Epic Entrepreneurs

How a Banker and Nurse Became Cedar Experts with Dale and Stephanie Hatfield

• Bill Gilliland

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What happens when a banking executive and a registered nurse decide to completely reinvent their lives at age 55? Dale and Stephanie's journey from comfortable careers to launching Cedar Direct, a specialty lumberyard in Western North Carolina, offers a masterclass in mid-life entrepreneurship and business development.

"Pine is fine but cedar is sweeter" might be their catchy slogan, but the story behind Cedar Direct reveals the grit, planning, and relationship-building required to establish a specialty business in a new market. Dale brings his financial expertise from years as a chief credit officer while Stephanie applies her organizational skills to manage the countless details of running a lumberyard. Together, they've created not just a business but a community resource for high-quality Western Red Cedar, a product previously difficult to source in the region.

Their candid insights about the entrepreneurial journey ring true for anyone considering a business launch. "For anybody starting a new business, you don't have a personal life," Dale admits, highlighting the all-consuming nature of entrepreneurship. Yet their approach to business - built on four core principles of trust, timeliness/integrity, treating others well, and maintaining a drama-free workplace - has enabled them to build a cohesive team that shares their vision. Their commitment to expertise, sending all employees to "Cedar School" and conducting regular product education, ensures everyone can speak knowledgeably about their specialty products.

What truly sets their story apart is how they've embraced community involvement alongside business development, joining local economic development boards and partnering with organizations like Rutherford Housing Partnership to assist Hurricane Helene victims. Their experience demonstrates that authentic community engagement isn't just good citizenship—it's good business.

Discover how this couple transformed from financial and healthcare professionals to cedar experts, and how they're building a business designed to expand while maintaining the personal touch that defines their brand. Their story might just inspire your own entrepreneurial leap! 

Visit cedardiret.com to learn more and see their full product line.

Contact information:
dale@cedardirect.com

stephanie@cedardirect.com



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All the best!
Bill

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All the best!

Bill

Bill Gilliland:

Hey there, welcome to this week's episode of Epic Entrepreneurs. I'm Bill Gilliland, your host. I am the principal at Action Coach Business Growth Partners here in Western North Carolina and I'm also one of the co-founders of the Asheville Business Summit. Now I'm excited today because we have Dale and Stephanie from Cedar Direct, and I'll let them tell you what Cedar Direct is. So welcome to the podcast. What the heck is Cedar Direct? Well, thank you, bill.

Dale:

Cedar Direct is a company. It's a specialty lumberyard. Our home base is in Wisconsin. We ended up a couple years later putting a store up in Chapel Hill, tennessee. Nobody wanted to drive over the Appalachias so after some market studies on Western Red Cedar and what's selling in the area, we ended up finding a spot over here in North Carolina.

Bill Gilliland:

Yeah, well, that's awesome. So let's dig in a little bit on the business side of things. Let me just get your take on, I like. If I mean, uh, how long have you been in business?

Dale:

The company as a whole has been around for 10 plus years. Um, we just opened up. While we searched all the last year uh, from North Carolina all the way down to South Carolina found a great community up here near forest city. It's called Spindale and um, and so we've been here since January. Was was really when we kind of broke, opened up and had all our remodel done, we. But we purchased the building. Well, we had a funny story we had our offer in and then helene came and then we flew down to make sure our building was still standing before we closed it and it was, and we got fortunate there.

Bill Gilliland:

I know a lot of destruction down this way yeah, so how'd you get into this business in the first place?

Dale:

Well, I was a banker. There's several other businesses tied in with the family that we were working with here and I helped them get it started up. I got them on our board of directors and we'd sit boards together and he said Dale, you know, you know the numbers, you know how to manage people, but you don't know lumber. But if you ever want, you and your wife get tired of your daytime jobs, let us know, and we're looking for people to open up locations and get things rocking and rolling for us. So that's kind of how it started.

