16 Crafting Success: From Childhood Dreams to Cabinet Mastery

In this captivating episode, we sit down with Zach Granger, the owner of Custom Crafted Cabinets, and explore his remarkable journey from a childhood dream to becoming a master in the world of cabinets. Zach takes us through the early days of the business, which was founded by his father in 1980 in a tiny garage near the train depot in Sheridan County. He shares the challenges they faced, especially during tough economic times, and how those experiences shaped his perspective on business and the value of resourcefulness.

Zach's story is one of dedication and passion for craftsmanship. He discusses how he started working with his dad at a young age, honing his skills and developing a deep love for the trade. We dive into his decision to transition from college to pursue his lifelong dream of owning his dad's cabinet shop. Zach's insights into the importance of family, preparation, and business continuity planning are both inspiring and educational.

Join us as we uncover the secrets behind the success of Custom Crafted Cabinets and learn valuable lessons about entrepreneurship, dedication, and the power of following your dreams, no matter where they may lead. Whether you're a budding entrepreneur or simply appreciate the art of cabinet-making, this episode is packed with wisdom and inspiration.

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Transcript

Hey, guys, welcome back. And today we have Zach Granger on our podcast as a guest. Thanks.

Yeah. So I'm Zach Granger. Grew up here locally, been in Sheridan County for my whole life.

Been in the trades, working. Started with my dad doing cabinets and that's what I've stuck to. Nice.

So what's the business called? Custom crafted cabinets. Right? Yep. Custom crafted cabinets.

We switched to an LLC for when I bought in. For the purposes of that, doesn't really work to buy into a sole proprietorship. Had to change the name slightly, but still same name has been around since 1980.

1980. So the business is actually older than you? Definitely multiple times older. Yeah.

Your dad started it? Yes, dad started it here in Sheridan over by the train depot out of a little tiny garage. I mean, smaller than the room we're in. 18 x 24 was the size of his shop when he started.

And we drove by it, I don't know, I was 13 or 14. Trying to get some perspective because I grew up working in a shop that was a full scale production shop. And we drove by it and I couldn't find it.

And then he's like, no, it's that building right there. And sure enough, it was just a tiny little garage and he had contraptions coming out of the ceiling and stuff that made it work. I mean, 1980s in Sheridan was it was rough times.

There was two houses built the first year he started, so he did two sets of cabinets. So he did cabinets on one of them and the foundation on the other. Really? Yeah.

And that was all the work he had that year. That sounds stressful. Yeah.

Oh, man. It definitely gave me a lot of perspective of why he didn't like to throw stuff away. Growing up in the economy that I grew up in, what I know is after the eight crash, so it's just gung ho, go, go.

I remember just being frustrated, like we were keeping just random stuff around the shop. Well, through conversation it came to me that when you start with nothing in an economy that's not doing anything, you keep every piece of scrap wood and everything in order because you might need it. You might need that one piece for your extra door, your drawer front or something like that.

That's pretty cool. From 1980 to 2008, is that area your dad was basically running. At what point did you come into the picture? I came in, it would have been 2012 or 13.

And you were how old then? I would have been 14 years old when I started actually being interested in the development of the business. So you were 14 years old and you're interested in business? Correct. You know what I was worried about is skateboarding.

Yeah. So when I was six, which would have been four, five, we did a poster when I was in kindergarten and on it. What I wanted to do when I grow up was take a nap with my son and buy my dad's cabinet shop.

Really? So from the time I was just a little, little guy, I wanted to buy that business. Wow, that's super interesting. You had a long term vision then? Yes.

Okay, so 14 you started working in the shop and what, started learning the ropes at that point? Of course, I'd been working with him from the time I could walk. I mean, if we were anything we were doing around the place, we lived right next to the shop. We would get out of school, we'd go find dad.

If he was doing something that we could help him with, we'd help him with sand indoors. And I remember one of the first things he taught me to do was sharpening chisels because it's boring and meticulous. So he would have us come in and sharpen his chisels.

And it was every couple of weeks us boys would come in and sharpen all the chisels, get them all honed up, tuned up and whatnot. But yeah, when I was, I guess it was a little younger than that, 2011 was when the VACuCh building went in here and dad sat us down. There was me and three of my brothers that were working for him at the time.

Dad sat us down and said, hey, I'm looking at taking this job, but the only way it's going to work is if you guys are on board with it. He made us a proposition of we're going to take this job. It's going to be evenings and weekends.

