AUSTIN GRAY: Hey, what's going on? It's Austin Gray, host of the OWNR OPS podcast. Welcome back to the show! We've got Alex Forbes joining us. Alex is an entrepreneur who makes cabinets. He has built a cabinet business simply from starting in his garage, building cutting boards. Now he runs a couple million dollar a year cabinetry business, selling to builders and custom homes. It's a really cool story, so I hope you guys stick around. Alex is a great guy, and I know that you will learn something from this episode. So stick around and listen to the whole episode.

If you like the show here, please make sure to leave us a review on Apple and Spotify. A five-star review for podcasts is super important—no different than building a small business. Um, you should ask for five-star reviews—ask your customers for five-star reviews; it's very important. Would you take 30 seconds and just leave us one if you are enjoying the show?

And then if you're watching on YouTube, I feel like I'm like a YouTuber now. It's like, could you like, comment, and subscribe? But really, could you like and subscribe to the channel? Because it does help us out and get the reach out. Look, I'm on a mission to help people start small businesses. I got a call from a friend yesterday, and he was withering away in the corporate world. I can relate because like eight years ago, I was doing the same thing. I was depressed; I had no motivation. I was falling asleep in the afternoon. You guys can hear it in my voice—it's 7:23 a.m.; I've been up since like 4:30 this morning, rocking and rolling, cranking.

I wake up every single morning with tons of energy because I'm doing something meaningful, in my opinion—like I'm building something from scratch with Bearclaw Land Services. It gives me so much energy and effort. I love doing the podcast; I love doing OWNR OPS. My personal mission has been clarified: I'm here to help people start small businesses. It comes very naturally to me, and this is what I'm sharing with the world. So this is why I do the podcast.

We also have OWNR OPS, which, for those of you who don't know, is an online playbook. Essentially, we have been documenting where we started at zero with Bearclaw. Now we are going to hit seven figures this year. We've been documenting the whole process very simply so that other people who want to start their own small business, like you, if you're listening to this, can follow the exact playbook. I felt like there was not a playbook out there for small service-based businesses. It doesn't matter if you're trying to start a power washing business, tree service business, land clearing business, excavation business, plumbing business, or electrical business—it's all the same.

In the early days, you need to OWNR OPS to stack cash. Very simply put, you need to start the business, do the sales, do the fulfillment, and do customer support, billing, invoicing, estimating—all that stuff—so that you can build up your business bank account and then reinvest in future people, employees for the business, equipment for the business. That's why I'm such a proponent of the owner-operator mindset.

You can start a business right now today. Go learn how to do a skill on YouTube. Power washing is a great one. My friend called me yesterday; he started a power washing site, ColoradoPowerWash.com, back in February. I hired my friends Bod and Andy to do their magic on the SEO side, and then he wanted a business. He wanted to start something, so I sold it to him.

He is now taking that business, and I'm excited because the guy is a really, really, really good person, and he's good at sales. So there's no doubt in my mind. He met with a Sherwin Williams lead yesterday; we got through the website, and now he owns that 100%. He's off to the races, and he's part of the OWNR OPS community. He is going to follow the playbook that we have outlined to go build a multi-million dollar business.

Okay, OWNR OPS is designed to get you to your first 500k, but we won't be stopping there, trust me. I'm building relationships right now. Once I got to the 500k mark, I said, “Okay, what do I need to do to level up here?” I need to get in front of the right people. I hired a business coach; his name is Les O'Hara. He runs the Contractor Huddle; he also runs a $4 million a year masonry business. He is coaching me on how to build a business, smash through that like 650, 500, 650, 750k mark, get to the seven-figure mark, and figure out how to juice this thing up.

I'm excited! If you can't hear me, I've got so much energy. We're having so much fun. I'm about to head out to the field with the field crew here at Bearclaw. We're about to crank out a tree job. I'm excited to run up and down a mountain, cut down some trees, haul them off. Let's go, baby! I'm excited.

Man, this is the longest intro I've done, but I hope if you guys are listening, you can't tell I'm passionate about this. If you want to start your small business, go check out OWNR OPS at ownrops.com. Okay? I'm not trying to sell you some snake oil stuff; this literally is what we have documented from the very beginning. You're going to get behind the scenes of exactly how we've done it. You're going to see what I was doing in the beginning to generate cash flow. You're going to see who we hired first. You're going to see how we do payroll, how we do estimating, how we do invoicing, how we implement sales—like sales is a big thing in small business, right?

If you get an inbound lead, you need to be calling that person like right now. If you're not getting the response from the customer, “Wow, that was fast,” then you're doing something wrong.

Okay, I'm going to stop; I'm five and almost six minutes into this intro. I hope you guys are well. Thank you for listening so much. I hope you can feel my energy this morning because I got some, and I'm giving it to you guys right now. So I'm encouraging you right now. If you're listening to this on a Friday or Saturday, whenever this is dropping, go start a business this weekend if that's what you want to do.

If you don't, the corporate world is fine—like if that's you, by all means, stay in your corporate job. I'm working twice as much. I have worked twice as much as I have—maybe three or four times as much. I don't know—than when I was working in the corporate world. So like, is it going to be easy? No. Is it satisfying? Absolutely.

I'm going to stop there. I hope you guys enjoy the episode. Real quick, wanted to share with you two agency partners who have helped me grow Bearclaw Land Services. Striker Digital manages all of our SEO services, and they've got us to number one on Google for specific search terms within our local service business. Cedar Digital Consulting manages all of our social media and YouTube, and they make it very simple for owner operators like myself. All I have to do is go take photos and videos in the field, upload those on my phone to a shared iCloud album very quickly, and they handle everything else from there. They edit and they publish. I don't have to worry about it; I can focus on growing my business.

