Building With Whole Trees: Rethinking Timber With Amelia Baxter

What if we could build with trees without milling them into straight, uniform boards? On this episode, Neal Collins is joined by Amelia Baxter, co-founder and CEO of WholeTrees Structures, a company reimagining timber construction by using unmilled, round timber as structural elements in buildings.

Together, they explore how WholeTrees transforms the often overlooked “cull trees,” trees that would otherwise be removed as excess byproducts, from well-managed forests into beautiful, durable building components. The conversation goes beyond architecture and design to touch on stewardship, entrepreneurship, and how to invest for sector-wide growth of bio-based and natural building materials.

From the fascinating origin story of the company, the technology and systems that they have developed that has allowed them to scale internationally, to the investment and growth path the company is on, this is a great story that invites us to reconsider how and what we build with. 

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The Regenerative Real Estate Podcast is an independent show exploring the people, projects, and capital reshaping how land gets used and communities get built. Two organizations grew directly out of this work, and they're worth knowing:

Hamlet Capital finances and advises on projects that integrate agriculture and conservation with mixed-use development. If you're building one or looking to invest, let's talk.

Latitude is a real estate brokerage representing sanctuary properties rooted in nature, beauty, and meaningful living.

Transcript

SPEAKER_02 0:02

Poultries, solid timber, fits into the mass timber family of products. It's just the least processed of all these engineered wood products. So we were able to live on that tailwind. And then there was federal funding towards better forest management ideas and market-based solutions to push our world in a new direction. So we kept getting to build on tailwinds. I think that the leaders at the company have been really creative in taking advantage of every tailwind and building on it. I look back and it's just, I often say it was like little Legos. If only Legos were wood, it would be more apropos, but just little blocks, building block after building block, building, building, building towards what's now become a global brand and a national presence.

SPEAKER_00 1:01

A show about human environments and how they can be used as a force for good. Conversations that educate and inspire people looking for a different way to do real estate. I'm Neil Collins, and on this episode, I'm joined by Amelia Baxter, co-founder and CEO of Hull Trees, a company pioneering the use of unmilled round timber as structural elements in commercial and residential buildings. I live in the land of big trees. My home is nestled in the forest, and I'm surrounded by towering cedars and Douglas fir trees. Trees that have been prized for their strength and adaptability for millennia. They've long been used as building materials, and the timber industry is still a major force here today. In fact, it's hard to travel far without coming across a ball patch of land marked by clear-cutting, perhaps nowhere more jarring than in our national forest, where the scars of extraction sit side by side with signs welcoming visitors to a land of many uses. The story of timber as a building material is deeply intertwined with our broader conversation around sustainability and regeneration. Products like mass timber are now being heralded as carbon smart solutions. Wood interiors are often described as warm and calming, and studies back this up. Being in spaces built with natural wood can lower blood pressure, reduce stress, and improve mood. Now, these biophilic qualities are undeniable. And I get the appeal of locking carbon into buildings, but I still have questions. Where is this wood coming from? What are the supply chains and forest practices behind the lumber that we use? These questions have taken me on a journey from green builders doing infill projects in urban cores, prefab home manufacturers to timber mills in Europe and indigenously managed forests in South America. But one of the stories that stayed with me comes from Madison, Wisconsin, where a company called Whole Trees is doing something remarkable. Rather than cutting down a tree only to square it off into dimensional lumber, they're embracing the full beauty, form, and structural strength of whole trees. In a world of straight lines and uniform boards, Amelia Baxter and her team at Whole Trees are doing something different. Their work isn't just about aesthetics, it's about stewardship, entrepreneurship, and transforming our relationship with the natural world. So without further ado, let's get into it with Amelia Baxter from Whole Trees.

SPEAKER_02 4:17

Yeah, um, I grew up in Connecticut. My mom's side was East Coast, my dad's side did root back to the Midwest, and as I get older, I do see some of the roots of my ethos in the Midwest. But I really I grew up in Connecticut. My mom and stepdad moved to Maine and I would return from college to Maine. I went to school in Chicago, thinking that maybe if I went to college elsewhere, then I'd get a chance to return to New England. And um, that never happened because of um love stories and really great jobs and career opportunities. I ended up in Wisconsin because of my connection to my co-founder of Whole Trees, where we founded the company.

SPEAKER_00 5:02

What what was that initial career trajectory? I'm curious what what brought you to Chicago and where you thought life post-college was going to be. I think it saw land management and agriculture and maybe even something about religion on your LinkedIn profile.