We're going to be running late, late nights. Do you guys want to do it? Essentially prepping you for the amount. He's saying this is going to be a big job for us and we really can't handle it, but if you guys are all in, we're going to buckle down and do it.

Yeah, 100%. And so the deal was we'd work until two of the brothers were sleeping each night. So we would get out of school 434 o'clock, get out to site at 430.

And we were doing all the trim, windows, doors, staining set and all that. And it was usually 1111 30. A couple of us would be nodding off, we would pack up and head home, do it the next day.

And then going to school here in Bighorn was cool because we had Fridays off. It's a four day school week, so then all day Friday and all day Saturday we would be up there working big money. When you're twelve, how much did you make? I don't know a total number, but I remember seeing my first dollar paycheck on that job and I was just like, what am I going to do with this? There's only so much candy you can buy.

And it was definitely a step into the experience of watching money flow. And I would say throughout that whole project. There was probably five or six grand that we made each.

Wow. And you're how old again? 1412 on that. You're twelve years old and you are making whatever the hourly rate is but up to $1,000 per check.

So let's see. When I was twelve, I remember working for my dad and I worked all summer. I might have been twelve.

Actually, I might have been slightly younger, maybe I was ten. But at the end of the summer I said, hey dad, do you pay me for working for you? Because I didn't even know. I go there when I can or whatever.

He'll wake me up in the morning and I'd like to work with him and he's like, oh, I guess I haven't paid you yet. Whatever. So he writes me this check and I'm sure it was very intentional.

He wrote it for some real specific amount. It was like $230, like sixty nine cents or something for a whole summer's worth of work. Which probably mostly got in the way.

I didn't know how to work, but I thought $230. I was like, wow, I'm making it. But here you are like nearly the same age at $1,000 every what, two weeks or something? Yeah, it would have been two week pay cycle.

And of course that was not the norm. Right. That was a job that we took.

But you were working hard to get that. Yeah, it was through the winter, so it's not like we were missing out on a whole bunch of stuff activities to do around here. You basically got to go travel to have fun in the winter, whether it be up the mountains, snowmobiling or snowboarding or whatever.

That was just field work. Learning how to interact with people on a job site. What's normal and what's not normal.

We found a lot of what's not normal on that job. Watching other different trades and different people that were there were some tweakers, there was some real hotheads different things that it was like whoa, that's unprofessional good exposure. But yeah, then when I was 14 was when we kind of dove into it headlong.

We had two intensive remodels that we did full fix and flip jacking the houses up off the ground and putting new foundations and completely gutted them and whatnot and gave us a lot of experience of the trades overall. But it was also at the point right in that time frame where dad realized we weren't making money by doing everything. We had the same crew that was roofing houses and then going and building the kitchen and then going insideing and building the kitchen and doing concrete and gutters and windows.

The whole everything. On the surface it seems like if you're performing all those sections of labor, you should be getting paid for all those sections of labor and be more profitable. So why do you think it was not so? That was a lot of discussion surrounding that and it comes down to transitions and distractions.

It would be one thing if we had a roofing trailer and a siding trailer and a sheet rock trailer, or even boxes with tools, right? Then that crew could grab that trailer, go do that work. But when you have the same set of tools that you're using for all of it, you have so much time lost between having all your tools on site, doing this job. You get done with that, you have a full day of moving stuff back to the shop, getting the tools back where they go, getting set up for the next project in the shop.

I would say even closer to two days before you're rolling into the next section. Whereas right now when we finish a kitchen, when that kitchen is done, we can be into the next one in an hour. Yeah, probably didn't even, hardly had to adjust.

Exactly. All the tools are still set up where they need to be. Everybody knows what they're doing.

You're not learning at every turn. Whereas when you're transitioning from every aspect of construction with the same crew, you have a non visible lost time getting moving into the next section. You could make it work with just say two people partner up and they know they're going to be doing everything and they go into it with that mindset and they're getting after it.

But when you don't know what the next month is going to hold for work wise, and you're looking at it of like, well, are we going to be doing sheetrock or are we going to be doing cabinets or siding? And there's no consistency to it. And it was all in lost time. The revenue numbers were great, revenue numbers were great, but the lost time made it to where the bottom line was not making money.

That's really interesting. And so you did two flips and then what? We actually did three. One of them was earlier, I don't really remember the first one, but yeah, we did two in that short.

