By NICK STEWART
Robbin Villars knew the Timmins-based family business, CutRite Firewood, was doing something right when they got a call from British Columbia, looking for some of the company’s white and yellow birch.
One of the company’s annual 200,000 cubic-foot bags of firewood, emblazoned with the CutRite name and phone number, had found its way into the hands of a Victoria, B.C. resident thanks to a Canada-wide distribution deal with Wal-Mart.
Confused, the Victoria man had called the number thinking it to be a business within his own province, never suspecting the wood he was using to stoke his fire came from a 10-acre lot in South Porcupine.
“We had a pretty good laugh about that,” Villars says.
“Still, it goes it show just how far away our product sold, and that took some getting used to.”
The incident highlights the company’s rising success since its inception five years ago by Robbin’s father Dan and mother Shari, who own and operate CutRite along with him and his sister Crystal.
Since then, the family has secured the national deal with Wal-Mart, and CutRite wood can also be found in all of Ontario’s provincial parks as well as in select Canadian Tire stores.
Along with a number of dealers as far away as Ottawa, Kitchener, Toronto and even Buffalo, the company also has nearly 1,000 local customers on an annual basis, with the average home going through 12 to 15 cords a year.
Robbin is part of an ongoing family tradition reaching back to his great-grandfather, where each generation of Villars men selling firewood in Timmins with their son. All told, the family has been selling their product in the city for nearly 90 years, though Robbin says this is the first time that the business is more than a sideline. For instance, it was only after “retiring” from 30 years of owning and operating ShariDan’s Logging that the couple decided to make firewood their new focus.
“They had sawdust on the brain,” Robbin says.
Now, each member of the family wears a number of hats to keep things running as smoothly as possible. Dan handles wood acquisition and maintenance, Shari tends to accounting, payroll and other administrative matters while Robbin looks after sales and shipping.
This ensures CutRite is a true family-run firm where each person shares in the decision-making process, and no major steps are taken without a group consensus.
However, like any family business, all of them work hard, often toiling up to 16-hours a day to make sure things run smoothly. For instance, when a loader operator left the company, Robbin stepped in to fill that gap, rather than spending money to hire another.
Employment has also grown steadily, with the company’s winter workforce currently at 12 and the summer crew reaching as high as 28, with another 10 working in the logging unit.
The operation isn’t without its fair share of challenges. Competitors regularly scout out the yard for ideas while the increasingly warmer winters have caused demand for firewood to fluctuate.
The nature of the product itself has also posed some particular problems, as the sheer bulk and weight of a single bag of firewood adds considerably to the cost of shipping and fuel.
This means mass production is necessary to achieve any kind of profit, and Robbin estimates that anywhere from 400,000 to 500,000 would have to be sold annually to start seeing any money over and above their re-investments into the business.
“It’s not like we’re selling a box of Corn Flakes,” Robbin says. “There are some huge challenges.”
After acquiring the wood through external purchases or cutting, it’s then piled and dried for a year before it can become suitable for use as firewood. It’s then put through a processor, while workers collect the cut wood, bag it, and prepare it for shipping.
Given the length of time between acquisition and final sale, the family often has to wait more than a year to see a return on their investments, which can be nerve-wracking.
Still, growing interest in the business is giving hope to the Villars, who only recently snapped up their new 10-acre site. Robbin anticipates that it might even be a temporary one as the company considers looking to snap up additional properties to host more facilities, including one dedicated solely to exports.
“In this business, you should never be happy in that you should always want more and always want to grow,” Robbin says. “It’s an extremely tough business to be in, but we definitely think we’ll be able to make a go of our dream.”