So if you're looking for SEO services, check out Striker Digital; that's stryker-digital.com. And for social media, check out Cedar Digital Consulting; that's cedardigitalconsulting.com.

All right, welcome back to the OWNR OPS podcast! I haven't recorded in a couple of weeks, but I'm super excited about this. Alex Forbes with Lane 17 Cabinet Company— is that how you pronounce it?

ALEX FORBES: Yes, sir.

AUSTIN GRAY: Whenever you're telling people, do you refer to it as just Lane 17, or do you say Lane 17 Cabinet Company?

ALEX FORBES: I typically am just saying Lane 17 when I'm calling vendors. That's when they get the full Cabinet Company. I want to create more like a brand around the Lane 17 thing, and then the Cabinet Company is just a little bit of a tagline to give context to what we're doing.

AUSTIN GRAY: I like what you have for a domain. I like the domain you have, just lane17.com. I think it's a little unique; it makes it a little easier to remember, especially in the trade. It's like you get construction companies and stuff, and the domain of their emails are, you know, 20 characters long.

ALEX FORBES: Yeah, so try to keep it short.

AUSTIN GRAY: And we can get into the story of that name if you want a little bit later.

ALEX FORBES: Yeah, I definitely want to!

AUSTIN GRAY: So congratulations, by the way! I saw that you were featured in... what's that newsletter called?

ALEX FORBES: Contrarian Thinking, Sanchez's.

AUSTIN GRAY: Yeah, that was cool! I had one of her—someone on her team reached out through Twitter and gave a quick background on what we do, a little bit of the background story, and did that interview with them. They must have gone back and thought it would be good content for the newsletter, and it went out yesterday officially on their website. It was cool to see that, and it was also a little weird because I was reading my own story back on a newsletter that I had been following for a couple of years now. It was kind of like this weird, cool validation of my journey and what we have done.

AUSTIN GRAY: But it was a great opportunity to, you know, get some eyeballs, get some exposure, and provide a little insight into the grind of trying to start a cabinet company out of a garage.

ALEX FORBES: Well, I sure enjoyed reading it. And this may seem a little bit repetitive for you, depending on when you did that last interview, but I'd love for you to tell our listeners just that story—just for how you started. I mean, you are literally the picture-perfect person to be on the OWNR OPS podcast. I wanted to showcase people who have started from the ground up because it's challenging.

I read that you started eight years ago; is that right?

ALEX FORBES: Yep, eight years ago.

AUSTIN GRAY: And you were a real estate broker, correct?

ALEX FORBES: That's correct.

AUSTIN GRAY: So take us back to the beginning and tell us about making the leap.

ALEX FORBES: So, you know, they laid it out really well in that newsletter, and I'll kind of follow that storyline. So a little bit of background: I guess this would be a logical time to give the background on the name. Growing up, my family, especially my dad's side, has had cabins in Maine—on a lake in Maine—about an hour and a half or so north of Portland since the 1960s. It's like a generational thing; they call them camps up there. I used to go up there and still go up there every summer since I was pretty much born, you know, one or two years old.

I ended up—my uncles had some wood shops up there, and then there was a summer camp I ended up going to on that same lake, you know, maybe from 10 to 14 years old. That was the first time I had ever been exposed to shop class, woodshop. Because by the time I got to high school, all that funding had been cut; no schools had shop class anymore. I didn't really grow up with anybody in the trades in my family, although I come from a family of small business owners. My grandpa on my dad's side started Forbes Brick, which was a brick and tile distribution company, you know, from the '60s to '70s. Ultimately, the company kind of dissolved around 2010.

Anyway, I was exposed to shop class up in Maine my whole life. It was always kind of a hobby—that's where I learned to work with my hands and the joy I got from doing that. Fast forward through school—I went to Ohio State and graduated with a finance degree. From being exposed to small business owners growing up and going through a business program in school, you know, OSU being such a huge school, is really pushing the corporate route once you get out, which I didn't really want to do. I always gravitated towards sales.

So I got a job at JLL as a commercial real estate broker. It was a suit-and-tie gig, you know. I was 22 years old, baby-face, you know, making 100 calls a week for a year. Nobody wanted to hire me to either try to lease or sell, you know, what ultimately is hundreds of thousands of dollars in rent or a lease. To cut your teeth in that industry, you have to somehow survive for three to five years with pretty much eating scraps. And like I said, I love sales; I love talking to people.

I felt that I was in the wrong version of sales, connecting with people for the wrong reasons. It got to the point where, you know, I had a great upbringing and never—my father died when I was nine years old, so I've experienced some adversity. But getting into the real world is a totally different thing, right? When you're fending for yourself and you got to pay the bills, and you're trying to do that with something that you hate doing, it took about six months for me to realize that role was not for me.

So my muscle grew to about the year mark, and I kept going back. It's like I got to the extreme of how miserable I was at that job—I wanted to flip to the other extreme: what can I do that I'm passionate about, that I just enjoy doing, that doesn't feel like work to me? I kept going back to when I was building stuff in woodshop and just working with my hands, tinkering. I never really made anything substantial, but it was always a fun hobby.

Over the summers between college, I would work out in the garage with a circular saw and drills, making stuff out of pallets and just whatever material I could get. Those days—16-hour days—would fly by! I'd look outside, and it would just be dark, and I had no idea where the time went.

