'd know more about my company than I do in a couple days.  I laughed and he asked, "Well, that last two loads of walnut, I see you sold them pretty quick despite you having to raise your price?  That right?" and I said "Yep, I marked it up and still sold all of it."  Then the analyst told me "I'm glad you ran out, because you lost a dollar a board foot on it!  You lost money on every single walnut board you sold, two full pallets of it."  Holy cow.  So he showed me and he was right.  I learned a lot that week, and I'm sure I'm still making mistakes, but not that one again.

 

[barbender]

I think it would take a very talented person with a ton of energy, and a great business mind to make a go of it from scratch with a mill. Like Stavebuyer said, when you are trying to support a family it seems every time you make a few bucks something comes up. I've been piddling with my mill for quite a few years now. It was probably only after about 10 years that I had made back what I paid for it. I worked too cheap, but I also didn't have my name out to where I had enough customers that I could name my prices. However the last 2-3 years, I've started to realize that my time is more valuable, or maybe I'm getting older and lazier (probably a combination of the two), and Covid definitely helped by jacking lumber prices through the roof. I raised my prices to where I make good money, and people just keep coming. My name is out in the community where if someone is looking for something specific, I have the reputation of being able to get the logs to saw and supply the product they are looking for.

 All of this has taken a lot of time to accomplish. A large part of where I am at is the fact I went to work for a logger for the last 11 years. I met tons of foresters, timber procurement people and other loggers (people in the professional world call this "networking") and now I have enough contacts that I can call and find the logs I need, I've built good relationships with all of these people and they know if they send me wood, the check will be in the mail. 

 All of that said, I wouldn't be able to support my family currently off of what I make with my sawmill and firewood operation. When everything is going good it can, but when something happens like my mill being down for a month and a half, it is really great to fall back on the nice income and health insurance that my wife's professional level job provides. It makes my life so much more stress free, and I wouldn't have attempted this without it. 

[stavebuyer]

barbender just brought up a huge factor that can't be overstated and that is industry connections and reputation. In a hot market you may break in but it's small world indeed in the hardwood business and the number of new people who won't be around next year is lengthy. Established relationships and reputations are still a huge deal. Doesn't mean much to those who buy and sell on Craigslist or Facebook but its everything when you are needing to buy from professional loggers or sell to manufacturers.

[moodnacreek]

Without established relationships I would have no logs.

[OlJarhead]

I'll admit, I've done quite well ;)  Though I started milling for others with a full time job so it's different perhaps.  However, I paid for my mill (the LT40) in 13 months flat!  Though the mill technically didn't pay for itself for about 18 months -- the 13 months is just when I went from buying it to when the last payment was made.  I made regular payments from my job (so about $6000 worth) and the rest was from profit off the mill and the down-payment from selling the smaller mill (the SMLT10).

Working part time I make about $20k a year and if I was willing to work in the heat more, or when the roads get bad I could definitely double that but that's working 100% remote.  I don't sell lumber or have a lumber yard to mill for others, however, I can see that if I did I could definitely increase what I earn. 

Physically, however, I could run the mill full time.  Some days it's tough to walk or roll logs etc and so for me it's part time only and to assist in living without a full time job.

[Magicman]

Last week I decided to very much limit my sawing during (Hot) August if not entirely not saw at all.  I am making some repairs, (more on that later) and will add the side support kit when it arrives.  (Looks like it finally shipped today)

Presently I am attending to a couple of medical issues that hopefully will not side line me for very long.

I have a large and a very large job waiting for me when I resume sawing, both for established repeat customers, so they ain't going away.  The very large one is for the "sand pit" customer but thankfully in a different location.  It will be sawing timbers again.

 smiley_old_guy

[Walnut Beast]

Magic don't jack yourself up for your Elk hunt over working yourself 

[longtime lurker]

I've done okay out of it... which is to say no-one has gone hungry and my kids both had the orthodontic work I never had as a kid. But there's been a few missed holidays and no fancy cars for me either.