SPEAKER_02 5:18

Yeah. Um I wanted to study agriculture. I went to a very academic setting, University of Chicago. So the anthropology of agriculture, the economics of agriculture, um, and I wanted to study comparative religions. I was introduced to the topic of comparative religions by my mom, who later became ordained as a UCC minister. And I was fascinated by how we shape what we do in the world and why we treat nature the way we do as humans. And I thought it might have to do with our relationship to our values and maybe even to our relationship to God. For me, it's always been some very deep-rooted sense of spirit and the way it shapes itself in the natural world and in the real world. Like, what did I think I was gonna do with that? Well, I think when I was 18, I just wanted to farm when I wasn't at school. So I interned at farms. And when I was at school, I was thinking about big picture things. By the time I was moving through school, it started to look like international development, working with farmers internationally, working with farmers and their access to markets and selling organic food into higher value markets. These are the things I assumed I'd be doing when I left college. And I did go into agricultural work and development work with an organization in Nicaragua. And then I returned to Chicago to work with a growing regional food system network of urban agriculture, urban rural exchange, development of new farmers for the region, and was very much involved in organizing a new infrastructure for farming and higher value markets for food. That's the trajectory this all went towards. I always maintain my own connection to spirit and probably connected to stakeholders, both in the fundraising side of things and in the management side of things, but also stakeholders in the communities where I worked. There's a connection that happens at the heart and in the spirit. And I think that's always facilitated the way I move in the world and maybe some of the successes I've had. That said, as I left college, I was very interested in the way that the economy and markets shaped what we do. So it moved in this fascinating spectrum from value to economics. Ironically, on the University of Chicago campus, the Divinity School and the Economics Department were right next to each other in terms of buildings, and I always found that fascinating.

SPEAKER_00 8:07

This is gonna be a juicy conversation. I love this. Uh first, I'm gonna foreshadow for people there's something about the spirit that comes out in beautiful buildings with biophilic materials that just captures me in a way that I I just I love that sense of uh place that comes out of architecture like that. And I that is the reason why we are having this conversation, first of all. But I I share an agriculture economics background and have this interesting parallel history. And what's funny is I find a lot of people, whenever you talk around agriculture, we think food, we think farms, but we often, and I'm gonna generalize here, and I'm sorry if this isn't the case, uh, foresters would certainly push back, that we don't lump forestry in with agriculture. It's it seems to be something completely separate. Uh when when did you first start? When did that perception around forestry and using timber as and fiber as building materials? When did that come into your awareness?

SPEAKER_02 9:15

Most definitely when I met my co-founder, um, Roland Gunderson is an architect. He was well known in the upper Midwest for really pushing the gamut on um eco-architecture and regional bio-based materials in architecture before that was a uh buzzword. And I was heavily involved in agriculture food systems, and he'd been hired by my mentor and boss, who was running a regional nonprofit around organic agriculture. And he had built this office building using farm-based fibers and materials, straw bales, uh, structural round timber for the full structural system. And so I was very moved on a gut level by his architecture, but had not been thinking about the role the forest plays in farming. Um, says a lot about the fact that I wasn't managing land at that time. I was working for other people managing land. Once you, once you're managing land of any sort, your mind does turn to the um the trees growing on that land and you start to think about the forest management involved. I just wasn't aware of that yet. I was so intrigued and by the the the ways of growing food in different ways internationally. So Rold was a major turning point in my life. He would say to me, This is the fiber side of the farm, Amelia. He'd also say, Amelia, trees are just giant vegetables. And I I loved that.

SPEAKER_00 10:44

That's amazing. When did the business start to percolate? I mean, did was that an immediate like, you know what we should do? We should, we should create this company.

SPEAKER_02 10:55

Right. Um there's two sides to that because there's Rold and there's me. On my side, I in my travels, I was lucky to travel to Central America during college and after. And during college, spent time on coffee farms where equal exchange and early fair trade certification was happening. And so I got to see in real time the difference in um standard of living of farmers reaching new markets, different ways of selling beans in skipping middlemen into cooperative markets. And they were living in a notably different way. I also got a chance to meet some of the early founders of Equal Exchange Coffee. And the founders of Equal Exchange are, as you might imagine, since they are some of the beginnings of the fair trade movement globally, they're pretty radical, exciting, visionary thinkers and economists. Took a lot for them to develop out the fair trade model and to make it work on the ground across a globe. So by the time I was working in the Chicago region, I had been inspired dramatically by big picture thinking that changed the way we do things. And I was inspired by the fair trade movement. You set that aside, you have me very inspired by the fact that if you think differently, you can actually transform lives across continents. Then I meet Roald, who's thinking in similarly large turns around architecture and material. And he was a project architect at the Biosphere II in Arizona as they were building this massive uh donor-funded experiment around human and ecological habitats. And he was pretty radicalized around the use of material. So he starts to consider what would a business model look like that brings biobased materials. And most interesting to him was the role that the thinnings from uh forest management could go into structure. So he was really sculpting with the innate strength of trees. So we meet and he's starting to prove out oh, what is it? I would say the nascent business model around bringing structural trees into residential construction. And I'm really drawn to the idea of business and how I can shape markets. Together with growing interest from clients, but not a lot of organizational capacity on Rold's side, and on my side, a great deal of organizational capacity and a vision for business models. The two came together into whole trees.

SPEAKER_00 13:39

That's fascinating. There's there's a book out there that for listeners that have really been listening to the show for a long time, they'll they'll have heard it before. And I'm curious if if you've ever come across it. It's called The Builders of the Pacific Coast.

SPEAKER_02 13:54

I don't think I have. Um, do you know the time it was written? I wonder what the copyright is.