So I connected the dots on what I enjoyed doing. And like we talked about before this, I'm also just someone who dives in headfirst. You know, I thought I didn't really think about a proper business plan; I didn't write one out. Although I feel like I have a good business mind, so I knew that I could solve any problem; I just didn't know what problems I was going to encounter quite yet.

I spent the last month of that job as a broker just really researching what tools and machines I needed to jam into my mom's one-car garage, which I was living at home at the time. This was still only about a year or two after school, and I got table saws, drill presses. I had a lathe. I had all the stuff. I can send you some photos of that first shop, but there was a two-foot aisle that you could walk in.

I got so trigger happy on the tools that once I went to go make an actual dining table for somebody, I was like, “This does not work in the shop; there's no way that can happen.” So I started super small with cutting boards, cheese boards. I launched the business in like August, and by the time I got the tools and machines, it was about October—perfect time for holiday-type gifts, right?

So I did like $5,000 in cutting board sales the first three or four months to get through Christmas. I worked my ass off to do it, and there was little to show at the end, but you know, I was just buying material. I was just kind of working for free, and luckily, I was living at home, so expenses weren't crazy for me.

After six months of that, I decided again on another leap of faith to pull the trigger on leasing a 5,000 square-foot, you know, proper warehouse-type shop in downtown Cleveland. So I needed to go from having only ever done $5,000 in sales to I had to do about 10 grand a month, or else I would run out of cash and couldn't be in that space.

So, you know, with no real strategy for how to get there other than just getting exposure, being active on social media, connecting with people, and hoping that the business came in, I also shared some of that shop space with another guy who was kind of getting into it. He leased a little bit as things were slowly rolling out, I started leasing time or renting time on the machines that I had—anything to just get by and get to the next month.

That first year was probably the most I learned—in that first year—than I had in the four years of college or high school or most of my life, because it was just like a real wake-up moment. I got to do this or, you know, I'm on the streets; I got to go get another job.

I'm really motivated. I think a lot of entrepreneurs probably are like this, where they're motivated by the fear of what I call ultimate failure. Right? So failure—I love failing; I love trying something and it breaks, or it doesn't—I love that. But ultimate failure is having to revert back to something maybe you didn't want to do.

Maybe you have some experiences like that you can talk about before you started Bearclaw.

AUSTIN GRAY: Just laughing over here because we're all the same! And that's what I love about this Twitter community of small business owners. You know, like I said at the beginning, I wanted to showcase people like yourself, but all of these experiences are so similar. My wife and I talk about this all the time—it's like I will make six to twelve-month promises throughout this journey since starting.

It's like, “Hey, in 12 months, I will be here; if I'm not here, I will go back and get my corporate job,” which is like my ultimate failure—to have to go back and work for some big corporation and just be in a monotonous role. And so I was laughing because that has been my motivating factor this whole time.

ALEX FORBES: Yeah, and it really is funny—the dynamic. It's almost like a paradox where you know the entrepreneurial mind, especially when you're starting something from nothing. Right? So, I think people who buy a business—it's still a super challenging route to go. You know, you gotta flush out all the stuff that wasn't working in that business and totally restructure, and it's a—I’ve never done that, so I would imagine it's a totally different mindset, and you're walking into something that does have some sort of foundation.

When you have to literally build the foundation of something from nothing, and listen, it's not like cabinets have never existed—there are thousands of cabinetry companies that manufacture cabinets, you know?

There's a lot of land clearing services throughout the United States. It's not like we’re reinventing the wheel here, but you are inventing the wheel for you and your team and really establishing the culture and the systems and all of that stuff. If you have never done that before, then you're very much throwing stuff at the wall every day.

Throw ten things at the wall; nine of them don't stick— and that's just how it goes for years.

So we're big on continuous improvement, and we have—we're big on lean manufacturing principles, which was really invented by Toyota. It's been refined a lot; people have different versions of it. So if you're cool with it, I’ll keep rolling through the story, and we’ll get to how we figured out this continuous improvement mindset.

So going back to when we were in this 5,000 square-foot shop, I had a guy renting some space, but he was really operating independently. I started, I quickly realized The Cutting Board thing alone was not going to work.

And also, to speak on that, all my friends and family who bought stuff from me and supported me 100% were chattering in the background, laughing at me, thinking like, “What? You just went to college, you got a degree! Everybody else, you know, $50k, $60k, $80k starting salaries out of school, and here I am, you know, doing cutting boards?” Like, everybody it was a weird thing. It's like no one really took me seriously. But people also wanted to support me, so I'm grateful for that.

Anyway, so I get into furniture because that alone wasn't going to cut it. Furniture started as just residential custom furniture—so dining tables, and we did wood countertops for people. Eventually, we connected with—ironically through the cutting board thing—some restaurants who wanted maybe 30 or 40 like cheese boards for appetizers and things like that.

I ended up buying a laser engraver so I could engrave their logo and do some branding type stuff for people. Again, to continue to differentiate from what people could just buy online or in a store, I did that for a while.

That commercial or restaurant exposure turned into doing a lot of commercial custom furniture packages. That might be bar tops for a bar, you know, 30 restaurant tables. The biggest table we ever made was a 7-foot by 20-foot conference table in a $100,000 commercial furniture package.

And by my standards, unless you're going to be like this kind of almost more considered an artist with furniture, and people all around the world will pay thousands of dollars for just your name on a piece, which is very difficult to get to. It really is—I would consider those type of woodworkers as artists, as much as a painter would be.

So we kind of got to what I thought was the pinnacle of furniture, custom furniture making, with six-figure commercial packages and about as far as you'd want to take it for in a business context.