Bill Gilliland:

Oh, that's cool, that's that's, that's exciting. So I know you're relatively new, but is there anything that you know you would do differently? Relatively new, but is there anything that you know you would do differently? The actual question is if you had to start from square one, what would you do differently?

Dale:

The only thing I would do differently, I think, at this point because we try to get involved in the communities. There's a lot of things with Helene coming through. We work with Rutherford Housing where we help with grants and things like that for anybody that got hit hard or anybody that got hit really, they fill it out. They go through Habitat we work in conjunction with them Is getting the name out quicker. I would probably start more calling efforts a little quicker. We started a CRM system, which is a commercial or customer relationship manager system where we can track who we went out and talked with. We didn't start that probably until four months in, four or five months in. I would start that day one just to get the name out there.

Bill Gilliland:

Yeah, I understand. So are you guys like a dealer for Cedar Direct? Are you an employee, or how does it all work?

Dale:

Well how it works with us. Um, it's a specialty lumber yard. We're just part of their three location group right now. Their goal in the end is they asked me if we would do three of these stores. We turned 55 this year. We're like. She was a registered nurse, steph was, and I was a chief credit officer at a local bank and I said, hon, you want to try something crazy? And she's like, yep, I said our kids are out doing their thing. We, we're sitting pretty good, let's go try something and explore a little bit. So we're going to open this location, possibly another one in Idaho and another one in PA and then one back home in Wisconsin, which is where we're from.

Bill Gilliland:

Got it, got it. Well, that's exciting, that's exciting. So your job is just to get it off the ground, get it going, or, and, and, and you know, get, get employees and all that sort of stuff.

Dale:

Yeah, kind of get through all the opening up stuff, get the procedures, the processes in place, get the yard set up right. I worked a couple of years in Wisconsin before I came out here just to understand their operations. Went to Tennessee, went to Canada for Cedar School to learn about you know we consider ourselves the Cedar experts. You can go to a lumberyard and ask them about Cedar. They might know a little bit but we know a lot and we got over, you know, combined experience well over probably a couple hundred years experience within all of the three locations. Yeah, that's great. Probably a couple hundred years experience within all of the three locations.

Bill Gilliland:

Yeah, that's great. So what are some of the bigger learnings that you've had so far in all that journey of the last few years? Um?

Dale:

there's a lot, you know, as a banker, I would tell people this is what you need to do until you get out here and do it. People getting good, good help. That you know, cause it's a different for me it's it's forklift driving. We, you know it's hard to find good yard people and uh, you know, and I guess the biggest learning experience for me is just getting that net cast out there so people know we're here because we were, I mean, people would see us. We've been advertising social media, facebook, all of that stuff, radio ads. We threw a billboard up near charlotte, um, so we were getting people in here. But until we started really reaching out and going out and meet people and joining organizations like the builders association, blue ridge mountains, uh, we weren't really reaching out to the the right people that we wanted and we were getting business and it's been going good. It's steadily going, going up. Uh, we're pretty much meeting our projections, so kind of where we anticipated being, but the last uh, month and a half, two months, we've really started to sprout.

Bill Gilliland:

so we're we're excited yeah, well, I mean it. It yeah, it does take a little while. So, what you know, moving from banking to this, what are some of the things that maybe you had misconceptions about, or you think that people have misconceptions about, opening or running a new operation?

Dale:

You know there's a lot of little minutiae, things that you don't think about, and it goes down to as low as who's cutting your lawn. You know we need. You know who's doing the pest control. You know just all these little things. So that's why I brought steph on. She's the office manager. She can handle like paying the bills and all these things that just eat up your time and you. You know it's better spent for me getting out there networking and just trying to meet people yeah, I understand, I understand, I understand.

Bill Gilliland:

So what do you think you attribute the growth to?