SPEAKER_00 14:00

Oh gosh, maybe the 90s. But what really struck me is that the the premise of the book, and it's very uh photography forward, is around these builders that that kind of dropped out because they're draft dodging. They dropped out of society, they went to the Pacific Coast primarily from California through British Columbia, and they started to build with driftwood and and trees just that they could find on the beach and that had fallen in the forest. And it it really wonderfully disturbed me because they would build a whole house around this organic structure of a tree that they would then turn into a staircase. Or a lot of the like the posts and the beams, it's it's real trees. That to me just like really screams craftsmanship and timber framing, and just like these people that have honed their skills, and it's it's not a scaled version. It's not something that you you bring together these processes in which you can source lumber from across the country in different working forests and things like that. But whenever I go to whole trees, it is so eerily similar, that feeling that it the architecture evokes. And if I had to put pen to paper and say, I'm gonna create a business around how to do this, I would get so boggled at the roadblocks from uh how do you even start this? You know, how can you how do you start a business that is going to to not just work with timber but work with cullings from forest? How do you make sure that you can get it into different buildings and and work with architects and engineers? There's a big tech stack that is embedded within your company. Yeah. Can you give me a runway here?

SPEAKER_02 15:55

And the the ingredients that bake this particular cake, called trees, are so interesting to me. It's like it was meant to happen in some odd ways. We have ruled, we call him certainly a visionary, and that he speaks for the trees, you know, the lorax of the of the founding story. And he was moved by the form of trees in that sort of innate craftsman artistry sculptural way. And then you pair that with me meeting him, and um, not only did I grow up in Connecticut, I grew up at the very edge of a large county forest called Westwoods, and had hundreds of acres of forest just as my playground. And it was the 80s, so nobody noticed if we were gone all day in that forest. So the forms and the shapes of trees were very much a pattern language for me. And my father was an architect. My brother later trained as an architect. They both went to Yale, so I'm surrounded by a very heady, advanced academic sense of what beauty is in this world and what aesthetic is. So I meet this craftsman who, with an architectural training role, is able to see how a tree fits into form. And I'm coming from a sort of similar sense that this material belongs in the canon or on the palette of materials in a way it doesn't exist yet. So the two of us are coming at it from different angles, but both with a well-educated sense of design, I suppose. And then we're both a little crazed, crazy? Uh, that's not fair. I think we're both a little um radicalized by our ways of understanding what's happening to our globe and to our climate. I studied environmental studies. So I'm learning about climate change at a lot of different deep levels in the 90s. He was already learning about this in the 70s and 80s. And we had already reached, by the time we met each other, a sense that if not now, never, it's time to risk. We have enough privilege in this world growing up where we grow, growing up in the families we've grown up in. Let's risk as much as we can to push forward something new that could change the way we talk to one another or even change the way we forest. So we had some guts between the two of us. We had some privilege that enabled us a platform to stand on. And we had a vision much bigger than sort of day-to-day building blocks. The other way that you could say we did it is we had blinders on and that we were very impassioned by what this could be, and we were encountering tailwinds at every step of the way because the rest of the industry and the markets were moving in the same direction. We could never have founded Hold Trees if we didn't get new contracts every year, new opportunities to enter new markets every year. We were able to move from residential to commercial construction. By 2014, I think we finished the last of our residential contracts. So then there's this tailwind movement towards mass timber, which is a similar market development around larger engineered structural materials, columns, beams, uh panelized walls and floors. And uh whole trees, solid timber fits into the mass timber family of products. It's just the least processed of all these engineered wood products. So we were able to live on that tailwind. And then there was federal funding towards better forest management ideas and market-based solutions to push our world in a new direction. So we kept getting to build on tailwinds. Uh I think that the leaders at the company have been really creative in taking advantage of every tailwind and building on it. I look back and it's just, I often say it was like little Legos. If only, if only Legos were wood, it would be more apropos, but just little blocks, building block after building block, building, building, building towards what's now become a global brand and a national presence. It's remarkable than the the story.

SPEAKER_00 20:14

I I mean, let's let me circle back to whenever you founded the company in 2007, that one must have been a pretty strong headwind actually going into the Great Recession there. How did you make it through that? I mean, you it sounds like, yeah, certainly. There's the fair trade movement, there's mass timber. That's still a very strong tailwind that's blowing right now. But to found a company in 2007 that is going to go into this, I'm surprised that you actually survived that.

SPEAKER_02 20:45

No kidding. Um well said, we founded the company with three incoming general contracts for residential construction. This is because Rold's style of building agricultural and residential buildings was getting some attention. The two of us worked together to get more PR press storylines around these buildings, and then though that that PR got more attention. So we entered 2007 with three general contracts to build residences, which was more than um rolled encountered in one year. Um, so we get our first bank loan in early 2008, and we probably never would have gotten it after the crash. And then right around the same time as the housing crisis, all our contracts stalled. None of them ended up stopping forever, but they all stalled. And at that same time, we got our first grant from the USDA. This one was around contemplating digitalized inventory systems for standing trees. And so here was this grant, maybe a quarter million, that helped navigate our way. And it kind of was the blueprint to a business model for the first time. Years was utilizing research and development dollars alongside operational dollars so that when one was stronger, the other one could pause and go in back and forth. The the use of those two revenue streams ended up being quite intelligent. That's that's one way you could say. The other way is we were a lot of us were young. And so we believed things I probably wouldn't believe now. We believed we'd navigate this and we'd get through that. People put in hours unpaid a lot in the early time years. And um, some of those folks have taken advantage of, we've been able to reward them with options and ownership in the company now that we've grown. But back in the day, there was just, you know, faith that this little group was going to grow into something more stable.