But I'll also own there's a lot of prioritisation in that. Food and my family are important, the car I drive isn't and reinvesting my wages beyond the bare essential level back into the business is how I've grown it in the absence of mortgage backed finance. Though most success stories involve a fair bit of sweat and sacrifice in my experience ; it ain't all smarts and lucky breaks.

 
Same junker car, but we broke ground for a 150'x24' air drying shed yesterday

Im going with a cantilever design, it adds cost and complexity but no posts down one side is going to make stock handling a breeze.

[moodnacreek]

A big drying shed . That would be a dream come true for me, I have always needed one, a big one but not to happen here. Too close to the city and in a residential area with pre existing status and not allowed to expand. On the other hand able to sell for full retail unlike out in the country where I always want to be.  L.L., I think you may be winning our little contest after all!

[YellowHammer]

Longtime, I have always admired your moxie in what you do, and the fact that you can expand your operation speaks volumes.  

There are others on here as well, some of who I remember starting from scratch and just plain getting it done and doing well. 

As I said before, success is based more on the Sawyer than the sawmill.   

[Peter Drouin]

Shed are handy.


 

 

 

 

 

 

[Southside]

Man rough summer you are having there Peter.   :D

[longtime lurker]

The drying shed is something I needed about 3 years back when I started to swing from strictly wholesale to doing retail as well. I have a love hate relationship with wholesale... it's a simple business model but the margins suck and I had to cut a lot of wood to get enough cash in the door post living expenses to repair cyclone damaged existing buildings to the point I could have customers walking into the place.

And the drying shed will be my typical staged construction... earthworks and the slab will happen over the next few months, followed by building a couple bays at a time as the budget allows. One of the great things about class 1 Australian hardwood is that it's durable - sitting in the weather won't hurt it although it might dry slow and I'll lose some to sun degrade - but at least it'll be on concrete and dry flat. I have a love hate relationship with doing things this way too... I can go into the bad trading times I see coming without much debt, but had I been able to borrow to do it a couple years back it would have paid itself off by now. Doing capital works from cashflow instead of spreading the pain over a decade via a loan is a bad way to do business: it's just plain dumb on so many levels.

There's a lot of built up frustration towards my family, because they won't sell me the place outright so I could borrow against it to do these major projects and I've had to do a lot of things a lot harder than they could have been done because of it. I cover the mortgage and pay the taxes on it and have all the headaches of ownership with none of the benefits. I've never been afraid of work but I could be in a lot better place for the same amount of effort had the handshake deal made 5 years ago been honoured.

There'll be a quarter million dollars worth of feedstock sitting on a concrete pad getting rained on here by Christmas. S'okay, it'll take an extra 6 months to dry then I can build a roof to get the next lot off faster without any degrade. My major asset aside from being an extremely proficient operator is that I'm awfully stubborn determined. Determined sounds more like a positive, yeah?:D :D :D

[Peter Drouin]

Longtime, I don't have all the info. But, If my family did that to me, I would stop paying everything, take my $$ and go find some land, and move. Hard but, in the long run you will be happier.
That's the way I am, f-me, and you're on your own.
I wish you the best of luck.

[customsawyer]

