Personal Touch

Giving customers individual attention and filling niches that other contractors can’t have made Tallahassee, Fla-based Boatright Timber Services a big-time player in its area.

Timber Harvesting / June 1993
By Mike Tankersly

TALLAHASSEE, Fla.
Timber businessman Allen Boatright might best be compared to the old baseball batting great Wee Willie Keeler, who claimed his secret was to “hit ‘em where they ain’t.”

Boatright likes for his company, Boatright Timber Services, Inc., based here, to handle the harvesting and other timber-related jobs that some contractors are too large or volume-driven to do effectively. That means giving landowners personalized service, including quality consulting, site prep and re-forestation work, as well as a customized harvesting job, if required. Just as the diminutive Keeler did everything he could just to reach first base, Boatright’s company does all it can to please the landowner.

“We’re the small kids on the block and we know it,” says Boatright, who’s assisted by Ron Heierman, a registered forester. “But that’s the way we like to do it.”

Boatright is proud of the fact his company is small. In fact, he considers it the key to his success. He worked for a large timber operation before forming his own company in 1985, and he’s more content working at a slower pace.

“The thing with volume-oriented operation is you’ve got to go in, cut that timber and get out and be gone,” Boatright says. “You don’t always make the right judgment.

“But most of the landowners around here have small acreage lots,” he continues, “so you’ve got to be geared slow and try to do a quality job and depend on repeat business. Word of mouth is how we buy most of our wood. As long as you can please the landowner, that’s the best referral you can get. If you make him mad, that’s the worst referral you can get.”

Boatright’s operations may be small but they’re certainly capable. Flint Equipment salesman Hugh Anderson, who considers Boatright both a good John Deere customer and a friend, says, “I’ll bet Allen does as well with his so-called little operation as some guys do with their big ones.”

Boatright’s operation produces about 30,000 cords annually, with about two-thirds of that coming from his two harvesting crews. The remainder is produced by private contractors, which Boatright hires occasionally when he has extra tracts to cut.

Boatright calls that kind of volume “small potatoes,” but his company has been successful in filling specific niches in the marketplace, both in harvesting and other related areas such as firewood production and log home sales.

His primary logging crew consists of just three men but they produce upward of 30-35 loads a week, working mostly a variety of thinnings on typically small tracts near Tallahassee and the surrounding area. Those tracts include hardwood, pine plantation and natural stands. That crew, headed by foreman Eddie Washington, employs a Bell feller-buncher with both saw-head and shear attachments, a new 548E six cylinder John Deere skidder with 75 in. JD grapple and Prentice 210 loader with CTR slasher.

On the day Timber Harvesting visited, this crew was putting the finishing touches on a salvage job in a 135 acre tract of 27-year-old planted pine located in Jefferson County, just south of Monticello. It was scheduled to be cut next year, but a heavy March storm blew down about half the tract, prompting the quicker cut, which also took advantage of the high market value for timber.

An even smaller crew – two men, including Boatright’s stepson, Rick Stevens – works in the Tallahassee area, usually within the city limits, salvaging wood that has been cleared on land to be developed either for commercial or residential purposes. Boatright saw that contractors who push down the trees on those tracts were either hauling that wood to the dump (and paying a fee) or selling it as pulpwood.

Boatright saw the opportunity to move in and merchandise that wood and haul it to different mills, thereby securing a better profit than could be made on a simple pulpwood salvage job. Boatright then pays the contractor for his time and effort.

“There’s a big charge on that (at the dump), as well as them being discouraged from hauling that material to the dump,” Boatright explains. “So, they’ll push it over and haul the limbs and stumps off, and leave the wood there. We’ll come in with our 10 wheeler (a recently purchased Western Star with an 870 Peerless loader attached behind the cab) and merchandise out the chip-n-saw, pulpwood or ply logs.”