SPEAKER_00 22:47

Yeah. What a what a great story. Amelia, give give the listeners just a flyover of how the business works. If you're to give somebody an extended elevator pitch, what does that sound like?

SPEAKER_02 23:00

Yeah. Um, well, we're the only scale provider of turnkey solid structural timber, mostly round timber, some square sawn timber. And we are able to bring timber from regionally sourced forests all over the country, often fabricated in that same region. And we do this by creating project management excellence across the supply chain inventory, grading, uh, fabrication, and then delivery of turnkey product. We market to architects and owners, and we then sell to their general contractors. We deliver complete stamped engineering packages for full structural systems made of round timber or squares on timber. And then we fabricate in the same um lead times as steel or GLULAM and bring that product to market. We do that by having vendor networks of a wide range of timber that enable us to source trees very quickly and then move trees into fabrication, either at our own facilities or at partner facilities. We'll outsource fabrication in order to move many projects along at the same time. So we've really put an eye towards logistics engineering across the entire value add chain of solid timber in order to bring it to commercial construction as you would steel or any other engineered wood product.

SPEAKER_00 24:28

So give me an example of the type of projects that this is really geared towards. I uh are you competing against mass timber or are you part of that stream and you find that you've got enough of a differentiator there against mass timber and steel?

SPEAKER_02 24:45

First, we consider ourselves the original mass timber. If the International Building Code, the definition is any timber massive enough to withhold fire ratings of one hour or greater, that's mass timber. We are the least processed, greenest mass timber products. So we are the family of mass timber products. We complement cross-laminated timber and other panelized wall and floor systems really well, uh, because we can serve as columns and beams and trusses. So we are an alternate to engineered wood of other laminated sorts. Most, when you think of mass timber, you usually think of trees that have been milled apart, ripped apart, and glued back together and then delivered to site as square materials. Instead of ripping material apart, we send solid structure to job sites and we are an alternate to other forms of columns and beams. So we sell to any market seeking to hold up structure with solid timber or at times with the greenest structure. We'll get into projects because there are owner architecture teams looking to do the greenest product possible. We'll get into projects because owners and architects are looking to be connected to a regional forest or uh timber supply chain. And now, after all these years, we've sold into so many different market verticals: K through 12, university, office, mixed-use development, beautiful tribal work and cultural centers, zoos, and we have a wide range of also play elements and parkitecture, as we call it.

SPEAKER_00 26:25

How are your clients finding you? What do you think they're typing into the Google search bar? Uh, like whole tree architecture? Is that the is that the Google hit word?

SPEAKER_02 26:36

That is big one. Um, and that's changed over the years, you know, 18 years ago when nobody was really tracking search terms, um, but now they are timber columns, timber tresses, whole trees. Folks who use the term whole trees just because they want a whole tree without knowing it's a or a registered title, they find us because of years and years of uh lunch and learns that we've given across the country. We find that, I don't know, about 30% of our projects sold this year can be tracked all the way back to a first touch from a lunch and learn, sometimes four and five years ago. Also, um, digital models, BIM trees. We are proud to have offered BIM families building information modeling objects and families to architects fairly early in the development of BIM families. And so we're known for being able to provide specification tools that help architects design. So they'll find us by searching for that as well.

SPEAKER_00 27:38

Interesting. And so these are more commercial-oriented projects. Do you find that they originate with an ethos or great, great, great question?

SPEAKER_02 27:48

We have a definition for our target market that's been the same since 2016. And it's innovative owners and their building professionals in nature-oriented institutions and corporations. So for us, innovative means you're able to set an ideal or an idea or a concept as an additional reason you're building. It can't just be cost per square foot or you're likely not our market. But if you're thinking of an economic way to build and you have an idea as well, it could be the story of the region around you, like nature centers. It could be the idea that your brand is green, like certain corporations we've worked for that want to retain millennials and Gen Zers and that they can they care about green and they want to assert that idea in their buildings. It can also be a story of transport, you know, being transported away. We're starting to get into more hospitality and resort. And every innovative owner has something beyond just dollars and cents that enables them to think about a greener, more beautiful material like whole trees. And then the nature-oriented, that can either be a real strong ethos, like I believe in improving our climate globally, and I'm going to build with green things. But often it's a nature-oriented because I want to create that experience for the users of this building for various different reasons. Zoos, for instance, want to create a natural experience because they know that their clientele are coming to be transported. So it's nature-oriented, it spreads across a few different definitions and innovation, spreads across a few, but together those create the perfect target market. And that helps us define which architects we present to, which developers we speak to, et cetera.