I think within that year we did two right on Sheridan Avenue. And it was that after that second one sold, we were like, are we doing general contracting or are we doing cabinetry? Because if we're doing general contracting, let's start subbing some of this stuff out. Right.

That was the conversation that was had with my dad and as it was me, my brother Danny, we had one laborer and my dad between the four of us, we said, well we have the cabinet shop already set up. There's no real point to continue down this route if we're still going to be selling cabinets in the middle of it. Right.

So different people that had driven by those jobs that we were remodeling had pulled us out and so we ended up doing, I think it was twelve reroofs wow. Out in Ranchester. Well, you got a bunch of cabinet makers, roofing.

It's great. The roofs look good. They're meticulous.

Everything's cut right. But you're comparing apples to oranges. And you can't build a company with the name custom crafted Cabinets by roofing houses.

It's kind of a funny thought. Yeah, it wasn't panning out, so, yeah, we transitioned strictly to cabinetry. It was somewhere 2014, 2015 and started getting systems set up.

And it was just a couple of years later we had to add on to the shop. Are you still in high school at this point in 2015? Yeah. Okay, so when did you graduate high school? 2017.

2017. So you must have been like, 1516 years old. Yes.

I was 16 when I started working with the clients direct for dad. And so you shimmy up to the counter and pull yourself up and peek over, welcome here. No, I was a big kid.

A lot of people didn't even catch that. I was not an adult at that point. I knew how to carry myself.

I knew how to communicate with adults. And that stems from being around a lot of adults, whether it be on the job site or even being the youngest of the family. All my siblings were adults.

They were all adults. I didn't have little kids to play with anywhere. Like, growing up, I had one friend, and other than that, it was all adults.

Oh, really? My nieces and nephews were the same age as me, but they didn't live here. So a lot of interaction with adults, a lot of conversation with adults. And it made it to where when it came time to jump into that sales and design role, which is what I started with in the office, it came quite naturally.

I worked under my mom for six months a year, learning the design from her, learning about all the work triangle and balance and colors and lighting and all the stuff that she is a wizard at. I mean, she did it for 40 years. Yeah, you learn a lot.

Even if you're doing it poorly, you learn a lot in 40 years. She was good at it, but even if you were doing it poorly, you'd still learn a lot. So yeah, 16 was when I really started navigating that there was a lot of times where I would step out of class when I was in high school.

Hey, can I go to the bathroom? And I'd go answer a phone call. Really? Yeah, and it was fun. I mean, it was a lot of fun.

Senior year, I had work release, so I was only at school for 5 hours a day or something, and I was working the rest of the time, and I didn't remember what I wanted to do when I was getting close to graduating. Right. So this poster, that was from when I was in kindergarten.

It had been lost, long since forgotten. And I was toying around with what avenue of life I was going to take. And I got married young, six days out of high school.

Oh, wow. Graduated. Were you 18? Yes, I was 18, almost 19.

I was really old for my class, made school easy. The next brother above me was really young for his class. And it's such a simple concept, but it definitely makes a difference, the hierarchy of children based on age.

There's a really good book called The Outliers, and he talks a lot about the time that you're born and the advantages that provides. It's super interesting. So book recommendation.

Yeah, I wish I could remember who the author was. Maybe Mason could look it up, but we'll get back to that in a minute. So yeah, talks about that.

So you were old for your age, so you automatically had or not old for your age, old for gray hair at 16. Yeah, old for my grade. So you got married right out of high school.

Did you go to college or anything after? I did, and that was kind of where I was leading to. I didn't know what I wanted to do, and I knew I liked building things, so I started toying down the mechanical engineering route. Oh, yeah.

Got signed up for college, got moved into it, and I got four days into it, four days into the mechanical engineering program. And I was not you weren't not excited thinking about sitting in an office for the next eight years before you can go on your own one. You got your college.

Then after that, you got four years of working under somebody before you can test for your engineering license. And then you got another four years before you can start your own firm. So I started thinking about it like twelve years, I was going to be 30 from that point, I'd be 30.

And it was not appealing to me being in a cubicle for the unprecedented future or whatever. I was kind of lost at that point. I was like, what am I going to do? I'm definitely not interested in this route.

And we were cleaning out my old bedroom at my mom and dad's house, and that poster came up from kindergarten. I actually have it hung in my office now. Oh, really? And my wife looked at me and she was like, what are you doing? It's pretty clear.