It was always a complete nightmare to try to get highly variable things through the shop, finding skilled guys who cared enough about the small details to get this stuff made. And there was no real way to create an operation or a production around it because everything that came through the door was different.

Frankly, that's entirely why people called us—because they couldn't just go to Restoration Hardware or any of these other big companies to get what they wanted. They would design something that had never been made, and we would have to figure out how to make it, and we made some incredible stuff, but it came with so much waste and inefficiencies.

I had this aha moment one day where I was quoting a dining table for a residential homeowner client, and I think, you know, this was prior to COVID and all the price increases and stuff. So I think it was only like $3,000 for an 8’ solid white oak or walnut dining table, and she was just giving me grief on it—trying to dog me on the price.

I’m like, “This has never been made before! We can’t just match what Wayfair is doing!” You know? It takes time; there are guys making this; it’s better quality materials, you know, the whole spiel.

We never got that job, but as I was leaving, I looked behind me in her kitchen, which she had just done, and I'm like: she had to have spent 30 grand on those cabinets at least! And I'm like, I'm connected to the right people.

So my aha moment was that I'm connected to the right interior designers, the right homeowners, and people that are following us on Instagram or are calling us—are the people we want to talk to. I'm entirely selling them the wrong product.

It was like when I was a broker; I was selling the wrong thing to people. We kind of had this light switch moment where we flipped over and started at least saying that we offered cabinetry— we still made furniture; our website still said we made furniture for the first year that we made cabinetry.

The thing that really set it off and kind of solidified our move to dropping furniture and going to cabinets was ironically COVID. It was like that weird "is the world going to end?" moment for that first 30 days, and then it was like the floodgates came through.

Everybody started renovating, building, and buying new houses because nobody could go on vacation. So they had the money to just put back into their houses, and nothing would say that we did furniture on our social media, but people would call and just ask, “Hey, do you guys do cabinets? Do you guys do kitchens? Do you do bathrooms?”

And we're like, “Oh, as a matter of fact, we do!” We just, just like everything, cut our teeth on doing not trying to come up with some perfect plan. A lot of the machines and tools we had had enough of an overlap to just kind of get into it, and we made a million mistakes.

You know, like we would be on-site wrapping up little punch list items two months longer than we needed to. We probably didn't make much money on those first five or six jobs even, and we just kept, like you said, throwing stuff against the wall—this worked. We didn't manage expectations well in this context; the way we made this thing sucked.

How do we make it better? How do we iterate, refine, improve? We've been doing that for four or five years now with cabinets, and we feel we just really got over the learning curve of how to manufacture this stuff efficiently. Now we're putting some resources into the office on how to process orders and stuff, and do design and all those things more efficiently.

I want to get into what your team looks like, but before that, I'm curious to hear: so as a leader of this team, you made a decision to switch from furniture to cabinets. You said that you had an aha moment where you were in somebody's house and saw what they spent, or you put two and two together, or you had a conversation.

How long did that aha moment linger inside of you or in your head before you made the decision—like we are going full force, all in on cabinets; strategy has completely changed; I'm 100% in on this? Or was it like; did that take time? Was it like, “Hey, let's throw this against the wall and be open to it for a little bit?”

ALEX FORBES: Yeah, so if I remember correctly, that aha moment was when we were doing furniture. The last quarter of the year was always insane because everybody wanted a table for Thanksgiving or Christmas. Essentially, they wanted to wrap up by the end of the year. So if I remember correctly, it was probably sometime between November and the end of December when that person shut me down on the table, and I'm like, “They put so much money into these cabinets in their kitchen.”

So I think after the New Year, as we started getting new leads in for furniture, I would always ask, “Do you guys have a bathroom vanity? Have you thought about that?” That was the easiest pivot for us. Vanities, A—they're small; you know, relative to a kitchen, they're small. Some people wanted furniture-style vanities, so there was a little overlap there.

I would start with vanities and built-ins for living rooms, built-ins, and eventually, people would say, “Oh, you know, because most of the time when you're calling for custom furniture, you're probably not— all the time some people just want a table—but a lot of times, people are on the tail end of their remodel, and there was always an opportunity to do some small cabinet scope.”

So we started getting some smaller things, probably the first quarter of that next year. Maybe three months of doing that, we kind of just caught a break. We had a developer reach out, and in hindsight, it’s like it's kind of crazy that this happened because I've learned that this never happens.

We had a developer locally reach out; they were building like an 80 to 100 unit apartment complex in an up-and-coming neighborhood around Cleveland, and they wanted 100 white oak, like furniture-style bathroom vanities. Typically, I've learned that developers never spend more than three to four grand for the entire apartment unit worth of cabinetry because they typically get them overseas; they're imported—they're just trying to cut costs.

So to spend half of their cabinetry budget on one single vanity was crazy. We ended up getting the job; it was like a $100,000 worth of bathroom vanities. Again, we had never made more than one or two at a time; now we had to make a hundred!

We just put the pieces together. We figured we had to get—before, we were kind of designing these things on the fly; we had to get proper engineering software to machine all the stuff on the CNC to locate all the drilling, pilot holes for hinges and drawer slides, and shelf pin holes.

We couldn’t just slap plywood together and expect to make money; if something went wrong, it had the potential to put us out of business because we didn't have the cash to cover major rework. So, you know, this was the first big commitment to cabinetry.

A, we had to—we had to do a crazy volume relative to what we had ever done. But we committed to financing a $30,000 engineering software that we still use today, and in hindsight, we had no business using that software. But my business partner, Jason, was the one that took the reins on that. He shares the same mindset as me and was like, “I don't really care what it takes; I’m going to figure this thing out.” And he figured it out to at least get through that order.