SPEAKER_00 29:49

This episode is brought to you by Hamlet Capital, an exciting new endeavor I founded to invest in the future of thriving communities. If you're developing an agrihood or conservation community, you know how complex these projects can be. From land acquisition and master planning to entitlements and securing investment capital, there's a fine line between a stalled-out vision and a thriving built reality. That's where Hamlet Capital comes in. We provide development, advisory, and investment solutions that align financial returns with environmental and social impact, helping bring projects to life in a way that's both financially viable and deeply impactful. So if you're working on a project and need guidance or capital, or if you're looking to invest in the intersection between real estate and regenerative agriculture, reach out and let's build something lasting together. Visit us at hamlet.com. We're working on this master plan community that's uh on the site of a former timber mill. And I just I love how you frame it. It's a story. What story do we want to tell with this development and the regenerative story of creating community and and really showcasing what it means to incorporate wood and biophilic building-based materials to create the community gathering spots from commercial and hotel down to the residential structures? And tell me the story of the impact. And I'm curious how you like to differentiate this from the wider story that's going around cross-laminated timber and things like that. Where do you really see what you're doing fitting into uh the impact side of things?

SPEAKER_02 31:38

Yeah. Well, first, before differentiating, I want to commend all timber products. Forests are a major global climate solution. We know that. We know that they can sequester carbon and uh that they need to be managed well to do so. Um, and so all markets that bring well-managed timber into construction are fantastic for good forestry. So, first, we commend all timber construction. The impact of solid timber is that you are analyzing the mechanical properties of the species of tree and using the wisdom of that innate material rather than saying, okay, we've got some fodder here, and if we rip it up and glue it back together, we have something we humans understand and trust. We already have enough understanding of solid timber that we can take the brilliance of that engineered material and bring it into um uh construction. So then what we do is we skip a lot of energy-intensive um middle steps that involve um uh milling, adhesives, transportation, et cetera. And we're able to draw a much cleaner direct line from forest to job site. Um, in so doing, we have a uh more impressive, I guess you could say, EPD, data-backed environmental product declaration of um global warming potential units. That's what an EPD tracks. And so whole trees is, I would say, it so far, it appears to be the greenest structural material possible. It also, because we're spreading the money, we're not we're spreading it less, let's say uh we're able to divert more of the funds from a contract directly to the forest and to the community adjacent to that forest who fabricates for us. And then that is a tremendous place-based impact in that rural economies are benefiting from the full economic well-being of the contract itself. We've tracked our impact such that we 80%, and I usually say 70, although it inches towards 80, at almost every contract of the cost of goods stays in the region within 200 miles of where the material's fabricated. And that impact to me is amazing because I know it's going force management and I know it's going to people. That's an impact. And then I think the third impact would be to our nervous systems when we enter a building. Um, as you mentioned earlier, you just uh feel good. You're you're not the only one. People um relax when they recognize a material on a deep level. Um, I think it's deeper than just intellectual, and it helps people feel good. So the impact on on our brains really interests me. And that one's less data-backed and more anecdotal. Um, but I do know there's groups tracking the data of biophilic material, and I think that that's an exciting direction as well.

SPEAKER_00 34:47

Yeah, I mean, I don't even know if it's just the brains. I do think that there's something, uh, a deeper connection to that material that comes out with that. W what is the the sourcing? Um, you said do you have relationships across the country? Do you this is really where I I don't have a very intimate knowledge with forestry practices? You know, I'm still trying to grapple with clear cuts in the Pacific Northwest where it it looks like you've just completely raped and denuded mountainsides, you know, at the Mass Timber Expo this year, a forester was trying to tell me that clear cuts are actually a good thing because they can sequester more carbon. Um can you kind of orient me personally? Not sorry, listeners, this is a personal question right now. Just like what is the state of our forest? Uh I have to contend with forest fires every year and at least the smoke fallout that comes from them. Where are we at in terms of this general situation that we're in and and how that relates to sourcing wood for your construction projects?