I have thought about my reply to this post for a few days. By some folks standards I have gotten rich (or done pretty well) with a sawmill. Keep in mind that my first sawmill was a LT40 super with the 42 hp diesel. Since I don't do anything small that was the best WM offered at the time, so that's what I got. I already had a tractor with FEL to help. A couple of years of that and I got a edger. Then I learned I needed something stronger than a tractor, so I got a few different pieces of equipment that was stronger. I then got a LT70 and a few years later I got another LT70. Then I added a kiln and several planers plus more rolling stock and different edgers. Then a resaw and some more planers and some more rolling stock. The point I'm getting at is that I didn't get where I'm at with just a sawmill like so many folks think they can.
There is a sawmill around every corner and down every dirt road in this area. I can't spit without hitting one. Every one of them has been over here to pick my brain and see what they can do better. I'm not worried about them because they don't have the ability to finish their product and they don't have the depth of contacts that I do.
The point I'm getting at is if your plan is to get a rich with just a sawmill you are setting yourself up for failure. It takes a whole lot more than a "sawmill"  to make it in this game.
If your plan is to produce for the whole sale market then I recommend something more productive than a portable mill. This game is about volume.
If your plan is to get into a niche, retail market. Than you are going to need a bunch more equipment to get your product finished for the end user. Just a sawmill isn't going to cut it.
You take any of the successful operations on this forum and they either have a lot more than a sawmill, or they offer a service of portable sawing. We all stay in our lanes. I don't do portable sawing and they don't offer T&G flooring. I get a half dozen calls a week for portable milling. I just pass on a phone number of a sawyer in that area.
I'm not trying to rain on someones dreams and say you can't make it with a sawmill. I'm proof that you can. I'm just recommending that you look at things a little deeper, than give it a go.  
 

[fluidpowerpro]

Shed are handy.

 
 

Your lucky that those trees grew right where you needed the poles!

[caveman]

Jake, I appreciate the guidance you and a couple of others have given John and me over the years.  We have no aspirations of getting rich or even working the mill full time.  We both have used the mill to supplement our school board incomes.  He fixes copiers and I impersonate a teacher.  

I am up front with customers.  We do not intend to compete with the box stores on dimensional lumber.  Saying that, the past couple of years, we have sawn quite a bit of dimensional lumber.  We try to offer what the box stores do not.  We also sell quite a bit of our live edged slabs through a retail store, and we get a commission.  The store owner's cut is 10% more than what John or I get but she is open 48 hours a week and we go by and get a check every month.  When they buy at the store, I do not have to spend an hour with nickle and dime Pete, who shops for an hour and spends $10.  John and I work a lot of Saturdays and an occasional evening each week.  The show is at my house, so I deal with customers during the week when they have scheduled a visit.

I have a former student who is a fireman, but he does his wood business on his days off.  He does well and stays busy.  He has us and a couple of other sawyers saw for him.  He has a Nyle kiln, a CNC flattening machine with a 7" head, 25" Woodmaster planer and other tools.  He sells river table kits, builds custom furniture and sells wood.  He does incredibly well.  His IQ is up there too, which does not hurt.  I stopped by his place today after attending a funeral of a good friend.  He has a 22' Aquasport Osprey that he finished restoring two years ago.  He has 10 hours on the new motor because he spends his time away from his day job doing his woodworking job.

My goal was never to get rich.  A lot of us have more money than days left.  The benefit of having a sawmill for me is that I can earn extra money doing something I enjoy, and people appreciate while being close enough to fulfill my responsibilities I have attending to my family's needs (the past four years my parents have had some health challenges).

[YellowHammer]

Jake speaks truth.  

I like that quote, I hadn't heard it before.  
"have more money than days left."  That says a lot.

[Peter Drouin]

Then you have a day when you break your watch' first
Then you hit steel in 2 logs and kill 4 blades, then a part falls of the mill'


 

 stop sawing and fix that.


 then go back to sawing after a few cuts.
The saw will run up the rpm up even when I have the switch in the off place to just idle. Spend time looking why.
Lost time, in fact I have no idea what time it is. :
The mill is down. I have to call WM to help. And that will be Friday. I think I need some parts. If they have them, I might get them next Tuesday, Maybe, So I'll be down some days.
Not all fun and money. And the chipper ran out of gas too, Go get some. Today it was an on and on one thing after another.
Not a good day here.
But a ride in the HOT ROD will clear my head and put a smile on my face. ;)

[Walnut Beast]

Finished product is where the money is at. Like the big wheels say it takes big money to have all the other equipment to do that.  If it was easy everyone would be doing it.