It's right here. You wrote it down when you were six. What you want to do? And it was a light switch, it was a change.

I mean, I was like, oh yeah, that's what I've been looking for. I've been wanting to go that route. So I got my associates in business management from the local college here, two year degree.

And I came out of that in 2019. I was going to buy into the business at that point. Dad encouraged me to wait until we had the addition done for the sake of getting financing.

Building addition. Yep. The addition to the you as soon as I bought in, which I saw what he was talking about as soon as I bought in.

Banks look at the date the LLC was formed for a lot of financing. So we got the addition done and that was October of 2019 and we started discussing the process of buying in. Right.

So, October of 2019, completed the addition, got all the tooling set up and whatnot, and it was an eight month process, essentially, to get everything written up and make sure that it was all our attorney was asking us to put in the whatever it's called, the death clause into the business of what happens if a member of the company dies. Me and dad are sitting there like a couple of worth it, is it not? He was in great health. We're sitting there like, do we really want to pay this guy to write some stuff on a piece of paper? Well our attorney ended up expressing to us that he had a client that was very similar situation the son was planning on buying in.

The father died of unforeseen situation and a couple of the brothers came in and demanded their portion because they didn't have that clause written in. That company was immediately liquidated done. There was no ability for it to continue forward.

So we agreed to it, got it in and we're definitely glad we did because it was a year and six months after I bought in that he ended up passing. Oh man, that would have been a nightmare. Well, it probably was anyway, I'm saying as far as the yeah, don't get me wrong, it was a nightmare losing dad, but I picture obviously let's set aside obviously, your dad is probably one of the closest people to you, and that's one thing.

But I mean, set that aside and say even if you had gone through the extra paperwork, just speaking business wise, now you've lost a big chunk of help. There's so many other things other than just that paperwork. But you did eliminate one small headache by filling out the paperwork.

Yeah and it was eliminated a pretty big headache on that because it would have went to property of the state upon his death. All of his business assets would have went to property of the state and all the proceedings that happened after that, I wouldn't have been able to use any of the bank accounts, I wouldn't have been able to use any of the credit cards, any of the insurance would have been null and void. I mean there was a huge stipulation that would happen upon that whereas since we had that paperwork completed, it was one paper with the attorney and acting upon that clause, the remainder of the business was rolled into the members that were already there.

So that portion that he still owned rolled into my see sorry, let me interrupt 1 second. Mason what's the book? So it's outliers by Malcolm Gladwell. Yep, that's the one I was talking about.

Good book. Recommend it. He explains why the self made man is a myth and what truly lies behind the success of the best people in their field, which is often a series of lucky events, rare opportunities, and other external factors which are out of our control.

There you have probably going to read that this weekend. Yeah, it's really good. So thanks for the interruption.

I wanted to get that out before I forgot, but I feel like you had me captivated. Let's keep rolling. Let's see, where were we? At the headache that was saved by filling out this paperwork.

Had you had not done it, the stuff would have went back to the state, and you may have been out of luck. Yes. It most likely would have been a long enough process that even if I wanted to continue, it would have been starting over.

The rest of his stuff took August to June, so that's ten months. The rest of his stuff took ten months to finalize. Oh, really? Yeah.

I mean, all the titles that were in his name, you had to go provide death Certificate and this and that. There's just so much stuff that goes with it. And the business would have been the same thing.

It would have been ten months of not being able to do business under that name. Yeah, I would have figured something out whether I would just do it under my own name or whatever, but that company would have been long gone. But, yeah, I skipped a lot of stuff in there because that went from me getting out of college to August of 21, 2019 to 21 a couple of years in there.

I mean, dad retired in September of 2020. I bought in in May of 2020, and he retired in September. That was a bit of an interesting situation.

It taught me that no single person leaving a company will completely destroy it. I mean, he was my everything as far as business went. He was my advisor, he was my partner.

He was the knowledge base. You have a question, go ask dad. He knew everything about everything.

Stems back to starting in the 80s. He self taught everything. He didn't have the money to hire anybody to do anything.

So he learned electrical, plumbing, HVAC, masonry. I mean, he learned it all. And he knew very well how to do most everything in the trades.

And so when he retired I'd be lying if I said he retired on good terms. Right. We had a seven year buyout that was set up.