That also gave us enough cash flow to start offering kitchens and maybe get some other tools. So to answer your original question, it was probably about a three-month period from when I think we should do this to we got that big apartment bathroom vanity job and said, “This is so much volume for us—we feel confident to drop furniture altogether and just start advertising cabinetry. We have the software now.”

You know, we would later figure out that we had to do a total wipe of like all of our—not all our equipment—but probably 60% of our equipment in the shop that didn’t make sense anymore. I got another like, you know, get out-of-jail-free card: somebody locally bought $80,000 worth of equipment from me, and that never happens. Normally you've got to go to auction; you maybe can piece it out in use machine forums and stuff like that online.

A guy locally just bought it all, and we got the proper equipment needed to actually manufacture cabinetry. You know, the rest is kind of history.

AUSTIN GRAY: You've had a couple of these situations where you've said, “This just never happens!” Right? I'll push back a little bit because I believe that the people like yourself who are out there taking action and just solving the problems and doing it for the right reasons—good things come to those who work hard.

And I personally believe in God; I believe He has a good plan for us, and I think hard work is key. So it's like your action, your willingness to show up and solve these problems. You know, you've had a couple of these things just fall right into place, and I can say on my end too, like we've had similar things fall into place.

A lot of I think you could easily say that never happens, but the reality is it did. I think it's because you're showing up and doing the work every single day.

ALEX FORBES: I love that concept. I consider myself a humble person, so I think it’s like when it’s happening to you, it’s like, “This doesn’t happen to anybody,” you know, that kind of feeling. But I also agree with—I’m big on believing that, you create your own momentum. Momentum is not just a thing that happens, and that kind of goes hand-in-hand with what people perceive as luck.

You know, I think that if you put in the hours, and you have the repetitions, and you talk about being at the right place at the right time—well, you don’t really have to try to time anything if you’re just always in that place, right?

So whenever we’re in problem-solving mode—even if I’m selling machines, every day I am figuring out how to unload this equipment to get to our goal of getting the right stuff. Or if I'm trying to do cabinetry, I'm every opportunity I get—whether I’m at friends and family events, at a bar, at a restaurant, you know, talking to somebody who called for a coffee table—I am always working in, “Hey, this is what we’re doing now; do you have any need for this?”

Like, I don’t—I did the broker thing; you know, I made 100 calls a week for 12 straight months, and thousands of NOs, you know? I’m not afraid of rejection, but I also learned through all that I’m actually very grateful for that commercial broker experience because rejection really doesn’t bother me at all.

But I also learned that you— that's where I learned that you do have to put in the reps, and even if you do, it’s still not guaranteed. So you can never stop; you’ve got to just keep it going.

AUSTIN GRAY: Absolutely! So, after you made the change in strategy, what did you do from a marketing perspective? Did you go completely rework what your website was portraying? Did you change things that you're portraying on social media? Talk me through your...

ALEX FORBES: Yeah, so there was probably a year of a transitional business year that we had. So, like I said, our old website was up for probably the remainder of that year we ultimately switched.

The next year, I revamped the website. At this point, the website is so outdated; there are so many projects we've done that aren't on there, and that's a product of just—I’m still wearing a lot of hats, and managing the website was one of them, so it slipped through the cracks.

But we’ve been fortunate, and this is also kind of going into like, you know, what you're selling, I think, does matter. I think a lot of seasoned sales guys will probably say it doesn’t matter what you’re selling—it’s just like they can get a deal done. But when I was doing the commercial real estate stuff, like nobody really wanted; I was viewed as a commodity.

Nobody wanted my services as a broker to lease or sell your building until they did need it, right? You don’t need an attorney until you need an attorney.

And so, I was very much viewed as a commodity. With the cabinetry thing, we were offering a level of quality and the options that we were able to accommodate. We differentiate ourselves with the customizability and the fit and finish.

You know, you could sell that as pretty much as long as the budget works on the project—people want what we have! Most people are willing to wait. I mean, our lead time’s no less than 12 weeks at the moment; we’re crazy busy, and it’s 16 weeks. We’re trying to fix that, but like, people are willing to wait for this stuff.

So the product of cabinetry made it so easy on Instagram to sell it because we would just post the quality. I’m fortunate that Jason, my partner, was in another life, was more or less a professional photographer, and so he does all of our photos.

And because he's also engineering this stuff, he knows exactly what super fine details to highlight. If you go to Home Depot, you know, you just get some renderings or you just see a flat shot of cabinetry—like you don’t see the back, the back end of the guys making it in the shop. You don’t see what’s inside the drawers. How does this cabinet function?

Like, all that behind-the-scenes stuff, in my opinion, you know, adds a lot of authenticity to what we’re doing. This isn’t just some factory cranking out a thousand cabinets a day, and connecting the story to even the story I’ve told you with our come-up with my background going to Maine and working with my hands, that’s what marketing is—you got to tell the story.

And so we haven’t paid— I've probably paid $500 over eight years in paid advertising. So all of social media word of mouth—I would much rather. So I started going on offense! To answer your question, I DM people on Instagram religiously.

I definitely—I used to in those early years doing this, and I would rather spend my time researching. I might, you know, if you were an interior designer or a builder, I might follow you for six months, observing what you’re doing, and I might be doing that for a hundred people.

When I see one opportunity where maybe you post something, and it’s anything relevant to what we do, or I identify that I think I could add more value to you, I kind of like sink my teeth in, I reach out, I try to get a call, I get a meeting.

