While it’s true I have splinters in my blood, I have not always wished it that way. As a matter of fact, I swore I would never work in the lumber business.
I spent my childhood as free labor for my dad and grandfather’s lumber business, turning a deaf ear to anything they had to say about it.
As a young adult, I was determined to make my mark doing my own thing and exhausted many years trying to figure out what that was.
The beginning of Buffalo Lumber marked a turning point for me, accepting that the splinters in my blood did, indeed, run deep. It was fate.
Character Building
Stacking armloads of reject molding into a storage shed is not as much fun as watching cartoons on Saturday. My dad and grandfather told me it was good for me and it was character-building. They teased me mercilessly, didn’t pay me anything, and, generally, had way too much fun at my expense.
They also spoke gibberish and gobbledygook when they talked about the lumber industry. They drove me crazy with it! They continually tried to teach me, but I refused to learn it on principle.
My divining principle was that my dad and my grandfather were jackasses when they were trying to teach me anything about the business. I had no desire to learn it, for I was never gonna be in the lumber business. (queue the foreshadowing music)
The Foreclosure King
Up until Buffalo Lumber’s inception, I had started 22 different businesses and incorporated three times. Near as I can tell, looking back, the reason I did this was so I could sound cool at parties.
I got some great return talking about things, but when it came to doing them, I wasn’t so hot. I would quit a business endeavor at the first sign of resistance. But I always had the big idea, hence 22 started and failed businesses.
The last business was as a cleanup agent for a realtor specializing in foreclosures. She liked me because when I went to look at a cleanup job I would also talk to the people who were still living there illegally. I was very good at being nice and helping them move out.
That made me her go-to guy; she was getting two services for one – clean up and evictions. Evictions weren’t part of the job but I was good at that stuff. I would typically offer to move them and I even helped load them.
Back in my day, this was called being nice. It didn’t seem like work to me to help people experiencing hard times. I always felt good about that.
As the cleanup agent, I got first dibs on all of the foreclosures because I could see them before they went on the market. One particular house foreclosure I could have sold before I bought it and made a lot of money.
Of course, I didn’t follow through, but it gave me “sound-smart-at-parties” fodder for my new business – Foreclosure King.
Golden Slivers
Let me backtrack a bit. Until the year 2000, I was pretty sure I knew everything, so I rolled around like I knew everything. And, you know you don’t listen to anybody when you already know everything.
There are four big fears that I, and I think a lot of people have. They all happened to me at once. In the year 2000, within six months, I lost my job, I went bankrupt, I got divorced, and my best friend was killed on a motorcycle.
This took me to a place, where for the first time in my life, I didn’t think I knew everything. I was pretty certain I didn’t know anything. I was in so much pain I wasn’t sure if I wanted to go on because all of my efforts had led me to what felt like the worst time in my life.
One of the moments when I was dwelling on my pain, deciding on my fate, I heard what I thought was a voice say, “It doesn’t have to be this way.” It was so profoundly clear I said out loud, “Who’s here?”
It was something I couldn’t explain; something I hadn’t heard or felt before because I was always too busy knowing everything. It became a tickle, an intuition. It told me to follow the feeling and I’ll get my dream.
Every so often something happens and I’ll get that little feeling. I call it a golden sliver and it was about to happen again.
Chevy Dream
As the Foreclosure King, I rented a stake-side flatbed that was perfect for hauling junk from foreclosures.
So, happy-go-lucky me, doing my little foreclosure business, decided to roll into Chevy to see if I could get the biggest, baddest four-wheel-drive truck in the lot, with the Duramax diesel and Allison transmission, and call it a business.
I quickly found that it was way past my price range. I was a little discouraged and the fleet manager at Chevy asked me, “What are you doing? What are you gonna want this truck to do?”
I explained my property cleanup business model and he said, “I think I might have something for you.”
The minute he said that I got a golden sliver. I knew that whatever he was about to say, was gonna be the right thing for me.