That crew, using only the 10 wheeler and a 440 Deere skidder, produces about 60 cords a week. Because the lots are usually so small, the 10 wheeler often must go to several work sites to gather a full load before heading to the mill (occasionally, partial loads are stored on the company’s small yard at its office complex near Havana, Fla.) That makes these kinds of jobs impractical for larger contractors but ideal for Boatright’s small-scale crew, which is geared for this type of work because of its low overhead.

There is hardly any felling done on this job, but when some cutting is required, the versatility of the Bell machine comes in handy. Boatright often has taken the Bell cutter to these tracts on weekends and taken care of all the felling needed, usually very quickly.

“We’ll cut it all down and get it ramped and eliminate the sawing,” Boatright explains. “Then we’ll come in with the little truck and process it. We try to keep from running that chain saw.”
Boatright says he purchased the Bell primarily because of its relative low cost, but since has come to appreciate the machine for all it can do.

“It’s just real versatile with the saw head and all,” he says. “With the thinning operations we’ve gotten into, it does a great job maneuvering around, causing very little ground compaction. A lot of what we do is fifth-row thinning where we’ll clear-cut the fifth row and then thin four rows in-between.”

Boatright obviously pays below the market value for this salvage wood because of the specialized service he’s performing. Some landowners complain, he says, but most recognize they’re getting a bargain and are happy to pick up a little cash while getting rid of the wood without sending it off to the dump.

Wood from both jobs typically goes to the same mills. Plylogs go to Coastal Lumber Co., Havana or Georgia-Pacific’s wood yards in the Tallahassee area. Sawlogs are sent to North Florida Lumber Co., Bristol, or Metcalf Lumber Co., Metcalf, Ga. Occasionally, hardwood logs will be shipped to Elberta’s Crate, Bainbridge, Ga.

Except for the hauling done by the Western Star, trucking is all contracted to professional firms. Boatright says he’d rather pay for such expertise because of all the new regulations and because his hauls go into multiple states.

Some hardwood stays at Boatright’s yard to meet the needs of yet another aspect of his company that fills another niche. About seven years ago, the hardwood market around the Tallahassee area was so glutted that Boatright was having trouble giving it away, much less selling it. More often than not, it was pushed together and burned.
“We were doing about a thousand to 1,500 acres a year in reforestation, and most of it around here was hardwood,” Boatright says. “We were just burning it, so we decided there had to be a demand at least for oaks and hickories.

The solution was a 2040 Multitek Firewood processor, which has a wedge that splits 16 in. long log sections into eight pieces. The idea of selling firewood in Florida may sound silly, but it didn’t take long for the operation to become a success, according to Boatright.

“Most everybody around here laughed at us when we started talking about selling firewood,” he says, “but within two years, the machine had paid for itself.”

The first year, with little marketing and promotion, Boatright sold about 200 cords of firewood. Then, the company moved to its present three-acre site on Highway 27, about four miles south of Havana, and the better location helped boost sales to 500 cords that second year. Sales continued to climb every year since, reaching 1,200 cords one year. That total included a large portion being shipped out of state, and Boatright and Heierman just decided they didn’t want to work themselves to death. So, sales now generally stay local and have leveled off at 800 cords annually, although the operation can gear up to produce more.

About 100 cords of firewood annually is packaged and sold in 30-pound bundles to retailers such as grocery and convenience stores. The rest is purchased on site by individuals who are responsible for hauling it off. Boatright says firewood is a surprisingly popular item in sunny Florida.

“You’d be surprised,” he says, “When the temperature drops down to about 40° at night, people around here during the winter are ready to start a fire. It’s unique, but it has done real well.”

Although most firewood is for home use, some also is sold to restaurants that use it in open pits. Of the 300-400 cords of hardwood on the Boatright yard, the vast majority goes to firewood production.

Recently, Boatright expanded into log home sales, serving as a representative for Southland Log Homes, Columbia, SC. He’s sold six homes since August 1992 and had six more sales pending at the time of TH’s visit. Such early success has Boatright hoping that log home sales will ultimately account for about 25% of his company’s business.