The other day I had to go fix a Lexmark laser printer over at Sierra-Pacific. Lexmark sent 9 parts and our contract states only use one part...no problem descriotion so I had to figure it out. The next day, I was at a guys house replacing his hard drive. Turned out that he is telephone pole grader/inspector for Sierra-Pacific.
One of the big things in Northern California's history, was threats of closing most of the mills because of availabilty of old timber, environmetal pressure, and regulations. A lot of people lost jobs. In the Redding area, I understand it was a major upset because of the economy was already in trouble. I believe Shasta County is still one of the counties considered as impoverished. Currently we are experienceing a slow steady growth.
The fellow I was talking with had worked for Sierra-Pacific for quite a while. Something I asked him prompted him telling me how the owner had been able to survive the industry resession. As he told the story, I could feel his pride for the company and the respect he had for the owner of the company.
Apparently, the owner was smart enough to see the writing on the wall. He started buying smaller trees and property that none of the other mills wanted because they were not big enough. No competition and motivated sellers sounds like he may have gotton some good deals. Next he re-tooled the mills to be able to handle the smaller timber.
I'm not aware of any decent size mill in this area that isn't now owned by Sierra-Pacific. This guy just kept making money and re-investing and borrowing money from the banks at incredibly low interest. The decks are usually quite full at all the different mills I pass in my travels.
Besides basic lumber, they don't waste too much. They sell sawdust of course but also have decorative bark, door and window and a few other divisions. What I didn't know is that they also built a cogeneration plant to run the mill operations with the unusable waste...Free Juice! They even get to sell the excess to PG&E. Of course that's not always so cool when PG&E filed Chapter 9. He said they lost over a $1,000,000.00 a few years ago to them.
Anyway, I was quite impressed with this guy's story how smart that guy is and thought I'd pass it along.
Here's a link to a write-up of Sierra-Pacific which is quite interesting. http://www.endgame.org/spi.html
A VERY POSSIBLE FUTURE EMPLOYER