I went out to the yard with him and there was a one-ton Chevy with an Allison transmission and the Chevy Duramax diesel. It was a dually, it didn’t have four-wheel drive or fringe.
It was a base model flatbed stake-side work truck and it was in my price range. I thought he was a genius, and I bought it to do my foreclosure cleanups.
Yes, indeed, I was in business.
Fightin’ Words
I had not been working with my grandfather… no thoughts of lumber at all. I did realize that when I took the stakes off the truck, I had a flatbed and I could do some hauling for my grandfather on the side.
My grandfather had been in lumber for 50 years by that time and knew everyone within 300 miles. He didn’t want to retire so he let it be known that anytime someone would crash into something with a forklift they should call him and he would go out and buy it, bring it back, and sell it at his flea market- style yard he opened on Saturdays, 10 to 2.
He always struggled with having anything delivered because he was so low on their priority list. He was very happy when I got the flatbed truck and started hauling for him.
My grandfather was a good guy, but he was old-school. He had some character flaws. He wasn’t a person you could get ahead with. He wanted to keep you under his thumb and pin you there.
One day he said to my mom, “We don’t mind supporting Christopher on this truck deal.” I guess it’s the ego that makes people say stuff like that; I know I inherited a lot of his ego, so I’m familiar. But you can’t say that to my mom about her baby boy.
When he said the words “supporting Christopher”, my mom’s face went red, steam came out of her ears, and that man was never in so much jeopardy of losing his life as at that moment.
Reality Bites
Mom went home and called me. “I want you to come to Marysville. I want to talk to you about something.” So, I hopped in my new truck and headed over the hill to their place.
Mom sat me down and said, “I want you to go into business with your father. We want to put $3000 on our credit card to buy wood from the big mill and we want you to run the business.”
I immediately said no, and launched into “bigger-than-life-real-estate-foreclosure-king, sound-good-at parties-schpiel”. I thought I was sounding pretty good with this one when I looked at my mom and noticed she was crying. It caught me totally off guard.
I was so busy being my audience for how great I sounded, that I couldn’t in a million years imagine why she was crying. I asked her what was wrong.
She looked up at me with tears in her eyes and said, “You never listen to anyone!” She punched those words into me with frustration and anger because this was very real to her.
That stopped me dead in my tracks and I came down out of the clouds. My mom is crying, I better pay attention.
I sat down and listened to her, again, explaining how they wanted to put $3000 into lumber from the big mill and start a business that I would run.
I knew the big reason I said no instantly was because starting a business with my parents terrified me. My other businesses were me BS-ing. I could quit any time and nobody would get hurt. This was different, my parents were risking $3000 of their money. I couldn’t just sound good at parties anymore.
And, I didn’t know anything about the lumber industry. I was so sure I was never gonna work in lumber that I ignored everything my dad and grandfather tried to teach me over the years.
Buffalo Lumber
My mom crying and being so strong in her convictions is what finally allowed me to overcome my fear and agree. We took that $3000 of credit card money, turned it into cash, and bought our first three loads of lumber from the big mill.
That was January 2003. My dad said those loads were the birth of Buffalo Lumber.
He told me the reason I succeeded at this business was because I started at the absolute bottom. My grandfather’s flea market business was at the absolute bottom. I understood that I didn’t know anything and I had to learn everything from the bottom up.
I wasn’t talking about this at parties. I wasn’t overconfident. I was pretty much terrified, which is the right attitude for starting a business.
In all of my earlier endeavors, I would stop to determine whether or not I wanted to solve whatever problem popped up. This hesitation and continuous arguing with myself led me to quit every single time.
This time, anxiety over Mom and Dad’s money, and my fear of not knowing anything created a momentum in me that did not allow for hesitation or wondering if I could solve it.
The effort and wide-eyed attention I put into surviving in uncertainty is one million times the effort I put into sounding cool at parties.
This voyage was underway and with mom and dad’s money spent there was no going back.
That is where the real fun began, but that’s a whole ‘nother story!