Cris Schureman and Martin Schwab and I have skied knee-deep powder in Steamboat and sipped Goldschlager in Breckenridge. We’ve also spent a night in a $20 hostel, in the depths of the great recession in July of 2009. Good times and lean ones, same three guys.
I got to know them in the early ’90s, when they became good customers of mine at KD Cedar Supply. They were the Specialty wood salesmen in Denver back when both of our companies were subsidiaries of Tumac Lumber in Portland. When my time at Tumac ended and my time at Patrick Lumber began in 1997, they were among my first customers. We quickly became friends, all of us raising families and sharing the same values. Honesty, and sometimes being overly direct, somehow only strengthened the bond.
I’ll own the overly direct part. There’s a little wooden Buddha on my desk, three or four inches across, that I picked up in Vietnam in 2020, right before the pandemic. I bought it off the man who carved it. About halfway down the country we walked through a village, crossed a channel in a rickety little rowboat, and on the far bank a couple had their carvings out on a few stands. The fellow in back had a whole row of Buddhas, most of them finished, but he was working on one, and that was the one I wanted, right out of his hand. It took some doing to pry it loose, and I’m sure I paid twice what I should have, but I wanted that one because it wasn’t done. I rub its belly three times a day, and I rub the belly of every Buddha I pass, three times, same deal. That little guy has done me a lot of good. He reminds me to ease up, to let the stress that comes with this business roll off, and he makes me smile every time. Cris and Martin had years of me at full throttle before he ever landed on my desk, and they stuck around anyway.
Before long they got the urge to start out on their own, and they asked whether Patrick would finance the venture. Of course, I said. Bob McCracken believed in empowerment theory, and he was hungry for new ideas to rebuild the business after a tumultuous decade in the ’90s. The concept became Wood Source, and they went to work. Wood flowed in, and before long our old company was caught peeking over the fence. That’s when we knew we’d made it.
Our first yard was barely a yard at all. A right-of-way, a strip of land maybe a hundred feet by five hundred, wedged between a dive bar and the freeway just south of Golden. We ran there for a few years before we moved over next to Reed Mill, where they leased us a rugged, triangular piece fenced in between another freeway and the road. We worked out of there for the better part of a decade, and it taught us a few things. The freeway flooded us out once, all that road water coming straight into the yard. And we had men stealing beams off the back side, right over the razor wire. Big timbers, twelve by twelves, twenty-four feet long. They’d roll them off the top of the pile down onto the railroad tracks. It takes six or eight men to carry a twelve by twelve that long, so they were coming in a crew, and we finally caught them on camera.
Eventually we put a deal together and bought our own ground in Thornton, and developed half of it. That’s where we’ve been ever since. Quieter out there. When we first moved in you could look across the street and watch the buffalo roaming. I don’t think they’re there anymore.
Martin’s creativity and the grit and determination that define Cris made the partnership an instant success. You buy lumber and you sell lumber, what’s hard about that? Plenty, when you’re new. Suppliers wanted volume before they’d open a line, and that was never a problem with these two. Cris and Martin were like a giant termite. Everything you shipped them, they consumed. When Sierra Pacific agreed to sell us eight loads of incense cedar, one of their big multi-state distributors called a meeting at SPI headquarters to fight it. Brad Mehl, our salesman at SPI then, went to bat for us in that boardroom, made the case, and won.
Cris and Martin had their first million-dollar sales month in October of 2003. To celebrate, they opened a bottle of wine with a story behind it and then went back to work. By then they were the fourth and fifth shareholders in Patrick’s fourth generation of ownership.
Cris and Martin are two of the best sales guys I have ever known. They have put an immense amount of high-grade lumber into the Colorado Rockies, and a good deal more into markets well beyond it. It has been a great ride.