Fifty years on the other side of the table

I started in the woods at eighteen, working for my father's logging company. Not an office job. Running equipment, felling timber, learning the trade from the ground up alongside men who had done it their whole lives.

I did that for thirteen years as an employee, and I learned every job on the crew before I ever ran one. Then I took over the company and ran it as the owner for another twenty-one. At the end of it the pasture looked greener on the other side of the fence and I sold out in pursuit of greener pastures.

Having an entrepreneurial spirit, I had tried other things along the way, but always stayed close to the logging industry. That is what I know best and has always been my “go to”. Even now I’m logging with a company owned by friends. That puts me in the woods longer than many of the current loggers have been alive.

Being in it now matters for a site like this one. Timber is a market and markets move. What a mill paid two years ago is history.

Why I built this

Most people sell timber once or twice in a lifetime. Often they inherited the land and had not thought much about the trees on it until somebody knocked on the door with an offer and a pen.

The person making that offer buys timber every week of the year.

That gap is the whole problem, and it costs landowners real money. They do not know what is standing out there. They do not know who to call. And the information that would settle it is scattered across state agency pages, forestry registries and government sites that were never built for a regular person to read.

I spent fifty years on the other side of that table. I watched good people take bad offers because nobody ever told them what they had. That is the only reason this site exists.

What I learned that is worth something to you

Most loggers I knew kept score by loads. How many they hauled to the mill that week. I knew men who out-produced me every year of their working lives and still could not pay their bills at the end of it. I hauled less wood than they did and put money in the bank.

Volume and value are not the same thing. That is the first thing to understand before anybody makes you an offer, because the number that matters is not how much wood leaves your property. It is how much of it you got paid for.

Here is a smaller story that says the same thing. My trucks were running about a ton light on every load. Timber gets paid by the ton, so that missing ton was money walking off the job, load after load, and you would never see it from the seat of a truck. I put thirty thousand dollars into portable platform scales so we could weigh on site. The loads steadied out, the ton came back, and the extra payload covered the note on the scales.

I know where value leaks out of a timber sale, down to the ton. Most of the leaks are not dramatic and nobody is being crooked. They are just nobody checking.

The same thinking runs through everything I did. I once switched hydraulic fluid from nine dollars a gallon to eighteen after I froze a sample and watched the cheap stuff turn solid. Fuel consumption dropped about ten percent and the machines lasted longer. Being cheap is expensive. That is as true of a timber sale as it is of a skidder.

Two opinions I did not ask for

An official with the North Carolina forestry agency once told me mine was the best-managed small logging job he had ever seen. A forester with a paper company told me I almost did too good of a job.

I put those here because standards are the only thing I have to offer a landowner I have never met. You cannot check my work from your kitchen table. You can at least know what other people in the business made of it.

What this site is, and what it is not

TimberClear lists timber businesses and routes introductions. We have not vetted, verified or endorsed anybody on this site.

That sentence is deliberate. Plenty of directories imply otherwise, and a landowner who reads a badge as a recommendation is being set up. What we do publish is what the public record shows: who is registered, where they are, what counties they work, what they buy. Where we could not source something, the listing says so instead of filling the gap with something that sounds good.

The landowner guides work the same way. They are written from North Carolina statutes, the NC Forest Service, and university extension research, and every one carries its sources at the bottom so you can go read them yourself.

What I will not do is print a number I cannot stand behind. Anybody who tells you what your timber is worth without walking it is guessing, and a guess in that direction is never in your favor.

Why North Carolina first

Because that is where all fifty years were spent. I know the mills here, I know how the market moves here, and I know a good many of the people. Other states will come. Being right about this one comes first.

If we were standing in your woods

I would tell you not to be in a hurry. Timber grows slowly and there is almost never a reason to sign something this week. I would tell you to find out what you have before you find out what somebody will pay for it, because those are two different questions and most people only ever ask the second one.

Then I would tell you to get more than one number. That single piece of advice is worth more than everything else on this page.