Love of Wood is the Deciding Factor
Can You Handle The Truth?
In 2008 we rebuilt our whole business from way behind the 8-ball and we quickly discovered it wasn’t important to worry about selling more wood, it was extremely (survival on the line) important to NOT have complaints coming back. You don’t want to make 10 sales and have 2 come back, you’d rather make 5 and have NONE come back.
Literally, it’s better to kill 3 potential sales to get rid of 2 for sure failures than sell 10 and manage 2 bad ones. THAT is the secret of our long-term success in the high-end wood business.
I would love to tell you I had a lofty reason for a focus on project success and not number of sales but to be honest I just HATE it when people bitch at me. To the point of neurosis sometimes (according to my team). I was just lucky this was the formula for success.
I started in the discount cedar business and you have to MAKE SURE your customers know WHY the wood is discounted or it’s a nightmare on delivery.
I became pretty aggressive in how I described the negative attributes of the wood because negative attributes are what separate wood lovers from people who should not buy the wood!
Wood lovers hear these (me trying to run people off) descriptions and say, “oh character flaws, that’s absolutely awesome, I love it!”
And the people who shouldn’t buy from us would go “oh I hate that” and everyone saved time and money (and WAY less people bitched at me!).
Flash forward to specifying wood for major high-end projects, my approach is you totally should NOT do wood if you are going to have a chance of failure. I have spent years looking at failures and finding out why they are happening.
In the same nature of getting in your face with the flaws of the discount cedar, failure cause IS the information you need to succeed. “Learning the Hard Way” is not how you want to do it, trust me.
I literally try to run you off with the challenges because this is the razor's edge of success. If you make it through MY paranoia you have a 99.9% chance at long term project success.
Wood lovers are NOT finite. They are a continuous stream of knowledge-seeking crazy people who are going to do wood no matter what!
Those are the people I care about. They NEED to know this stuff. The good news is that this approach saves the people who should NOT use wood as much (or 10 times more) than the ones who go ahead with it. Talk about the ultimate Win/Win.
Architects are wood lovers and they are the best researchers (especially when they are doing their own homes). Everything starts with a design and I have never had an architect get angry because I presented them with an accurate map of challenges to make decisions.
AIA accredited courses with a Negative Aspect Focus (AKA accurate map of challenges) are the best way to reduce failures. If more architects know about this stuff, less of it is going to happen.
I invite the entire architectural design community to join me in researching and reporting what works, what doesn’t and helping ALL wood lovers succeed long term. I am failure coaching on my own dime and reporting back to you guys. I ask that you share what you learn in return.
Eradicate Failure to Promote Success.
That is the purpose of CedarSiding.ORG
Chris Buffalo