SPEAKER_02 35:56

Yeah, great question. Um, there's a lot of different answers to that. Let's start with the broadest, maybe 30,000-foot view would be the concept of working forests that um old growth forests are almost non existent now because humans have come in and taken the value from old growth forests. We have young and mid-growth forests across the globe mostly. And young and mid-growth forests need human interaction to grow towards maturity. And that human interaction, when done well, can create sustainable, long-term, biodiverse, healthy ecosystems that also yield economic value. So that is a working forest. A working forest is a young and mid-growth forest being managed towards economic and ecological value. And future, most of our forests are working forests. So then the question is in each region of the country, and there's different kinds of forests, and they all take different kinds of management. What are the forest management plans that optimize carbon sequestration? What are the forest management plans that optimize um the health of the water systems within the forests? Um, and that is different for every kind of forest. The good news is that North America tends to have more forest regulations than most places in the world, and that most working forests are hitting a certain bare minimum of management that's better than much of the world. So that's the good news. Um, there have been fits and starts in terms of US regulations around um uh national forests that have prohibited our ability to manage them in a working forest style, and that has contributed to some of our wildfire risks. There's also the fact that humans don't want to put our personal assets at risk, so we don't do prescribed burns often enough, which then create bigger wildfire hazards decades later. Um, we have a lot of stuff, we want to protect our stuff, and we're not taking care of the forest. That's an easy, sad point to make. Last thing I'll mention is that Doug fur is a tricky one. And so Whole Trees prides itself on understanding the methodologies of forest management, at least at a very superficial level across a bunch of kinds of um uh typologies, uh, hard and softwoods, et cetera. Douglas fir is grown much like corn. It's an agricultural product. If we're getting angry at clear cuts, it's like getting angry at a uh farmer for cutting their corn once a year. They're not going to grow the corn if they can't harvest the corn. And so then the question is, well, are they taking care of the soil so that there'll be future corn harvests? And are they taking care of the edges of their cornfields to make sure that there's not runoff and that there's not wasted chemicals flowing into our water systems? And the answer is that many foresters are, some better than others. We work with a uh forestry company, Port Blakely in Oregon and Washington, and they do a remarkable job pushing the gamut of sustainability practices, at times um undercutting their economic optimization in order to push biodiversity, length of harvest. And so I think what I urge folks to ask is what are the forests like in the mass timber product I'm purchasing? And can I get closer to a forest management practice by getting closer to the uh by using solid structural timber by calling whole trees? We can help make sure that the story of who's growing your timber and how it's being grown is as traceable as possible by the time your projects land on site. That's a long answer, but you asked a very rich question.

SPEAKER_00 40:00

Well, that that origination or the sourcing story, that's wild. I mean, if you think about that, with even within mass timber, if you're to say, I want to I want to know exactly where this lumber came from, I would imagine that could be kind of challenging. For the folks that maybe aren't as familiar with mass timber, uh, there is a significant tailwind there around decarbonization and and really whenever you contrast that with steel and concrete. Do you want to talk about why you think there there is these tailwinds and just give more color to that conversation?

SPEAKER_02 40:40

I think the tailwinds um for mass timber directly parallel what caused us to create whole trees, which is what is so interesting to me, that it was all happening at the same time. And I said earlier in our conversation, it's as though whole trees happened just at the right moment at the right time. Mass timber makes brilliant sense. Uh, we need to have working forests, we need to manage our forests, we need to have markets, and you can create, you can source from a wide range, a wide uh geographic landscape of forests and bring a timber basket of well-managed trees into a centralized fabrication facility, and you can create a product and can hold up big buildings. And people love this because forests are being now it's being taught that forests sequester carbon and now they're understanding working forest helps sequester carbon. And um, I truly believe the building industry wants to be part of the solution to our carbon and climate issues. So they are suddenly handed this gift of a solution, which is mass timber. So now they can be excited and impassioned by something that actually makes a difference to entire regions of forests and then makes a difference to the data that shows how much carbon is sequestering the buildings they build. And so everybody can feel good. It's a very feel-good story that's actually accurate and data-backed. So that's why mass timber has such a, I think, easy uptake in the hearts and minds of architects. There's also been a lot of money put into mass timber as a product from big groups like the Softwood Lumber Board and things like that. If we put a portion of that money into bringing solid structural timber into more markets, we could add that scale and see the price decrease in solid structural timber as well. So I'd love to see that occur. But I think to summarize, it is a like one of those few win-win stories from supply chain all the way through to job sites.

SPEAKER_00 42:56

That's interesting. What needs to happen to increase the market for solid structural timber?

SPEAKER_02 43:02

Okay. On our side, we're doing what we can. We're handling largely inbound sales, meaning that we're spending very little on prospecting jobs, and yet we're quoting 30% more each year. So on our end, we're doing what we can to receive a market that's actually larger than we are, and that's great news. That said, that market needs a lot of education and hand holding, just like other forms of Mass Timber do, to say, here's the best way to engineer this product into your building, and here's the best way to lay out the grid system for your columns and your spans in order to make this a cost effective building. So bringing um architects and builders along at an early stage in the design process, and then to scale this material, having more opportunity to invest in inventory. We do a lot of as needed just in. Time inventory and when we have the money, we capture data of standing trees, we scan them, we upload them into a big web-based platform, but that costs money. And so it as the industry expands the digitalized inventories, we call them digital twins of trees, and we get them up for architects to shop in, that's going to excite them and get them thinking about the material more. So it's kind of expanding the ability to for architects to understand what's near them, how can they specify it? What does it come in? What are the abilities it holds? There's a lot of digital tech and specification tools that ought to be developed out. And that contributes to the education and it contributes to the market uptake. Um, I also wish that we would internalize the price of carbon and then all would become more cost competitive with the least expensive steel. If only we had regulations that put some price tag on the carbon emissions of uh all building materials, that would do wonders for timber markets.

SPEAKER_00 45:10

And what about for your business in particular? What if you dropped capital into that? What unlocks are you or innovations are you really excited about investing in as you go forward from this point?