And this is one of the reasons why I advise people to not do a stepped buyout to make it to where what's a stepped buyout? Even so, what we had put together was I bought 10% initial in which year? In May of 2020. Right. We set up the LLC.

I bought 10% of the company. Then the contract we had signed was 10% per year for seven years, and then the remaining 30% would be purchased at that point. Right.

And so the value of the company would be reevaluated each May, and I'd purchase 10%. Right. We got a couple of months into that, and I don't blame him, but he wanted to be retired.

He'd worked his whole life, worked hard. I mean, he was a go getter. He was outrunning anybody I know.

And he wanted to retire and travel with mom. And we talked about it a lot and made it happen. So then I bought another 70%.

At that point, that was September of 2020. So you basically bought out the whole business in one year. Yeah.

Okay. With the intention of being a seven year buyout, there was a lot of hard feelings, a lot of navigation surrounding that, of I didn't want to tell him no, because he'd worked his whole life, and if he wanted to be retired, there's a point where that's acceptable. On the other side of it, he had just got done signing a contract that was seven years, and going into that winter, I had a lot of anger, a lot of anger because there was a lot of times where I needed him, but he was gone.

He took his camper and they traveled, and I was super excited for him on that side. Yeah, it's really cool. He's going to see his kids, staying at kids house, hanging out with grandkids and whatnot.

But I was still trying to run a business that I was not that well versed in. Realistically, I knew how to build the products, but when it came to the business management side of things, I was floundering it's like a fish out of water, just flopping. And it was March of 21 when I finally when I finally put that anger aside and went and talked to him, and I said, Look, Dad, I had planned on having you day to day with me for seven years.

I said, I understand that you wanted to be retired, but I need you. This business needs you. I'm not able to manage it effectively without you.

And there was amends were made. He apologized for it and whatnot, and we were able to move forward and work as an advisor. Seems like a good idea.

Yeah. And I'd got myself into a pretty sticky situation in the eight months that I was running without him, because there was as soon as he stepped out, my ego let's just say my ego ran rampant. The good old ego, the little voice that tells you to do stuff, was pretty much in control of me at that point, and it was, well, I'm going to figure it out on my own.

I don't need anybody. All the stuff that goes along with ego was present in that time. So he came in March of 21 and started acting as a financial advisor and business advisor, and he was still a 20% owner at that point.

So there was vested interest and things started to smooth out quite well. Moved into summer of 21, things were going well, projects were flowing pretty smooth, stuff was happening. We hired on a couple of different people and getting them trained up.

I mean, my dad was an exceptional educator and that's where I needed him the most in the business, was to bring these new hires up to speed. Because it's kind of interesting how if you frame a house, you can build a deck, right? If you know how to build wood stairs, you can do concrete stairs, right? There's a lot of things that are multidimensional. There's not really.

Like the closest thing to cabinets would be drywall, in my opinion, because you're working with sheet stock, you're breaking it down, but also on drywall, you cover it with mud. There's not a multidimensional aspect to cabinetry. Cabinetry is cabinetry.

And even if you were building cabinets out of metal, it's not the same as wood. Right. Because the nature of the wood, the way it splits, all the things that go with it.

And my dad was really good at educating and staying extremely patient with new hires. I'm not quite the same on that. Well, I mean, that's definitely a skill that people, most people are not naturally that way, but there's a few that are naturally that way.

And when they are, it's pretty obvious because they can just build on that natural skill and be super good at it. Where everybody else, if they're just starting from just trying to learn that teaching and being patient with people and stuff like that, it can be learned, but it's way harder than somebody who's naturally good at it. Yeah.

So he came in summer of 21 and was training different individuals that were working for me. And then things started to smooth out and then August, he ended up passing away and it started a whole nother cycle of unknown and chaos and whatnot, but yeah, it was really cool that I was able to get that resolved with him before he passed away. Yeah, I could imagine.

It weighed on me every time I would see him. There's a quote or whatever of to find the ones that have done you wrong, just look for the ones that avoid you. And it's interesting how true that is.

There was a lot of times where we wouldn't see each other for weeks. No. Even when he was here.

And I would work in the shop, which is 35ft from his house. No, probably 90ft from his house. And we wouldn't see each other for a couple of weeks.

And it was good to get that resolved before he passed. But yeah, what a relief. So I had essentially a year of running a business semi on my own and I was 21 at the time.

So I was 21 when I bought in. No, I was yeah, I was 21 when I bought in, and I was 22 when he passed away. So I had a year of having a business advisor and partner in business.

