Hey everyone it's Dylan and Charlie from The Black Forest Wood Company so this week we're we're gonna
be talking a lot more me and my dad are gonna be sitting down and he's gonna be talking about
the start of The Black Forest Wood Company kind of telling you guys how we came to be
any tips that he has for people who also have a woodworking business
and then i kind of talk about when when i came into the business so some really valuable content
for you guys there, i know a lot of you guys really like my dad and he doesn't get as much camera time
as some of you may like so you're getting lots of brad time this week and then we're we've also
got kind of a cool salvage job we did earlier in the week where me my dad Spencer Sagar and Haley
went in Charlie not on camera we went and grabbed a maple burl log from a just a homeowner here
in calgary who's getting their house torn down because they sold it and we were able to salvage
that maple burl log so i hope you guys enjoy this video let us know what you think of this style
of content because it is a little different and please leave a like again for Charlie because he
really appreciates when you guys like the video okay so we're here in Calgary on site right now
uh at the in an older neighborhood and we've got this maple burl log here that our client is
letting us take away and cut into slabs so the hardest part is going to be definitely getting it
on on the truck so we're just kind of hooking it up with straps and we're literally going
to try and just yank this thing out that's on there okay here we go flip it over this
way and then i'll get the trailer just roll it off the concrete pad pretty much yeah oh yeah
okay we've got some big donuts for leverage too i don't know yeah see how far you can go maybe yeah
over here
bring that other one in here yeah and then just go like way in again
straighten out there
it's coming
there we go
scraped all your stickers off with the burl
I have more stickers
that chewed it up pretty good yeah, there we go, we did it though a little dent yeah a few
stickers removed, easy!
okay logs on, we did it. is very hot out today at least in uh
as far as Calgary standards go it's like 30 celsius
um it's probably about a 2 000 pound log so we all easily lifted 500 pounds at once
I did my end anyways. yeah he probably did about a thousand then we just
yeah he had the big end, and then the 3 of us had the little rotten dinky end
yeah but we did it so now i think either we're gonna saw it up on our
own saw we're gonna have to call Gerry out and he might have to do some chainsawing
yeah so i'm here with my dad and we're gonna just kind of talk to you guys a little bit about
how The Black Forest started how my father founded it and kind of how we got to where we are today
oh gosh it's been some time now I think it was 1993 when we officially incorporated our business
what were you guys doing in the beginning like were you selling all this wood building tables
just doing doors what was happening well we started as a custom solid wood door manufacturer
and in that manufacturing process we were generating cutoffs and waste
so we had a small section at the front of our business and we're actually advertising using
a media source called the bargain finder which i don't know i don't think it exists anymore
it and we started doing posts about selling our waste and our cutoffs because we've
always been heavily dedicated to recycling and resell salvaging solid wood cut-offs
created by a manufacturing process and that was the beginning of it we didn't make any tables
so to speak it was just doors and then that retail sales thing started to grow a little
bit we started bringing in material to actually sell and you had obviously you weren't doing
solid wood doors before but you had extensive construction and woodworking experience correct
oh absolutely i've worked in several different various fields of the construction industry over
the years i guess it is a funny thing going back even to my high school days dylan i was i received
the award in woodworking shop three years in a row so i guess i was kind of bored with sawdust in my
in my blood and uh then worked various forms of construction i did framing i did finishing i did
custom kitchen cabinet design designed and built some absolutely stunning and amazing kitchens
uh historically speaking and then kind of graduated into solid wood furniture as well so
there was about 20 years it sounds like of experience that you had accumulated before
you even started this business over 25 years ago oh certainly yes yeah yeah it was we get a lot of
questions from people on you know how can they go and start their own business how can they do this
what what do you recommend to someone in that position that is wants to follow these
footsteps oh goodness creations goodness gracious it's such a challenge these days and i think
either you have to be a couple of things one of two or three things either you have to have a
product that's absolutely unique and that people are interested in acquiring or you have to be
the best at what you do and the third thing is you have to be the cheapest at what you do so
in order to be the cheapest you have to have the lowest quality and the lowest quality control so
i had no interest in doing that whatsoever don't go that route we're not going to compete with huge
manufacturers we're custom one-off builders that strive to be the best at what we do yeah
so you pick quality in being the best absolutely yeah yeah and that's kind of what black forest
has been about through its whole history like we're not for being honest we're not the most
affordable company for someone to go with you know we don't sell the cheapest product no we don't
uh we'd have to compromise that people come to me doors are still one of our fortes and people
come to me time and time again and say well brad i can get a door less expensive so i just suggest
maybe that that's they make their own decision and go with that and time and time again these
people have come back to me a year two years later asking if we can fix the door that they decided
to go with that was less expensive in the first place and we don't fix other people's doors so