SPEAKER_02 45:28

That's such a great question. Um we are more than halfway through our our final equity raise at this point in time as a company. I'm thrilled. So I have just a little bit more to raise. And so we've laid out here's how we go from here to a really strong and profitable company in 2030, and that is um intensive aggressive sales strategy that involves some of the specification tools I just mentioned, making those and the education process faster, quicker, more scalable for our sales team to reach a market that's bigger than us. The second part is the tech side. So we have a digital platform. We are partnered recently with MIT and did an exhibition in Venice, Italy at the uh Architectural Biennale this year, and are studying how their digital toolkits of comp they that can uh analyze big data, massive inventories of scanned trees and help place the digital twins of trees into the smartest structural applications of a design and do it all automatically and quickly. And so we can see where the raw data of trees and species can be communicated into fast-paced allocation of inventories in different regions. So we have this vision of what that software platform could become. And um, really investing into that would be the next level. And because I think that would really crack markets, it would help more and more architects believe this material is truly scaled and uh it would really open kind of floodgates to a whole new level of market.

SPEAKER_00 47:12

Amazing. What's the growth path of the company? If you're raising equity, you know, I'm sure every investor is saying, what is this going to become? Is it you raise money and and you see that site on a public company? Do you see it as you know, selling to a larger European mass timber company out there that wants to to really move into a differentiated marketplace? Maybe you don't have you don't even have to know an answer to this.

SPEAKER_02 47:39

Well, I of course I haven't. Are you kidding? Um here's the here's the here's the vision for our current company, which is a turnkey products company. Our margins right now are 20% stronger than other industry products. So what we do is we grow every year. Um, and we've been growing at about 20% a year. So this last equity raise will push us up to growing more than 30% every year and maintaining those margins. And with that, we become very attractive to acquisition by 2030. With that attractive strength of a company, we could be a bolt-on to a building products conglomerate. We could be part of the products offerings of a glue lamb and engineered wood product like conglomerates selling very specifically to architects and engineers. But once we're strong, we can also find alternate liquidity events to maintain our separation from others. And so there's a sense that if we're strong enough to sell, we may be strong enough to find other forms of liquidity to buy out current investors and maintain our current status as a B Corp. I'm actually interested in both. I want a company valuable enough that it could be acquired by 2031. And that's why investors are coming in right now. We have a strong ability to show 15 to 18% IRR by 2031. And um, although that's not your best venture investments, that's not who we are. We're making major impacts in rural-based communities, and so we have a different IRR and it's fairly strong. Now, we also envision a subsidiary that is um based on the tech that I mentioned earlier around best use inventory computational models. And that's a side kind of story that could launch into its own thing and become a little bit more venture-oriented. But my goal right now is marching Whole Tree's the Building Products Company to 2030.

SPEAKER_00 49:43

Yeah. And I I hate when people are always having to justify their company in relationship to a venture-backed technology company just because I think that um this is a really interesting space that you know, I I think people that are seeing the ecosystem and the playing field and where this industry is heading is certainly putting chips on the board and wanting to get involved there. And I just I feel like we can even see in Europe where that industry already is, and and you can look at the market size of North America and say, wow, that that's an interesting just where the mass industry mass timber industry is going. Um and and so to me, it it's like who are these companies that we should allocate capital into that really starts to unlock really unique parts of the ecosystem that can substantially grow that overall market, especially if you're really representing a solid structural timber market, that is unique enough, and I don't see too many players in that space that understands scale that you're talking about. But if I was to go find a mass timber company that is trying to go after panelized or manufactured structures using CLT, I have a host of companies that all look and feel the same. And so my due diligence has to has to be extra sharp of what's the company that's gonna create those outsized impacts and returns. So, anyways, that that's just me kind of analyzing where I see whole trees and how you guys are sticking out in the marketplace.

SPEAKER_02 51:35

I agree. We're kind of swimming in blue oceans and referring to very little competition and and opening new markets. Um, but you're right that something that's always fascinated me. We we started back in 2010-11 learning how to pitch and getting sent through um accelerators. We won the Cleantech Open in San Jose, National Cleantech Open for building products in 2010. And we thought, you know, well, why why we could be a venture model? Sure. And so it took us years to figure out wait, venture models don't make a lot of impact to natural resource management. And they don't necessarily create jobs in rural economies for many years to come. And gosh, we're really different than that. Also, we're going a lot slower because this is our difficult material and we're de-risking it. So we have to solve new solutions and propose new products. And I still, because I, you know, I'm still pitching, and you have to pitch to very specific groups, funds, family offices that are specifically interested in employing, deploying capital towards real change on the ground. And then to show them these returns are strong. Stick with us. Look, we can do this, and then we can do this. It's novel, but it's very difficult to move capital towards new things that don't hit a venture model. And I get it. I mean, we don't want to put risk risk capital into things that won't have major return, but then I challenge our sense of what's an appropriate return in this world and what has that done to our globe and our climate. And I I I think I'll probably rail against that conversation, grapple with it for the rest of my life if I'm lucky.

