 But there's no substitute to going and meeting the person you're doing business with, providing them the assurance and demonstrating the fact that you could deliver on time, on target, on quality to meet everybody's expectations. Welcome to the Smarter Building Materials Marketing Podcast, helping you find better ways to grow leads, sales, and outperform your competition. All right, everybody. Welcome to Smarter Building Materials Marketing, where we believe your online presence should be your best salesperson. I am Zach Williams, alongside my co-host, Beth Popnikov. It's got a great show lined up for you today. We're going to be talking about sustainability, how that applies to building products, how you can actually leverage that to grow sales and grow your business. We have a phenomenal guest lined up for you today as well. We are really excited to welcome Ted Durgasoff. He is the CEO of New Life Forest Restoration. They really live and breathe sustainable forestry, and we are very excited to dive in with all of our sustainability questions today. So, Ted, thank you so much for your time. Welcome to the show. Thanks, Beth. Thanks, Zach. Before we get started, why don't you take a couple minutes and talk to us about who you are, what you do, and introduce our listeners to New Life Forest Restoration? Well, my name is Ted Durgasoff. I'm two years with New Life Forest Products. I'm a career lumber guy, and over the years, I've developed expertise in extracting higher value out of all types of different logs and different species. And this opportunity is particularly exciting, because it primarily has to do with restoring the nation's forest, ponderosa pine forest in northern Arizona, to the state they once were. So, for our listeners, you are a lumber dealer, and you also harvest and collect lumber as well. Is that correct? Yeah. The New Life Forest Products were a vertically integrated company. We work with the U.S. Forest Service, and we restore the forest on a prescription basis. They give us a parcel of forest that needs us to go in and clean out the undergrowth and remove the small trees or the space, the forest accordingly. And then from there, we've got sawmills, and we're building another sawmill in Belmont, Arizona, just outside of Flagstaff. That takes the thinnings and the small logs that we do extract, and we convert those into lumber products. And then ponderosa pine being typically a non-construction product. We've got an engineered wood plant, which takes the ponderosa pine boards and makes higher-end products, including siding and trim and fascia products. Excellent. So, are you primarily selling in Arizona specifically? Are you selling nationwide? Our products go nationwide. We try to focus on working with stocking distributors and those that will get our product out into the retail lumber yards. Okay. Great. So, one reason why we're really excited to chat with you, Ted, is just to hear a little about the sustainability component of how you all are marketing your business, because a lot of what we hear is that oftentimes sustainability can come at the expense of profit and or growth. And it feels like, at least when I'm looking at your website and hearing you talk, that is at the core of your mission is to help forest specifically in Arizona, as well as just breed a bigger culture around sustainability. So, I'd love to hear from you about how are you leveraging your position on sustainability, making that at the core of your business to ultimately grow and expand, whether that's revenue or sales, whatever it might be. How are you all doing that is really the big question. How are you doing it? What does that look like? Can you walk us through that? Well, the nature of our business, the essence of our business is forest restoration. And over the years, over the last 10 or so years, we've developed an expertise on how to go in and do the work in the forest. And then we've also gained an expertise on how to convert those types of restoration grade logs into lumber products. And also, we've brought in the expertise on how to convert those to the high-end products, primarily engineered products, finger-jointed edge glued painted products that compete on any level with those like products in the marketplace. Now, we strongly feel that our product line, which comes from the restoration efforts, has a compelling story to tell. And we're confident that the consumers, the end users of our products will embrace the fact that they're products. Consumers all have a choice and we're confident that they'll choose a product that's made out of the efforts in making our forests better and less susceptible to the fires that we've seen over the last several years. But you guys really take it even a step further because you're not just helping to restore forests and you're not just using sustainable forestry practices. You also are a zero waste manufacturer. Is that right? Well, all of our products right from the forest through to the milling process, all of the byproducts have homes. In the forest, we're able to chip products and those chips, they go for playground material for landscaping and whatnot. And the next level down of residual products, the pine needles and whatnot, they get ground and those form a fuel for power generation. I'd love to go back for just a minute and talk more about the story that you're selling to the consumer because that's really where sustainability can get traction is that's something that we know consumers today really demand more and more is one they care a lot about where their products are coming from. But also they care about partnering and purchasing from sources that have a story to tell. Can you tell me about what that process looks like from an internal perspective, how you've crafted the story? What are the points that you're hitting with the story and maybe even some feedback or traction you feel like you've seen because of that story positioning? Well, the message or the story is compelling. We feel in its own right being able to take the thinnings from the National Forest and convert them into lumber products and to appearance grade products, sightings, trim boards, fascia products, tongue and groove paneling. Those are all specialty products because they require a higher level of attention to detail. And certainly consumers have a choice, but