Dale:

I think there's a demand for cedar in this market. There's a lot of nice places going up in Asheville, up in the mountains Swannanoa, blackmount, all those areas and it's really hard to get Western red cedar around here. People have been using a lot of other things. They'll use ash oak, um, atlantic white cedar and things like that, but western red's one of the more superior woods for longevity bug resistant, you know, mold, all that stuff and it's. It's been a welcoming experience. People are excited and when they come in and see our store, we put a showroom up to show them what we have.

Bill Gilliland:

Sure, yeah it's awesome, it's awesome. So how do you balance sort of the personal side of things and the demands of running the new operation?

Dale:

For anybody starting a new business business. You don't have a personal life. We're working saturdays, sometimes sundays, you know, just to stay ahead of the game. But we we do take some trips back to wisconsin and up into the mountains.

Bill Gilliland:

We've done that a few times now okay, yeah, stuff, you got anything to say about that? Yeah, our daughter just got married a couple of weeks ago, so we we had two weeks off to go visit her and go to the wedding and everything. So that was a nice break. But now we're back at it. Yeah, yeah, it it. I mean I don't think people understand what it takes to open a operation. Until you've done it, it's hard to really understand the demands and, like you say, so what do you? You said you're having, you know you're looking for employees, forklift drivers, that sort of thing. What qualities do you look for in team members?

Dale:

You know, when I started this out of after getting out of banking and it's kind of a stressful job I told Steph, I said you know the next job we do, I really got four things. One, trust. That's my biggest thing. We're, we're it's a family owned company. We let family folks work here. Our, our sales guy who's going to become the manager, his daughter works here. We, we let we do that at all of our locations. No lying, biggest thing for me is trust. With that. We need, you know, obviously, timeliness and integrity there. My kind of my golden rules is just treat others like you want to be treated. We don't want the drama in the workplace. We want to make a good family work environment where people actually want to come to work, and I think we've, uh, accomplished that. We have five employees now and we go out, we do dinners, we, we try to do things together and and it's, it's awesome, we got a great spot so I'm curious.

Bill Gilliland:

uh, I I'm Was involved in a business one time where a guy came into town, opened a new business. That was his job to get it going. He stayed, I don't know, nine months or a year and then he went and opened up another one, another location. And so what? Is there a playbook for that, or are y'all figuring it out?

Dale:

We're kind of figuring it out and part of it was is we left for two weeks and we were going up to. We went up to Wisconsin and I actually married our kids, I got ordained and I married them. But it worked out perfectly because these guys have been coming along great and we just we got lucky. We got some guys out here Jason Harrell is going to be our manager and by finding that guy early on, it allowed us to get away and we could kind of test them, see how they did. And they did amazing. The store's still standing when we got back. They were busy. So yeah, I think I don't know that we'll get that lucky every time, but we have a certain metric we would like to get to in sales and once we hit that I'm going to start. You know, we're going to start looking for that next place. So that's kind of our plan.

Bill Gilliland:

Yeah well, that's exciting. They're lucky to have you all that are willing to like, do the, you know, do the traveling deal. So super cool. Well, let me. I have an acronym called BEPIC, that's sort of my tagline, and so I'm going to give you what the letter stands for and you just give me sort of a quick fire round. Just give me a couple of thoughts about what that means to you. So B means bring the energy. You seem to have a lot of energy.

Dale:

Energy feeds everybody, and positive energy specifically, because negative it'll spread like a virus in your shop. So that's one of the things is treat others like you want to be treated. We all got problems, we all have problems. Leave them at home when you come to work. We're here to work, we're here to have some fun, and that's kind of my take on that.

Bill Gilliland:

Yeah, energy feeds everybody. I love that, I love that and obviously we want that to be positive. So the E stands for education.

Dale:

We send all of our employees to Cedar School because we want to be the Cedar experts. If you have a question, if we don't have it offhand, we want to be able to tell the Cedar experts. If you have a question, if we don't have it offhand, we want to be able to tell you know, we have the knowledge in our company to get an answer for you, probably within an hour or less. So that's great. We educate all of our people. Matter of fact, the first couple of weeks when we start, we put a showroom up every night, about 15, 20 minutes before the end of the day. I'd walk them around and say this is a V-joint, this is a 1x6. This is cedar, this is pine, this is a nickel gap. We'd go over all of the different aspects of all the lumber that we carry. So everybody is consistent and they understand it well.

