THINKING Ahead By Chris Sainas
Building from the ground up hile the lumber industry offers a variety of opportunities at all different levels of organization, it’s also wide open if you’re ready to strike out on your own. There are always risks involved with any startup, of course; but if you make the right decisions, you can write your own future in this industry, on your own terms, instead of sitting around waiting for the phone to ring. Here’s how it happened for me:
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“This Is How You Start to Understand Lumber”
I first got involved with lumber as a teenager. I knew nothing about the lumber business, and wasn’t particularly interested in getting into it. It was the good pay and physical activity that initially caught my attention. A neighbor happened to manage one of the last sawmills in Vancouver, right in the middle of town, not even eight kilometers from my home. Thanks to that connection and the mill’s need for an able body at the end of a shovel, I had an “in.” I was able to land summer and weekend work while in high school and university doing odd jobs such as running the re-saw and driving the fork lift. I’m grateful for all that early “grunt work,” too, because that’s how you start to understand lumber. I had the misfortune of getting my undergraduate economics degree
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from the University of British Columbia right around the time the stock market crashed in the late 1980s. Needless to say, the finance industry wasn’t hiring. While there were no opportunities at the sawmill, the manager gave me some advice that changed everything: get into lumber sales, he said. I took him up on that advice, and eventually found myself in the offices of BC Forest Products. The first question I was asked was whether I had any lumber industry experience. Because it’s rare to find a Canadian sawmill in locations like Vancouver, and even more unusual
n Building Products Digest n December 2020
to find one in a city environment, by all rights I shouldn’t have been able to answer that question with a “yes.” But, I could, and that was the ticket to getting my first lumber sales job! Without it, I never would’ve been hired. Trying to launch a career in lumber sales when you have no background knowledge of lumber means struggling for years just to figure it out. But coming into the job at age 23 with seven years of experience already under your belt sets a different scene. It makes you credible. That, combined with having an economics degree, helped me to
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