SPEAKER_00 53:28

I don't know how we we won't be grappling with this, especially as there is different decision-making processes that's going on as this intergenerational succession of wealth is transferred. Uh you know, there is certainly a growing movement of family offices oriented towards, I don't want to just blanketly say impact. I mean, that might be the the tidy bow. There's a lot of interesting conversations between what impact investing is and what it isn't. Are you finding that uh you know who your tribe is? Like is it is it easy to identify?

SPEAKER_02 54:09

That's a nice way to put it. We were talking about the capital raise before, so economic tribe. We are, you know, the raise is going better than the past raises did because we have figured out who wants to deploy capital towards something like what we do with you know strong returns. So, in that sense, yes, that's where spirit comes back. If we want to bring it all the way back to the beginning, you may have a love of spirit, and yet your heart one's heart, my heart, kind of cinches in a little bit when I think about giving up wealth. And how do you give up wealth? The truth is wealth generally consolidates, it doesn't get given up and spread across. And so when you ask folks to consider a portfolio that hits at 9% rather than 12% across all the things it's invested in, um, so that it can have more impactful investments, I think a lot of people, our hearts cinch in and we actually kind of don't want to give up the 12 and go down to the nine or and and how privileged it is that there's any wealth at all in the first place. And all of these questions, they're at the heart of what does it mean to be human? And what does it mean to own things when other people don't? And when is it right to get a return on things? And what does a return on investment mean? And that stuff is that's the question. Is the tribe those who have wealth and those who don't? Those might be the only two tribes. That gets harder for me. I guess I've decided I want to grapple in the world that moves capital. And despite the fact that I don't know what to do about the fact that have that them that have and them that don't, I'm curious about how many people are willing to move to a tribe that says, I'm interested in looking at rates of return. I think uh, yeah, I found some of that tribe. And I uh I really impassioned by the times we all get to get together. I really am passionate by uh ethical investment concepts and it's studying what's working and dreaming up new portfolio makeups. This is stuff that on a personal level really interests me. Have you found your tribe?

SPEAKER_00 56:24

I I love the uh the pursuit of this because it it's not static. It's not just like you need to go talk to those people and not those people. I think that it's a really fluid and dynamic space right now. Um I think more and more that there's people that are wanting to explore the division between uh concessionary capital and extractive capital, the different innovative ways in which financial instruments are getting put together. You know, the the reason in which I think we are able to find success is that we're representing overlapping areas of impact, but it's backed by real asset strategies. And and I don't think a lot of people have seen that combination before to the degree that we're we're trying to go in to raise larger, more institutional capital to say, look, we want to support those things that the impact-oriented investors care about, like regenerative agriculture, uh, forest stewardship, affordable housing. Uh, but we also are still reliant upon the uplift from entitlements uh of land and being able to build horizontal and vertical infrastructure. And so that to me is just been this amazing playground to figure out uh who wants to be in the tent with us, who wants to be in it in our tribe, what amount of money that we're working with. And I still, you know, there is an alternate reality, and maybe it's a future existence of where we're oriented is not just how do we invest into place-based community projects, but how do we also kind of create that venture portfolio that is looking at what's the watershed impacts that we're looking to make? And let's actually allocate, let's say, 40% of our capital into those companies that are gonna help create the biophilic, bio-based material environments that are very carbon negative or positive. I always get confused on this.

SPEAKER_01 58:46

Uh carbon negative. Yeah. Carbon smart smart, carbon smart, carbon negative, yes.

SPEAKER_00 58:52

It's um and and and I just think that I am really attracted to saying, okay, how do I I know what the instate is that I want to get to in terms of the communities that we are building and the kind of building materials that I want to use and the design that I want to use, and and then I want to actually allocate capital across that.

SPEAKER_02 59:13

Yeah. Yeah. It is like you said, it's playful. It can, if you feel curious, there is a great deal to be explored, and there's lifetimes to explore it. And I think now I'm gonna decide to say that yes, I found my tribe, and that I tend to get into conversations with people who recognize that wealth and its role on our our heart and our spirit are interconnected, and that that actually has an influence on the way that we interact with nature. So folks really interested in the intersection there become my tribe.

SPEAKER_00 59:56

This should give everybody hope that um you're building a company uh and fighting that tribe, and there are others out there like that. So yeah. What a real treat to have you on, Amelia. I hope that Equity Raise goes well. I can't wait to actually create places with you guys with whole trees uh and tell those stories within our own developments. And uh we'll certainly have to do that on the ground.

SPEAKER_02 1:00:21

Yeah, I think we're fun to work with as well as uh effective and cost effective. I think I think it's a good time at Whole Trees.

SPEAKER_00 1:00:30

That's good to know. I asked a very successful developer, I mean magnitudes of success, said what what's the secret here? And he said, only work with people that you like to work with and that are fun to be around.

SPEAKER_01 1:00:46

Yeah, no problem that's what you're representing.

SPEAKER_00 1:00:48

Well, I'm all in the morning. I'd love to hear about the projects and ideas you're working on. The best way to connect with me is on LinkedIn, just search Neil Collins. And if my team at Hamlet Capital or Latitude Regenerative Real Estate can help bring your vision to life, whether it's buying or selling a home or developing a community integrated within a farm, do not hesitate to reach out. Let's build something meaningful together, must be awful.