Bill Gilliland:

Yeah, and I love that. Yeah got to have education. How about? P stands for planning? The P in EPIC is planning.

Dale:

We did a lot of planning to come down here. We put together a business plan, we put together projections, um, and we're in the process of doing that for the next locations, um, along with just some market research to see, you know, does it, do we need to be there, you know? And so, yeah, planning is a big part of it. One of the owners, he's an account, he's a numbers guy, and then the other owner is our wood guy and things. It's just everybody ties in together and they throw in all their little bits that help with the planning aspect of it.

Bill Gilliland:

Yeah, I love it, I love it. How about I inspiration?

Dale:

cedar itself is inspirational. Pine is fine but cedar is sweeter. You know, once you see the wood, people love it. It's rich. There's a, I think, the philanthropic feel for it. They they found that they're starting to put in the hospitals because it just makes people's health better. It makes them just feel better being part of the nature. So inspiration is kind of all that. And then I love success and things are going really well.

Bill Gilliland:

Good and the C stands for commitment.

Dale:

You've got to be committed, and it's not an eight-hour, it's not an eight-to-five job. Once you make that jump or leap, you're in it and we're ready for that. So we're definitely committed. Committed, and everybody here is I mean everybody, I don't ask them to do things One of the employees that we hired, she grabbed books and she studied before she even started, so she knew a lot of the things that I was going to go over. So we have a very committed group.

Bill Gilliland:

I love that. Yeah, I love that. So what words of advice would you offer to other business owners who are looking to grow?

Dale:

Get out and network, you got to meet the people. People have to know you're there. Once you're there, if you give them the best customer service that they can get, treat them with the best honesty and integrity and have a good quality product, it's hard to beat that. It gets harder and harder's hard to beat that and that's really hard. It gets harder and harder these days to find that.

Bill Gilliland:

Yeah, yeah, it's good. Get out and meet people. You got it. You got to network.

Dale:

You got to network.

Bill Gilliland:

Yeah, really Well. I've been thinking about this for a while. It seems like almost all marketing really comes down to networking on some level. I mean, you might get a lead, but then you got to network to get you know, to actually get it. So you know it's great, it's great. So what's the next big thing?

Dale:

Well, I'd like to outgrow this yard before I leave and get a little bit bigger building and you know, so they can keep on trucking. But I just you know. Another thing back on your last question is getting involved with the community too. I believe is important. I'm now on the board of the Rutherford County Economic Development Corporation. Try to help with you know from my prior knowledge of being a banker. I was on boards and we did an EDC group up north. But just get out there and help the community. If you help people and people see you helping, I think that's a big part of success as well.

Bill Gilliland:

No, a hundred percent. Yeah, I think, uh, and yeah, and we're here in Western North Carolina, we're really big on community. So yeah, absolutely, absolutely. So what's the best way for somebody to find y'all?

Dale:

Well, uh, you can Google search us. Uh, we have a website out there called cedardirectcom that has all of our locations in there. It has inspirational photos if you're looking for projects to do. But if you reach out to any of us or our sales staff, we have thousands of pictures we can send you so you can kind of get some great ideas, kind of like that Howls or Views app that people go to to get their ideas.

Bill Gilliland:

So all the information is out there on cedardirectcom. We'll put that in those show notes and really, yeah, that's awesome. Well, listen, fantastic. Thanks for being part of the community and being part of this, for part of our podcast, epic Entrepreneurs, and we thank you for all you're doing locally and it sounds like it's going to end up being more nationally and that's exciting, for, I mean, I think that's good for everybody, right, the more economic impact we can make. So certainly wish y'all continued success and thanks for being on the program. Thank you, bill, thanks and until next time. All the best.