My sales mindset is I put myself in your shoes. I’ll never call you telling you how great we are. Hey, I heard that, you know, you posted a photo of your last project; it looked like the color of the white oak was like a little off or something like that. Or, you know, we could create way more consistency or we could do this, or I always tell people, “I’m happy to value engineer and let’s get you what you want on the outside.”

But there's a lot of things we can do behind the cabinet doors that save on cost. This is very much a collaboration, and so people are pretty receptive to that. Because cabinetry is a big line item on a lot of remodels and new constructions, we want to get it right, and we want them, we want the clients to feel like they got what they were expecting and what they paid for.

It’s about creating value—that’s really what sales is. Solve a problem for somebody; add value to them. It’s never about you!

AUSTIN GRAY: You're absolutely right!

So you obviously manage the sales or lead the sales in your company. Can you tell us who your team is and who handles what responsibilities and roles within the company?

ALEX FORBES: Yeah, so today, you know, four years ago, we had—my business partner and I—maybe two other employees. It was really hard to keep up.

We’re also a little unique in the sense where we make, finish, and assemble everything in-house. A lot of other shops—there’s nothing wrong with this; it’s just a different way of production— a lot of other shops outsource cabinet doors; they may outsource the drawer boxes; they might outsource finishing, sometimes just kind of piece it together.

We internalize all of that stuff; we make our own doors, drawers; we do all of our own finishing. It's a lot about control of the process; quality control. We can do a lot of other things that most other companies aren’t doing because of that.

So it takes a little bit more effort in the shop and in the office to execute that. So the dynamic is I’m still doing all sales, estimating, and pricing.

I hope to delegate that role sometime in the next year and focus more on building long-term relationships with what we call trade partners, designers, and builders. My business partner Jason does all of our engineering, so that produces the shop drawings; it programs the equipment; it gives the guys in the shop the reports and cut lists to make the cabinets.

He is now—we’re training our old project manager to become an engineer—a hybrid engineer project manager role. He’ll do the shop drawings and guide clients through the project process.

We’re hiring a second engineer. Jason will focus on operations and managing the guys in the shop, scheduling, stuff like that. And then we have five guys in the shop operating our equipment, making cabinets, and getting them out the door.

So there are nine of us now. We might be bringing on a designer in-house, which would make it 10. That would be kind of a milestone because we’ve never had like double-digit, you know, personnel within Lane 17. So that’ll be kind of cool; we’re going to offer health insurance for the first time this summer.

There are a lot of cool things happening that we’re able to give back to our employees and make it a hopefully long-term home for people.

AUSTIN GRAY: Yeah, that's awesome!

I mean, it’s like every single growth stage—well, I had John Wilson on the podcast, and he called it like, every stage brings a gut punch because you got to make a decision—like whether you're building the team and bringing on more people or investing in machinery.

Like in your business, I'm sure it's very asset-heavy as far as the specific type of machinery you need. But I don’t know about you, each time I had to make those decisions for, like, are we going to add a new team member or are we going to add a new piece of equipment? It's a big gut punch!

ALEX FORBES: Yeah, so how do you—

AUSTIN GRAY: Like, I'd be curious to know your—their mindset because we’re going through a similar phase, and I call them, it’s the same concept as a gut punch; I call them breaking through glass ceilings.

Because there are very much glass ceilings that can be broken through. But if you consider what it would take to break through a physical glass ceiling, you’re going to be left with a bunch of cuts and scrapes and wounds, and like—

It'll hurt to do that! And so, it’s the same thing. You know, we have to—you know, I'm never going to feel comfortable hiring another person. I'm never going to feel comfortable rolling out benefits for a whole company.

You know, we’re facing a situation now where we are going to need to move shops within the next 12 months, and I want to buy a building, and it’s going to double our rent back to the business. And you know, there’s no one to say that yes, it’s going to work out perfectly or not—you just have to commit! I mean, you know, strategize—make sure it’s a calculated risk, but at some point, you just have to pull the trigger and do it.

So I’d be curious to know—and because, you know, we have tons of equipment in our shop. I know that you are asset-heavy; you've got a mini-X, you've got a skid steer, I know you’ve got a chipper and all that stuff.

Like, what is your mindset into onboarding equipment and balancing that out with people? Talk me through your process, when you're like, “Hey, we’ve got to do this, or we’ve got to scale back,” or something like that.

ALEX FORBES: Well, I haven't had to scale back yet, thankfully. And I'll knock on wood there! But each time, you know, even from the beginning, when it was just me renting a skid steer after I was renting for multiple months in a row going into that second busy season, I had a decision to make.

I knew that we were going to put a skid steer to work, so I went and purchased the skid steer, and I financed it. In the beginning, it was like, “Man, okay, this is a big—,” I love the way you phrase it, breaking through a glass ceiling.

Because I think of a positive outlook—like, you're gonna break through, and you're gonna have glass to clean up. And you know that—it’s a new floor! So I love that.

And um, yeah, the first one was a $2,000 a month skid steer; that was a lot for me in the beginning. I knew deep down I believe in myself enough that I can go pay for this skid steer per month no matter what, like every month from here on out.

Then we did that, and I went and did the sales and marketing to go get enough to pay for that skid steer.

Right? And then I started—like, then I hired my first guy, and it was like, “All right, I don’t remember if it was $25 or $30 an hour, whatever I started in the beginning.” It was like, “Man, that was going to be a lot for me!” Because I'm like, “Dang, that’s like $30 an hour less. That’s not going to be able to pay towards my family’s expenses or reinvesting back in the business.”