And as soon as he died, it was really interesting because it was it was so when he retired, it was my ego out of anger that was controlling me. Right. I was extremely frustrated.

Like, where are you at? Why aren't we working together? When he died, it was ego out of sadness. Nothing matters, whatever. It's all pointless anyways because you get to the end of the life and you die.

And it was a couple of month period there where that was just day to day. And those two situations in my life has taught me tons about who I am because it was the same set of actions. Like I said, ego out of anger versus ego out of sadness.

What does that tell me? That's my nature. If I let my nature run, that's the way I'm going to act. If I'm not building habits and intentionalizing what I'm doing, that's how I'm going to run.

So, yeah, there was a lot of life lessons learned out of that short period of time. And it took me six months, I would say six months after dad died, to really intentionalize within myself, okay, let's make this work. Let's make this company work and getting into the nitty gritty and going for it.

So that pretty much brings you up to today. It's been two years since he died, a couple of years since I've been running. It just strictly cabinetry by myself.

But in the meantime, you've told me this before, so correct me if I'm wrong if I'misremembering at a point after you took over the business to now I understand you completely redid your shop in the way that you've rearranged equipment and made it more efficient. How did that turn out? I mean, tell me a little bit about that. Yeah, so the big change of the shop was because I had to change the layout in order for me to be able to work in there because it was too emotional having everything set up the way that dad had set up.

Oh, okay. Some reason I had pictured it being due to production. There was that as well.

When dad was gone, I had to recognize, what do I want to do? And for me, it's production cabinetry, whereas for dad, it was the high end custom. Well, when you have high end custom and furniture repair and everything woodworking right. You're looking at essentially the small town craftsman.

Your shop is going to be set up in much smaller workspaces because you're going to have more meticulous situations. Whereas when you're looking at production, you need these long channels. You need channels for product to flow.

Essentially, assembly line runs down the shop. So there's a term for that what's it called? Is it single batch or single piece flow? Single piece flow, yeah. So with the traditional custom cabinetry, you'll do batch work.

So that's where you cut all your parts for your doors, all your rails and styles and the frames around them, cut all your panels. You cut everything for the whole job so that you only have to set up the saw once, which works great when you're working in a small space with one guy. You're setting up one tool, run all your pieces, then move it to the next station.

Whereas when you get to production and single piece flow, you need these channels because you have your machines set up down the runs with your standard cutters to where you can cut the four pieces for one door. Machine them, assemble them, get them to the spray booth so they can start painting them. So those are all individual stations or whatever? Yes.

Okay, so you're moving your body instead of moving, or you're moving your piece from station to station along, you pick it up and carry it to the next station, do the next phase, pick it up again, move it to the next station, do the next phase. And by the time you get out of that loop or those channels, it's a complete cabinet, correct? Yep. Sounds like a car.

Yeah. Yep. So the Toyota production system, that's the epitome of single piece flow, vertical integration and all that good stuff.

And lean manufacturing, getting rid of waste. One thing that so with batch work, on a good system of batchwork, you have three quality control points because you're cutting all of your parts at once. So you have your quality control before you start cutting, overseeing your cut lists, making sure they're right.

You have your quality control, your fit, once you have your doors assembled to the cabinet. So you hold your door up to the cabinet and see if it's going to fit on that opening. And then you have final finish.

Right. So you have three quality control points. So final finish is after the actual clear coat or paint or whatever.

Yeah, because even with that, you go through and you stain all your doors and you spray all your doors and then you're inspecting them. Yes, you're inspecting them as you spray them, but it's not as in depth, where with single piece flow, when we transition to that, it introduced eleven quality control points. Wow.

So you cut your cabinet box so you still have your cut list before you start. Right. You have that quality control point.

Then you cut your cut your cabinet man cut your cabinet box parts. Right. They move to the assembly station, the guy that's assembling it, they'll be able to tell if something's cut wrong.

So, right, there is a quality control point. If something's cut wrong, they can feed it back to the first station, review the cut list, see what needs to change, and it follows through as a continuous feedback to the station before. Okay.

So instead of having there was a couple of projects that us boys were doing that I remember, we cut through 45 or 50 doors, and we realized that we hadn't left enough length for our tongue and groove. So on your cabinet door, you got your styles running vertical and your rails running horizontal, and your rails are a tongue and groove that fit into the style. Well, when we had done our cut listing, our cut list was just we took our cabinet door minus four and a half, two and a quarter inch styles, minus four and a half.