we know with our team, with our technical team that we are making products that compete on every level with respect to quality and finish and availability. And presenting to the consumer that they always have a choice, we've had very, very good success on feedback from the consumers saying that given all the options out there that they really want to embrace the product that comes from making our forests more healthy. What kind of input or feedback are you hearing from the marketplace, Ted? Are people saying, are they coming to you and are like, oh, we really want this product? Or is there a level of convincing that you have to do to say, hey, and I don't know about your pricing here, but if your product costs more, are you having to convince them this is why you need to pay more for our product because there's a level of sustainability? Or is our way to point in society where that story is selling itself? Well, first and foremost, we have to be competitive in the marketplace. And we're price competitive with certainly with our competitors. And we compete every day for shelf space and for on the product offerings. The very interesting thing about our engineered product span where we finger joint edge blue and surface and paint is that consider a 3D printing with little pieces of wood, where we're able to turn over our orders considerably quicker than most other manufacturers. And when you're working with stocking distributors, it's all about turns. And if you're able to bring in an order, turn around and get it out the door into the hands of our distributors who then in turn take it to the retail lumberyards, that efficiency, that the link from manufacturing to the end user shortens in time considerably. And that's really significant as well because that's the business of distribution is get it in, get it out, and get it out to the consumers. So we've not only do we have a compelling story on the sustainability, on making our forest healthier, we're doing it in a way that we can meet the needs of our customers, which are largely the distributors, and make us their preferred choice, their preferred supplier. Is there you're saying so much that's important? And you guys have a compelling story and you've got a really compelling go to market strategy that's appealing to your stocking dealers. Are there any specific sales or marketing tactics that you feel have worked really well over the last year or two years? Well, we've just started our engineered wood products facility here, six weeks, two months ago. So we're just in the infancy and it's our team's history. We've done this with other species and products in different parts of North America before. And it's something we have a lot of experience with. But there's no substitute to going and meeting the person you're doing business with, providing them the assurance and demonstrating the fact that you could deliver on time, on target, on quality to meet everybody's expectations. If I can pivot for a second, Ted, I'd love to hear your perspective on what's happened in the lumber industry in the last 12, 18 months. Whoever thought that like lumber prices would make like the front page of news. And so I'd love to hear your take on, hey, we saw this massive huge spike in pricing. We've seen a little bit of a decrease of the last couple of months. How do you see things trending moving forward? Are we back at a steady state or are we going to see another price escalation? Well, all the information that we have available, the massive run up in prices in the subsequent fall was unique. It's not something that I think anybody's planning on or I don't think it's anything that too many people are expecting again. In the long term, the housing market will continue to be strong. Housing starts will continue to be strong. We're not meeting or fulfilling the household formation requirements in North America. So we think demand will be strong. We don't see an escalation in prices that we've seen before or the subsequent drop. Both are not healthy in the long run for the industry as a whole. The high prices invite competition from other materials other than wood. While we compete daily with our friends who are also in the lumber industry, it's important that those are our competitors and that we're not inviting competition from other building materials. True. That was one thing we spoke about when pricing was so high was that it was introducing traditionally more expensive alternatives to lumber in the built environment or in the home. One other thing I like to just enclose and get your perspective on is if a manufacturer is listening to you and they're going, wow, look at the success of this organization. Look how they've leveraged and used their positioning around sustainability to grow sales and grow the organization. I mean, you guys are opening up a new mill here. I actually was checking out Google and saw that as well. What advice would you give them? What would you tell them if they're saying, hey, we know we've got a sustainability story. How should they leverage it and where do you see the greater spectrum of the marketplace responding to it best? Yeah, I think in general, there's always opportunities for these types of sustainability products and manufacturing processes that people figure out. It's really going from tip to tail. In our case, we go right from the forest, right to the end product. If it's a new entrant with just a really good idea, I'd suggest they surround themselves with good people with a lot of knowledge and a lot of experience. There's a lot of moving parts and the lumber manufacturing industry in general is a very complicated business and something that takes a while to figure out. But if the new entrants have the passion and the idea and the products in mind, lots of effort and they'll be successful. That's great. Ted, thank you so much for coming on our show. If someone wants to connect with you or reach out, what's the best way for them to do that? Well, our main office phone number is 480-649-4127. From there, the call will be directed to whoever could best help. Excellent. Ted, thanks so much again for coming on the show and for our listeners. If you enjoyed this content, make sure you go to venvio.com slash podcast to subscribe to get more. Until next time, I'm Zach Williams alongside Beth Poppeglav. Thanks, everybody.