Each time it’s tough. But at the end of the day, I just came to this conclusion of, do I believe in our team? And in the days, it was just, do I believe in myself enough to go sell enough work to be able to pay for that monthly expense? And we just kept in that.

And the way I like to view it is I do it, and then we prove to ourselves that it can be done. And then whenever we need the next piece, it’s another glass ceiling that we have to break through.

I think about it for a while, and in the early days, I thought about it for a lot longer, and it was a lot harder to do. Now, like we just hired—a guy basically is going to be the highest paid person on our team to do sales, estimating, and project management.

I thought about that one for like a day, and then I was like, “No, we can do it! Yes, come on board. I’ll allocate this amount to you, here’s your salary, here’s the benefit package, and let’s rock and roll.”

Now that’s where I’m allocating all of my time. Like we’re spending like three, four hours a day total on the phone, back and forth to work through estimating.

But to your point, it somewhat does feel like you're taking a step back in the beginning because you have pioneered this process; you know how to do it very well.

And then to bring either another team member or another piece of equipment on, then you’ve got to take a step back. And so I think that's the hardest thing for me because I like to move a million miles an hour, and I keep having— I have to keep reminding myself: take a deep breath, Austin.

Just slow down and be in it for the long haul. The time you invest now is going to pay dividends in the future because if I can delegate sales and estimating to someone who is as good or better than me at that, now I can go focus my time as the owner to figure out the next glass ceiling to break through.

And that’s just how I’ve viewed it this whole time, and it’s fun that way! To your point, it’s not boring; there’s a new challenge every single day, and that’s what keeps my brain alive!

ALEX FORBES: Yeah, I would say it is funny. I mean, even how different our businesses are, it’s the same parallel.

I’m curious to know how much equipment do you have?

AUSTIN GRAY: We have like $500,000 to $600,000 worth of equipment on the shop floor in a 6,000 square foot shop. Like, there is barely any room to move! If you didn’t have that $600,000 worth of equipment, how many people would you have to have?

ALEX FORBES: We’d probably have to have like eight to ten guys, so basically double the amount of people in the shop.

One of these companies that I followed—they're also big lean guys and they're also a cabinet shop out in Utah, Trimart is their company name. Tyler, who owns it, he's always on the videos— a phrase that makes a lot of sense and sums this up is— I think it’d be similar for you to an extent: where you can either hire a person or you can hire a machine. Either way if the business needs to expand, the expense will—the money will be spent; it doesn’t matter.

Now it's a different type of risk and commitment because, for us— I don't know if it’s the same for you, but typically our equipment financing is pretty much like a lease with a dollar buyout—it's a straight line five-year term.

So yes, if I buy a $100,000 piece of equipment, I am committing to paying for that thing for five years unless, you know, if I have to sell it, maybe I lose a little bit of money on the difference. But it is a commitment to get that—you know, it's always a few grand to get it hooked up to power, dust collection, all that stuff.

Where if you hire a person, you know, if things go south, you could let that person go. I guess you have a little bit more flexibility, but you know, especially on a small team, turnover is never good for morale.

We really try to be selective on who we get, and we’re willing to pay, you know, $25-$30 an hour starting to do that. Again, where I connected all this is last year—we did have a relatively new but lower skilled guy just sanding all day.

He showed up on time, you know, and that wasn’t an issue, but he was super slow. There were so many inconsistencies and just defects ultimately going into the paint booth.

Because it just—he wasn’t being effective. We let him go, and I got a sander that was $50,000 that reduced our hand sanding efforts by 80%. So to even give you a more extreme example of what we did this time last year—like May or June—and to show you the effectiveness of it, we had our shop floor was like, you know, a big thing with manufacturing is creating flow, right?

We had no flow in our shop. It was carts and people and parts crisscrossing all over the place, and it made no sense. We could never figure out why we couldn't get enough out of the door each month.

We just—my business partner and I had like a conversation. We had a major reset; we relayed the shop. We shut down for two weeks and spent 70 grand on electrical and rigging to redo the whole shop.

The whole footprint changed completely! I got like $300,000 worth of equipment last year that we integrated into the process, and the same five people are producing 80 to 100% more throughput in that new layout!

We could never do more than like 50 or 60 grand a month last year, and now we do like $100,000 to $120,000 a month with the same five people in the shop.

Now, granted, I have the payment on all that equipment, but it’s typically about $2,000 per month per $100,000 in equipment you finance, and a person’s $4,000 a month minimum.

So it’s always a balance. We had an equipment-heavy year last year—this year now we need—we have all this capacity in the shop; now we’re having a people year, and we got to get people to operate the equipment.

And it’s just like this back and forth over the years.

AUSTIN GRAY: I love it; it's so similar!

Yeah, last year, ours—I was pushing hard to get to this. I had this ideal equipment model as well, and I knew we needed to get there. I knew we could get there, so we got there, and then now this is a people year.

And it’s like a consistent bounce back and forth between machinery and equipment, but I am unbelievably excited to watch you grow. Where are you at top-line revenue?

ALEX FORBES: So last year we did just about $1.2 million; we should do $2.5 million this year, but we had our target set for $2 million. We’ll see if we hit it or not; this is very much a glass ceiling year for the office, where we need to add a lot of capacity to get stuff engineered to the shop, you know, flush out design with clients more quickly than we’re doing now.

So we’re in a— we’re in a heavy people year, and we—there’s a reason why that our lead times have climbed to like four months, and that would be the only reason why we wouldn’t hit it.

But there’s, you know, I have 10 or 12 bids that I’m trying to get to at any given time, and it just can’t happen; there’s not enough time.