You did almost 50 of these? Yeah, we'd went through it was a big kitchen. We went through 50 doors. Sounds like a lot of work.

And we realized and it was just like, man, if only there was a way. Well, single piece flow. You can reduce your skill set of labor, have more quality control points, and have stuff.

Worst case scenario, you have two cabinets because the first one might go together, get sent to the spray booth, and then they're assembling the next doors. The spray guy fits it to the cabinet, and it's like, whoa, this is wrong. Hey, double check, double check, double check.

It shoots back to the cut list, and all of a sudden, oh, there's our issue. So since introducing that, the most we've had was two doors or two sets of doors. Well, that's good.

Yeah. So it's a substantial change on the need of extreme skill set, which opens your labor force substantially, which you need to grow. My dad was a wizard of doing batch work.

He could have 500 parts on a cart, and he knew where they all, like, literally 500 parts. It would be stacked 3ft deep of door parts, and he would know where they went, which ones they went to, these ones paired with these ones, with this panel. And he could work it that way.

But it takes somebody that's been in the industry for a long time to have the skill set to manage that stuff. Also, you have to have a semi photographic memory, which he did have, so that helps. So the transition was twofold.

One was for my own personal sake of being able to work in there, and two was for efficiency of production. Changing that from a if I can try to paint a picture. Most people know what a corn maze is.

That's kind of what the shop was like. Okay, there was multiple exits, but once you got into it, it was essentially a corn maze. You're walking between workstations.

Everything was four foot walkways. So with the intention of being able to stack a cabinet on one side and still work on the other, everything was four foot walkways. And from our table saw to our chop saw, was a 90 degree change.

And there was a lot of things that work well because in that the concept of having your chops 90 degrees to your table size, because the parts coming, you have everybody looking the same direction. When you're standing in front of a tool, say your shop's facing your shop is positioned north to south with batch work, you set it up to where when you're using the tools, everybody's facing the same way to where you don't have I'm trying to think of the word. There's a concept around it of batchwork, of having everybody moving forward, looking forward, and it's all based of towards the finish booth.

That's the final station. Right. Okay.

And when you move into production, as soon as you get something that's 90 degrees, it's like ductwork. You got a 90 degree corner. It slows the air, it slows the flow, it changes the direction of the channel.

So getting everything moved to where we were focused on the product this is going to sound capitalistic. I'll end we were focused on the products, not the people. As far as the shop layout focused on the products, not the people.

And what that meant was you're able to take a cart and roll it all the way down a channel. There's nothing in that main walkway. Makes for a lot smoother flow and yeah, I'm not sure where I was going with that, but changed all that to where we got substantially more efficient.

That's awesome. I can see how that would be just like your example with the ductwork, every time you have to turn and go a different direction, it adds inefficiency, doesn't it? That's really interesting. After setting this up, would you say you cut your time down significantly? Oh, yeah.

So before transitioning to single piece flow, we were averaging three to four weeks per kitchen. Well, for a house of cabinets, right. Kitchen, vanities, laundry, I would say we were doing seven to eight cabinets a week.

Right. We made the switch to single piece flow and we intentionalized. Okay.

We're running this job to where for us, a piece is a cabinet box. It's drawers, doors, or drawer fronts. All the components within that box is our piece.

That one piece moves down the line. So you never want more cabinets in the line than you have bodies work in the line. Okay? Right.

So if you have one guy, that one guy cuts the parts, assembles the box, assembles the drawer, assembles the doors and drawer fronts, brings it to the finish booth, finishes it out. It's a finished complete product before they're cutting the next box. If you have two guys, then you do a leapfrog effect.

So this guy cuts the pieces, sends it to the next one, then he cuts the next cabinet, sends it to the next station, jumps over that, picks it up. Right. It's a 14 step process.

So then with two guys, you do a leapfrog effect throughout the system. Three guys, same thing. It's just a double.

You never want more cabinets in production than you have bodies working the line. That's interesting. So where are we at on time? We're about 50 minutes in.

Okay. We need to start wrapping it up, but ask you a couple more things. Is there a specific project that stands out in your mind that was awesome? What makes it awesome? Is there a certain species of wood you like working with or certain features? So twofold.

