Today we’d like to introduce you to Doug Zeyer.
Hi Doug, please kick things off for us with an introduction to yourself and your story.
I grew up on a dairy and beef farm in Appalachian, Ohio. After college, I began working as a software developer in Columbus, Ohio, but stayed involved with the farm on weekends, helping my father. I know that many men don’t like to shop, but he hated it with a passion and was convinced that it was going to kill him. The 1998-99 Winter was especially cold, and my parents were unable to return Christmas gifts until March 1999. during the return, he slipped on some ice, which led to his death a few weeks later. That Summer, I helped to round up and sell the cattle before going to Denver, CO, to work on Y2K fixes of Human Resources software. While there, I found out that someone had approached my mother about logging a seven-acre tract of forest. I expected that she may have been underpaid, so I flew back to check. She had signed a contract and was paid in cash in advance. The logger had borrowed the money from his best friend. He proceeded to spend the next 6 months doing about half of a 2-week job and drinking huge amounts of Busch Natural Light. By the spring of 2000, he finally had some huge Red Oak trees cut. He pulled the whole trees out of the ravine into the crop fields. There, he cut off the large crowns and sold 2 semi-loads of tree-length logs. He pocketed the funds and disappeared without paying back his now ex-best friend. After Y2K, there was a brief recession in the software business. Since there wasn’t a lot to do, I used some vacation time to cut up the tops for firewood. This was a popular commodity and was making some nice extra money. Eventually, the pieces of wood got so large that I thought they might be logs. I began to check with some small local sawmills, and they wanted these logs. Once the fields were cleaned up, the sawmills wanted more logs. The original logger cut off quite a few trees that got stuck in other trees. My brother and I began to drop these, not really knowing at the time how dangerous it really was. This went well until one of the sawmills had financial problems and couldn’t pay for the logs. We had a supply of Cherry logs and no one to buy them, so we bought a small portable sawmill and began to cut them ourselves. One thing led to another, and a builder wanted kiln-dried lumber, so an old chicken house got converted into a kiln. The business continued to grow and first had a small warehouse in Pataskala before moving to the current, much larger facility in Baltimore, Ohio on a property that was once a Lock on the historic Ohio-Erie Canal.
Alright, so let’s dig a little deeper into the story – has it been an easy path overall, and if not, what were the challenges you’ve had to overcome?
We were fortunate to not know anything about what we were doing, so nothing seemed too difficult. Most expansions were proceeded by some form of “How hard can this really be?”.
Appreciate you sharing that. What else should we know about what you do?
As stated before, I was a software developer who wasn’t a woodworker and didn’t know about chainsaws other than cutting some Locust posts for the farm.
I’m probably most proud of the amount of sales that I have been able to make after being told at my office job that I had “no sales skills.”
I’m mostly known for partially finished lumber, wide selection, and low prices.
Also pretty happy to be known as the guy with the Customer Service Cats.
Risk-taking is a topic that people have widely differing views on – we’d love to hear your thoughts.
This business is constantly about taking risks. It isn’t something that I particularly seek out, but just something that has to be done.
Contact Info:
- Instagram: Zeyer Lumber
- Facebook: Zeyer Lumber