especially with a solid wood door you're dealing with the exterior environment of -30 to plus 30
in alberta you can't compromise to try and make it less expensive in other words you're going to pay
the price and have one of those doors that fail yeah so has it always been profitable and easy no
no no there was not always there was hard times right some very hard times there's times when
you're scratching your head trying to figure out okay how do we catch up on those payables etc
uh i have one person we have to mention dylan our ever faithful bookkeeper yes dylan's mother
my wife has kept her pencil sharp and carried us through thick and thin my father laid down all of
this hard work and all of this foundation for this business and i guess me being younger and sort of
social media inclined i saw an opportunity to start bringing social media into the business
and that's where haley the girl behind the camera right now where she comes in too we we
kind of brought this i guess different element to something that was already here and just exposed
it to more people i can't actually say enough about the transformation that social media and
dylan's involvement in promoting our business through social media on i can't say enough
about the transformation it's made to our business it's helped growing our business our our business
has expanded tremendously our sales are up profitability you struggle with and manage like to
stay profitable what makes someone an attractive candidate for employment to you they almost exude
their own confidence and skill set and you meet people and i mean we've hired people based on
their personalities maybe their skill sets aren't as high but it's the type of person that they are
like if people are open-minded i mean you can train people to do what you need them to do
but we've had several unique individuals that maybe didn't even come from this field
of expertise uh within two years one of them is now our shop foreman just because of the
awesome attitude that that some of these people have yeah so we look for unique individuals
it uh we look for the personality characteristics that just make you a great person and that for us
has worked more so than just looking at all the things on someone's resume
that lists them as being absolutely great at absolutely everything we kind of like to talk
to people and get a feel and a vibe from them well the the example that you brought up that's a good
one is um our foreman spencer you guys know spencer dimples some of you like to call him
yeah um he was not a woodworker before he worked at the black forest wood company he he was working
in a print shop and we did the interview with him yeah we asked him about his woodworking
experience he didn't have much of it basically just fixing some things up here and there yeah
but we like spencer we did we just thought we need to have this guy in this yeah and he's the foreman
now he is ours and he's a skilled woodworker so it yeah we've noticed it really comes down to
the attitude yeah and just the passion and the drive that a person has i'm way more interested
in helping develop youth in this industry than giving a bunch of jobs to crusty old guys like me
it uh so with my skill set and frame of reference i give everything i can to these to these young
guys uh to try and develop the the proper skills to help run our business successfully
and then as a final maybe as a final question a final thing to say do you have
I guess advice for not someone who's looking to start
but maybe other business owners in our same industry technically I guess our competitors
how to achieve what we've achieved how to grow their business
jeez that's a tough question dylan and it's it's a hard one to answer it i think you have to have
like an unending commitment to your business you have to be willing to work 12 and 14 hour
days you have to be able to go willing to go the extra mile in order to create this environment
and you have to i guess to a degree you know there's a cost associated with it but believe
in youth and and just give these opportunities to the youth because they are our future
that's awesome well i hope you guys enjoyed that um get let you guys know a little bit more of
who we are and our personality i guess spend some more time talking on here so if you guys like this
style of content let us know leave a comment and we can answer more of your guys question
uh questions now like we said a while ago we still have a podcast we want to do one day
yeah we've got a room for it um so if there's enough demand and enough people like this maybe
that's something we're going to start thinking about more seriously here but
thank you guys so much for all of your support you know allowing us to achieve what we have
wouldn't be possible without all these people who follow us so our followers our
customers thank you to everybody thank you guys another question uh that we get quite a bit is
if we do shark cutery boards because a lot of the projects we post on here are very large
so we do we've got a whole bunch of sanded but unfinished our cutery boards here that people can
buy if they want to finish their own and then we also do take custom orders on charcuterie
boards so right now we're doing a package for jeff newstator he's a real estate agent
and we're doing 70 custom boards for him to give to his clients so you guys can send us an email
call the store if you're interested in getting some or like i said you can buy these boards here
but that's all we've really got for this video again let us know if you want us to do more
kind of informational talking videos like this where we're answering your guys questions
because we actually had a lot of fun shooting this video my dad always likes being on camera
too he he does complain that he doesn't get to be on camera enough so he enjoyed that but yeah thank
you guys so much for all the support uh that you that you keep showing us leading up to now uh we
haven't been doing youtube all that long and we're already over that hundred thousand subscribers so
it means a lot to have all your guys support and we'll see you in next week's video
charlie look at the camera look at the cam good boy