I want to do stuff like this right. I want to jump on calls with people; I want to meet people, develop relationships with builders.

We do stuff all over the country; it’s not just Cleveland, and so we’re like getting to that point where someone’s got to take my place as estimator.

To a point that you made earlier, as you break through more of those ceilings, you do learn that as you're approaching it, you feel like, “How could I ever take on this expense?” Because the capacity that I’m trying to unlock—it sounds good on paper, but it isn’t guaranteed, because you still have to go out and execute.

But what is guaranteed is you're going to pay for that person or piece of equipment. But the more you do that, the more you realize it typically pans out as long as you're working on the right things.

And you know, I— you sound like you have a very similar mindset to me.

You’re going to—your back’s against the wall; you’re going to go out and you’re going to do it, and there’s no stopping you!

ALEX FORBES: I love the fact that you use that term—your backs against the wall. There is nothing more motivating than backing yourself into a corner where you just have to fight hard to get out!

AUSTIN GRAY: Yep, 100%. That was—for me, I sold five grand in cutting boards, and then I just signed a three-year lease on a 5,000 square foot space.

I put myself in a position where, you know, everybody else thinks you’re kind of nuts and why would you—you’re stupid for not planning this out and blah, blah, blah.

But like planning stifles execution! You’re just—you’re not going to— the quicker you can get out there and do the thing, you’re going to get the feedback again—what works and what doesn’t—and iterate and keep doing the thing!

And so that 5,000 square-foot space was like, that was a back-against-the-wall moment. From there, we moved to a 14,000-foot building down the street. That’s when we really started getting into cabinetry.

The only reason we moved into that space that was that big is because we got crazy cheap rent, and then we started learning about lean and continuous improvement and flow.

We had 16 feet of space around every machine, and we're like, there’s all this wasted space that we’re paying for!

And we moved three years ago to a 7,500 square-foot shop with all of the same equipment, and we actually got a lot more equipment since we moved in there.

And we’re doing—from that old 14,000-foot shop, we’re doing three times the volume out of 7,500 square feet with twice the amount of equipment.

And now we’re just getting to the point where you can't get inside the front door when a bunch of cabinets are stacked up, ready to go out.

But it’s been, you know, more space, more equipment, more people—it shouldn’t be the first answer. You should be looking at your flow; you should be looking at the process.

My guess is, you know, you have X amount of time allocated to rigging up your equipment, getting them on and off in trailers.

And I guarantee that, if you haven’t heard of Two Second Lean, I would—if you care to read it, it’s a short read; it’s like 150 pages.

I’d be curious what you think of it because I bet there are a thousand things you could do.

What’s that called again?

ALEX FORBES: Two Second Lean. I can send you the link!

AUSTIN GRAY: I’m going to read it. Yeah.

It’s short, but I bet there are a thousand things you could do to incrementally improve the rigging process on your trailers, and it would get your guys in and out on site probably half the time or something like that!

You know, an easy example is if my guys need a drill or a drill bit or a tool—we have 10 or 15 drills in the shop, right?

And it's because I don’t want to just have one or two drills that everyone’s got to go check out of a tool room or something like that.

We’re going to put a router or the drill bits or whatever they’re doing at every single spot that they use them throughout the workflow.

Like, a big lean thing that Paul Acres talks about is the answer should be where the question is asked. So if the question is, “I need a tool or I need a drill for this thing,” it should be right in front of your face!

It shouldn’t be a hundred steps across the shop or back in the truck. Like, you know, for you, maybe you need a small toolbox on every skid steer or whatever it is.

I mean, there are a million options, but read that book and let me know what you think of it because it was pretty eye-opening, and it’s a very approachable thing. They’re very small little things that you can tweak to really add value to your overall operation.

ALEX FORBES: I definitely will read it, and thank you for the recommendation!

And so, any listeners there, check out the book. Let us know in the comments below if you read it, and if you do like it.

Alex, this has been so much fun! I’ve got a couple crew members here—our project—and they’re waiting on me to jump out there, so we’ll have to wrap this one up.

It’s been great meeting you in person, and I want to do a second episode because I think we could dive into so much more.

ALEX FORBES: Yeah, man, it’s been a ton of fun! I’ll go crush it today, and let me know if you have any other questions about anything, but I’d love to do this again.

AUSTIN GRAY: There’s a chance! Oh, fantastic! We will definitely do it. Good luck this year, and we'll talk to you— I mean, we’ll keep engaging online, but now that we have each other’s contact info, you can feel free to reach out anytime on my cell phone.

I love the fact that, you know, that’s the most fun thing about this podcast is you get to meet people like yourself and just challenge each other to grow our businesses.

At the end of the day, we’re going through similar challenges, and yeah, it’s been really fun! So thanks for sharing your story.

Where can people find you and your business online?

ALEX FORBES: I’m on Twitter, Alex Forbes with two underscores at the end. And Lane 17 Cabinet Co on Twitter, Instagram, all that stuff. So it’d be cool to connect with people that are doing something similar, and happy to answer any questions about what we’re doing if anyone's interested.

AUSTIN GRAY: All right, listeners, thanks again for listening to another episode of the OWNR OPS podcast! Just like building a small business, five-star reviews are super important for podcasts as well.

So if you are enjoying these episodes, would you mind taking a quick 30 seconds and leaving us a review on Spotify or Apple? If you are listening on YouTube, would you mind just liking and subscribing to the channel?

Thanks again for listening! Don’t forget: work hard, do your best, never settle for less, and we’ll see you guys in the next episode.