One is the project I learned the most on, and the other is just the overall satisfaction of the work. There was a project out close to the base of the mountains that we did all. It was CVG fur, clear vertical grain fur, so old growth, super long grain.

And we paired it with European beach so they have a similar color complexion. And it was all natural, all clear coat. There was no stain, no paint.

This individual was a custom book binder, so he liked that long. Probably looked like the end of a book. Exactly.

Yeah. And the whole house was this way. And we ended up doing work from one end to the other of the house, everywhere from stair treads to kitchen cabinets and vanities and built in bench seats and trim.

And we did his fence out of the same cabinet. Grade a fence. Yeah.

Sounds like an expensive fence. Oh, man. Yeah.

I told him, honestly, I was like, I have no ability to quote this. I don't know what it's going to cost. And he said, that's fine, surprise me.

And we did. We surprised him. And we made a killing on that job.

But yeah, seeing that job from we went into it thinking we were just building the cabinets. And then he loved the cabinets. So then we ended up building a dining nook table that was the shape of a toilet seat.

Oh, really? Essentially. Or an egg, whatever you want to look at it. And it's all that European beach CBG fur, all integrated stair treads.

Newell posts handrails. For that same project, we did a custom ladder that was 14ft tall, and each tread was two and a half inches thick. I mean, it was a it goes into a loft or something.

An artist nook, that had a drinking fountain up there and a little sitting area. That project was just so much fun because there was no rush and it paid very well. All the subs were extremely meticulous on that job.

All the siding was hand nailed with specific placement. It was overkill, but it was a really fun project to be on. We built an eight foot tall cabinet with a mesh door to hide his water heater.

He didn't want to see the water heater, so we built that. And it's interesting because with a clear coat, CVG fur is one of my favorite woods to work with. But the project that I learned the most on was actually CVG fur, but with a stain.

Okay. And the dynamics or the structure of CVG fur is such to where the tight grain is extremely hard and the soft grain is extremely soft. It's on the oh, so they don't stain.

Correct. Good. Yeah.

And the biggest part of it is any scratch you get in there, in the soft part, you can't get it out without wrecking the texture of the wood because you're trying to sand all the hard stuff down to get to the exactly. And so you have to use a hand block of hardwood with sandpaper on it and go with the direction of the grain very carefully. Well, I figured that out after we had already palm sanded 40 some doors.

Right. We were doing batch work. I'd went through and I'd sanded all the doors.

We started putting the stain on and it looks terrible. All of them. Just terrible.

There was scratch marks, swirl marks. I mean, it was a nightmare. So we're trying to sand the stain off, hand sand them, just work it over.

Work it over. Well, we use a solid ply plywood so that the veneer of wood is only a 32nd of an inch thick. And you got the hard grain and the soft grain.

So immediately we're burning through the veneer. So we ended up having to trash all the doors. There was no saving them.

We ended up trashing all of them. Then we did it again, and that time we sanded them all by hand. And when we put the stain on, I don't know if it was the humidity or the temperature or what in the shop, but it was a dark, dark stain, and it pulled it so dark it looked like it was painted.

Really? Yeah, it was just boom black. Like, just pitch black. And it's like well, at that point, the client was like, well, at that point, I would have just painted them black.

I want to see some of the grain. So, to put it into perspective, the average kitchen has 200 to 220 man hours into it. We were over 2000.

Tenfold. Right. We learned so much on that job of how not to do stuff.

Ten times. That's ten times. It was sickening, to say the least.

It was frustrating. And it taught me a lot about perseverance of just keep going till it's done, because I didn't want to deliver cabinets that were not especially this was a full custom job. It gets into a little bit of a gray area.

If it's production, if someone's looking for the cheapest cheapest, then it's like, well, you get what you get to some extent, right. There's minor defects that are good to go, but when it's a full custom job and they're expecting full custom, you do what you got to do to get it done. Yeah.

I learned a lot on that project. And because of that, in hindsight, it was a very fun project at the time. No, it was not fun at all.

One of our core values is constant, never ending improvement. Exactly. That's, like, a perfect example.

Dang it. This didn't work. But the thing is, you can't just stop.

I mean, you got to fix it and figure it out and improve it. That's awesome. Well, I feel like you had an awesome story.

We're out of time. We try to keep them under an hour, 45 minutes ish. But I appreciate you coming in.

Definitely. And maybe we'll do it again sometime. Yeah, I appreciate you reaching out.

All right. Catch you later.